Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Here is my Preliminary Task that I completed in a group at the start of the course, the simplicity of the video we made is of large contrast to the film opening we now have, and have worked hard to achieve. In the time of progression to reach a final product, I believe I have learnt a lot about the importance of preparation during the pre-production phase, and the organisation and patience within actual production. You simply cannot just pick up a camera and go...

Research

Due to the simplicity of the Prelim Task, there was no need to complete any research, specifically research into genre conventions, which in contrast, I spent hours doing before starting the production of our film opening. My research within the pre-production phase consisted of looking at existing texts and familiarising myself with the psychological thriller genre, and how other production companies/directors have gone about creating a film that follows the conventions of the genre. This includes aspects such as character type, location and mis-en-scene. I carried out this research by watching film openings from our film genre, analysing and commenting on the aspects I named above. I also did specific research into what were the traditional conventions of a psychological thriller - so that we could reflect these conventions within our film opening. It was vital that this research was completed in order to produce a product that would be accepted into, and successful within the genre. 

Here is a screenshot of the 5 blog posts that contain my Genre Research.

Planning and Time Management

For our Prelim task, all that was needed was a single sheet of planning, briefly noting the few shots that we needed to film, and who would be within them. However, for our film opening we knew that a lot more thought needed to go into producing pre-made Documents that would lead us through the production phase. This is due to the much larger amount of time we would be producing our film opening (over the course of around 3 weeks), as opposed to our Prelim that took the majority of 2 hours during lesson time.

After deciding from my Initial ideas what film opening I wanted to peruse, Harrison and I prepared and delivered a pitch of the idea. With a great response and a new member of the group, George, we created the following pre-production documents, to plan our film opening.

• Detailed Synopsis
• Storyboard
• Screenplay
• Shot list

I then decided to go a step further and create an Animatic, as the plot, timings and sound would be more or less reflected the final cut. The Animatic contained a voice over of me describing what would be happening and I think this really helped me to visualize what the final product would look like, and ultimately allowed me to come up with some creative shot ideas.



Casting

Unlike our Prelim task, where we simply used people amongst the group as our actors, a lot of thought went into who would star in our film opening. Our protagonist, Molly, was a no-brainer decision, with her being a close friend of mine, and living locally, we knew she would be readily available. We also wanted to ensure that our main character was of a good acting ability, and with Molly studying A-level Drama we were sure she would be up to standard! The role of Molly's Parents however was much more difficult to cast, we had to find two parents who would be willing to give up a couple of evenings to film - luckily Georgina and Nick volunteered. Before we filmed we made sure the actors were familiar with their lines, fortunately there wasn't too many to learn.

Props, Costumes, General Mis-en-Scene.

For our Prelim, we only needed the following things - which were all found within school.

• A stairway
• A free room
• Table with 2 chairs
• A piece of paper to hold.

There was also no need to change from our school attire.

However, this is completely different to our film opening, which we had to gather the following props, and move from place to place.

• Quiet street;
• 2 Cars - to imitate the crash, and film within
• Molly's Bedroom;
• Small items for cut away shots
• A suitcase, and clothes to pack
• Molly's first costume - Pyjamas
• Inside the train;
• Molly's second costume - Casual clothes.

Our General Mis-en-scene, related to our audience, and genre research. The costumes and Molly's Bedroom contained signifiers that represented Molly as a typical teenage Girl, attracting a young female audience, and also building an emphasis on the mental deterioration of Molly that is to come later in the Film. The dark, quiet streets used for the car crash reflected our genre research, following the convention of low light, and creation of a tense atmosphere.

Location Scouting and Test shots.

We knew we must pick locations that was going to help reflect the correct atmosphere for the film opening, as well as being accessible. We chose the street of the car crash, due to its short distance from Ilkley town centre, so it was both easy to access but much quitter street. There was also limited lighting that we thought would emphasise a tense atmosphere. Molly's bedroom was obviously the easiest to access, with no worry of disturbance during shoots - as it was in our main actresses' own Home. The Train station, and Train were the hardest locations to organise due to picking convenient train times, and then picking a station for Molly to exit the train that wasn't too far away, but also looked remote (lots of trees, less houses).

During our location vlog, we also did some test shots of the first scene using my car, that was not going to be used in the actual footage.

Rough Cuts and Audience Feedback

When creating our Prelim we simply has to shoot, and edit the clips together, and the feedback was commenting on if it had been correctly filmed and edited together - which we successfully achieved. However, for our film opening multiple Rough cuts were needed alongside both self/group analysis and audience feedback to successfully reach a Final Cut that both ourselves and our audience were happy with.

Rough Cut 1 (Car Crash)

Rough Cut 2

Rough Cut 3

It was after our first Rough Cut that we made a Vlogs as part of our 'Production Updates' In it we were commenting on our production so far, what we needed to improve, and what were the next steps... This allowed us to use self-evaluation for improvement.

I also gathered audience feedback by sharing the link with my friends and family on social media. Here is an example of me sending the link to my blog post Audience Feedback Survey that included our Final Cut and a survey I created using 'SurveyMonkey'

We also filmed feedback from audience at two stages of production, after our Rough Cut 3, and after producing our Final Cut.

