Friday 15 April 2016

Evaluation


MEST2 : EVALUATION

The film that I worked on was with 3 other members, Sunny, Ladan and Rashida. We were working on a psycho thriller movie, with a bunch of other students that were experienced with acting. We then called our production, ‘Transgression’. Our initial plans for our film was going to be an ‘Urban life’ movie but we felt that once we started to make our script and other elements of planning, we also wanted to use the ‘romance’ genre which then gave us more to write about and made it more creative. This is because of the fact that we made the movie, the opposite of romance as one of the main protagonists had killed the other.

 We also spent a lot of time doing focus group research. This is basically where we spent the most of our time planning by looking at our target audience. Another thing is that we looked at different types of movies that were trying to inspire us, coming up with an idea of a movie.

The planning section for us was the most difficult part of the whole MEST2. We had watched a lot of arthouse movies to get a good idea of what we can do and once watching those movies, we got the idea from a movie called ‘Drive’. This is an arthouse crime thriller movie that starred Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan and many more successful actors. The part that we were inspired from this film was ‘The Elevator Scene’. This is where Ryan Gosling and the other character were kissing inside the elevator with another man standing next to them; He then killed him as he was a target to Ryan Gosling in the movie. Our idea was to use a similar sort of idea for the scene but twist it a little. Instead of the main character killing another man, he would kill the women he was in love with.
From looking at the brief, it tells us that we have to make the production itself a 15 rating movie. In order to do this, we went onto the BBFC website to look at what makes a movie, a 15 certificate. On the website it gave a list of the criteria and the thing that we took out of the list were the extreme violence and also the use of swearing words. For extreme violence, we decided to use a weapon (prop) which was suitable in public and also used fake blood on the main protagonists.

Furthermore, I believe that our target audience for this film is between the ages of 16-28 with a mixture of the audience being male and females. This film is more of a low brow film which means that the audience are less likely going to be young and not as much educated as others who would be into movies that were related to educational movies (highbrow). The psychographic group that I would put this target audience with, is mainstreamers. The reason I believe that our target audience are mainstreamers is because they seek security. Our extract is about a girl who thinks she is safe but really isn’t as she is going to be killed by one of her best friends. Therefore, the role of a mainstreamer is to be safe and they most likely go by the saying of ‘Trust no one apart from yourself’ which is also written in my double page spread; this is a message to everyone as they shouldn’t do anything that they do not want to. Also, I believe that another psychographic group are reformers. This is an audience that are slightly older and more educated. These audiences are people who are seeking a challenge and get out of their ways to watch an arthouse and more complicated movie rather than your average ‘everyday’ blockbuster movie.

Personally, I believe that the target audience for this movie would be the type of audience that would watch films 'on demand' (catch up TV) and also, they would use devices such as a tablet, laptop or even their mobile phones. Considering they are a target audience in the demographic groups between A-C1 means that they are going to be more educated than the people that are in the groups C2-E. This means that they are most likely going to have busy days and hardly anytime where they can sit down and watch TV. Therefore, our target audience would watch our movie ‘on demand’ considering the lack of free time and would most likely watch it on brands, e.g. Netflix. In my opinion, I believe that our target audience was lived up to this because since our movie is an arthouse movie, it means that it would take a lot of thinking and this is where the educated audience would come in and like to watch movies that are quite unusual to the normal society.

One of the key moments that I believe that we did well on was the spinning the bottle scene. In this scene, we did a lot of editing and camerawork to make it work. First of all, it started with the main protagonists spinning the bottle at a medium close up shot. Then we made a straight cut edit which then changed the view of the camera. The camera angle was then transformed into a point of view shot. The point of view shot was of the bottle spinning and looking at everyone in the circle until it had landed onto the main protagonist. As the bottle was spinning, we added non-diegetic music in the background. This suggests to the audience that something bad is going to happen because this music is something that would be played in a scary movie.

Another key moment was the killing scene. This is where we used more background music but in this case, it was parallel. This was parallel because of the fact that it went with the theme of the scene (sense of horror). Also, before the part where the killing took place, we used a vertigo shot which was most commonly used by a director called Alfred Hitchcock; it was also used in a popular movie called Jaw (non-arthouse). The vertigo shot is a zooming technique where the foreground remains stable but the background expands backwards which plays with the audiences mind as they may think that it’s a point of view shot but really it isn’t. Also, we used a variety of shot/reverse shot between the two actors when the actor ‘Grace’ thought something suspicious was going on.

The last and final key moment was at the very beginning. This is where we used one shot which was done in a panning technique were the camera would move from side to side. This is very effective to the audience because when the camera moves, the audiences eyes are moving with them which would almost make the audience feel as if they are a part of the movie too. Also, we had the same background and contrapuntal sound as we did in the bottle scene. This is where the effect had started and suggested to the audience that something was going to go wrong.

Personally, I believe that our weakness in this extract was the camera movement. This is because a lot of the times, the camera was too shaky when it shouldn't have been; At some places, we did try to change it but it didn't work due to the weather conditions and the lack of equipment that we had which I would think was us back.

With my print work, I used many different cinema brochures to get an idea of what they are meant to look like; I used the BFI Film brochures. Also, throughout my print work, I used one colour scheme which was black, red and white.

