Evaluation Question 1

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

Three act structure

1.Jenny had a difficult childhood and was bought up in a run down area. At the age of 15, she decides to run away and refuses to ever return. She moves to the city and marries a wealthy business man. To make some easy money, Jenny sells a painting to a buyer. The buyer then realises the painting is a fake and hires a hit-man to kill Jenny.

2.The hit-man follows Jenny around trying to ‘hunt her down’. Jenny is soon to realise of this and this is where the chase begins.

3. Jenny manages to slip away and change her identity. She returns home to her husband (the hit-man) who is unaware of Jenny being the target. She realises this, so she continues to make him dinner but adds poison to kill him.

We chose to produce a film trailer, poster and magazine cover to promote our crime film ‘UNPAINTED PATH’. We researched into other magazines techniques as well as other movie posters and trailers, to see how they adapted their ideas into promoting their film. We needed to do this research as we had never done this before and needed research in order to carry out the task efficiently. We used all three of these promoting techniques as a way of communicating with our audiences to evaluate their thoughts about our film. We could then use this feedback to improve in our future work.

To be able to establish our target audience of 15 and above, with an interest for crime films, we wanted to include some iconography. This included ideas from Kill Bill. For example, we used ‘twisted nerve’ one of the soundtracks used in the film, as well as the split screen shot. Using bold yellow backgrounds as well, was something similar to Kill Bill that we wanted to include to show an element of Pastiche and potential hyper-reality.

We originally decided upon a three act structure as a group, but we did change the ideas from when we first pitched them to the rest of our group. This is because we were continually deciding upon different and better ideas whilst filming.

We followed the typical film trailer conventions of a crime film. This was followed by adding camera shots that were fast paced and high-resolution colour, allowing the audience to feel the ‘what happens next’ expectations that they should do for this genre of film.

Our soundtracks were used to add suspension to our trailer, which then contrasted each other to add a slight element of action.

All of our camera shots, sounds and titles were mainly influenced by Kill Bill and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. This allowed us to use conventions from both films, ensuring we had covered all areas of a crime film.

As our film essentially followed the typical life of a couple, our costumes were ones that weren’t too fancy. They wouldn’t be seen to be different for everyday life, yet when filming the busy shots in the middle of town, we mainly focused on Jenny so that it was obvious who the main character was.

As most of our scenes were films in busy, built up areas, we felt that this followed the conventions of a typical crime film as it included a chase which was necessary to film in somewhere easily distracting.

We also followed the conventions for a typical film trailer as we did not choose to have all the footage in a chronological order. This made sense when looking at other trailers as they also do this and we wanted it to be similar to these and to not give away too much of the narrative, but enough to entice the audience in.

However, we challenged the conventions of a typical Crime genre film as our ‘heroes’ appeal to both genders, which then helps to widen our target audience appeal. We incorporated Post-Modern techniques in the way that our film falls under the sub-genre/hybrid film of Crime Thriller. Although Post-Modern techniques can be quite popular throughout crime films, it is also very well-known for a crime film to fall under two genres, creating a sub-genre. These would be films with added humour, challenging conventions of a typical crime film. We slightly adapted this and over-dramatised our film to add a slight element of humour, similar to the film Mr and Mrs Smith.

Our Distribution and Marketing techniques

Miramax are a well known film distributor. However, they haven’t recently distributed many films; especially crime. They are well known for Pulp Fiction (1994); Muriel’s Wedding (1995); Trainspotting(1996); Kill Bill: Vol 1(2003) and Vol 2 (2004) and many other mainstream films. However, more recently they have not been distributing quite so many films, their most recent well-known being Sin City: A Dame to Kill for.

Film Trailer ConventionsGenre Conventions and Narrative: Our film features two main characters, a husband and a wife. Both the characters play the antagonist role as well as the protagonist, leaving the audience questioning who they prefer as neither character is better than the other. However, the female role in this film is different to most other crime films, yet similar to Kill Bill as they both play the antagonist role. The narrative follows both the theory from Roland Barthes and Levi Strauss. Strauss introduces the ‘Opposing structures Theory’ such as hero/villain, good/bad. Whereas Barthes, challenges the idea of a narrative to have enigma codes like in Kill Bill with ‘Who is Bill’ and a Proairetic code, again in Kill Bill with ‘shoot-out’ or ‘show-down’. We use both of these theories as we include the question of ‘What is going to happen’ and the tag line of ‘get your guns ready’/ ‘showdown’.

Camera work/editing: Our shot types as well as editing techniques were done as close as possible as something that would be used in a crime thriller genre film. We tried to follow mainly the editing techniques that were used in Kill Bill. These include fast paced shots and split screen effects as well as adding cartoon effect images to incorporate post-modernism. At the beginning of our trailer, we use time remapping to rewind the footage of the female role walking down the corridor. This falls into place with the voice over, but would still make sense without sense and fits perfectly with the rest of the trailer.

Time remapping shot

ExamplesThese are some screen shots from our trailer on YouTube. They show the fast paced, comic effect and split screen shots that we used for our trailer.

Film Trailer Conventions

Sound and Titles: Our sounds were found on www.bensound.com as well as our main background music from ‘Twisted Nerve’. They were both edgy and a little ‘unnerving’ which was the theme we were looking for as this is similar to most crime films.