Story

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My main inspiration for my story was from a multitude of thrillers such as ‘Narco’ and ‘Top Boy’ which focus on the dealing of riches between gangs. I believe that by following a generic character motive like this my au-dience will be able to follow the story with ease, despite other conventions being challenged.

I did however decide to follow a narrative which is different from that of many crime thrillers. In my research I studied how Italian director introduced his main characters into a film. In both ‘the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ a set of characters are introduced briefly, then murdered by a more dominant character in the film. In each instance this event is delivered in a standoff styled event, with characters facing one another until a gun is drawn and fired.

I believe that my story was a success and the outcome is clear and easy to follow. My biggest criticism of the story is that the open ending has left some audiences unsatisfied or confused. The introduction and slight de-velopment of characters however was well received by audiences and I personally feel that I was able to present my characters and their actions within the film as I had intended.

Sound

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

I began my research into sound in film by exploring the use of music in classic thrillers, Tarantino’s films in particu-lar. Tarantino notoriously contrasts the violence and conflict being displayed on screen with well timed music which is often associated with peace and love. This convention offers a more compelling scene of conflict and broadens the effect of the music to almost give it another meaning which is solely relevant to that scene. I decided this was a convention I wished to use in my film.

I explored the Motown genre of music as that is known for expressing romance. After testing multiple songs in the editing process I decided that Smokey Robinson’s ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me’ was perfect for the interroga-tion scene. Lyrically music seemed appropriate, yet it Robinson’s delivery of the lines creates a tone which directly conflicts with the violence being expressed on-screen.

One other diegetic song is used in the film and is being played from Winston’s car stereo. The idea of using a song in this scene came later in the writing process as after the first few film drafts I decided that Winston needed further detail, and presenting a song he would listen to was my way of doing this. I chose the song ‘Clint Eastwood’ by the Gorillaz mostly due to it’s references to the films of Sergio Leone who I had already taken great inspiration from. I therefore felt that this song choice was authentic within the film.

I decided that the sound effects used in my film should be authentic and obey those used in generic crime-thrillers. I therefore used the website ‘Soundbible’ to collect all the sound effects I would need in post-production.

Mise-en-scene

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

When planning my shots for filming I decided that I would follow the generic codes and conventions of mise-en-scene in ‘Field of Snakes’. This includes using low angles on more dominant characters, long-shots for establishing shots, and closeups to draw attention to expression or a significant object.

Although not planned in my initial character designs and script, I later wished to avoid using colour and other forms of mise-en-scene to connote morals of characters. Therefore I decided to dress the antago-nist in black clothing and have the only character wearing white be killed in the first two minutes. I fur-thered this by dressing the antagonist in the lightest clothing to subvert the common stereotype that ‘bad guys’ wear black. This encourages the audience to question who they should support throughout the film, and obscures the roles theorised in Propp’s character theory. Despite this due to character screen-time and the overall narrative it can still era argued that various characters fall into Propp’s theory.

The prop’s, accents, vocabulary, costumes, and setting all adhere to typical thrillers set in London. The all-male cast is also generic of a crime-thriller, however this was a result of actor availability and if more female actors were available I may have considered changing roles.

Typography

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The typography of my poster has changed multiple times over the course. Initially I wanted a classic Western style font to reinforce the Western influence to this film. From this I began to explore the ty-pography of Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’ and Sergio Leone’s ‘the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. How-ever, after trailing these fonts with my poster and title sequences I decided that they were too obscure and looked misplaced.

Following from this, I explored the fonts of other thrillers genres such as horror-thriller and psyche-delic-thriller. These fonts seemed far more interesting due to their sharp edges and blood-like tex-tures. I decided that this would fit nicely as my thriller does contain violence and fear despite not being a horror.

I finalised the typography by adding a black shadow to the text on the poster which is a convention used in the film ‘Django’. I therefore consider this font to be a generic hybrid of multiple thriller genres, much like my film.

Film review

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For my film review I took heavy inspiration from magazine-based film review in terms of formatting and style. I found the presentation of ones in mag-azines such as Empire and Total Film to be very tidy and easy to navigate. I therefore did not challenge the conventions of that form of review much, however I did take inspiration from other forms of reviews.

As I use YouTube for a lot of film news and reviews, it made sense to criticise the film in the way a YouTube-based film reviewer would. I therefore decided to write my analysis with knowledge gained from that format, although after comparing with the magazine articles, the content is very similar.

