James Terech Evaluation

Evaluation Media - James Terech


Introduction

The opening sequence that my group performed, edited and filmed was called ‘One final note’, we didn’t decide on a name until we had finished the filming; once that stage was complete we decided from what we had filmed that this is an appropriate name. My group contained myself, Chris and Taran, we decided on working in a trio so that we could each have our designated areas of work however we would all work as a team and help each other when needed. Filming was done by Chris, Acting by me and editing by Taran.



Q 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In my own opinion I would say that the genre for the sequence would be a ‘teen’ & ‘bullying’. As a group our first decision was for the film to be about a gritty victim of bullying, we wanted to do this as we felt that there was a niche in the film market and not many other films are done in such a way. It is obvious to the audience that the girl is very stressed and can not cope with it much longer, she gets bullied at college and her family do not seem to take any consideration towards her feelings. We used the usual camera shots and angles such as a close up, medium shot this was usually used on the final note and also when the actress was walking down the corridor, when she was being bullied we used a medium shot mostly this was so that you could understand what kind of bullying it was, at 1 point we even canted the angle. Although everything that we showed was what you would expect in a bullying sequence we decided not to add a twist to it as it might make it a little bit too cheesy, but I thought that we made it look very dramatic, I feel that with the build up to this point allows the audience to understand the concept of our sequence. From our feedback that we received it showed that our choice to stick to a basic bullying theme: “very unique in how it ends, easy to understand and not cheesy”.



Q 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

From an audiences point of view it is easy to see that there are two main characters in this film with two supporting roles, this is shown by the bully and the bully victim, then the supporting roles played by the bullies friends. The social groups that our group have presented are:

* Bully
* Bullies friends
* Bully victim / Unsociable girl

You can see that the victim is also very insecure in the way that she looks behind her often and clutches hold of her belongings tightly, furthermore the victim is usually walking alone through corridors, she is also portrayed as weak and vulnerable. The bully shows his dominance by looking down at people and also staying in groups of friend; the bully is rough looking and always has a moody look on his face, this fits in with a media stereotype that most bullies are rough and don’t treat people with respect. So that the scenes do not complicate they are all shot in similar places, this allows the audience to get an understanding of the characters.



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

I think that the insinuations given off from our film are that not everybody is safe in college. If any film production company were to take on our project would be Paramount motion pictures – MTV Films; the reason why I think that this would be suitable for our film is because MTV is directed at teenagers and with this film they will be able to show what can go on in college, also as it is a short movie it could be showed after a programme. It could also became a really big film as MTV is a big business with lots of viewers all around the globe this could then promote the film further.



Q 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?


If I had to narrow the into a certain character audience I would choose bully victims although our film could also be aimed at non bully victims. I would say that its main audience would be teenagers but then also parents on students at school or college. As it is a bullying film I would say that it is a mixed gendered audience however I feel that the female audience will understand the message of the film clearer. For a stereotypical bullying film people may suggest that you have to be of a foreign background or ethnicity or maybe even a poor child, however we challenged that stereotype by having a regular middle class English student. We decided on a bullying audience as there are not many films out which help promote the awareness of bullying to the parents of their children; we saw that there was a niche in the industry, I feel that we could also get many sponsors and financial backing as it is showing the audience what could happen in college and that your not always safe.



Q 5: How did you attract/ address your audience?

The start of our film allows the audience to gain an interest, instantly you are drawn in and you want to know why the victim looks so insecure even though she is walking through college corridors. Our video is shown from past and present, this is shown by video effects; when the video is in colour the tense is present when in black and white it’s in the past. All of the present tense is set in the victims house where as the past tense is set in college. The enigmas allow the audience to wonder what will happen to the victim, and what will happen to the bully; this allows people to watch until the end of the film. The binary opposites are clear to all of the audience as there is a clear opposite between the bully and the victim, this then creates tension between the characters. Our film creates a message to the parents of students at college/school that your children are not always safe.



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

Mostly we used a mixture of YouTube and IMDB.com. As I did most of the acting I didn’t learn much about the editing side of the film production, I assisted in filming but again didn’t learn much. The first time that we filmed the victim writing ‘the final note’ we did not have the correct camera angle so we reproduced it at a better standard.



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

In our preliminary task I’d say that we performed alright but we could have done better. Our film uses many more camera angles which makes it more natural to the genre, music providing tension for the audience and transitions to swap from past and present which resulted in it being more professional.



Conclusion

In conclusion I think that our genre has been achieved as there was a niche in the market and I think we were successful and it would have been filled, also it is suitable for the target audience. This has been achieved through the mise en scene, camera angles, and editing as we have fulfilled our targets. The past and present clips are very useful to our film as it gives an understanding; this is because it is very forceful and the audience can see the difference.

Media Evaluation – One Final Note - Taran Draycott


For our product we made an opening sequence to a movie named, One Final Note, it is a film about a troubled schoolgirl who attempts to take her own life in the first part of this film. But we created it in a way that would, hopefully, create enigmas for any viewers. I worked with Chris and James on this and our individual contributions were as follows. Chris and James did the majority of the filming outside of college as it was hard for me to travel, so I was mainly responsible for editing the clip and putting together new footage, sounds and sequencing the clip correctly.

