1.In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Top left corner – This is a key part to our film because it is the first shot. This is a close up of our main characters face and although little can be seen, it shows the emotionless expression on the characters face which sets the tone for the first 2 minutes.
Top middle – This is first of the titles. The font is Times New Roman, which we chose because it is simple and not a very commonly used font. This suggests the independent genre because many independant films use plain titles, much like Reservoir Dogs, which also uses Times New Roman for the titles.
Top right corner – This is a long shot of our main character walking which shows the setting of the film. In this shot there is a jump cut because the full shot of him walking would have gone on too long and we were struggling to cut our film down to two minutes, and it was also a good opportunity to show one of the many shots we learnt.
Middle left – This shot shows the curiosity of our main character and still displays the dull and emotionless facial expression. Behind him, some of the setting can be seen. In this shot, it jumps from here to a shot from the outside of the van of him looking in, and then back to a shot from inside the van. I got this idea from a scene from Kidulthood, when the group of adolescents are running down some stairs, and it cuts to another view of them running and then back to the original.
Middle – This shot is key to the first 2 minutes because it clearly displays the costume of our main character. It shows him wearing a big coat, v-neck jumper, scruffy jeans and a scruffy hat which is significant to the character.
Middle right – This shot shows pursues the antisocial behaviour of our character and is crucial part to the first 2 minutes because it allows the audience to get a better idea of the troubles caused by the main character. It also shows the other character in the first 2 minutes of our film, the teacher. In the shot, there is a clear contrast between Maxime and the teacher, which makes our main character come across worse as he is just picking on someone causing no problems.
Bottom left corner – This shot is key for me because the lighting displays a thoughtful moment for our main character as he thinks about his past actions. The light changes from the earlier part of the clip and this shows the change of thought going through the head of our main character.
Bottom middle – This shows the title of our film, it is the same as the other titles and is therefore easy to read and very clear.
Bottom right corner – This is the very final shot of our 2 minutes and it shows the character seeing his reflection in a mirror and shows his final reflection and regret about his previous antisocial actions. It is key because our story line is mainly based on our character changing his ways and this is the start of this.
2.How does your media product represent particular social groups?
This is Freddie from Series 3 of Skins.
This is our main character, Maxime.
Even though the genre of Skins is Teen Drama/Comedy, it is similar to our film because Skins is about rebelious teens spending their days and nights drinking, taking drugs, partying and causing trouble. Our film is similar to this, although Skins is a more extreme. The dress sense of Freddie is similar to our main character, Maxime, because his appearence is very scruffy, almost as though he doesn't care and it he is not bothered how people view him. This is stereotypical, would be known as North London or Hackney, as it similar to the stereotypical teenagers there. With out main character, Maxime, we have taken a few things from this stereotype, for example the scruffy look, but we have not gone to the extreme as Maxime is wearing quite alternative boots.
3.What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
4.Who would be the audience for your media product?
After going through all the questions on the UK Tribes website, we discovered that our ideal audience member would be a Grunger. The website described a Grunger as 'You are a Grunger! You wear plaid like it’s a uniform and your jeans – not to mention hair – haven’t been washed in several weeks. Your music taste is dominated by those who know how to create feedback with a guitar and a good chunk of it was created while you were still learning to walk. If the artist has died of a tragic death – like your icon, Kurt Cobain – so much the better.'
This is a picture of grungers that I got from google. We decided that this is a good audience member but maybe a bit extreme.
The boys would commonly wear tight jeans, high tops, t-shirt or shit and some form of scruffy jacket or zip up jumper. The girls would wear lots of jewellery, rock t-shirts and messy jeans. They both have a very scruffy and careless look about them.
They would most likely listen to rock or alternative rock music, bands like Nirvana or Stone Temple Pilots and probably not watch much TV but may occasionally watch a Teen Drama such as Skins. For films, they would probably avoid Romantic Comedies and stick to something a bit more serious.
We have attracted them by relating to them, firstly by their dress sense in the way that our main character, Maxime, is dressed with a scruffy appearance and also the careless and rebelious attitude of our character.
5.How did you attract/address your audience?
6.What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
7.Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
Audience Feedback.
After uploading it onto facebook, here are some of the comments we received...
Anna Stoss: I love the variety of angles x
Charlie Martin: ooooooo very melancholy, gotta eastern european twang to it! X
Cristina Mcleod: very artistic ;)
Joe Bottomley: was touched
George Hill: It has really good sound.