On my front cover, I believe that there are much strength with two of them being the way that the photo of the character was taken and the composition.  As you can see, if a rule of thirds grid was placed onto the front cover, the photo of the protagonist is placed in the middle, which makes it the centre of attention to the audience. Also, I had made a strip at the bottom with some of the main films written at the bottom which makes it appealing to the audience; if it was blank, the reader wouldn't find it appealing as they don't know what will be inside the print. My last and final point is that I had also used a strapline next to the characters photo which is describing the actor as 'The Next Big Thing'; this is a strength because this is a small phrase describing him as a good actor which is also appealing to the readers.

Along with my contents page, the strengths that I thought were the descriptions below the movies on the contents page. This is because I made sure that they were short and snappy which would make it more exciting for the readers as they would want to go onto that specific page. On the other hand, I believe that the weakness of this contents page is that it is too plain and I should've added more pictures near the main picture on the right.

In addition, my double page spread has more strengths than weaknesses in my opinion. This is because I believe that I have done everything that is usually required for a double page spread; I used an overlapping picture, I also talked about the movie itself and what happened it in, I used a main heading and subheadings and I also used smaller behind the scene still images.

From what we had been working on, the representation that we created in our work was that we tried to use different people from different ethnicity backgrounds. Most commonly, when making films, the majority of people in England and all over the world, a group of people from a white ethnic minority are been used to act in films which is now known as a stereotype but we tried to change that way of thinking and used people from other backgrounds and a mixture of male and female. 
Therefore, I believe that by making this film, we had subverted the stereotypical representations as it was also intentional. To conclude, I am very happy by our decision because it gets the viewers thinking and getting them to watch something that is against the stereotypes.

The representation theory that I think is linked to Dyer's theory as this is also linking to power and shows that the male, in the extract, was more powerful than the female. This also leads to the fact that the male are more dangerous than female which is a negative representation for the male. Us as a society have a way of seeing things meaning that men have more power and the women look up at men. In our extract, we showed the male protagonist as a civil character but when he was all alone with the female character, he showed his real, true self which is stating the theory of Dyer.

I believe that if I had made a film blog, I would have made many links to our movie. For example, the film will be in a brochure which goes by the name of The Little Picturehouse and therefore, I would've made a link e-media link which would take you to that page about the film; I would also publish screenshots of whatever else is linked to our movie 'Transgression'. This will allow the audience to go to those links and get a better feel about our movie. In order to make this more attractive to the audience and for those who have watched the movie, I would have a different section of the film blog which will allow the audience to take part in quizzes and also more updates on when or if the movie 'Transgression' will be screening at different arthouse cinemas. The ideas that I would be inspired by is Plan B’s website; His website looks like a social media site but it’s only him giving updates of where mostly, every single film that was made has got a social media account whether it being Facebook, Twitter or even Instagram. On the accounts, they post updates about when DVD's, interviews etc are coming out. With our movie, I would've made these different accounts and link it to the blog, so when something interesting has been posted, it will get updated onto the film blog too.


To conclude, I believe that we successfully met our original brief and we did more than what we had planned to do initially. In addition, I think that our product will be a success but not for everyone. This is because, as mentioned above, this is a movie that is for the young and less educated and not everyone will like a movie like this, mainly the elder audience.

Wednesday 16 March 2016

Film Production Feedback

1. Opening sequence

  • Include dialogue : can't be silent
2. 1 minute - audio on clip
  • need to be merged better
  • re-record dialogue - dub over?
3. Soundtrack/Music
  • Create atmosphere
  • Start experimenting  
4. Complete filming 17/3/16

5. Edit before Wed 23/3/16

Tuesday 23 February 2016

Print Work Draft


With this first edit of my contents page, I am still missing a few pictures which will go into the white boxes and the background that I have used is just temporary. My original background plan is to have a picture of numerous trees that will create a field that looks like the woods with adding a darkness effect to it.



United 93 : Review

United 93 is a movie that is based on 9/11. A plane, by the  name of 93, got hijacked which is what the setting is in the movie but there were also another three planes that were also hijacked. The people who monitor the airplanes were the ones who realised that something wrong was going on. Once the terrorists had started to hijack plane '93', the monitors of those planes tried to get communication to the people on the plane; they tried to get communication to the pilots but they had been killed or injured. Also, those people were also trying to find where the hijacked planes were allocated so they could send other planes out to see what was happening. Therefore, the only people they had were the passengers on board who had the airplane phones by them. Some of the passengers would get messages through to their loved ones because they knew that their life was in jeopardy. The terrorists were either praying or wearing an explosive device. Passengers, on plane 93, tried to do as much as they could by fighting back the terrorists but they were all armed and was too scary - one did manage to get injured but there more controlling the plane. No one managed to survive on the planes.

This movie was made to show the audience that what happened on September 11th 2001 was really frightening and to show the audience that these many people had lost their lives including the people who were crushed in the 'twin towers'. Many people had lost their lives for no reason and had to pay between the fight that was going on between the Al-Quaida and the US government.

United 93 is a highly recommended movie as it shows the audience a lot of history that has happened across New York, Washington and other parts of the United States; How many people had lost their lives  and how much money was invested in order to pay for the damages.