FINAL FILM EVALUATION - JOE GALLON

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



For our film, we started off with covering up his identity completely, making the audience ask themselves more what he is doing there than who is he? In the first shot we used a shallow depth of field to do this, with the focus on the door and the character in the background.

The second shot is a very high angle shot of him from the back, again, still not revealing his identity to the audience.

Third shot in and eyeline match, in shot two he is looking at the door handle, reaches for it and then opens it. This is a very important continuity aspect of our film and is again keeping the emphasis away from his face. This carries on into the fourth shot.

Fifth shot is a sillouhette of him walking down the corridor and and tracking shot behind him. Again, typical to a thriller, asking questions of who he is.

Sixth shot

This starts to reveal the identity of the character, but you still don't know who he is in relation to the film and also the shot is not clear, it is still in a dark light and typical to a thriller, the dark lighting gives you a sense of mischief towards the character.

Seventh Shot 


Another shot that links back to the Fifth  because of the sillouhette technique used.

Eighth 


This shot finally puts some light onto the character and reveals his full identity, so has therefore stopped the audience asking the question of what does he look like, but still asks who he is in the film? This is a crucial link to the next shot which shows him with a policeman in a police station, it is another clear shot of him and confirms that it is the same person as the rest of the film has shown. This then opens a whole load more questions, for example, what has to done to be in this situation? This worked very well in our film and is a typical thriller theme that we felt would be very effective incorporated into our film.
























The main conventions of a thriller film are that it in the opening, it asks more questions than it answers, and I think that our film really does this well, in the opening shots of the film. Nothing is given away and it ask a lot of questions! Why is he there? Who is he? Where is he going? Why is he at the police station?

At the beginning of a lot of films, this method of not revealing who the main characters are and why they are there is very effective.  Films such as the Dark Knight , Harry Brown and No country for old men. Each of these films cover up their characters identity in different ways but all have the same principle to them.

The first one, No country for old men, sets the scene for the first minute with just shots of landscape, but all the time there is a voice over the top, and this is a method of hiding identity and asking questions to the audience, it makes you think who is the voice from?

The second one, is from the Dark Knight, this film used masks to cover up their identity. But because this character is the only person in this shot, it makes the audience ask why are they significant and who are they in the context of the film?

This is from Harry Brown, this similar to the way we used to cover up identity during the attack scene, with very dark costume and the lighting is bright in the background to take the emphasis off their faces. For our film we have used a lot of methods that Harry Brown has used and this was a crucial thing.

2-    How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our product represents the female gender in quite a passive way, as if to suggest that the dominant male attackers think that she is just an object and her sexual orientation is jut as an “object”.  We used a girl to be the victim because we thought that it is a more realistic way to do it. The male attackers fit better into the role and come across as more intimidating towards the girl. If the attackers had been female and the victim male, this could have been viewed in a different way by the audience. The male audience may not have been as attracted to watch the film is the victim had been male.

The police officer was a male because we wanted him to come across as quite a sly and cunning character. As if he always gets his own way and has a sarcastic attitude. I think the mise en scene fits in to this well. He dresses well, in a suit, but also has quite a scruffy attitude in the way he represents this dress. He is constantly starring into the eyes of the suspect, making him come across as a powerful intelligent man. This is the way that male police officers seem to be presented to us in most tv dramas and films, but we felt that this stereotypical view of a policeman was used, as it does fit well in to our film.

We tried to give of the impression that these two sets of characters were from a different social class. The attackers, being the ones who are from a working class background and the victim, the chef and the detective being from a higher class and with a higher status in society. We tried to use the fact that the detective is the girls dad in a beneficial way in the opening. Because the female victim doesn’t say much in the clip, we needed the detective ( her dad ) to come over as quite a well spoken and upper class man. 

