Film Evaluation: Question 2

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

We would hope our film represents a younger, female social class. With it's female lead character and she is quite young, it would make sense that they would be able to relate to her. Also, because the film is in black and white and the introduction scene is set in an older house with an older woman living in it, it could represent an older social class.

It seems to be very unconventional for a young person to play a main role in a thriller film these days, especially if it were to be a female. One of the most recent films with a younger character as the main role is 'Stormbreaker' but that was in 2006. A thriller film this year where the main cast are all young people is the film 'Maze Runner', however it's a very male dominated film. This is why we decided to make our character a female as in breaks the conventions of most thrillers and it's very uncommon. Usually, if a female character is in a thriller film, they are represented as the 'Damsel in distress' role which doesn't make them look strong and makes it look the the males always have to save them. They also very rarely get their own narration as well.

Film Evaluation: Question 1

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

Our media product challenges other real media products as it is in black and white which is the theme of a noir film. There really aren't many black and white noir films today, however one of the most significant is Sin City which is known for it's use of noir cinematography along with it's voice overs. A lot of noir films today are mainly known as 'Neo-Noirs', they are still in colour and are often very dark in the form of a thriller. In a lot of ways, we used a lot of ideas from Sin City by using a voice over of the main character explaining some of the main parts in her life in order to make an enigma. Voice overs are important parts of Noir films, they're are one of the most iconic parts of them. They're usually in a dark and gritty way, and we hoped that at the end of her narration it would sound dangerous or threatening and the audience would worry about what she's going to do next.

We wanted to challenge modern day thrillers and see how it would do against them. As they are all in colour, we thought it would be good to challenge other thriller films with making this black and white and show how people would still be interested despite the lack of colour. However, the titles had some colour with the beginning of every word being red. We did this because we still want people to feel some colour and it also links with Sin City when they sometimes show colour despite it being black and white. Sin City was a huge inspiration for our media product as it seems to be the only modern day film in black and white as was ours.

Other conventions we used are from the film 'Taken'. The last line of our introduction is 'I will find you' and the famous catch phrase from Taken is 'I will find you, and I will kill you'. This phrase is used a lot in lots of thriller films as it makes the main character sound powerful and threatening, so we thought it would be good to put this into our product as it would work with the story.

February feedback

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Complete the evaluation

Put the preliminary task and your production as last posts then the questions

Add any extra elements to the resrecah and planning.

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Coursework feedback

Research and Planning - 16

Excellent script, Organisation of actors and cast is excellent, schedules, recce, props and equipment etc. the film is also well planned with a full pitch. The storyboard is written and I would have liked to see a traditional drawn one though. However overall this is a detailed and confident preparation and planning effort. The research into potential target audiences is not as good as the rest of the blog, this is disappointing. I would have liked to see secondary research onto his genre as well as a look at demographics etc. However the research into similar products is wide-ranging and excellent.

Main Task – 52

An excellent and confident film opening. The camera work is controlled and there is a variety of shot lengths and framing. Close attention has been paid to creating meaning through editing, notable in the close-up eye cut between the letter shots. The titles are appropriate and used in accordance with institutional conventions, particularly when the logo changes to black and white to match the film. Excellent use of sound, especially when the non-diegetic music switches to be diegetic as she turns down the volume. I would have perhaps like to see another location and a little more attention paid to mise-en-scene to gain top marks, and perhaps one or two more varied shot lengths. On the whole an impressive piece of work.   

Truth - Finished Cut

Feedback:

Person 1: Harry, 16

• Like use of music - appropriate times and volume
• Intro goes from colour to black and white to fit film.
• Smoke

Person 2: Ellie, 16

• Good logo
• Black and white looks effective
• Nice angles
• Good close up on characters
• Good music choice

Film Evaluation (Truth): De-constructing My Product

This is the first shot of our film and it takes place at a stonewall. This is done because a stonewall can mean avoiding responsibility for something or being evasive, which is what the main character and her grandmother are doing at the beginning of this film - they are avoiding what has happened to Roseanne's parents. Also, the titles as the beginning go away as the actor walks passed them which is done to look like it is interacting with him. The two capital letter's on the words 'Productions' and 'Presents' are both in red as we were going for the theme of love (Roseanne's love for her family) and death (both her parents' death and the people she is going to kill). It also fits in with the Sin City vibe of having certain things in colour when the rest of it is in black and white. 

Here, we have a shot looking down the steps (a high angle shot) as there is a close up on the feet. The leaves in the background give it an old feel and as the leaves are dead from the trees, it links in with the theme of Roseanne's dead parents and what is in the lett the man is about to post through the door. The shoes an trousers he's wearing are all black which makes it look dark and he looks like he has something to do with death or about to bring bad news to someone. But it can also look scary as well.