Douglas Williams: seriously good.. its like something out the boy in the striped pajamas :) x
Aureen Peatling: interesting makes me wanna see more
Farina Rachor: ok a bit pointless story haha but very impressing filming and cropping and everything ;) xxx
Kaeli Gibson: I think that the camera angles are really effective, the mystery is good, but I found it sligtly hard to tell what was going on until I read the info about it, but I guess that adds to the mystery. I cant think of anything that screams out awful to me :) its really cool especially the shot with the sun:) hope that helps xxx
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Top left hand corner box:
This displays the setting: We are at boarding school and so we have had to make the most of our campus and try and give the Illusion that it is suburban town. The town is supposed to look slightly neglected with run down vans (the van that he peeks into) and abandoned industrial yards. This neglect of the town is a metaphor for the neglect of Maxime as his parents obviously do not pay much attention to him and there is a lack of love in his life. There is also obviously not much for Maxime to do in the town displayed through lack of interesting buildings. This meant we could display Maxime looking bored and searching for things to do furthering the point that he looks for crime to supplement the boredom in his life. The main symbol of Maxime is the broken-down neglected car. He is peeking inside almost like he is searching for someone to care for him, but the van is clearly empty and neglected like him. After stealing the bag he then runs into a beautiful wood. The tracking shot shows him exiting the town into a more ethereal and fulfilling environment – a perfect template for him to become creative and write… where all his creative thoughts become writing. The woods provide an inspiration for him and reflect how, although, on the outside he is a troublemaker, on the inside he is also a poet. The last shot shows him sitting down in the wood reflecting and reminiscing, whilst he empties the contents of his bag (shown in the grid). We tried making the setting, as much like ‘Fish Tank’s’ setting as possible, but of course, being at boarding school it is very hard.
Bottom left hand corner box:
This box depicts the costume Maxime wears. He wears a trench coat, with V-neck jumper, belt, jeans and hat. The trench coat is supposed to look worn down – an indication of little wealth. Maxime occasionally puts his hood up as a sign that he is about to commit a crime. Our aim was to dress our protagonist up in the style of the skinheads from the film ‘This is England,’ but because lack of accessibility to various items that would make up a skinhead we tried to capture the rebellious boisterous aspect that the skinheads portray. On the contrary the teacher that Maxime steals the bag from is supposed to look conservative and ‘proper’ through her closed jacket and unrevealing outfit to show their indifference. She wears a closed jacket, high top boots, scarf, a turtleneck top and a sling bag. We based the style of this character on the style of the mother in ‘Into the Wild’ as she wears incredibly formal and conservative clothes (http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3800400896/nm0001315) It is a generalisation and connotation that teachers dress like this, but we wanted to characterize our actor as a teacher as it adds to the angelic ‘perfectness’ of the character.
Top line and in the middle box:
This box depicts my favourite camera angle. The camera is placed down the wired fencing. As Maxime walks away he becomes more out of focus as the only focus is on the closest bit of the wire. I really like this shot because it very diverse and unusual conforming to the genre of Independent film. I also like it because it doesn’t relate to any normal camera angle. The genre of Independent films are defined by, ‘Sets to make films which focus much more on developing ideas or exploring new narrative techniques or filmmaking conventions.’
Top Right Box:
This displays the font and Style: I chose this particular title because it was a perfect example of our aim in creating the title. We chose this style of font because it was sophisticated, simple and easy to read. It was not too distracting from the film contents and provided a neat introduction to a potential film. It is quite a common font style and I felt the fade in/fade out style of transitions meant the film flowed smoothly.
Below ‘font and style’ box:
This box depicts the narration of the film. It is the scene where Maxime steals the bag from the teacher. This still is the climax of the film as it shows the perfect example of how troublesome the boy is, it is also is the most exciting bit of the 2 minutes we were commissioned to create. The full 2 minutes follows Maxime. He walks out from behind a hut after having a cigarette down through a small wood. He then comes across a van, peeks in it. Then walks further on until he comes to the teacher, whom he steals the bag from. Maxime then runs off with the bag and returns to a walking pace where he eventually comes to a wood. The wood is where he emits his creativity. These two minutes are just before the boy has a fight with the men and is omitted to hospital.
Below ‘The narration’ box:
This is supposed to depict the special effects of the film, however there are no special effects. I wanted to keep the film completely raw so it seemed more realistic. I chose this film still for no apparent reason it just displayed the rawness of the film.
Below the ‘special effects box’:
This film still is part of my favorite clip in the film. I filmed Henry in a tracking shot whilst the sun was behind him. It was the most beautiful sunset as the sun casted honey colored light across the trees, as if the trees were made of gold. It was perfect as previously the light had been quite gray and dismal in the town (school) and then when we reached the woods there was this blast of strong light. I felt particularly in this clip we have conveyed the conventions of ‘An independent’ film. An independent film as I stated earlier is a film that has explored new ways of filming using light and unusual camera angles. A perfect example of a very Independent film is ‘Les Trois Coleurs: bleu’ by Krzysztof Kieslowski, starring Juliette Binoche (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXmed9U58rQ&feature=related) The film plays with blue light to convey a certain message. I gained inspiration for this clip with Henry from the scene from Fish Tank where she is dancing for her mother’s boyfriend and the light is behind her. Throughout the film as well I feel we have displayed lots of aspects of an Independent film.
