When watching The Truman Show it was hard to define what category of genre it would come under, I would say that it is a film which is focused around a variety of genre's and not just one in particular which is most popular in other films. I would say that this films most obvious genre would be a comedy-drama, as when I first began watching it I thought that it was a comedy but as the film went on the realisation of Truman's fake life and his reactions when he realised this could give the film a sub-genre of a drama. The dramatic side of this films allows us as the audience to sympathise with Trumans character, but the comical values also gives it a light hearted atmosphere.
Throughout this film it breaks the conventions from the theorists Vladmir Propp who believed that every film contained stock character, I believe that The Truman Show breaks this theory, although Truman would appear to be the hero and his real lover from his teenage years would be the princess and all of the other characters throughout the film would appear to be villains as they are all lying to Truman and do not want him to find out about his real life. Christof may appear to be the main villain in this film as he would go as far as killing Truman to prevent him from leaving his fake life in a 'bubble world', even though Christof see's Truman as a child to him, and loves him as he feels as though he has raised him and has been protecting him.
Roland Barthes theory is that every film contains signs is that be establish understanding through signs, I believe that this is true within this films as there is a darkened faded edge in some shots of Truman's life, this shows us that someone is watching him and that he is getting filmed on another camera.
Claude Levi-Strauss had a theory of binary oppositions and there are some obvious ones in the Truman Show, a clear one being good vs evil with Chrisof and the rest of the characters against Truman, reality vs fantasy which would be the real world against Truman's fantasy 'perfect' world.
In conclusion I believe that The Truman Show is good way of showing and agreeing with some theorists, I still also believe that it is a hard film to define which genre it would come under.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
Directors Commentry
We wrote our directors commentry to add to and evaluate our final film opening. We got given a sheet with seven questions on that we needed to answer which when all answered would evaluate our film. Everyone within our group had to speak in our directors commentry so we decided to split it by each answering a question. Some questions we decided were not suitable to answer within our commentary so instead we were going to answer them on our blogs. We wrote notes on our question that so that we were able to answer our question without it sounded scripted. After a few times of recording we decided that it sounded good enough to use so we uploaded it onto the laptop and we listened back to them and realised that Amy's was not on there so she recorded hers again. Once they were all uploaded them onto the laptop we uploaded them onto our film opening via pinnacle studios, then we edited our film and commentary so they fitted together, we had to cut parts of speech out and short clips and we also used freeze frames due to the speech being longer than the film.
Audience Feedback
After we finished our film opening we decided that we would get some audience feedback on it and that it would be good to do so. We got the audience feedback from the other members of our media class who would be the age group of the audience that our film is based on if it was released.
Here is some of the feedback that we got:
We asked the audience members to rate our film out of 5 with 1 being poor and 5 being excellent. On average we receieved a rating of 3.5. We pleased with this result which meant that the audience did enjoy our film at least a bit.
We also asked our audience if we asked if they could find any continuity errors when they watched our film and the result was that nobody did find any which we were pleased about.
Finally, we asked if there were any improvements that we could make, they said that our film companies should be real but we disagreed with this as we researched into the film companies and distributors and even watched some films from them and found that they were real.
Here is some of the feedback that we got:
We asked the audience members to rate our film out of 5 with 1 being poor and 5 being excellent. On average we receieved a rating of 3.5. We pleased with this result which meant that the audience did enjoy our film at least a bit.
We also asked our audience if we asked if they could find any continuity errors when they watched our film and the result was that nobody did find any which we were pleased about.
Finally, we asked if there were any improvements that we could make, they said that our film companies should be real but we disagreed with this as we researched into the film companies and distributors and even watched some films from them and found that they were real.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Evaluation
In this blog i am going to be focussing on three questions to evaluate the film opening that i have created with my group as our recorded directors commentry covers and answers all of the other questions.
How did you attract/address your audience?
In order to attract our audience to our film opening we decided that a particular target audience for our film would be of young adults/ teenagers that are 15+, we also felt that females of this age range would be more attracted to our film compared the male gender. We decided this because being female and at a similar age ourselves we created a film that we thought would interest us. We also found that by being part of that audience we realised that most teenagers like in watching thriller films as they like the adrenaline rush that films from that type of genre give you.
We decided on basing our film on a sterotypical event, a male stalker who is stalking a femaile victim. Also, by looking at the targeted audience we decided on making the characters within our film to be of a similar age to them, as we thought that the audience would be able to put themsleves in the characters shoes and get more emotionally attracted into the film. As we decided that a female audience would be more attracted to our film we put our main focus into this, as we felt that the scenario of a female victim being stalked could be scary to a female audience as this is an event that could happen within every day life, some people may also be able to relate to the event because of personal experiences, and this may also create appeal.
We chose to include a lot of point of view shots as we felt that this could help the audience in the place of the character to help to see from the characters point of view. We also wanted our audience to the vulnerability of the female character who does not realise that she is being stalked, which could make the audience feel for her and could create a relationship between the audience and the female character.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Throughout creating our film opening my group and i have learnt a lot about the technology in which we have be lusing. The first piece of technology we got to use and expand our skills with was the camera, although we had already used a camera to film our preliminary task, we found that filming our Thriller film opening was proved to be very different as we had a lot more shots to focus on and we had to think about what we wanted them to create. We had to experiment in using the camera in different ways and sometimes even using the tripod to get a better shot. I felt as though we done quite well with the filming process, however we did have one problem due rewinding the tape to try and watch what we had just filming and thne losing some of the shots because we had filmed by filming over them, a lesson we learnt from and will remember for the future. We also developed our skills in Pinnacle Studios and everybody tought everybody how to use different parts of the programme and we had to use a lot of team work in doing so. Also throughout using Pinnacle Studios we realised who was best at what when it came to doing the editing, as some were better at uploading and others better at cutting the clips. We found that the editing of our film opening was not overly hard and the reason for this being that we had filmed each scene in order so that they ran from one into the next and we found that by doing so the editing did not take as long as we had expected it to do so.
