Evaluation Question 1

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation Question 2

Q2. How does your product represent different social groups?

Evaluation Question 3

Q3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Production & Distribution Company Ident:

 

Production company: Lionhall Productions

Distribution company: LMA Company

LionHall Productions:

Our production company is an independent company which is not backed up by a congolomerate. This company is run on a low budget, which limits our access to high quality and expensive equipment, like cameras, tripods, figrigs, etc. Low budget also restricts the high post-production values as we cannot afford appealing CGI. Our company cannot afford to hire big named stars as we don't have the funding to pay them off so we will have a much smaller crew, in front and behind the camera. Our unknown, local cast leads to the lack of an inherited audience. The hybridity within the genre of the teen film (Rom-Com) will appeal to a wider audience as it attracts fans of both, comedy and romance genres. Our settings will remain local as we cannot afford to travel to other countries or areas due to our lack of money. However, using independent production companies has many advantages. For example, we have more artistic freedom, meaning our original ideas will not be altered by our conglomerate which provides us with financial backing if our film were a mainstream film. Indepedent films also allow uprising actors to gain a little more popularity and represents the talent that goes on even outside the official acting industry.

On our Prezi, we claimed we would use a mainstream company like Lionsgate which is the most commercially successful independent company. However, we concluded that we would make our companies as realistic and accessible as possible so that our film portrayed our low budget. Therefore, we chose to use an independent company due to our lack of fundings. 

LMA Company:

Our distribution company is also an idependent company with no financial backing, meaning we run on a low budget. This restricts our release to a national audience in the UK, rather than international. Merchandising, synergy and cross-media convergence won't be methods of our marketing and advertising as we don't have the money to do so. Instead, we will use the internet to reach out to our target audience as it is the only free method of advertising. Free saturation of online marketing will be used rather than more traditional methods of OOH distribution due to our low budget. We will make a free facebook page and twitter page as a way to reach to our teenage target audience as social networking is merely made up of teenagers and young adults, both of whom would, ideally, watch our film. We will not have a big, red carpet premier for our film with lots of press as our film won't be distributed to that extent as we lack funding. Our low budget distriution company based the main marketing strategies online, through Instagram, Facebook and Twitter profiles.

Our indendent company could be related to independent distribution companies like Revolver which distribute teen films around the UK. Companies like Revolver have no big conglomerate that provide them with financial packing. Therefore, they base their marketing strategies through the internet and through social networking sites which is the ideal way of reaching a teen target audience. 

Fox Searchlight Pictures is the company we claimed we would use on our Prezi which is a mainstream distribution company that has distributed teen films like 'Juno' and '(500) Days Of Summer' which are films that have the same target audience as my teen film opening. However, our film was produced through a low budget which means our film opening failed to present elements of high budget, for example, advanced editing through CGI.

Evaluation Question 4

Q4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

Here is a Facebook profile of our ideal primary target audience for our film opening, portraying their interests and values:

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This image portrays his interests as you can see by his profile picture that he is a nerd. He finds excitement in "revising for biology" which again reinforces his 'nerdy' portrayal. We thought our primary audience would be people who are very similar to Reggie Bernard as they can relate to his characteristics and how he deals with situations.

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As you can see, our primary target audience, are quite comedic characters, like Reggie and find comedy within funny sci-fi shows likes The Big Bang Theory.

 

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As you can see here, he has liked Eminem's page, suggesting he listens to rap music as a way to privately unleash his gangster alter ego when he is alone. He has also posted a photo of his classmates in chemistry class who are all focused on something else but him, suggesting he doesn't receive a lot of attention from others and is quite antisocial. The photo also suggests he likes chemistry and is interested in sciences.

Evaluation Question 5

Q5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Evaluation Question 6

Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Evaluation Question 7

Q7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Research & Planning:
For our preliminary task, no research was collected. We didn't search for other films in order to gain inspiration. We were simply given a script to follow for our prelim. The actors in our prelim were reading off of the scripts and refused to get into character, making it difficult for the audience to recognise the plot of the clip. The only thing we may have slightly researched was camera shots with how they're used and what they portray.

For our original task, tons of research was collected! We researched before we even started planning for our film. 
We had to ensure that we knew about: 
1. Stereotypical characters and how they are presented in films, in terms of mise en scene, camera work, sounds and editing. 

2. We researched sub genres and how they're clearly established within films so we knew how we would represent our subgenre of comedy and hints of romance within just the opening. 

3. We had to also research ways in which binary oppositions are identified and represented in teen films. 

In terms of planning, we had to plan which conventions we were going to follow and challenge in our film. We chose to follow the conventional nerd & jock stereotypical character. We also chose to follow the conventional teen film themes like fitting in, first love, teen angst, etc.

We chose to make our teen film follow the subgenre of comedy as this genre seems to attract many young adults and teenagers, according to our research of statistics within the cinema and who watches which subgenre most.

Reflection on Filming Sessions

Reflection on Filming Sessions

As our film was going to be shot in Crouch End, some of our group members lived further away from the location than others which caused chaos when arriving to the location as it took some longer than others. This issue was eventually overcome once we all arrive to the location. 

The first session went fairly well but we only had 3 hours to film so we hadn't filmed much, which meant we have to meet up again. Once we met up again, we discovered we didn't need the microphone since we had planned on using a voice-over for the majority of the video, so we unplugged the microphone. However, when we looked over the footage in college, we realised that the settings were set for the sound to work only when the microphone is plugged in, so we came to the conclusion that we had to film all over again as we needed sound for some of the scenes. 

