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)

Opening Sequences with Analysis

Chris - 'The Spy Who Shagged Me' 

This opening sequence fits its genre perfectly! Straight away with the upbeat music and seventies style clothing and scenery you can see it is a comedy. With Austin dancing all the way through the clip it is full of laughs especially as he is naked, yet covered at all times by little items or by the titles that are included to introduce characters and directors. 

James - 'Casino Royale'

This opening sequence is very very good. You can tell it was expensive to make as it is done all using computers. The use of a mysterious song creates the genre defining aspect of James Bond that he is a spy and the use of the black and red and the 4 suits used in card games links the main theme of the film which is gambling while the fight scenes are reminders of previous films and run in sync with them.

Taz - 'Alien Resurrection'

The opening scene to this movie is very confusing if you haven't seen the first movie in this trilogy. But it is quite a good hook either way. With the name of the film being Alien the viewer would expect to see huge killer aliens but in fact all you see is a little bug being squashed by a man and then it being spat against a window which then cuts to a scene of the huge spaceships moving along towards a planet. This part of the clip is shrouded in mystery and makes the viewer watch on.