I do not believe I have challenged this format of film reviewing, but I don’t feel that is particularly negative as film reviews are not expected to be or praised for being creative. I think approaching this task with a wide knowledge of generic conventions and then enforcing them was a good way to do it.

Film poster

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

When first planning my poster I analysed multiple posters from both the crime-thriller and short film genre. However, as my main product developed, I de-cided I wanted to utilise some Western conventions in my poster as well as my short film.

Therefore I have maintained some conventions of crime thriller posters but given it a Western theme. I have utilised conventions such as the large, bold font and plain background which appears in generic crime-thriller posters, but adapted the typography and background texture to be representative of a Western-style ‘wanted’ poster.

This use of hybridisation creates expectations for the film to include both crime-thriller and Western elements, which it does. However the ‘wanted poster’ design is arguably too dominant and some audiences may view the poster and expect a generic Western, despite the subtle elements of other genres.

Overall I think this use of hybridising multiple thrilling genres has the potential to become an overall more thrilling product, despite my execution not being as thrilling as it could have been.

One generic convention of most posters which I left out was a tagline or re-lease date. I feel that this is somewhat unnecessary for a short film and is not included in posters for a lot of other short films, only for feature-length movies.

How effective is the combination of your main and ancillary tasks?

Despite having rough plans for what my ancillary tasks would include, I decided to develop them too much until my main product was near comple-tion. This enabled me to ensure that each of my ancillary tasks would reflect and reinforce the ideas and tones expressed in my main product. I be-lieve this was well achieved in the sense that each product uses the same typography, colour scheme and tonal feel.

The main problem in terms of consistency between products is the fact that Winston and Jimmy are wearing different clothes in the poster to the ones in the short film. This could have been avoided by recreating the shot in later reshoots, however we did not get time to recreate this shot.

Review

How effective is the combination of your main and ancillary tasks?

I wrote and designed my review after already planning most of my film in order to get a clear understanding of what to write about in the final draft of the review. I have been back to the review multiple times to update shots from filming as well as changing the text in order to address strengths, weaknesses and plot points of my film.

I feel that now the review acts almost as a teaser to the film much like many other reviews- something a consumer can read in order to get an under-standing of what they are going to to watch without it being spoiled.

I therefore believe my execution of this task was good although I do think further improvement could have been made to format the review in such a way that it could be inserted into a magazine. For example, page numbers and social media links could have been inserted at the footer and sides of the document in order to secure authenticity.

Due to reviews not directly being a product of the director, I did not format the review to look similar to my poster as a magazine company wouldn’t do that either. They instead would format the text and boarders to reflect the company’s brand. I did however use the same typography for the title as I had seen that in other reviews during my research stage.

Poster

How effective is the combination of your main and ancillary tasks?

I consider the main purpose of my poster to be advertising my main task. Therefore I have decided to design it to reflect the tone and aesthetic of my film. By taking heavy inspiration from the Western genre it is clear that my film will contain Western elements. I have also chosen a shot which in-cludes both Winston and Jimmy, the two characters I consider to be most important to the short film.

As mentioned before, I failed to acquire an updated shot of Winston in control of Jimmy. Therefore there is some loss in continuity between these two products, lessening their effectiveness as a whole. I considered using another image but believe the tone created with the current image is exactly what I had intended when designing the poster.

Whilst creating this poster I did not view the situation displayed to be a spoiler, however can respect how some may view the conflict established to be a spoiler as it is a main plot point.

Research feedback

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I conducted this survey during the research stage of this course. I decided that in order to plan efficiently I would need a good understanding of what my audience would want from a thriller.From these results I was able to plan my short film in a way that challenge some generic conventions whilst still creating a media product that the my audience would enjoy. I reflected back on this research frequently in each stage of production in order to ensure my film adhered to at least most of what the mass audience asked for.In order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of these results I could have collected more results, collected results from a wider audience, or asked more questions to aid the rest of my production.The most influential results acquired from this survey were: guns, drugs and violence are typically featured in crime-thrillers; my film should adhere to the 15 age-rating restrictions; it should be uploaded to YouTube; the majority of my audience is young males.

I collected these results through both the website ‘SurveyMonkey’ and paper-based handouts.

