1. AS Media Evaluation Emily Hardy

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Throughout making our product we tried to use as many conventions of a film noir as possible. This way the audience could familiarise with the genre. Before deciding on creating a film noir, I watched previous thriller texts and analysed them to get a better understanding of all the sub genres in thriller and the typical codes and conventions. One thing learned from analysing thrillers is that a common feature is a white font on a black background which is what we have included for our film name to make it stand out. All the rest of our opening credits are over the top of our footage which is similar to what se7en does. We chose a serif font as we thought it fitted more into the theme of film noir unlike most thrillers I analysed which used a sans serif font. We were influenced by Sin City as we wanted to have a red tie while everything else is black and white like in Sin City however, this proved very difficult when editing so we couldn't carry through with the idea. 3. I also researched the codes and conventions of the film noir genre so we could try and include as many as possible. I found they use extreme close ups to make the viewer feel uncomfortable which is something we used quite a lot. This being our most significant ECU. This shot will make the viewer feel very uncomfortable and it gives them a close up of the murder and the reason why our film is called 'Forever'. The name juxtaposes the shot in which it's set which also adds to the uncertainty and unease of the audience. We attempted to create shadows as this was another key feature of a film noir however, ours isn't very clear. We found it very difficult to film as positioning the camera and the actors to just get the shadow and not them in the shot was very tricky and it took a lot of time. Its very dark and its not very clear that this is the murder scene. Its also very quick so its quite hard to tell what the action is however the scream helps to make it clear. We could have made the shot a bit longer or tried to light it differently to make it look more effective. 4. How does your media product represent particular social groups? In our media product we represented two social groups. We had white british and british asian. For white british we represented both genders. Our women is presented in quite a stereotypical way. She is quite weak, vulnerable and passive as she does nothing to defend herself when she is attacked by our male character. This contradicts our british asian character who is presented as strong and powerful which is an atypical representation of women but as our femme fatal these are the characteristics she should have. We presented our male character as dominant and strong which is also a stereotypical representation of men. Age is represented through costume, we wanted to show they were in their early 20's which is shown through the short dress Shauna is wearing and the suit Jack is wearing. These aren't clothes teenagers or older people would typically wear. Another thing their clothes represent is their class. From their costumes you can infer that they are middle class, which is also shown through the car that we use and the setting (the piano show). This links to our target audience as we are aiming our film at middle class people as typically they would probably enjoy a film noir more. 5. What type media institution might distribute your media product and why? We are going to have our film distributed on TV through programmes such as Film 4 and we would have it on DVD. Film noir is quite a niche genre so it probably wouldn't be appealing to a mass audience which is what hollywood films generally aim their films at. However, as it isn't very similar to existing products people might have been more interested to go to the cinema and watch something new but we thought people would be more comfortable watching a new uncommon genre on the TV at home so if they don't like it they can just change the channel instead of risking their money at the cinema for something they don't like. We thought our film would suit more of an independent distributor. We also don't think it would work as well being distributed via the internet because our audience is 15 to 45 and we don't think our older demographic will be necessarily be on the internet and it isn't so much of a wide way to distribute films as people may not know how to find films on the internet. We think Film 4 is the best way to distribute our film. We found a presentation on the channel 4 website about Film 4's sales and distribution. It reaches more people than cinemas do. The majority of their audience our men so our crime and vilence aspect of our film will appeal to them. 6. Who would be the audience for your media product? Our demographic are people aged from 15 onwards. We chose to make our film have a 15 rating because of the level of violence in our film. We show a death in the opening with a close up of the slit neck using special effects which would probably scare a younger audience. We wish to appeal to both genders. However, our film might lean more towards women as there are more female characters for them to relate to in our opening. Our representation of gender is quite stereotypical so they will be able to relate easily. Sin City is a film that is very similar to ours. The storyline is very similar to ours, there appears to be romance between the male and female however, the male character goes on to kill the female leaving the audience wondering why as they thought he loved her and had feelings for her. This opening scene however, was just a conversation between the two people and a narrative from the male (a convention of film noir we failed to include) carried out in the same setting whereas there is more action in ours and there isn't as much dialogue because we wanted the score to help tell the story and show the characters feelings which is a typical convention of film noir. 7. Target Audience Feedback We asked: Did you enjoy the film and why? Was it engaging? I enjoyed the title sequence very much, the camera angles and editing set the tone well and made it very gripping. The costumes and set were also very convincing. I would happily watch the rest of the film, the ending made me want to watch on. male, 16 We carried out a survey to find out what our target audience thought of our title sequence. The majority of our target audience enjoyed our title sequence and wanted to carry on watching the film which goes to show what we made appealed to our demographic. The majority thought we had used enough camera angles which infers they didn't find it boring and it flowed well enough. Most people also recognised the genre for