How does your media product represent particular social groups?In our media production peice entitled 'Tuesday,' it portrays a variety of ethnic and social groups, though a range a frameworks. These are represented in many fashions throughout my film opening, e.g. Choice of character, the group focoused on; Gender (male and female), ethnic origin (white and black) and mise en scene (prop, clothing and appearance). Mussa plays the lead role throughout the opening as a male character, we purposely put a male typecast into the vulnerable situation to challenge his masculinity, in the intention that this will raise questions to the audience because male figures in films more often than not typically have dominant type casts. The iconography of having beth in shot while she's running away from the killer, implicity suggests that beth could be the reasoning for the vulnerable situation. Also implying a narrative theme of mysogny, almost like a downfall of Mussa. The representation of women thanks to hollywood is that they come across in a less dominant fashion, undermined by the role of men, we represented this fact through the frame works of our opening. The irony is that beth leads the way in shot, while herself and mussa are running away from the killer, thus emphasising the fact she could be to blame for the situation. To greater impact mussa remains the powerful presence on screen, he is larger in structure in the majority of shots while him and beth flee. Both characters are dressed sterotypically teenage british, with mussa lookin of other ethnic origin, but also being dressed in the casual british style which could arguably suggest that he is trying to change his cultural capital, in the modern day the average black male is prejudged to be associated with the 'gang' lifestyle. The evidence is in the dialogue of mussa's freeze frame. His accent does not sound british, yet he is talking with a mancunion accent. This links back to the fact that he might not be of a full british origin but also helps to recognise a full british film.
What kind of media institution would distrubute your media product and why?Verve Pictures (Independant) Released feature length film 'Bullet Boy' in 2004. Leading male character 'Ricky' is if young nature, a man who's been caught up in violence and crime in the east end of his home town London. 'Bullet Boy' explores what life is like to grow up "On the streets" in a run down area of the country, showing how Ricky's actions effect his younger brother 'Curtis' and mum 'Diane'. In our opinion Bullet Boy plays on social and ethnic groups as the main focus to its narrative, being in relation very similar to our media production 'Tuesday'. We believe that Independant label Verve Pictures would be likely to take strong interest in our project after having great UK success with 'Bullet Boy' we used simliar frameworks and played on a similar style of using social and ethnic groups as our main narrative focus, by doing this we intended to imply the stylistic genre conventions of a drama and thriller. Both films played on the realities of British life, and steers cleer of hollywood cliche's which makes them more successfull as their original storylines attract a bigger audience.
Who would be the audience for your media product?The target audience for our production 'Tuesday' would be between the ages of 15 and over, but mainly categorized as 16-24, This is because it appeals to the younger spectators directly by involving and casting the younger generation as the lead roles. In hope that they could relate to the characters, due to similar experiences and similar age groups. As well as having a younger audience, we would like it to expand towards the more mature audience also, to make it niche e.g. Parents as they would watch it in hope that they could get to terms with the new teenage life, and use it to help guide their own childern or family from the experiences they have seen.
How did you attract/Address your audience?We styled our media project around a drama/thriller genred peice. A stylistic we felt is commenly used in these type of genres, is black and white footage. While beth and mussa flee we have used this technique to imply that of a flash back. We have put this in our product to attract our audience because throughout the scene, there is a clear structure of two stories being told, attracting the audience wanting to continue watching and to find out more, as more and more black and white flash backs occur. To impose a thriller style we used a variety of camera shots for different puroses, e.g. hand held running shot, continuing in black and white, showing the emotion that mussa is vewing as a victim, from a direct point of view. Also as his point of view rotates, we, as an audience descover the reality of his surrounding because the woods are renound to be used in thriller films, for tippically chase scenes. Further more we see a glimps of a dark figure in the background. Considered to be, what looks like, a killer. He gives off this effect from the clothing he is wearing, which is all black to create that dark, scary, misterious look. This greatly adds to the impact the scene has to our viewing audience, adding tension and worry to the viewing atmosphere. The frantic footsteps and breathing in the diagetic sound also helps with the thrilling atmoshere, as well as, the unusual non diagetic sound of the music in the background. The transitions between edits are not soft, but very abrupt and sharp, keeping in relation to the frantic style of the scene.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? And, Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you think you have learnt from the proggression from it to the full task?The preliminary task was a introduction to the main task, so we could get used to the equipment and software that we were going to be using. We did this so we could get to grips with each others ability, so we could know what boundaries to push for our final peice. During our preliminary task we had a confound location, as we was only able to shoot around the college. We made the college look like different surroundings using camera angles and props. It was a big difference going from windows to using a apple mac for the first time, But i think we all got quite used to it after a while. We used lots of different software, such as; Final cut pro, to edit the clips and put everything into place to create the final peice, Garage band, to make the sound effects and background noise, to make it more interesting. And also, Photoshop, we used this to create our credits on the opening of the film.
This question was also answerd in a podcast style, by Bethany Sherwin. But blog spot will not let me upload it for some reason.