Roles and working within a group

With everybody offering their help wherever possible within the production group of the prelim - In a smaller group of 3 creating our film opening we decided that roles should be assigned. We knew from the start that George would be the film editor, due to his expertise in this area, however from the initial roles that we decided, Harrison and I swapped (making me in charge of Cinematography and Harrison the director). This is due to the confidence that I developed for camera work as production progressed. As a Group we had to collaborate our ideas, compromising to keep everyone in the group happy with the developing product. On a whole I think that we worked well as a group, with some moments being frustrating, we pulled through to create a film opening that we are proud of, and hopefully others enjoy watching. On the contrary, I am looking forwards to working individually next year as I think I will challenge myself, and doing so develop the skills further that I started the AS course with, and advanced throughout the year. 



Audience Feedback Survey

This is our Final Cut of our film opening 'Hightail'. Please watch and kindly complete the survey beneath with your feedback.

Create your own user feedback survey

Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During this years AS Media Studies course, I have developed the basic skills that I initially had, using technologies. I have realised how important technologies are in achieving a final product to be proud of.

Apple Macs

With no experience using this hardware prior to the course, I knew I needed to familiarise myself with them, as they are very different to the Windows PCs that I am used to. At the start of the course I explored the uses of the Macs, in order to understand them, and achieve the most from them. As I became more aware, I was confident to use the software that I needed to achieve my final product - our film opening.

Creating a Soundtrack on LogicPro

Using advice from our teacher, we decided to use LogicPro rather than Garage Band, in order to create a soundtrack for our film opening that reflected the advanced skills needed to use this piece of software.

We decided that for the base loop, that would run throughout the whole of the soundtrack was an 'Acoustic Picking' selected from the downloaded loops. Although there was many loops to choose from, we has heard a piece of royalty free music that would have been perfect for our film opening therefore we wanted to replicate aspects of it- so this is partly how we made our decisions.

As our film genre is a 'psychological thriller' we knew that it was vital that we created a build up of tension within the soundtrack that would co-ordinate with the tense atmosphere in the opening. We achieved this by building layers of very low, and very high pitched sounds. for example with 'Tube Bass' and 'String Essemble'.

Possibly the most important thing we achieved by using LogicPro, was being able to import in our film opening, so that we could match the visuals on screen, with the audio on the soundtrack. This was really effective and allowed the film opening to reflect a more perfected product, with advanced skills used in the production. An example of our visual and audio co-ordination can be seen in the first 40 seconds of our film, where the opening titles are shown: 

Final Cut Pro

This is the main software that we used to edit and produce our film opening. Using Final Cut Pro, I was surprised about what I learnt, and how it would help us achieve a product that would have been completely different without the use of technology. An effect that we used, that was vital for the success of our film opening was the 'masking' tool. Unfortunately, from the shots that we had taken to represent a car crash, were not convincing - therefore we had no way to show how our protagonist's (Molly) parents had died. This was vital to the plot, and we therefore had to find another way. Using 'masking' we were able to overlay clip 1 (of a cars headlights driving towards the camera), onto clip 2 (a point of view shot from Molly, looking onto her parents and out the front window). We used the tool to crop down clip 1 so that it fit around the perimeter of the front window.

Conclusion

In summary I believe the skills that I have developed, in using technologies to produce our film opening are vital skills that I can carry onto A level. Next year in Media Studies, the course will be more challenging and will require a larger scale of understanding for both shooting and editing - therefore having developed my skills I will be in a more prepared position to achieve a high level product.

Question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

Here is a screenshot of my blog post containing my audience feedback survey, that I refer to in the video.

Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Question 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Costume is an important factor when creating a representation of a particular type of character. We wanted to portray our protagonist as a Stereotypical teenager – a sociable young girl, whose traumatic events of her recent life has been emotionally affected. We used costume to portray our character in certain ways, and involved:

 Comfortable Clothing – The sweater that Molly puts on during the film opening gives connotations with warmth and comfort, this emphasises the support Molly is seeking after her parents death. She is ultimately receiving comfort from her clothing rather than physically from humans.

Fashionable Clothing – Following the convention of psychological thrillers (the deterioration of a characters’s mental state as the film develops) we decided we wanted to continue to portray Molly as the young socialite that she is, at the start of the film. Although we only created a film opening, we know that if the film was to progress, this fashionable, socialite attire would gradually change into dark, plain, maybe dirty clothing (with depressing connotations) that would portray her emotional state having a physical impact.

Final Cut

Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Reflecting our genre with specific Conventions. 

Key Conventions of Film openings: 
In terms of general conventions of film openings, we have overall reflected them rather than challange them. We created a list of these general conventions:

Ident:
A film opening will always show identification of the production company/companies involved in creating the media text - in our case 'GHK Productions'. Idents are used so that the audience can set their expectation for the film; if an audience was to see an Ident of a large, popular production company, a big budget block buster may be expected. 

Titles:

This conventions is designed to tell the audience the people involved in the making of the film. Doing this, is acts as an acknowledgement for these people. This convention helps to attract audiences, especially if a famous actor/director is involved. Our film opening involved the titles:

Director.

Filming. (We decided not to used the word Cinematography, as it was too long to fit out Titles format).

Editing.

Narrations:

This convention is designed to involve the audience straight away, in the film opening. It allows the audience to access background information, of what has happened prior, or is happening at the start of the film. It may also give an insight as to what type of characters are involved. In our film opening, apart from in the flashback with her parents, Molly is the only person that we see. This reflects the narration technique as it helps develop the idea that Molly has been deeply effected by her parents death. The voicemail that is involved is also a narration technique, that tells thew audience where Molly is now planning to go - to get Grandparents house.