The music that we had used for our film opening was non-diagetic and we had found it and downloaded it from a non copyrighted site, we listened to a lot of the music clips on the website and all decided on the final one that we thought would be best for our film opening as a group.
Looking back at your Preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
By looking back at our preliminary task i feel as though that we have all learnt new skills whcih we used within the filming and editing of our film openng and we have all progressed as individuals as well as a group. We learnt new and different camera angles which helped us to create a better final film and we found that by using traditional Thriller film conventions helped to create a better film, especially by using tilted angle shots helped to create mood and unease. We also learnt about different effects that we were able to use on Pinnacle Studios which we had not known about when editing our Preliminary task, we found that these helped to change and improve shots that we had filmed, an exmaple of this would be slowing down shots created more of an atmosphere to help to fit the genre of a Thriller film, as well did the zooming in and out of certain shots, all of this helped to create a better final film opening.
We also created on other skills which were not technology based, like creating our story line and making it more in depth. As we were only creating a film opening we also needed to create the rest of the storyline in which the film would have. We also had to think a lot about the audience and how the audience would react to our final piece which made us concentrate more on how our final piece would come out. Also by making our anamatic story board helped us a lot in the filming and creating of our final piece because it gave us ideas of what we wanted from our opening and what would work and what would not. Also by making an anamatic story board was a whole new skill to us because we had not made one before as we did not do one when doing our preliminary task.
Another thing that we had to do when creating our final film opening was thinking and trying to created everything in so much more detail and having to make it all as near to perfect as we could as we did not have to do this when making our preliminary task, but we found by doing all of this really did make a difference when we finally finished our final piece.
How did you attract/address your audience?
In order to attract our audience to our film opening we decided that a particular target audience for our film would be of young adults/ teenagers that are 15+, we also felt that females of this age range would be more attracted to our film compared the male gender. We decided this because being female and at a similar age ourselves we created a film that we thought would interest us. We also found that by being part of that audience we realised that most teenagers like in watching thriller films as they like the adrenaline rush that films from that type of genre give you.
We decided on basing our film on a sterotypical event, a male stalker who is stalking a femaile victim. Also, by looking at the targeted audience we decided on making the characters within our film to be of a similar age to them, as we thought that the audience would be able to put themsleves in the characters shoes and get more emotionally attracted into the film. As we decided that a female audience would be more attracted to our film we put our main focus into this, as we felt that the scenario of a female victim being stalked could be scary to a female audience as this is an event that could happen within every day life, some people may also be able to relate to the event because of personal experiences, and this may also create appeal.
We chose to include a lot of point of view shots as we felt that this could help the audience in the place of the character to help to see from the characters point of view. We also wanted our audience to the vulnerability of the female character who does not realise that she is being stalked, which could make the audience feel for her and could create a relationship between the audience and the female character.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Throughout creating our film opening my group and i have learnt a lot about the technology in which we have be lusing. The first piece of technology we got to use and expand our skills with was the camera, although we had already used a camera to film our preliminary task, we found that filming our Thriller film opening was proved to be very different as we had a lot more shots to focus on and we had to think about what we wanted them to create. We had to experiment in using the camera in different ways and sometimes even using the tripod to get a better shot. I felt as though we done quite well with the filming process, however we did have one problem due rewinding the tape to try and watch what we had just filming and thne losing some of the shots because we had filmed by filming over them, a lesson we learnt from and will remember for the future. We also developed our skills in Pinnacle Studios and everybody tought everybody how to use different parts of the programme and we had to use a lot of team work in doing so. Also throughout using Pinnacle Studios we realised who was best at what when it came to doing the editing, as some were better at uploading and others better at cutting the clips. We found that the editing of our film opening was not overly hard and the reason for this being that we had filmed each scene in order so that they ran from one into the next and we found that by doing so the editing did not take as long as we had expected it to do so.
The music that we had used for our film opening was non-diagetic and we had found it and downloaded it from a non copyrighted site, we listened to a lot of the music clips on the website and all decided on the final one that we thought would be best for our film opening as a group.
Looking back at your Preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
By looking back at our preliminary task i feel as though that we have all learnt new skills whcih we used within the filming and editing of our film openng and we have all progressed as individuals as well as a group. We learnt new and different camera angles which helped us to create a better final film and we found that by using traditional Thriller film conventions helped to create a better film, especially by using tilted angle shots helped to create mood and unease. We also learnt about different effects that we were able to use on Pinnacle Studios which we had not known about when editing our Preliminary task, we found that these helped to change and improve shots that we had filmed, an exmaple of this would be slowing down shots created more of an atmosphere to help to fit the genre of a Thriller film, as well did the zooming in and out of certain shots, all of this helped to create a better final film opening.
We also created on other skills which were not technology based, like creating our story line and making it more in depth. As we were only creating a film opening we also needed to create the rest of the storyline in which the film would have. We also had to think a lot about the audience and how the audience would react to our final piece which made us concentrate more on how our final piece would come out. Also by making our anamatic story board helped us a lot in the filming and creating of our final piece because it gave us ideas of what we wanted from our opening and what would work and what would not. Also by making an anamatic story board was a whole new skill to us because we had not made one before as we did not do one when doing our preliminary task.
Another thing that we had to do when creating our final film opening was thinking and trying to created everything in so much more detail and having to make it all as near to perfect as we could as we did not have to do this when making our preliminary task, but we found by doing all of this really did make a difference when we finally finished our final piece.
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