It became more and more difficult to meet up as it had happened so many times that some group members no longer had a lot of time, but we tried to make it work. During our third session, we came across so many errors and restrictions. One of our memory card slots were broken and we didn't know how to fix the settings to make just slot A work. This took us an hour and a half to figure out (we didn't actually figure it out, we called our teacher). Then, we were only left with one hour to film which meant we had to meet up for the fourth time to film.

The fourth filming session was purely chaos. Due to a loss of direction, we all met up an hour later than planned. We came to the conclusion that it was going to be our last filming session so we rushed everything as it was starting to get dark and we needed to film in day light. Just to make matters worse, it started to rain and we had no umbrella, so we grabbed the equipment, wrapped it up in our coats and ran to shelter. After all the rushing, we realised that the quality of our scenes were horrendous. They were extremely rushed and the camera was very shaky and uneven. Therefore, we had to meet up again. 

This time, we had to meet even earlier in order to catch the day light. It was a sunny day but we didn't get much done as it was a school day and we only had 2 hours to film which, realistically, wasn't enough.

So we met up for the last time and shot all the scenes we had to re-do on a beautiful sunny day. Finally, we finished all the shots we had to do. Eventually, it was decided that the whole film should be re-shot so that's what happened. And now we're left with editing which consists of creating match cuts and jump cuts and adding music and voice overs.

Ms's feedback

On Thursday we had feed back  from our teacher on our rough cut she gave us good points and improvements that we should consider after. She found the rough cut really enjoyable to watch as she was really pleased from the standard of humor mainly due to our main actor Devon.She also mentioned that she enjoyed the story however if we could develop it more to make the story more understandable.She also said to fix up our shots  to make them more clear and smooth.Overall we are pleased with the feed back that miss has given us as we thought our rough cut was poor and didn't meet our full potential.

After finding out our rough cut wasn't bad.

FINAL FILM COMPLETION EVIDENCE

Group 30 confirming we finished our film

EDITING 3

Shots are put together in order

Choosing sound effects for our film.

ROUGH CUT FEEDBACK

Last lesson we got our rough cut feedback from our wonderful media teacher Rebecca. Overall she said she really enjoyed it and she was absolutely thrilled that we had already improved our film in the areas she had identified. Some of these included addressing the accidental jump cuts and the poor mise en scene which we had already done due to us re-shooting our whole film. She also said we need to add a voice over to make it slightly clearer for the audience.

Overall she was very pleased with what we had produced.

Final Project - Order of Titles

Final Project - Order of Titles

Reggie Bernard's High School Survival Guide

Order of titles:

1. Production Ident - Columbia Pictures
2. Distribution Ident - 21st Century Fox Home Entertainment 
3. Distribution in Title Sequence - 21st Century Fox Home Entertainment - This title will occur within the first shot of Devon in bed, waking up as Reggie Bernard.
4. Production in Title Sequence
5. Actor 1
6. Actor 2
7. Film Title
8. Actor 3
9. Actor 4
10. Actor 5, etc.
11. Casting
12. Costume
13. Music Supervisor
14. Music By
15. Edited By
16. Production Designer
17. Director of Photography
18. Executive Producers
19. Written By
20. Director

EDITING 2

100 BLOG POST CELEBRATION

WE MADE IT TO 100 BLOGS!!!!!!!!!!!! HERES TO ANOTHER 100!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HERE IS US CELEBRATING!!

Sound

 After having an succesful video shoot and now that me and Devon are editing  we have to bring sound into focus as this is our most important in our video because it brings a scene to life. Sound is great, we need it in our life. Without it, we would not be able to hear things.

Our plan for the sound was to have that banger of a classic we found on soundcloud entitled 'Hip Hop House Party (90s Throwback)' if you havn't heard yet here it is:




For the scene where Reggie encounters his bully we needed some dramatic, gangsta music to match with the character portrayed. The music we have chosen to use is:


By adding this music, it will add lots of tension and suspence to the scene.

Evidence of rough cut

Rough cut

This is our rough cut that we have made ,over during the process of editing we realised that our film has some flaws that need to be fixed such as the lighting becuase in somes scenes the lighting changes which is very unpressfessional. Also some scenes are patchy and don't flow into the next which is a major downfall as it can confuse our audience. We need to make the ending clear and start to work on voice overs and adding music so we can develop  story which an audience can understand. Camera positoning  has to be on point and should always be used on a tri-pod so that the transitions are clear and perfect. Lastly we have to make a better effort in introducting the supporting characters such as the Jock and Sweetheart  which we will do with voice overs.

During filiming tomorrow on the 5th of march 2014 we will take all these  mistakes and create a much better film.

PLANNING FOR FINAL RECORDING

1. Re-shoot bedroom scene - make sure curtains are open to use natural light, lighting must be the same, falling out of bed must look natural, make sure mise en scene is correct, no crew in the mirrors on the wall, make sure there is no head space above actors head, re-do panning from window to bed, do move camera when filming the same shot, walking into wardrobe.
2. Bike scene - add more shots to show a longer journey, make them easy to match cut, time the recording time well so we have enough natural light, more off bike scenes if possible, riding up hill, turning the corner? (2 angles for both of these shots)

EDITING 1