The Mise en Scene of the attack shows the class differences well. The attackers turn up in distinctive hoodies and the victim is well dresses and innocently walking home. The diegetic sound in the film also suggests the social class of the different characters, the bad language coming from the attackers, and the well spoken voices from the detective shows how different it can be between these two social classes. The non diegetic sound, is quite calm and classical and quite contrapuntal to the actual scenes. This suggests that the main characters, and who the rest of the story will be about it actually the victim and the chef, as the soundtrack fits in with their social class better.

We also used a high camera angle on the attack as this shows who has the power at this very point. The power could easily change, but we wanted to portray that the attackers have the power over the girl as this was obvious due to the number of attackers. And we thought that the best way to do this would be through a high angle.

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

The distribution of our film will be done through Independent Art house Cinemas. I think that this is the best option for us as the competition of mainstream cinema films is very high. If we aim for Art House cinemas, we stand a much higher chance of succeeding as these show films of a low budget. As the budget for our product is not very high, we would only release the film to a few british cinemas. Each film would cost us £1500, and I would like to distribute the film all over the UK to specialist cinemas. 6 in England, 3 in scotland and 3 in wales. This is 12 cinemas overall, costing £18000. If the film was then successful in these cinemas, then it is a strong possibility that we would have the funds for more releases in the UK.

 I would also like to release the film to Europe, but to do this through European cinemas it would be too expensive to do, for the amount that we would get back. It would cost double the usual price of a film role (£3000) to have a film with subtitles and this is definitely necessary for a European release. Therefore, I think that the better option for a European release is through a simultaneous online release. A website would be created, where you can either pay to watch the film there on the website, or for a slightly more expensive price, you can download the film. 

To advertise and promote the film I would mainly use online sources. Through online film download resources, such as Itunes and playstation network, I would offer a free trailer of the film, coming with a link to the website where you can watch or download. As an extra method of advertising, When you download the film and have viewed it, to get a 15% discount of the price of the product, you can email the website to a minimum of 5 contacts and if you reach 15 contacts, this will give you 25% off the cost. This would hopefully produce more viewers of the film and I would hope that at least 1 of the five contacted would watch the film. 

To advertise the film in the cinema, I would use the other Art house films to advertise. A trailer of the film would be shown before the film is shown. This would hopefully produce more of the same audience to come and see my film at the same cinema. ??

The certification of the film is 15, This is because there is mild aspects of violence and language througout the film, but it does not need to be classified as an 18 as they are not frequently strongly used. As far as violence is concerned, it only needs to be an 18 if injury and pain is shown in detail, “may be strong but not dwell on the inflition of pain or injury”

This is a link to the website for the British Board of film classification, it is evidence of why our film should be given a certification of 15.

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/download/guidelines/BBFC%20Classification%20Guidelines%202009.pdf


For the distribution of the product, I will use Soda Pictures, they are a British based film company who work with art house and independent cinemas. The main reason for using this company is because of the films and cinemas that they concentrate on, I think that the best way to promote my film is through art house cinemas, so Soda pictures is perfect. 

Also they are introducing film downloads from their website, as this is the way that I wanted to show my film outside of the UK, this is a great distributor to use for our film, giving us all the options that we need to distribute our film to the UK and Europe.

http://www.sodapictures.com/about/

4 - Who would be the audience for your media product?

 We think that our audience can really be anyone from the ages of 15 and up. People below 15 should not watch the film, because of the clear violence and language used. But anyone above this age can enjoy the film, as we tried to make it attract all audiences but incorporating what it is about in the opening. But, having said that, there is some bad language in the film, so this could possibly offend some older audiences as the style of thrillers has changed in the modern day.


 It can have something for everyone, it has some violence and action, and a huge part of the film is based on mystery, which of course can attract anyone. We show that our film has both of theses genres because of the two main scenes we have. There is a fight scene, showing that our film has action, and then also an interview scene, showing that our film will have a mystery side to it. The main film that we used to do our research on was Harry Brown, we all really liked the attack in the opening of this and thought the style would work well in our film. So we took this and made it less violent, meaning that we could then aim our film at a much wider audience.

5 - How did you attract / address your audience?

