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.