In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We took inspiration from the film Drive, directed by Nicholas Winding Refn for our opening credits, mirroring the order in which the credits appear as well as the ambiguity of the opening scene. For example, Ryan Gosling is seen driving whilst the audience is unaware of where to and why.
There is also no significant introduction to the character. In our film, the audience is unsure as to why Jesse is being told to take the bag to the lift as more of the storyline will be revealed later on in the film.
When watching the 2001 Sci-Fi K-Pax we noticed how prominent the use of lighting is throughout the film, due to Kevin Spacey's character, Prot, claiming to have travelled to Earth through a beam of light. At many points in K-PAX the lighting technique Bokeh can be seen. We decided to use this technique when creating our film because of the word and its connections to our plot: Bokeh comes from the Japanese term Boke meaning a sense of mental haze, relating to the instability of Jesse's mental world.
For the shots where Jesse is running up the stairs, we looked into some action sequences online and found a scene from The Bourne Ultimatum. The scene shows the main protagonist running through hallways and jumping out of windows etc. with fast cutting. In order to achieve a similar effect we filmed lots of short clips from different angles, cutting them all together using match on action.
In order to develop conventions of other psychological thrillers we decided to use a realistic urban environment as the location for our opening sequence with only a low budget. This meant that we had to rely on natural lighting and focus on continuity between shots. For example ensuring that the lighting was not drastically different. We also had to film in the order that the light would change naturally in the scene, getting darker as the sequence progresses.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
For example we would like to use a variety of extras who represent different groups. This would include different genders, couples of varying sexualities, people with disabilities, people with different body images, different ethnicities and different ages. We used a white male to play Dex so as not to use the negative stereotypes of gangsters that have been formed by films of similar genres. Due to films such as Adulthood (2008), teenagers have been labelled with a negative stereotype; we wanted to subtly conform to this stereotype by involving protagonist in what he thinks is illegal activity. Contrary to this, we are challenging the stereotype of women as weak and vulnerable by initially making the audience believe that Alexa has taken by a group of men and needs to be saved by Jesse, when in fact she was involved in the organization from the beginning.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Who would be the audience for your media product?
The age of the protagonist might mean that an audience of a similar age would be attracted to our film because they feel they can personally relate to the experience of adolescence. However, we would aim to create interest in a audience of a universal age range. The grungy and underground feel of our film would also change who would have interest in our film.The genre of our film would mean that we could attract an audience that are psychological thriller enthusiasts. It may also attract people who are involved in the art scene because of the artistic elements within our film. although we cant generalize and expect all young people to enjoy this film; due to a massive variety of interests that they could have. For example two people of the same ethnicity, gender and age group may have completely differing interests in film. We should have a premiere with a specially selected audience consisting of different social groups. We will also facilitate a question and answer session at the end of the premiere - We would do this to gather feedback on what other social groups we could include and continue to target through new marketing schemes.
How did you attract/address your audience?
We used various ways to attract and address our audience. We wanted to capture the audiences attention through both subtly and the more obvious elements to our film. One example of something we used was the music which created tension for the audience and made them want to continue watching. We also used point of view shots to include the audience within the action of the film, this allowed them to see through the eyes of the protagonist and therefore would enable them to feel as if they are at one with the motion and the narrative. We didn't use any birds eye or worms eye perspective shots because we felt that this would make the audience feel distant from the action. Most of the shots we used are at a 'human' level and therefore mean that the audience can picture themselves being apart of the film.
The use of realism induced by the location and film style has allowed us to possibly attract an audience who are drawn to films with a lower budget with a focus on artistic shots/lighting etc as well as a sense of authenticity; as apposed to multimillion pound hits.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
As mentioned previously, we used natural lighting when filming our opening sequence. However, looking back it would have been less of a challenge to ensure continuity had we used professional lighting equipment. Although, this may have sacrificed the realism that is now one of the vital aspects of our film. In order to create a slightly surreal and grungy atmosphere we altered the exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation and white point of each shot. We put the techniques learned in media theory into practice when editing, ensuring our match on action was as seamless as possible, adding pleonastic non-diegetic music (made especially for the film), recording and editing voice overs, also adding the diegetic click of the boot lock over the visuals (ensuring the sound was synchronous with the visuals).
When filming we focused strongly on shot composition as this is a vital technique for making the shots aesthetically pleasing for the audience. For example, throughout the film we used asymmetric composition with Jesse on one side of the shot and empty space on the other, suggesting that he is about to move into that empty space. This is a subtle technique that makes the audience believe they know what is about to happen, when the narrative holds surprises.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
We have learnt that the planning stages of filmmaking are key to creating a quality piece. When creating the preliminary task we did not focus on creating a plot or script which meant that we lacked in content. By correcting these mistakes with the final film we were able to achieve a more smoothly run filming process. Also, the audio was really bad quality in the preliminary task, with quiet dialogue and lots of background noise. This was something that has drastically improved with the final task due to more skill and more time spent checking the audio. Using a high quality microphone to record audio to be overlaid later ensured that the audio was clearer.
Due to the film being devised by us, we felt more inclined to make it a high quality piece of work. The potential possibilities of what we could achieve with the film motivated us to create something unique and extraordinary; we crafted a piece which we felt demonstrated our artistic perspective. Improved technical skills during the filming and editing process helped us to achieve this finished product.
