How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Conventions:

For the first two scenes I used a master shot and an establishing shot. This challenges the convention of fiction movie openings. Because looking at some examples of openings from famous movies like the matrix and zombieland, they both used close up shots, medium shots and long shots to establish the scene. They also used narrations, something that I didn’t use in my movie at all. One of the most noted things I saw in zombieland and the matrix is that they didn’t have a lot of dialogue in the first scenes of the movie. They used shots to explain the scenario.

After the establishing shot and the master shot, I used close up shots, medium shots, long shots and wide shots to show the morning routine of my character and to introduce him. In a lot of action fiction movies they usually introduce the character using action scenes and violence around the character. As shown in the opening of Dawn of the Dead and Zombieland.

An example from the matrix.

An example from my movie.

An example from my movie An example from dawn of the dead.

For the last scenes of my movie, I start adding suspense and action. But other action fiction movie openings has already introduced us using violence and action. So my suspense and action came in late. Also in a lot of the action fiction movie openings like zombieland showed very gory scenes. Unlike my movie opening that showed minimum amount of gore.

Social Groups:

All media products represent a particular group of some sort. Our fiction opening represents teenagers. My movie’s target audience is teenagers aged between 15 to 18. They live in countries in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, South America and North America. Teenagers in this age usually like action and violence. Also in a lot of the mentioned continents, most of them have violence in their culture. I researched the type of people who love action fiction movies and found out that they are teenagers.

The main character is a teenager that is aged exactly like the target audience. The character is dressed up like a teenager, for example dark pants with a graphite T-shirt. He also takes care of his looks as we see in the movie. He brushes his teeth every day and takes good care of his hair. My movie included a gun as the weapon of choice. This is an aspect shown in many teenage action fiction movies like zombieland, including my own. My movie included a laptop. As my media product was created to represent teenagers, I feel as though the laptop was a good prop as it allowed the use of a popular teenage social networking site, Facebook. The final similarity that I found in action fiction movies is that the evil person or thing is very powerful. Teenagers hate bad guys with a lot of power that they use for evil. In my movie the bad guy is zombie, he is very aggressive and violent when he sees humans.

The main character from Zombie land. He is a teenager like our

character in our opening.

The main character from our opening. He is a teenager like the other main character from

zombieland.

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Audience:

As a group, we have decided that our target audience for our media product are teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19. Although it is viewable for the older age groups. We researched what engages the teenagers in a movie. We have also used some of our opinions because we are teenagers.

The first thing we found is that teenagers get engaged to a movie that has a lot of suspense and action. Our opening provides this by showing guns and zombies. Teenagers like zombies. It is a popular thing on the internet and the TV. People talk about it nonstop on social media websites. Our opening engages the teenagers by adding zombies. We also found out that they like weapons especially guns. Our opening includes an old classic revolver (the name of the weapon). We also showed the audience fire from the gun making the scene look more realistic. We added a good sound effect to the gun to make also look more realistic. The gunfire engaged the audience by being more realistic. It also engaged them buy using weapons like guns.

Teenagers these days like to know other peoples morning routine. Because it gives them an idea of the characteristics of a Person and they usually use it to compare it to their morning routine. My character shows his morning routine. This will engage the audience by telling them the characteristics of the character. Lastly, teenagers these days like electronic music because it gives them power and excitement. My opening has electronic music playing in the credits.

How would my product be distributed as a real media text?

Because we Live in Qatar we are going to use Qatari an film institutions to distribute our product. As a group we have discussed what kind of media institution might wish to distribute our media product. We feel as though we should aim more towards the lower budget Qatar film institutions rather than a higher budget film distribution company such as The Warner Brothers. We think this because if we were to distribute with a higher end company then our media product would not work out as well because those types of films would use infinite levels of CGI and very expensive and upgraded technologies.