Here we have a shot of the main character sitting at her desk. This shot was made to show everything that was on the desk. We wanted to emphasise what kind of person she is. There's a laptop on there which shows she does a lot of work, there's also a picture of her parents on the side which becomes more noticeable as it goes on, we thought it would be a good idea to subtly put it there. We placed an incense candle in the shot as well in order to make her look a bit mysterious and like it's quite dark. The actress' name appears in the corner as she is the main character and she is also on the screen, therefore we decided that would be the appropriate place to put the title. The capital letters are also in red again for the same reason they were last time. 

This shot is an over the shoulder shot put it's also made to look a bit like a point of view shot. We did this to do two things: 1) show what was on the letter 2) to establish what the main character's name is. After this she then walks off and we can see a bit of her face.

Here we have a high angle shot which was done to really show how big the stairs was so we could make it look like the grandparent was wealthy and had a lot of money. The colour of the banister is also very white which makes it look pure and stands out from all the other darker colours around the setting - particularly the floor. When we first made this shot, the camera looked a bit jumpy at the end however we managed to change it by having it swap camera angles a couple of times, this made it look a lot smoother. The shaky camera was actually a big criticism on our first cut that we made. 

This is another over the shoulder shot but this time two people are interacting. We also did the same shot but from Roseanne's shoulder. When we did this, we had to make sure we kept to the 180 degrees ruler so it looked professional and not out of place. The window in the background also looks very white so it looks a bit mysterious as we don't actually know what's outside, it really makes it feel like these two characters are the only people that matter at this moment in time.

This shot is a low angle shot. We made this for two reasons: 1) So the grandparent looks like she's the one who's in charge of the family; she looks dominant. 2) So we were able to catch the emotion that goes on on her face. We also wanted to make it clear that she was looking at the picture on Roseanne's desk and she felt someone sad about it. There is also a voice over that goes on at this point which explain why the photo is making her sad.

As the narration about her dead parents finishes, we have a close up shot of her photo which is now blatantly obvious what is is: her parents. This is done to make the audience feel sad about what happened. We had to take this picture on the day of filming so we had to make the main character look much younger than she actually is. We wanted to put them in front of a painting as stereo typically in films, wealthy family photos are usually taken next to some sort of painting. 

For these two shots, we used extreme close ups both times. For the scene, we wanted it to look like there was nothing but herself and the letter in the room. We did this by having an extreme close up of Roseanne's eyes and her hair blocked out the rest of the room, so it looked like she was in a black room. And when it cut to the letter, there were extreme close ups on each letter that were important to her parents death. We tried to make sure none of the room was shown in the background so it really didn't look like they were in the office room. Also, the writing on the letters were printed with old styled writing, and we thought it would look effective for the old noir style we have.

This is one of the last shots we used in the room. It starts off as a long shot and slowly turns into a medium shot. We did this by moving the tripod on the dolly closer and close to Roseanne as she stood up, however as the tripod moved, the camera moved in a different direction in order for it to look effective and quite a bit more professional or cinematic along with the music.

Filming Day

The day we filmed (Wednesday 22nd October 2014) went very well and smoothly. Before we started filming we had to tell everyone involved what we were going to do which took us about an hour. We started off with doing all the shots that had to be indoors. The scene we started with the scene was the one where the grandmother picks up the letter that was posted for Roseanne. This was at first quite awkward to film because the tripod was in the way of her arm when picking up the letter. This is why on the actual footage, her arm slowly goes to pick it up, but we decided it worked well with the shot anyway.

For the scene when both the grandmother and Roseanne look at the photo of her with her family, we had to take that photo on the filming day. Luckily, we had a photo printer so we got the two owners of the building we were using to take it. With this picture, we were able to present a story about Roseanne's dead parents along with the narration.

The overall filming took about 4 hours to do. We were worried the dolly wouldn't move on the carpet just in case it was bumpy. Sometimes it was but luckily we managed to make it work, especially in the part where Roseanne walks out of the room.
Throughout the filming, we knew that we were going to edit it into black and white with some colours shown (primarily red), so for this reason we used red candles and tried to show as much of the red carpet as possible when appropriate.

We had to record a scene several times as the grandmother forgot the lines and what to do. Luckily after a while we managed to get the scene filmed and the scene looked perfect, although there were loads of outtakes that we had to eventually delete from the camera.

We made sure that we stuck to the storyboard well and we kept to the exact camera shots and movements. Also, we had to bare in mind that we had the narration that was going to go over the footage so the clips had to be long enough to fit onto it.