I think that we attracted our target audiences through the use of the narrative mainly. Our story line is clear but still asks more questions than it answers, like the opening to a thriller should. The fact that not much information about our main character, Mr Collins, is given away, means that our audience want to find out more about him and what he was doing in the area. Also we ask questions about why the policeman is trying to set up the main male character.

I think that the way we used the camera shot sizes and angles makes our audience feel more involved, and more like they are into the story. For example, this shot were we have a handheld view of the attack makes the audience feel like they are right into the scene.

Also these two close up shots of the detective, make him seem cunning and and like he is up to something, which again, draws our audience in and encourages them to want to see more of the film and find out what the detective is actually like and why he is like this, does he have some kind of incentive to act like this?

The music can also have an effect in attracting the audience to want to watch more. As the music is almost a bit contrapuntal to the action on the screen, such as the fight scene, the diegetic sound is quite different to what you would expect the music to be like, it is calm, whereas you may expect it to be fast paced and quite loud. We had the idea to create this kind of music, virtually from the beginning, and we had Lianne and Jack in our group, both doing music, so they were able to create this Non Diegetic sound.

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAfw4aqT_nQ

A link to youtube where my video has been uploaded.




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


I feel like our group has taken a big step up in the quality of the film, in comparison to our first film. In all aspects of the film, there has been strong improvement.

CAMERAWORK


Our camera work was good in the preliminary film, we used a variety of different shots sizes and angles throughout, but I do think that this improved for the thriller opening, because we were less afraid to be more confident in leaving blank space in the shot, or to the other extreme, no space at all! This is backed up in the top left and top centre. In the preliminary ( top left ) we left a lot of blank space around the face and the shot was more of a close up, whereas in the new one, we left far less space, and I feel this worked very well and the emphasis was on the face more and we were using an extreme close up.


We also experimented with more camera movements in the new film, which we did not attempt in the preliminary. In the bottom centre photo there is a tracking shot and we also used a pan in another shot, so this gave us a lot more variety with camera movement and made the film opening look a lot better as a result.


Also under camera work, I think in the second film, we used the shallow depth of field much better. In the preliminary (middle centre) they are both in focus and there is not much depth of field. Whereas in the new film (left centre) , we used this to much better effect.


In the preliminary, we occasionally forgot to use the white balance option, but I think that we learned from this and in the new film, we had the white balance perfect. This has a massive effect on the film, as you can see that the preliminary (top right) has a yellow wall in the background, but all of our new film shots have pure white walls as we corrected this using the white balance.


EDITING


In the fist film, we only used straight cuts for our film, but in the new film, we thought about how this would look on our film and what we wanted to construct and we used fades and dissolves. In the bottom right, there is a dissolve, and we used this to great effect to show that the time was passing in the interview room. We also used titles, in the preliminary we didn't do this, we only added credits. But I think that our basic titles worked well and didn't overpower the screen. As you can see that bottom left, there are only credits, but in the new films, (middle right and bottom centre) there are titles and they fit well into each corner of the shots.


SOUND 


The sound in the preliminary actually worked really well and we stuck with the same sort of method when making the Non diegetic soundtrack for the second film. We stuck with the same sort of contrapuntal sound that we used for the preliminary. There was one difference between the two though, there was no extra non diegetic sound effects in the preliminary and we did add these on using GARAGEBAND in the thriller coursework.


MISE EN SCENE


In the preliminary, our group did not really think about the importance of mise en scene but as we had more complex situations on out coursework we put a lot more time and effort in to this. For example, in the left centre photo, we used a proper tape recorder and also the policeman is in full uniform. This has a massive effect on the continuity of the film because it makes it a lot more believable for the audience.




CHARACTER AND STORY


The way that we constructed the characters for the second film was thought about a lot more. We wanted to make the girl come across as quite a vulnerable character, the policeman as a cunning and sarcastic character, and the chef as quite a nervous and frustrated man. They way we did this was through the script, and what they said, we also used body language ( the girl with her hands in her pocket and the Male protagonist looking down and nervous )