Further feedback

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Following on from my initial draft I frequently briefed ideas and screened further drafts to friends, family, teachers and classmates. I found the results of each screening to be extremely beneficial as by taking feedback I was able to improve on the film’s flaws each time I reshot or re-edited. I find this feedback invaluable as it resulted in an extreme rise in quality between my first draft and final cut, each draft improving greatly.Here are some of the most valuable individual pieces of criticism which have significantly furthered my ability in filmmaking:- “Change filter between environments to exaggerated divide” (flashback)- “Re-write first sequence to make dialogue clearer”- “Make interrogation scene brighter”- “Music is too loud”

Although each of these comments seem simple and obvious, each little improvement helps and when I was editing for hours at a time, it was easy to miss some flaws as I became so used to them. Lots of people criticised the lighting and sound which on my laptop was fine, but when presented in the classroom there were significant changes in quality. In order to improve this I screened the film multiple times in class with different edits in order to find a good balance of both colour grading and volume.

Planning and research

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout my planning and research stage I mostly began each piece of research through an internet based format. For example, when deciding which films to analyse for inspiration I would often search for thrillers and short films through websites such as ‘Google’, ‘YouTube’ and ‘IMDB’. These websites contain many resources which were able to both expand my knowledge of filmmaking and provide media which inspired me to plan multiple aspects of each of my tasks. ‘YouTube’ in particular contains many productions from previous A-level students and which granted me a rough idea of what I was aiming to produce.

I used the website ‘SurveyMonkey’ to collect the majority of my initial feedback which kick-started my planning stage. Moreover, in order to gain a large amount of results I shared the survey on multiple platforms of social media.

Another website I used was ‘Celtx’ which provides resources to aid script writing in a profes-sional format.

I also briefly used iMovie when creating my animatic. This enabled me to visualise how my planned short film would look, I edited the animatic multiple times until I was happy that the shots flowed well together within the narrative. This also developed my ability to use the soft-ware which became essential when editing my final product.

Filming

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

When filming my short film I used a basic range of media technologies:DSLR cameraMicrophoneTripod

I used only this equipment as I did not require any complex shots, each shot utilised steady-cam other than one tracking shot. We had trialled the tracking shot before using a dolly, but the camera did not move fast enough to pick up the intended shot. A more suitable piece of equipment would have been a gamble but that was not in my price range.

The DSLR camera was the same one I had used in my AS course so I already had a brief under-standing of how it worked. Throughout filming I expanded on this ability as I learnt how to navigate through the settings. Unfortunately, as I was borrowing this piece of equipment from a friend, I was not able to test it much before using it, so planned my shot list to only include basic shots that I knew how to perform.

The tripod was extremely useful as it did enabled me to get multiple steady shots which aided con-tinuity as well as the flow and professionalism of my short film. It was easy to adjust and I think that without it my film would be of much lower quality.

The mic, although not perfect, was good enough to record the sound which I would fix during edit-ing. An easy piece of equipment to use which is always necessary for filming. If I continue to film however, I will invest in a higher quality microphone in order to improve on sound quality.

Editing

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

I performed all of my editing on using the free software ‘iMovie’. I had ini-tially planned on using ‘Adobe Premier Pro’, but after using iMovie to pro-duce my animatic I decided it would be good enough to edit my film on.

Unfortunately I did not have experience on iMovie before A2, so decided to watch various YouTube tutorials before and throughout editing to develop my ability. This was very frequent as the ‘help’ menu for iMovie is very lim-ited, despite the program’s potential.

The main tool I used from iMovie were the ‘cutting’ tool to reduce the time of some clips and match them with others to maintain good match-on-action. Furthering this I was able to reduce background sound significantly and colour-grade each clip in order to improve quality of both sound and visuals.

I inserted multiple soundbites and visual effects from the website ‘Sound-bible' which were easy to download and insert into various shots.Moreover, music tracks purchased on the iTunes store were easy to insert as iMovie includes a database of the tracks stored on the account.

I eventually created a final cut which I am happy with due to these freely available softwares.

Ancillary tasks

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout the production of both my film review and poster, I used the program ‘Adobe Photoshop’. This software enabled me to insert and manipu-late images, which was especially beneficial for my poster. The ability to change shapes, positions, and colours allowed for me to create my ancillary tasks with a lot of freedom. I had previous experience with Photoshop in my GCSE digital art course which made the production of each of these products fairly easy. However, I do believe I could have been more ambitious with the poster as it seem fairly bland, despite being heavily edited.

I did not require the use of any other media technologies in the making of these two products other than the computer which had the font used and images stored on it already.

In order to improve on my use of these ancillary tasks through the use of new media technologies, I could have explored Photoshop further in order to create a more complex and refined poster.