The bottom middle box:
This box displays both of our only characters together. There is Henry Dobson as Maxime and there is Charlotte Simes as ‘the teacher.’ This film still shows the only time when the two characters come across each other in the two minutes. Henry stars as the main character as we thought he fitted the image in our heads the best due to his shabby and troublesome look and we felt that Charlotte fitted the ‘teacher’ look the best due to her angelic stance and reliable sensibility. They both were perfect and they played the roles to our expectations.
The middle box:
This box displays the main title. The reason why we called the film ‘Maxime changed’ is because the story is about how Maxime changes from a troublesome boy to a stable writer because of Alfie. There was no other perfect title as it summed up the film in two words. It isn’t particularly unusual, but I feel if titles are too unusual and the director tries to be too creative it deviates from the point of the movie, so therefore this was the simplest and most uncomplicated title I could think of.
EVALUATION QUESTION 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our main character mostly relates to the characters Mia in Fish Tank and Freddie from skins. He has had the same neglected upbringing as both Mia and Freddie. Freddie is pushed aside because of his successful and near-to-famous sister and Mia is deeply neglected by her mother. Maxime also lives in the same sort of council estate, as Mia, - a rough and ready town displayed through the setting in our film. Maxime dresses in a similar sort of way to Freddie, however our character Maxime dresses in a more ‘quirky way’ hence the hat and boots. In the same way as Freddie and Mia our character Maxime is constantly searching for trouble in order to suppress his boredom with life. Unlike Mia and Freddie our character does get himself onto the straight and narrow and creates a career for himself where as Freddie is killed and we do not know the whereabouts of Mia. At the beginning of Fish Tank Mia starts a fight with a group of girls and this same event occurs in Maxime Changed where he finds a group of men and ends up starting a fight with them. Mia and Maxime are in away quite dissimilar in the way of their personalities. Mia is much more fragile and vulnerable, also because of the fact that she does not have Alfie, as Maxime does, but also because she has quite a frantic personality. However Mia and Maxime are both appreciative of beautiful things, as Mia becomes infatuated with this beautiful white horse. In the way of personalities Freddy and Maxime are quite different as Freddie is quite weak (except at the end of the series when he goes to confront the therapist) where as Maxime is quite a strong character.
This was our original post on the ‘Ideal audience member:
‘After taking the questionnaire from the 'Uk tribes ' website and answering the questions as our ideal audience member would; the results came out with 'A Grunger.' The website classified a Grunger as:
'You are a Grunger! You wear plaid like it’s a uniform and your jeans – not to mention hair – haven’t been washed in several weeks. Your music taste is dominated by those who know how to create feedback with a guitar and a good chunk of it was created while you were still learning to walk. If the artist has died of a tragic death – like your icon, Kurt Cobain – so much the better.'
This is quite close to our perfect audience, but more of a Skinhead than a Grunger.
Our perfect Audience member would look like this:
I don't have any skinhead clothes, so I just drew it instead...
Which is classified as a 'Skinhead.'
Clothes - The boys would wear braces, shirt, high boots: like Doc Martins, fly jackets and tight trousers. They would normally have a shaved head.
Girls would wear tight top, tight mini skirt, ripped tights, fly jacket, Doc Martins and would have a shaved head, with maybe a fringe.
Skinheads also wear a lot of the Union Jack.
They would have many tattoos: containing stuff like: F*** the Queen and pictures of topless woman...
They would normally hang out in Brixton, Manchester, Sheffield, Camden and suburbs of London.
Food they would eat: Chicken and chips and poor man's food.
Music they would listen to: Blackpopular music genres such as soul, ska, rocksteady and early reggae: Bands like: Madness, The Specials and The Selector. A genre of music called Oi! was invented by Skinheads and the type of band that played this music was a band called 'Screwdriver.' Here is a taster of their music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin6vZhYl3w
They also listen to Madness and this is my favorite song from Madness:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkZFmZqZZM4
The kind of thing they would do on a Saturday night, was commit anarchy, set fire to a car, go to a hard core concert in Brixton... and then start a crowd fight, go to a pub and then get chucked out and then eventually pass out in some ditch.
They would enjoy tele, but wouldn't have the concentration to sit still and watch it. They would enjoy watching films - If it was edgy, violent and not about the richer class.’
