Media EvaluationBy Vikki West

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

• When beginning the process of making a film opening, I thought that the most useful way to start would be to research as many different film openings as possible to understand common elements, and therefore work out what should be included in our own, along with the length of the opening. I discovered that titles can make up the majority of many openings, and sometimes speech is only used towards the end of an opening if visual and musical elements are used instead.

• Although we appreciated that this can be effective as it allows the audience to get into the film, we wanted to use the titles to grab the audience immediately by making them quite different to an average title sequence for a film. For this reason we chose to use sped up footage of Abby’s hand writing and rubbing out the names on a whiteboard which for our target audience would hopefully be a new and interesting way of making something potentially quite boring, more fun and quirky, therefore fitting well with the rom-com genre.

• We chose to use dialogue within the opening to force the audience to pay attention from the start, as I saw in the opening of ‘Love Actually’, although I purposely made sure that the script was simple and easy to follow, and used it mainly to set up the plot of the film along with the main characters. Also, by choosing to go backwards in time within an opening, we expected the audience to be intrigued as they should wish to find out what happened before the first scene, taking place two weeks later than the scenes that follow, which go back to the ‘beginning’, explaining how the two main characters initially met.

• When we initially began to research the genre, we tried to research and note down significant conventions that we noticed in rom-com openings. The most obvious was the use of colours, which tend to be warm to reflect the romantic feel to the film, along with bringing a happy tone which the audience will enjoy visually, as colours on the screen appear brighter and bolder.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

• Within our opening, we realised that we were representing many aspects of a young person’s life, including the school/education system, falling in love, and a partying lifestyle. A lot of the time, young people are misrepresented, so we aimed to give a realistic view of a lifestyle not dissimilar to our own, which would appeal to our target audience as they would relate to the events within the opening.

• Furthermore, we unintentionally included stereotypes within the classroom scene, and noticed that we had seated the trouble making students who intentionally disrupt the lesson towards the back of the classroom, and the hard workers at the front getting on with their work. This could be seen as representing a typical classroom set up, based on a stereotype within the school system due to the perception of social classes.

• When devising the initial idea for our opening, we decided that we wanted to challenge the stereotypical attractive guy falls for a geeky character who is perceived as ‘ugly’. We wanted to make our film different and a little controversial in this, as sometimes this relationship would then be seen as comic, which was not our intention, so we chose to set the plot as a quiet, pretty young girl who is forced to spend time with someone that she doesn’t believe she gets on with, but ends up falling in love with him. This is still a big generalisation in terms of the female character, as we have classed her as “quiet” just because she is smart, which could suggest that we have still kept elements of the stereotypical ‘geek’ character within our plot. Having an attractive female lead could also encourage a wider audience, as many people these days tend to watch films based on the actors, not just by looking at the genre.

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

• As a group, we decided to use Ardleigh Media as the media institution that would be most appropriate to distribute our film opening. This is because it’s a small company based in Essex, England which isn’t far from where we live and therefore would suit the location and social class around this area. Furthermore, as the actors are English, it makes sense that the film would be working with an English institution, as the target audience would mainly be within the UK. Also, because it is a small company, it would be more fitting for the small budget, and would hopefully make a bigger profit margin than it would if it was produced under a much larger company.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

• Our film opening is entitled ‘Study Guide’ which gives an immediate impression on the target audience. From this title, we wanted it to be clear that the target audience were one who were familiar with the current education system, so age wise, we aimed at early teens to mid 20s. Hopefully, this would mean that within the film opening there would be at least one thing that each audience member can relate to, if not all of it, which is why we intended to show a multitude of things that our target audience of young people are often depicted as experiencing within this age range: love and romance, a kiss, partying and college education.

• We also knew that widely, rom-coms are watched by a female heavy audience, therefore we chose to aim the film slightly more towards a female audience that men, a clear example being the smart, attractive female lead, which many woman aspire to be. We wanted the opening to portray how unpredictable love and relationships can be, which hopefully a female audience could truly relate to.

