Evaluation question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our media product doesn't represent many social groups in stereotypical ways which stays true to the drama generic conventions. This adds a sense of realism to our product which makes it a more appealing and more successful product.
Gender-In our opening we do not portray gender in either biased form, however in the rest of the film we intended to use the male hierarchy as our guideline. This would mean that the male actors in our films would be less dominant and the males would have more control. This will create a positive stereotype for males but a negative one for females. This means that our product is going to appeal to more males than females. In our opening we used several low angles on our male actor to create a sense of his power and dominance, if we were to have used a female in our piece then we would have used slight high angles on her to create a sense of insignificancy. We do have some representations of age in our piece but there are no stereotypes of age e.g. older men/women are wiser or more clumsy. Sexuality, ethnicity and disability are not portrayed in our piece as we felt that this would be a stereotypical view on the film institutions where there is a stereotypical  view on all social groups.

Evaluation question 1

Final cut

rough cut 3

rough cut 2

Feedback


•'Nice establishing shot but it is quite slow
•Change the font of the titles – it is not good
•You need institutional logos at the start
•Look at the placement of the film title – it is right on top *The shot where he walks across the screen with the lamppost in it is too long
•Some of your shots are much better
•Consider placement of other titles too – some of them are over the action
•Consider sound track
•The shot after he has thrown the leaflet away and the shot on the bridge is too far shot over to the right – it looks odd as he has just been in the centre of the frame
•As an opening title sequence it runs well
•Narrative is difficult to follow'

rough cut 1

You have a few nice shots but on the whole there is lots to improve on in order to bring your piece up into the higher levels:

You need an institutional logo - at least one at the start

You need at least another 30 seconds of footage

The notebook on the bench is not great

Your titles are not in the correct order - look at your research for this

The voice over is not good - there are gaps in it - will you add in non diegetic music?

The Film Title font and lavishness is bad - does not fit in with the genre

Some of the shots are out of focus and need to be filmed again

The narrative doesn't make sense - does he love him? who is it? I thought it was meant to be a gangster film - it feels like a love story at the moment.

As Ryan is in it (and was warned not to be by Miss Peacock) he cannot get any marks for use of camera at the moment.

For rough cut two you need to focus on the narrative and what you are actually trying to produce because it is all a little confusing at the moment.

filming diary

Day 1:

The first day that we began our filming our film opening we had several issues to solve. The largest issue was that the original actor that we had planned to use did not show up for the shoot. This created a large problem as we were unable to get anyone else to fill in, so we had to use one of our group members in the film. We had originally planned on staying in the location (Admirals Park) for roughly 3 hours, however as we did arrive later than expected at 4:30pm we had to accelerate our filming as we had roughly 2 hours of sunlight left in the day. This did at first cause some concern as to if we needed a second day to film the rest of our opening but we were able to fit in all the shots that we need and we left with about half an hour remaining. Over the next couple of days Ryan and Peter spent a large amount of time editing our first rough cut together. We knew this was a rough cut but we still put a lot of hard work into creating a professional looking piece. After showing our product to an audience and our teachers we have been given a list of improvements that we need to do whilst in editing and while we are filming. The biggest thing is that we needed to make it longer as it was too short to be a film opening. From this feedback we were given we are going to be able to improve on our original piece and create an even more professional looking piece.

Luckily, because we had came up with the main protagonist's characteristics, he had a good idea of how to portray him and the qualities within him. This was challenging though, not just because it was short notice that Ryan would have to play him. Despite the visual weather on camera being sunny, it was also very windy the first day we filmed, which, on top of the impending night time darkness, made us feel all the more compelled to finish shooting as quickly as possible. The wind also didn't help us, in regards to our camera work, especially with the numerous panning shots we have in our sequence, because it resulted in the camera being harder to control steadily on the tripod. While doing our best to control the stability of the camera itself, we also tried our best to make the panning shots appear as smooth and thus professional as possible, however, looking back at our first rough cut, we can now see and understand why this was not achieved.

Day 2:

The second day of shooting we had to re-film our scenes as we had a different actor so we re-filmed to create a sense of continuity throughout the film. As we were filming during the day at 1:30 we were no longer rushing our filming so we were able to take as many takes as we needed before we thought we could move on. We were in the same location as before (Admirals Park) but we had arranged for a different more reliable actor to use in our film. We have also added in a few extra shots and extended the time of some shots. This will hopefully extend the overall time of the film opening to a more acceptable length.

Having more time to shoot meant we were also able to make the opening appear more artistic on screen, with a higher attention to detail, in regards to the cinematography. We also took into consideration the connotations within each shot, making a point of conveying this single character as the stereotypically masculine, yet remorseful male we had planned to from the start. For example, we used multiple low angle shots to present this male as a physically dominant protagonist and amplify the stock character of a humanising, mourning and vengeful businessman, quickly establish this narrative as being very much character driven. The weather also worked in our favour more so on this day of filming than the previous, with the dark clouds helping to highlight the depressing and solitary tone we wanted to get across. When we compared this to our original footage we found that the less vibrant weather conditions worked a lot better in correlation to our narrative than the sunshine that can be seen throughout the first rough cut.