Our movie aimed to attract the audience called ‘Skinheads,’ however I think those intentions slightly took a turn in direction, due to our inaccessibility to get hold of typical Skinhead clothes. The Skinhead culture is originated from the ‘Hard mod’ culture, which was a more violent, working class group. They wore less expensive clothes such as, suspenders, tight jeans and chequer shirt; they ‘were identified by their shorter hair and more working class image.’ From the film ‘This is England’ one learns that it is quite a rough and violent culture showing a real epiphany of lower class, Northern England culture. However our film does not at all display this amount of rawness and grit as a film attractive to skinheads would. So due to our inability to reach these requirements I would say that our film went down a notch in its aggressiveness to viewers that would watch ‘Fish Tank.’ Maybe the lower class culture of nowadays displayed in that of Fish Tank. This means we have got a new target audience for our film. Our new audience member would wear second hand clothes from charity shops. This would mean that their clothes would be worn down and old. They would generally eat poor man’s food like baked beans and Iceland ‘s processed meat. Most of them would have, had to drop out of school at 16 years old to work, as they would not be able to afford to pursue an education. They would tend to get into a lot of fights as they were not educated enough to see the opponents point of view. Their accent would be that of North London (Camden, Islington, Totteridge) accent, and they would generally congregate around there. If they did go to school they would tend to go to very rough state schools because of the areas they lived and worked in. Most of them would have been kicked out of their homes at an early age and would have had to find money for their well-being. The music they would generally tend to listen to would be R and B, trance and dubstep music. I would say the closest thing I can relate our character to another character in another film would be Adulthood and Kidulthood by Menhaj Huda. The film has the storyline of ‘A day in the life of a group of troubled 15-year-olds growing up in west London’ – However our ideal audience member would have grown up in North London. There would be a lot of rivalry gangs amongst our audience members similar to that of ‘Freedom writers’ which is about, a group of students all from different cultural, rival groups who is inspired by a middle class teacher to apply themselves to education and pursue it beyond high school. It actually has a very similar story line to our own storyline however the focus is on one boy instead of a class. I feel that we would attract this audience member through the way Maxime walks, dresses and acts. They would enjoy the thrill of Maxime stealing the bag, however the only thing that I would fear would be that they would lose interest easily as it is slow at the beginning as the music it un-like the type of music that they would listen to. Also if the majority of them were uneducated I don’t know if they would really get the metaphors and symbols in the film that challenges the audience to think beyond just watching. In the respect of just watching and not thinking our film could be an interesting watch and quite inspirational to many in Maxime’s circumstance. In the future if we were to re-do our film again we would use a shaved-head protagonist and dress him in skinhead clothes, therefore to attract the skinhead audience. We maybe would have used fast paced music to keep audience attention, however it was hard to find good music from free-play as most of the other music that was fast beat was really awful and so the ‘MC Mendelssohn Songs Without Words Opus 19’ was the best we could find.
Farina Rachor - ok a bit pointless story haha but very impressing filming and cropping and everything.
Kaeli Gibson - I think that the camera angles are really effective, the mystery is good, but I found it sligtly hard to tell what was going on until I read the info about it, but I guess that adds to the mystery. I cant think of anything that screams out awful to me. Its really cool especially the shot with the sun. hope that helps
From this feedback and in conclusion there are a few things that I would have done differently:
I would have made Maxime more like our original ideal audience member a skin head.
I would have followed the original route, however the sun was directing its light on the other side of campus and so it was not ideal.
I would have made a more upbeat story-line however the props and ability to do so was not accessible.
I would have used the original music, however because it was not copyright it was not available.
I would have used some special effects especially when Maxime is walking, however I discovered how to do this after we had uploaded our film to Youtube.
Our film didn't upload to Youtube in the end, but it came as a touch of fate as we realised it was not copyright so we had to search on http://freeplaymusic.com/ for some other music...
We found that alot of the music was very synthesised and therefore quite horrible to listen to. Eventually I came across this music called:
Which was perfect as the music was very pure and actually quite beautiful. I put the music to our film and it turned out contrapuntal as it did not reflect the imgages displayed on the screen. There was Maxime stealing a bag and walking in a criminal manner along to calm and classsical music and it worked! It also refelcts that there is more to Maxime than people think as he is an incredibly talented writer.
We have FINALLY finished editing our film. After waiting for about 5 hours to render our movie as it was HD, we edited it. The editing took about 2 hours, which is quite short as most of our footage was in order anyway, so it just involved cutting out the unnecessary footage. We had to edit the film down from 10 minutes of footage to a 2 minutes 20 second film. This was a very hard job, but do-able. We are now waiting for the film to broadcast on Youtube, and this will occur shortly.