We set out attempting to make it a kind of Real, Teenage Gritty Drama genre as we thought that it would appeal to the aforementioned teenagers. We followed the basis of a similar film ‘Kidulthood’ and tried to create slightly new elements to this by using flashbacks instead of showing it all then and there; we showed our clip to a group of 16-18 years olds for feedback. They said that the flashbacks were very captivating and gave the viewer an insight into what has happened up to this point so that they were not too clueless but not to much so that they would know everything about this girl. They also said that the scenes which show her writing her ‘One Final Note’ are very different to the norm and this also made them want to carry on watching knowing that it wasn’t just like every other film already out there.

In our film we based it solely on teenagers and kept to only representing this age group. We showed how each person is different, in the case of the bully and his friend or the case of the victim, we were trying to point out, that teenagers have quite a difficult life, but not all to the extreme that our opening sequence shows. We showed teenagers with every aspect a normal teenager would have, normal clothes and normal appearances, although we did not use any speech we showed teenagers as social beings and showed that they tend to hang around in groups. We used quite a lot of media language to show how intense the bully was with the acting being quite violent and intimidating. I think the way we have represented teenagers in this fit perfectly with what the media portray them as in television and films of everyday life. Our test group also pointed out that the media language had made it a lot easier to respond to the characters in this clip.

A similar film directed by Menhaj Huda called Kidulthood is a low budget film that was quite hit with the British teenage public and was widely accepted as a good film at the British Independent Film Awards where it won two awards, I believe our product would be distributed in a similar way. Revolver Entertainment who produced the film could also be a good starting point for many independent films such as ours but I believe they would be the kind of media institution who would distribute our product.

Our product was set to be aimed at Male and Female people between the ages of fifteen and twenty and that includes people of any nationality as the problems dealt with in our films are faced by teenagers world wide.

This was our target audience as we believe they are a very good audience to screen our product too, they are a wide scale audience with a lot of different views and preferences for films and we attempted to appeal to all of those by creating the enigmas that we did in our opening sequence. The would be good for our product financially as we believe they have money that they could spend enjoying their time at our film, instead of wasting it on something
that they would not enjoy as much as our product. We could have several secondary target audiences but I believe they main one would be adults, specifically adults who have teenage children as it could give them a little idea of how life is as a teenager in today’s world. As our test group contained members of our target audience we asked them a range of questions and 80% of our feedback came back very positive with may commenting on how they would watch the film if it was actually produced and that they would rate it highly compared to actual films that they had seen made before.


Looking back at our quite shoddy preliminary task we have improved in many ways, from the technological expertise we now possess both with the filming equipment and the editing equipment we have improved ten fold ahead of that task, the only mistakes we had made was failing to look over the clip sufficiently before we showed it at our first screening to our test audience and I hadn’t removed a couple of sound blips which ruined the overall impression of the clips but our feedback mentioned this only very slightly and made comments on the better aspects such as our editing techniques and angles used during filming that had impressed them enough for it no to be an major issue. The main issue I personally had with our product was the time we had to do it, we had not spread out time our correctly and we had to rush certain parts of our editing but we managed to rectify our problems before we created our final product.

On the whole I think our product was quite a success with only a few minor blips such as the time which I mentioned before and the sound blips , but the overall product once it was finished was quite strong and by the feedback we gained obvioiusly grabbed the attention of a great many viewers, I believe it comes quite close to the opening sequence of the film we refer ours to ‘Kidulthood’ and is quite near to being ‘the genuine article’ which could be shown on the big screen.

Final Video - One Final Note

Outline of Idea

Our first decision was for the film to be about a gritty victim of bullying. 

The sequence is only short, but in the time it is on you get a very vivid image of what this film will entail. 

The clip itself is two separate occasions and as the girl travels through the corridor and she is bullied, the clip of her harming herself at home is inserted in between.

Realism and Media Language

Media Language

For our video we will be using Natural and Low Key lighting as we are trying to deal with the harsh, difficult, gritty reality some teenagers have to face. The mise en scene for the whole of this clip will be no different to everyday life. At college the corridors will be the same, and at the girl's house her room will be the same as usual. However we will be attempting to make the scene in her bedroom darker and a bit more emotional and using it to try and involve the audiences in how she is feeling.

Box Office Information

Kidulthood is based around the same kind of gritty teenage theme we are trying to achieve and is the only similar film we can find. It was made by a small time studio called Revolver and grossed £89028 in its opening weekend in March of 2006 and since has made an overall gross profit of £227094.

Most other teen dramas are all glitz and glamour and not really true to what we want and it would go in the opposite direction to the kind of effect we are trying to have on our audience as we want to make it an enjoyable film but one that makes them think about the subject at hand.

(Chris)

Target Audience + BFI Statistics

As stated earlier in our blog we are aiming our clip at teenagers, as they can relate directly or indirectly to the theme we have chosen, which is bullying. But we also think that our clip may appeal to adults as it gives them an insight into what may be happening to their children if they are being bullied.

According to the BFI Handbook 2005 in the year of 2003 the percentage of 15 - 24 year olds that visited the cinema at least once a month was 52% and the percentage of people aged 35 or higher who did the same was 33% so there is large target audience we could aim our movie at.  

(James)