How did you attract/address your audience?

• To attract an audience for our opening, we decided to create a survey on a website called ‘Survey Monkey’ which allows you to distribute a link to a list of questions and collect all of the results. We kept the survey simple, by asking what different people would expect to see, or would prefer to see within a rom-com film, so that we could use the responses we received as a basis for our plot. We wanted to survey to make the audience feel that they were getting involved with the process of the production of a film, and made it clear that any feedback would be taken into consideration. We were given a clear set of results which I have written a post about on my blog, stating how and why the ideas were helpful to us, because we were able to see what the target audience would be interested in.

• We aimed to keep the film opening realistic to a real life setting, which was convenient for us, particularly as we were filming within our own college, which meant it was familiar to us. This familiarity is hopefully put across within the film, to an audience who could watch the film and relate it to a similar setting within their own lives. Many of the students at our college who were involved in the filming of our opening were really interested in watching the final result, and had spoken about it to others, meaning we had a real interest from people within our target age group who wanted to watch our opening. Word of mouth is a very popular device for publicity these days, especially with the popularity boom in social media, so we used this to our advantage to get an audience interested in our opening.

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

• During the process, we found many technologies that aided us to work together as a group and successfully create our opening. A hugely useful tool was iMessage, which we could use as a quick and simple way to communicate within a group message, as we all own apple products, that can access this form of communication at all times. This was much quicker than emailing, as it was instant and we could therefore be brief and get messages and responses between all of us within a matter of seconds. iMessage also allows you to send files, so I could also send drafts of the script as I was writing it, to get opinions from the group quickly.

• As mentioned previously, we found that websites such as ‘Survey Monkey’ could work to our advantage as a way to get feedback from a target audience. We were able to post the questions and got responses within merely a few hours, which would then help us to decide on the content of our opening.

• Another tool we used was twitter. We made an account for our group as a form of communication between us and the public, asking for help with character names and ideas for the plot, and gained a substantial number of followers, ranging from writers, the National Youth Dance account and even to small media companies. We got responses from many people and this really aided us, along with showing us how useful social media can be in terms of publicity and marketing our product.

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

• Looking back on how much I’ve learnt since we completed the preliminary task, I can see a huge difference within my own knowledge and ability. I recall that we were extremely confident that we would be able to easily film and edit this short task, but once we actually started the editing process, we realised that we hadn’t completed the task properly as we really clearly break the 180 degree rule as the first character sat down. Also, because the two actors were not actually sitting opposite each other we didn’t get the true feel of the task, and should have read the instructions better instead of rushing off to get it done. I do, however, know that during the process of planning and filming our main task, we were much more aware of how to go about successfully filming without breaking this rule (unless a shot was from a character’s point of view), as well as using a better camera to increase the quality, and editing the footage together more smoothly to create a good quality finished product.

Conclusion

• In conclusion, I can see that I have really improved within media throughout this process, from researching and analysing openings, to discovering how to film using the 180 degree rule and making sure that the appropriate conventions are used within the genre of our film opening. I have realised how much work can go in to simply the opening two minutes of a film, and therefore how extensive the whole process, from planning to editing a film must be.

• I feel that the genre we chose was the best for us in terms of our facilities and equipment available to us at college, and especially since we were able to film the majority of our opening on site, meaning we could use our media lessons and free periods to put the film together. I don’t feel that any other genre would have worked to our advantage quite as well, mainly due to budget and having enough actors to participate in the filming of the task, so am pleased that we chose romantic comedy as our genre.

• As a group, we feel that we have succeeded in our aims, and feel that the opening is appropriate to the target audience as well as being relatable and interesting to watch. If I was to do this task again, I would probably stick with the same genre and target-audience, but mainly alter the style of the film to be completely contrasting with a typical expectation of this genre, to see what it would be like to go against an audience’s expectations.