Evaluation of our final film

Foundation portfolio evaluation- Evaluation of your finished film


In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The genre of our film is horror/thriller. In comparison to other thriller/horror films, we have tried to come up with something quite similar to something of which the real major productions such as Warner brothers/WT2 would produce. Thriller/horror films concentrate on a main character, which we did. The structure of our film is a standard structure, compared to a formal structure of which Hollywood would produce. Our film structure is based around the genre of social realism, as documentary elements were we follow the lives of young people in Britain, a life of violence, fear, drugs and distraction.
We overcame the fact that our short footage may not be done by professionals but may come out looking professional by having good planning and dealing with the minor problems that occurred, to get a great final product efficiently.
We exploited with the use of camera angles to see what would work well. We research on YouTube different films to see what we could get from them to help our film product come out as good as the pros would produce. We used a lot of close ups to distinguish the feelings of the characters. We used unique music to give our film a spooky feeling. Our film is set at Hulme Bridge at night which makes it more dramatic and adds the effect of the couple being vulnerable to a multi-cultural Britain were young people tend to get each other’s respect through violence.
Our film is original in the sense that we filmed at twilight (between day and night) which would mainly be done by major film productions with professional equipments, but we were able to film at this time of day with just a simple video camera.
The way in which we used the camera in capturing our shots was interesting as we used quiet a lot of different angles, such as bird’s eye view, of the area in which we were filming in , to show were the film is set, and bring familiarity to our audience.
We used some over the shoulder shots; point of view shots.etc by using these kinds of shots we brought our short footage to life. Also when it came to editing we added some effects which made our film come to realistic and more dramatic.


How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our chosen social group for our film is males and female teenager, even though it may apeal to older people who are interesting in social realism, we aimed it more to young people as they could easily relate to the theme of our film.
There is a young teenage couple, of which there’s a black young man and white young woman protagonist, by using these characters we aimed to portray a multi-cultural biracial Britain of an urban environment. This film portrays the black environment as positive (non violent) as the boyfriend is black. At the begining an ominous figure of a man enters the shot, although we do not identify the assailents identity we know its a man. We deliberatly kept the assailents identity a secret to give a sense of suspence and to avoid racial stereo typing.We also decided that the assailent should be a man as we believe that its stereo-typical of men to be in such violent situations withought being biased. There are many shots that show are main task is about the younger generation. Our first shot is of hulme bridge, being part of the younger generation I know that alot youths are in this area, and alot of them like to gather in area's like this. This is all adding to the young actors. Also as our film came from the idea of kidulthood and adulthood, they too have younger actors, showing alot about the younger generation.

What kind of media institution would distribute your media product and why?
Our film could be seen as being similar to films such as kidult hood, adulthood and bullet boy as they are urban dramas based Britain. Kidulthood and Adulthood were both distibuted by Revolver Entertainment. This distributor allows any film makers to distirubte there film in any place, with terms and conditions obviously, but they are open to anyone with a good film. As our film is based on teenagers in an urban environment, we could be compared to films such as shifty. So if our film was real it could be distributed by Metrodome Distribution who distributed Shifty, as our film is quiet similar to Shifty, but not as much violence and bad language. These kinds of films wouldn’t be able to be realised in the States, due the culture boundaries, were compared to the British people lots of Americans go to cinemas a lot, and films like Shifty mainly do not go as far as cinemas. Here are some websites that could distribute short or long films that the general public could use with out payments these include, YouTube, Vimeo and other websites.

Who would be the audience for your media product?
Our audience are young people of the ages 16-24 years of age. We research into our chosen age group to see what they like watching and made sure our films had met the level in which they enjoy. We aimed at finding out what they enjoy and we aimed for a mass audience as, our film portrays today’s Britain for which we want to teach young people what is going on around them. Although our main audience are young teenagers, we believe our film could apeal to older people who may be interested in social realism films, for example the films of Ken Loach are very popular with film lovers in britain. But its mainly aimed at teenagers as they could relate more to our film, due to the fact that we have used situations of which they would be involved in, in todays urban environment.


How did you attract/ address your audience?
As our film is thriller/horror (although it includes some social realism, as documentary elements were we follow the lives of young people in Britain of all races). We used a wide shot of the area in which our films takes place, as this helps the audience connect or relate to the environment. There is a close up of the phone ringing this helps create an eerie feeling for the audience as they are expecting it to be the girlfriend ringing but it happens to be the kidnapper. A medium shot is used at the beginning of the film when the mysterious figure enters the shot this helps create tension in the sense that the audience want to find out who that figure is. By using different camera angles we were able to create what we believe is a unique but socialist film which young people from all races could relate to as an urban environment. The film opening takes place on Hulme Bridge in Manchester; we chose this for our film to take place at this location as it is perfectly open and at night could help give our film that extra edge of fear and eeriness.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
As a group we compromised by helping each other in learning how to use every technology we needed to make our film. With camera work, we developed the technique of the 180 degree rule, this was used in our preliminary task. With editing software we used “Final Cut Pro” on the Apple Macs and we learned various techniques as how to capture the film off the camera and put it onto the computer, we learned how to add video and audio effects such as fading and cross dissolving, and how to cut down shots to make it perfect. We also learned how to make titles and credits to introduce and close the film. We also have a phone call towards the end of the film, which was done with the main filming and a voice over. We had to cut the voice over up, so that it would fit around the actual filming.

Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you think you have learnt from the progression from it to the full task?
The preliminary task helped us in the sense that we learnt how to use the equipment we needed, which made it easier in the final task. We were able to learn from the preliminary task what we did well and what needed to be improved for our final filming to come out as planned. We learnt how to use the editing equipment, the cameras and how they function.
The preliminary task acted as a base for our main task, as everything we learnt from it would be applied to our main task. Everything from the planning, editing and use of technology helped in the final task as we knew what we wanted our film to turn out like, we knew how to handle the cameras and how to do use the editing suit. For example the bird’s eye shot, we had to make sure the camera was perfectly placed on a levelled ground for the shot not to be shaky. In our preliminary task, there is 2 shots of someone walking through the door, one showing them open the door and the other showing them come through the door. We had to make both shots perfect in order for it to actually look like the person has walked through the door. This is like our main task as we had to show the couple walking up the bridge towards the camera and then a shot of them walkin arcoss the bridge away from the camera. Both shots had to be done with good timing and good camera angles.