Target Audience and Age Certificate of our film opening

The targer audience that we decided as a group for our film opening is for people in their late teens and young adults, probably most likely to be girls of this age group because our film is about a stalker and victim relationship. Due to the victim being a female in her late teens, we feel that women would relate better to the story line rather than males. We also think that the reason why it would to appeal to teenagers and young adults, is due the the characters within our opening being at a similar age, helping the audience to relate to characters. Therefore we agreed on the age certificate of our film would be a 15 because of the story line we agreed on and that there would be violence throughout the film. It may also be upsetting for people who may have been in similar situations.

Second Filming Session

On Thursday 26th November we walked back to Saffron's house during our lunch and last two lessons to re-film our thriller opening. During Wednesday's lesson we wrote down what shots we needed to re-film and if there were any extra shots that we wanted to film, to try and improve our film opening. It took us the whole of lunch and the two lesson to re-film our film opening. We felt that this filming session went better than our last because we filmed more shots being used to try and create a typical thriller film opening. Also, after watching what we previously filmed back we realised and picked up on some continuity errors that we had and we wrote them down and re-filmed them shots to improve on these errors. We also decided on using a tripod on most of our shots that we could whilst filming to improve the standard of filming. We hope to edit our film opening so that we are able to get up to date with the other groups in our class.

Filming so far...

We arranged to film during our lunch time and our two media lessons in our last two periods on the Thursday 19th November, at the beginning of lunch we walked down to Saffron's house, who lives quite close to the school. During and after our filming session we thought that everything had gone rather well and that we had all the shots that we needed, and we even shot some extra shots incase there was not enough to fill the timing on our film opening as it has to be between one and half to two minutes, and we thought that we would be able to begin editing during out media lessons on Monday morning. However, when we went to upload our film onto our laptop we came to find that some of our shots that we needed had been erased, because we rewound the tape when we was filming to watch back some of the shots that we had filmed. We also thought that the shots that did have were not up to the standard in which we expected it to be, and we was not happy with what we had. We decided that we had no other choice but to refilm it, this was a problem for our group because of the other techinichal difficulties and other mistakes that we have had we were behind the other groups in our class who were getting on to finishing their films. We decided on another day to film which would be the Thursday coming so that we were able to begin editing in the first lesson of the following week.

Logo

This is the logo that we have created for the film distributer that we created, we chose to name our film distributer that we crated 'dead tree productions' we chose this because it sounds like a thriller type and we hope that the logo represents this.

Font ideas

Here i have researched different font types from the website dafont.com these are examples of fonts that could be used for the titles in our thriller film opening. I have chosen these fonts because they reminded me of the style of writing used for titles in thriller films that i have seen, i also believe that these type of fonts fit the titles for our film opening because they are quite scary and would fit the genre of our film title and film very well.

Problems so far

The problems that we have experienced so far within our Thriller film opening is that on Saturday 14th November we arranged to do some filming at our chosen location, which is Saffron's house.
On the Friday after school i went with Saffron to collect the equipment that we would need for the filming that we were going to do the following day, we collected the camera we had booked and a tri pod but we did not collect the tape as we thought that somebody else in our group had already picked it up and had the tape.
So on the Saturday we realised that nobody had the tape so we tried to find out if somebody had a tape we could use, but we was unable to do so. So we were unable to do any filming on this day. In our next lesson we arranged another day to film which will be on Thursday 19th November, so we have booked all of the eqipment that we will need to start to film our opening to our Thriller film.
This problem that we have experienced we have become more organised as a group with what we need and who has what for our filming. We have also arranged what costumes and props we will need in advance to make sure that we have everything ready and so we will not forget anything for when we come to do our filming.
Also due to problems with finding possible dates to do our filming we have chosen to use a boy from our class, Jordan Friday to play the part of the stalker, who was previously being played by Ryan Evans. We have arranged to leave school at lunch on Thursday 19th November so that we are able to film during our media lesson that we have that day so that we hopefully will get most of our film opening filmed that day so it will hopefully be filmed quicker.

