Evaluation

BY: BEN LLOYD

Evaluation

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

products?

From our media film, we can see how the youth of nowadays society may be represented in the poorer parts of London. Through our movie, we have represented the codes and conventions of drugs and alcohol to shine a light on the theme of what they are doing to the youth of the world.

However, we also tried to challenge most codes and conventions of drug takers as we see our actress, Mason, looks very innocent and like a normal girl and we wouldn’t expect her to do drugs.


products?

The easy codes and conventions to manipulate for the thriller genre are things like sound, lighting and the typography of the text that appears on screen.Sound For the music in our movie, we used a very popular UK Grime Artist called

Skepta. The song is called Nasty, and it has a very harsh beat to the rhythm, which is why we found it fitting for the video.

We had no dialogue throughout the movie as we felt it would be more of a mystery to the audience.

Lighting Throughout my 10 title sequence analysis’, I

realised that for all the thriller movies, there was a common theme of there being very low lighting, with some blurriness and occasionally some blackouts.

So for our movie, we decided as a group to have the movie blackout in time with the harsh beat of the music, and have this happen repetitively throughout the title sequence.


products?

From the title sequence research, I can understand that the most common things that I saw throughout the thriller title sequences were colours. I feel like the most common colours to appear throughout all the title sequences were black, white and red. This means that the title sequences were quite dark, however, the only colour to appear was red which is an easy comparison to blood.

Additionally, I also feel like there are common sounds that appear throughout most of the title sequences. I feel like most of the title sequences contain noises that are quite ‘scratchy’ and ‘screechy’, which some sudden noises and heavy bass.


products?

In our continuity task, we didn’t use a lot of low lighting, or we didn’t have a lot of blackouts throughout the movie as we hadn’t seen any other movies that had done this. However, since filming the continuity task, we had gathered more experience and therefore were able to add different things into our main task, for example the blackouts.

Also, in our continuity task, we developed on the codes and conventions of a gangster by having whiskey and lots of disposable cash on the table in front of the gangster. This was the only strongly prominent development of codes and conventions in the continuity task, however, in the main task, we had a lot more things like what the characters were wearing as well as props in the scene, but as we have no dialogue in our main task, it makes it harder to develop the codes and conventions further than that.

We also decided to slightly challenge codes and conventions by having an innocent girl play the drug taking role. This meant that we had not only progressed from developing codes and convention since the continuity task, but had also learnt to challenge them in our movie as well.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

As I stated before, our product is a presentation about the youth of nowadays society. This means that we must try to show them in the light that everyone thinks that they are like, however, it is up to us, the creators, whether we want to change the way the viewer looks at a certain group of people.

Throughout the title sequence, we see lots of drugs and alcohol in the scene to help remind the audience of how we want to present the social media group that is youth.

We try to make the characters that play the young individuals to not look like they should be doing drugs.

We tried to dress the main character, Arthur, in a very typical Adidas tracksuit set so it follows what we would expect youths to wear. However, we dressed the other characters in clothes that they look like they would wear at night to give it a party theme to the movie.


We decided to represent the youth of London as it is a very important matter, and entails very important problems like the use of drugs and alcohol. We wanted to try and spread awareness about the possibilities of other youths using these narcotics that the viewers may know.

The characters in the movie are portrayed as quite daring and stupid as they are doing lots of drugs and excessive drinking at a young age, and this is how we wanted our media product to be portrayed as it is a harsh reality of the world, and can cause lots of problems for people.

From doing our research, we managed to be able to gather a fairly conclusive representation of the London youth in nowadays society. For example, in the movie ‘Ill Manors’, we can see that the characters are represented to be quite unfriendly and unapproachable:

The impact this may have on the audience would be that they are shocked by the characters that are taking these narcotics. This is the intention that we, the production team had, as we want to spread awareness that anyone can be taking these illegal substances, no matter what they look like on the outside.

I also think however that some of the audience may have some acceptance with what is happening in the movie, as they understand that they possibly could have once been a teenager willing to try anything.

Using our target audience research, we decided to include drugs in the movie for the representation of nowadays youth society, as more people thought it would be a more accurate representation.