We think that our film should be produced with a film company such as Doha Film Institute (DFI). DFI has produced many low budget, yet successful, Qatarian films. Whilst researching we found that DFI do not produce films within the fiction genre. Therefore we feel as though our action fiction would stand out amongst the rest of their films, therefore leading it to be successful within the film industry. However this could also be a drawback as they may not wish to take on a media product of the fiction genre as

they do not specialize in this area of the industry. An example of their work is shown In movies like Just Like a Woman starring Sienna Miller, The Reluctant Fundamentalist directed by Mira Nair which opened 69th Venice International Film Festival, and Kanye West's Cruel Summer - a short film which shot in Doha and premiered during the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

Other film distribution companies like Qatar Cinema CO could be used to produce our movie. However it also does not distribute fiction movies.

How did your production skills develop throughout the project?

Our production skills were very bad because it was our first time working on a project for AS media studies. We didn’t know a lot about production because we did not cover all of it in the classroom. We had problems with time management. We set dates for us to meet in but a lot of people ignored them and went to work on other subjects. This caused a lot of arguments within the group. We also didn’t know the importance of each objective, for example we worked more on scripts than making the actual opening. Our lac of production skills made us waste time until the deadline came close. So we worked as hard as we can a finished just in time. After knowing all the problems that we had with production, we decreased the number of members in our group to make it easier to manage. It was a good call for the group because after decreasing the amount of members, we were able easily manage our time. We were also able to know which targets are more important than others. We used online calendars to help us plan meeting. We started setting up deadline dates that the group would have to achieve.

For the editing software it was easy use but it need a lot of practice to get the hang of it. Editing was easy but we need more time on it improve our skills. We had some problems with putting the correct sound effect in the correct scene. But after sometime practicing on the computer it was very easy. We experimented with a lot of transitions but the dissolve was the most used one as this allowed us to almost merge frames together and give good flow. Luckily one of my group members is good at video editing software so he helped us out.

At the beginning of the project we had to know about the camera movement, angles and shots. The teacher showed us their uses and what equipment they needed to be made. For example for tracking camera movement you need to have a trolley that moves you on a track, this gives a smooth camera movements. It is used to follow characters around. But we were not able to do it our elves because we didn’t have the resources. However were able to use other camera movements like handheld. At first we were bad at handheld camera movement but we got the hang of it. For our shots and angles we read their definitions and we did examples of each shot and angle.

How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

Before we were actually introduced to any filming equipment, our first task was to create our own ‘blogger’ account; this is where all of our work would be stored so that we could look back upon it. Nobody in our group had used this website before however it was quite simple to use as it had a clear straightforward layout. One problem we did come across was uploading our document on to blogger. This was not a major problem as it was easy to overcome by uploading the documents on to other websites like Slideshare and putting a link to them in the blog. As we had to upload PowerPoint presentations and word documents to our blogs, we created accounts on the website Slideshare which enabled us to do this task. It was quite simple to upload the PowerPoint and the Word Document onto our Slideshare accounts however; it did consume quite a lot of time. Doing this allows people to view a full PowerPoint and Word document via a blog.

Within the production of our media product, we have learnt how to use various filming technologies. Primarily, we were introduced to new equipment including cameras, tripods and a range of computer programmers. We found that using tripods is important while filming an action fiction movie, because there would be a lot of movement. Also we found out that because of Qatar being windy these days, we have to have a good mic to produce a good sound quality and making it easier to hear. However we didn’t have the budget or the equipment to buy a tripod and a good mic. The school didn’t help us with equipment because they also didn’t have it. It was very hard to learn with the lac of equipment.

During the editing process we used a Windows software called Moviemaker. The software was very easy to use. It only took us a couple days to understand the software. We also didn’t need a lot of guidance as the software was making things easy. However we did have a couple of problems. When we work on moviemaker in school, the software runs perfectly. But when we run it at our home computer, then it doesn’t work. We noticed that the computers in our school run on Windows 8 operating system but our home computer runs on windows 7 operating system. This made it hard to run our work that we did on moviemaker in school, to run on our home computers. But at the end we were able to find a computer with windows 8 operating system.

We used web browser a lot to research a lot of the things in making a fiction movie. For example we used Slideshare to look at work that other people did when they did their media product. It gave us a lot of inspiration. We also used websites like Wikipedia to give us information about the fiction genera. It was very easy to use because we use it every day. But the hardest part was to find the correct source of information. It is because not everything in Wikipedia is completely accurate.