Ideas

Before we begin filming our thriller film opening we have to think about what the ideal costumes our characters our going to wear in our film opening and the ideal location. I have uploaded some costume ideas that i found off of the internet for both the female and male character in our opening. Our female character is not actually in the film but we see a lot of pictures of her, the clothes in these pictures are both casual and fashionable. The male character will be dressed all in dark colours also in casual clothes. I got a picture of some houses for the location as this will be our location of our film opening.

Anamatic Storyboard

Anamatics

Before we make our film opening we have to create an anamatic story board and film it so we have an idea of how many shots we will have and the timing of our film opening and also how our finished piece will turn out like. When filming this we completed it quite quickly and found we had no problems and everything ran smoothly, included the finished clip. Our film opening is only aloud to be 1:30 to 2 minutes at the longest, ours is exactly 2 minutes. Our anamatic consists of hand drawn images of what we think each shot will look like and we also estimated how long we thought each shot would be when we film the real piece. We also created our own music as we was not able to use anything that was copyrighted, we did this by using two keyboards. We was happy with the music we created and felt that it fitted in well with our anamatic film clip that we considered using it in our final piece as it works well to build up suspension and can also felt that it fitted in well with our ideas that we want for our finished film clip.

Thriller film opening

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yslbfE-HRWE


This is the opening credits to the film 'Seven' i have chosen this film to compare with our film opening because it uses the same ideas we would like to use within our film. It has a very unusual opening with no hint of who the character is, you do not get to see the character's face, and this is an idea that we are using in our film opening. This film also has the same sort of soundtrack that we are using, one that uneases and makes the audience watching feel uncomfortable. It also used unusal camera shots which we have tried to use in our opening, such as close ups and jump cuts. The shot of somebody writing is the same as one of our shots in our film opening.

Institution

School is a major institution, as is the home, they both contain a whole set of rules and codes which 'constrain and control' our lives. In Media Studies, we are most concerned with the institutions responsible for producing media texts.
The institutions concerned with media are usually big companies that would own lots of other smaller companies, which are usually used to influence their ideas and rules into the other companies. The institutions are very big and have global patterns of ownership.
This biggest example of a media institution is The Disney Corporation, owning many companies such as Walt Disney Motion Pictures, Walt Disney Records, Walt Disney Studios, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, Walt Disney Pictures, Disney Consumer Products, Disney Store, Disney cruise lines. They also own a variation of television channels, including their own entire branch such as the Disney Channel, ABC, ESPN, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel and even 25% of GMTV.
Many people do not know that Disney own so much, one of the reasons why Disney does not make it so obvious that they own all of these because people might start to dislike Disney because they control a lot of the media, but by owning many of the companies as an institution it can be biased. Disney is expected to promote family values and they make all of their companies do this, even if the viewers or customers are not aware of this.