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

Personally, I feel like any media institution is capable of distributing our media product as it can fit quite a wide audience, however, I think that the most suited media institution would be something like Netflix or Now TV as this is an internet based media distributor, and our target audience is mostly young people, so maybe this movie would be best suited for the younger audience that use an internet distributor for example.

Another possible media distributor is Miramax as they have distributed other crime thrillers like Pulp Fiction. This means that they be more inclined to distribute hoe crime thriller as the other one was such a success.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

We have set the age rating of the movie to 15, so this means that we would expect any age above 15 to watch the movie, however, I feel like the main audience would be fairly young audience, between 15-20.

The following images is an official description by the BBFC of what there would be expected to see in a 15 rated movie.

We would also expect to see some older viewers purely as there is going to be someone older than 20 that would watch the movie, and not only have viewers that are between 15 and 20.

Although there is no dialogue in the title sequence, which means we can eliminate the use of swearing to justify our BBFC age rating, we feel like the dark tone as well as use of drugs allowed us to make the movie age rating 15.

How did you attract/address your audience?

Through other famous movies like “ill manors” and “Kidulthood”, we feel like this movie will attract a similar audience as it is is also about drugs and alcohol. I feel like this would mostly be aimed at a younger audience and not the older audience.

I feel like the teaser trailer allowed for the audience to be attracted to the movie, and therefore gain some excitement for the movie.

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

Throughout the editing process, I have learnt lots of basic things like cropping the length of certain shots down, and adding special titles into the movie.

Some of the other things I have learnt that are more practical include things like lighting are when we were filming the continuity task, we used quite dim lighting, and the only lighting we did use were from lamps and normal lights. There was one scene where we moved a car and turned the lights on to help us see the character better:

When we were filming our main task, we still did not use any professional lighting as we didn’t find it necessary as we wanted quite a natural theme to the movie. All the same, we used a lamp that we could maneuver better to give us better lighting for when we were filming the main task suspect board.

For our planning, we found it very effective to have a recorded discussion about the ideas we have for the movie. This helped us to refer back to the video to help remember any of the ideas we had, and to help have some proof of planning. For the recording, we simply went into a quiet room, and placed my phone on the floor whilst recording a video and began discussing our ideas. I then sent the video to the people I was working with and we were able to blog about it.


For the creation stage of the product, I learnt a lot about distributing the product. We placed all of our drafts and final edits on YouTube, which made it very easy for everyone to watch and give feedback. Additionally, we had to create questionnaires for our viewers which meant we had to find a survey creator. This is where we used Survey Monkey. This tool is a very well known website that allows you to distribute your questionnaire easily and get lots of people to answer it.

For the evaluation of my product, I had to refer back to my product on YouTube, however, I also had to look back at some of my previous blog posts on my blog domain to look at some of the thigs I did for preparation. In making this evaluation, I also had to use some sort of presentation software, which is where I used PowerPoint. This is the most commonly known and used software to present anything, and this is why I also used it.

Throughout the preparation, production and final evaluation of my product, I feel like I used technology as effectively as I could have, and used a very wide range of software to reach my final product.


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

Looking at my skills audit, I was able to realize where my problems lie, and what I can do to improve them. This meant I had to create a skills audit and realistically judge myself in different fields and see where needs improvement;

Looking at the skills audit, we can see that there are some issues with time management and organization. This was a problem for us when filming our preliminary task as it meant that we faced some issues in preparation for filming. However, I feel like since filming the continuity task, we have improved as a group and managed to create more time for the production of our main task and organize it better.

In the research stage for our continuity task, I feel like it lacked the depth that we went in to for the main task. For example, in the main task, we researched ten title sequences including the theme that we made the title sequence on, and some of which were based on similar aspects of our movie (Ill Manors). Furthermore, having watched ten movies to the do title sequence analysis’ on, it meant we had further knowledge into how films are made and what effect this gave the audience.

In the planning stage of our movie, I feel like we barely planned much at all for our continuity task. In our main task, we planned the location, props, costumes, and even recorded ourselves discussing the ideas we had for the title sequence we would create, whereas in our continuity task, we only really decided on these things at the last opportunity.


Looking at our final continuity task product, and even comparing it to our main task draft I can immediately see that the quality difference shows the difference in professionalism, and also looking at the way the video was exported, and has a black border compared to our main task further distinguishes between how we have progressed as a group.


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