being a thriller and identified it as a film noir which shows we used enough conventions so that you can tell what genre we were trying to make. 8. How did you attract your audience? Our audience can relate to the characters we have used through their personalities and the way we have presented them. They can also relate to the dating experience and some could also possibly relate to the love triangle we begin to introduce just not on such extreme terms. Our murder scene would probably scare a younger audience, explaining why we made it a 15. The scream and the close up of Shauna's slit neck is quite gruesome and graphic meaning it would very likely scare a younger audience. The audience is asked to put themselves in the position of Jack, they will want to know why he has murdered the person he was on a date with and who the woman at the end was. The audience also sympathises a lot with Shauna. We can see from the way she behaves around Jack that she has strong feeling for him and then we are shown her death scene in a lot of detail. The audience will probably be made to dislike Jack from this as they don't understand why he has done it. This will engage our audience and make them want to carry on watching. The majority of shots we have used are typical of a film noir. The jumps cuts used between Tiffany playing the piano and the reaction shots of Jack and Shauna create tension as it makes the audience feel like it is building up to something. The black scene of silence when Jack turns off the lights also creates suspense because the audience doesn't know what is going to happen. 9. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing your product? When using the camera equipment I struggled with making sure the camera was still all the time whilst filming and getting used to assembling the camera onto the tripod took a lot of time to learn. However, once I had gotten used to assembling everything together, filming became a much quicker and hassle free process. The main problems whilst filming we time efficiency, getting everyone organised and keeping the camera still. We tended to waste lots of time setting up and deciding what to film if our initial ideas didn't work out. We should have referred back to our storyboard more often and we should have had an idea as to what we were going to film if things went wrong to save time as it was limited because we were filming within school hours. Organising everyone proved difficult because we had to make sure our actors were available at the same time so we could film their parts together, making sure they all had their costumes was hard as well because they were bringing them from home. We made timetables so they knew and we knew when we had time to film in the room and which actors were available, we also had to film after school some days to keep up with the amount of filming we had to do. Keeping the camera still was a significant problem for me as I had the tendency to hold the camera while filming which made it shake which meant I had to reshoot quite a lot. I had to get into the habit to letting go of the camera when I pressed the record button to avoid any shaking. 10. Personally editing has been quite a big problem, it has taken a while for me to understand how to do things such as cutting clips and detaching the video from its sound as we wanted the music to be the only source of sound for the majority. We wanted to create the effect of the footage being in black and white which was quite easy to do as we just had to drag the effect to the video clip and this proved very effective at making our title sequence look like a typical film noir but we wanted certain items to be in red however, this proved very difficult as we could keep the red a consistent colour and keep the same black and white effect so we had to get rid of this idea as we couldn't figure out a way to do it that worked effectively. 11. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? The planning stage was very important because it gave us an insight into everything we needed to create our thriller effectively. The research we did into genre was important because we learned about all the different sub genres of thriller there are which helped us to choose one to base our film on. We choose film noir so then we had to do further research into that to learn the codes and conventions so we could use them in our opening to make it look like an effective and realistic film noir. Storyboarding was an important process to learn as when it comes to filming we have a detailed plan of what we are going to do so we don't waste time thinking about what to film while we are on set. We had to redo our storyboard quite a lot as we never made it quite detailed enough to give us all the information we needed when filming. Doing the continuity editing task was useful as it gave us an idea of the filming process and when it came to the real thing it pointed things to improve such as keeping to the 180 degree rule and making sure we don't cut the tops of people's head of in shots which we could learn from and avoid doing. Creating mind maps of our ideas was useful as it gave us lots of choice over what we were going to film, we had lots of ideas to discuss so we could choose the best one and we could adapt all of the ideas and enhance them. 12. Since our continuity task I think that our match on action has improved, we struggled to do it and in our first cut we didn't include it at all because we didn't really know how to do it but we managed to do it better in our real thing as we had more of an idea of how to do it. A shot we had a problem with were tilts, we struggled to do them without shaking the camera a lot so it doesn't look smooth. Also from the continuity task we learned to use a more varied amount of shots as we didn't use that many different shots and they were quite long, instead we should of changed to different angles or shot reverse shots for when people are talking. The continuity task gave us an idea of the camera equipment but I still wasn't particularly comfortable with setting it up, I got better the more I used it when filming our real thing when I had chance to use it more. This was our task 'we have to make the titles and the opening of a new fiction film that has to last for only 2 minutes. There are four parts we will be assessed on which are research, planning, filming and post production. All of the video and audio must be original (produced by myself) apart from if there is music/audio I can use that is copy right free.' I think our opening sequence fulfils this well as it is exactly 2 minutes of a sub genre of thriller that isn't commonly shown anymore which makes it more unique and all of our video and audio is completely original.