Final Piece evaluation

Media Piece by Reece Hack, Alex Jones and Jack NichollsIn what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

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

Who would be the audience for your media product?

How did you attract/address your audience?

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

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real

media

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

• Our media piece uses a lot of conventions and typical forms of real media products. • For one, our antagonist character’s costume is consisted mainly of black and dark grey and his

face is covered, which is a convention of antagonist characters in thriller. • There are also some thriller conventions in the writing of our piece. For example, our piece

uses the convention of the character waking up with no memory of what happened and where they are, which is shown in “The Bourne Identity”, “Unkown” and “The Maze Runner”

• However, we have challenged forms and conventions of thriller movies in some ways• For one, we have challenged to convention of having a male protagonist by having a Female

one, which markets the film towards a female audience as well as the typical male audience of a thriller

• Also, we have challenged the forms of the Thriller genre by how we edited it. Our main task contains mostly faced paced action scenes of our actress running. While most thriller films edit these scenes to have lots of very short shots and fast cuts, our piece was edited to mostly have longer shots consisting of a few seconds or even more each, with only a few instances of very fast cuts throughout the piece.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

• Our piece doesn’t represent a wide range of people from different social, as there is no portrayal of Religion, Social class or a wide range of ethnicities

• However, we have portrayed both Genders in our piece, as we have a female protagonist and a male antagonist.

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

• Our media piece was shot almost no budget apart from money spent on our machete prop and camera stabiliser, so I think it would be distributed by a film festival such as Sundance

• It may also be distributed by a British Independent film distributer such as Polygram Filmed entertainment, who have distributed British Indie Thrillers and Dramas such as Shallow Grave (1994)

Who would Your audience be for your media piece and why?

• Our media piece I feel would have a fairly wide audience• I would say that our piece would appeal to both men and women, as even though

it is in the genre of Thriller which is a genre of which the target audience is men, our piece has a female protagonist which means it may also appeal to a female audience on top of its typical male audience

• In relation to the social grading scale, I would say that our piece appeals to classes B to E, though the main target audience I would say is C2

• The fact it appeals to this class is because I feel it fits into the young and Rubicam classification of the struggler, as a working class person is likely to to seek visual and physical sensation and a sense of escapism in a film, which our piece displays through putting our character in extreme and dangerous situations

How did you attract/address your audience?

• We attracted our audience through using both a male and female character in our piece, which means our piece would attract both a male and female audience rather than the typical male audience of a Thriller.

• We could also attract an audience by marketing our piece through the Facebook page we’ve created for our studio, on which we would post teaser shots for it and posters.

• Additionally, we could discuss getting our piece displayed at an Indie film festival such as Sundance, which would act as marketing for the film’s theatrical release.

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

• Although my role in our piece as director didn’t directly implement much technology, I still learned some things about technologies in media

• •For example, I learnt about colour correction in editing, which can be used to entirely changed the colour palette of your media piece, which we used to bleach our footage to give it a gritty feel. A screenshot displaying this colour pallet can be seen below

•I also learned about the uses of certain pieces of equipment in filming. For our piece we had planned to a lot of fast moving actions shots, for which a dolly would be too slow and not smooth enough. This meant I had to research other things to mount our camera on. I soon discovered handheld camera stabilizers, which were small, cheap and would be much sturdier than the alternative of simply running along while holding a camera. I therefore purchased one of these, on which we shot every shot of our piece. An image of the stabilizer can be seen below.

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

product? • Comparing this to our preliminary task, I would say that we have learnt a lot more regarding the production and

planning of a media text.• For one, I feel that I have progressed as a director. In our preliminary task, most of my shots were simple static

over the shoulder shots, however in my main task, there are a wide variety of shots, including tracking shots, high angle shots and extreme close-up eyeline shots.

• I also feel we’ve made better use of equipment, as we decided to research what would be best to shoot fast tracking shots on rather than use the Dolly provided by the College. It turned out that the best thing to use that was cheap was a handheld stabilizer, which we opted to use to shoot our entire piece. The benefits from using can be seen especially during the running shots, as they shots are fairly smooth and have a shaky-cam effect to them rather than the violent camera shake we would have had when moving a dolly along that fast.

• Additionally, I feel my skills in organising and planning out a media piece progressed. As the main task had no prompt other than it being a film opening, the script that was written for it was much more complex to transfer into a film. The script required use of another location other than the Sixth Form studio, which meant we needed to talk to site managers of locations we wanted to film and fill in any paperwork required to give us permissions. Also, as this piece contained much more shots than our Preliminary task and had a much wider variation of shots, I made both a shot list detailing every shot we were going to include as well as how long they were going to be and a story board as a visual demonstration of these shots. When shooting, I followed the shot list directly as a prompt of how the shots were being shot, from what perspective, what the actors were doing in them and how long they would be. I feel that the use of this shot list made shooting the piece a lot easier, and meant that we only needed one day to shoot and there was a fairly clear idea of how it was going to be edited together.