Film opening

Back to the Future was was distributed by Universal Pictures in 1985, executive producer Steven Spielberg and director Robert Zemeckis brought us this comedy-adventure featuring a cast of then largely unknown actors such as Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd and Crispin Glover and a plot involving time travel. Written by Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale Back to the Future has become one of the most popular and successful film trilogies ever created.
The opening sequence of this film is an unusual one as it does not the introduce the character to things such as the plot and location to the film, this is used as an advantage because the way the film does this is makes us, the audience want to carry on watching because it intrigues us and we want to find out more.
The film begins with some credits, details if the cast and crew then the title of this film appears on the centre of the screen in large, bold, futuristic font, whilst this information is appearing on screen there is a diagetic sound if clocks ticking, the first shot of the actual film is a close up of a clock and then there is a reverse zoom and the camera is tracking to reveal loads more clocks within the same room, all different types but all reading the same time, this is very unusual, it makes you wonder why there are so many clocks within the room and who the clocks belong to, it makes you want to carry on watching because it is so unusual you want to find out more about it. The camera carries on tracking and takes the focus off of the clocks and onto two newspaper articles that are framed on the wall, the main headlines of these are ‘Brown mansion destroyed’ and ‘Brown estate sold to developers – bankrupt inventor sells’ this reveals a bit more to the viewer without making it too obvious. The camera then tracks some more to reveal some framed photographs of some famous inventors and you then see a bed with rubbish on it and around, all of this gives clues out to the viewer to what kind of person lives here, the diagetic sound of the clocks ticking carries on throughout the whole of this sequence.
The radio next to the bed that has been programmed to come on does as if it was an alarm to wake somebody up, but we have established that there is nobody there to wake up, the person talking on the radio reveals what year we are in, which is in fact 1985, then the television comes on and it is the news that is showing, there is a main headline about plutonium has been stolen, we assume that this is some vital information because otherwise they would not have bothered to tell us it.
The camera then tracks to show a close up of an invention that makes coffee, toast and feeds the dog, the camera tracks to show all of this as it is happening and at the end shows a close up of a dog’s bowl that has the name Einstein on the front.
The front door then opens and it is not until 2minutes 50seconds that the first piece of dialogue is said, a male character says “hey doc?” not much of this character is revealed as you only see the characters lower legs from the knee down, we can assume that the character is a male in his teens because he is carrying a skateboard and a school bag and he is wearing Nike trainers. We see the character walking around the house but still we only see the characters lower half of the legs, it is not until 4minutes into the film that the characters face is eventually revealed, who is one of the main characters in the film, Marty McFly who is played by Michael J. Fox.
The opening of this film does not reveal too much about the film which makes the character want to carry on watching to find out what the plot is about. You do not know much about the characters within the film and you still do not find out who the house belongs to. The unusualness of the opening sequence is what makes you want to watch more.

Evaluation - Preliminary task

When planning our preliminary task we had to produce a small piece of film which consisted of a character opening a door, walking across a room and exchanging some sentences of conversation.
We followed the three continuity principle actions which were match on match action, shot reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.
We began the task by creating a story board of how we wanted our preliminary exercise to be, we planned to set our short film in the toilets. The story board consisted of the speech that the two characters were going to say, what each scene was going to consist of and also what camera shots we were going to use. We knew we had to include match on action, shot reverse shot as well as keep to the 180 degree rule. However we also included a point of view shot, side shot, bird’s eye view and a close up, we had to film our shot reverse shot twice so that we could get it from both character perspective. In our story board we decided that Amy would be a bully and Saffron the victim, the scenario would be that Saffron owed Amy some money and she was aggressively asking for it back.
When filming our preliminary task we found that we had no problems and that we also found it relatively easy to film and we completed filming it quite quickly. We found that the problems did occur when we attempted to upload our film from the camera to the laptop. We attempted to change everything from the video camera to the battery charger when we eventually found out that it was the laptop that was faulty, so we changed are laptop and found that our video uploaded virtually straight away. We found that the editing of the film went really well and was completed quite quickly as we found that there was not much to do a part from shorten the length of frames and delete a few clips we did not need or could not use, but when watching the film back we found that we had made two continuity mistakes, one was where of the characters had moved suddenly from one place to another and had slightly changed positions, we tried to cover up these mistakes by using different editing techniques, on the first we used a fade transition to try to make the continuity mistake less obvious to the audience watching and for the second we attempted to use a close up to try and draw out the attention of the mistake by doing this we found that our only problem with this was that the transitions looked a bit out of place when we played back our film. We also added some music at the end of our film and some text and transitions, we did this to try and make it look more professional.
Overall I was quite pleased with the turnout of our finished film clip for our preliminary task. I felt that everything went well and the finished film ran quite smoothly and the continuity mistakes that we made were not as obvious as they were before. I thought that this was a good first attempt at making a short film.

Why i chose AS Media studies

I chose to take Media studies because i thought it would be a fun an interesting subject to study. I also thought it would interesting to study the different types of medias in detail.