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

This is my analysis of the structure and style of the piece in relation to genre conventions.

GENRE

This is our final piece with a commentary by us on how we utilised genre conventions

FORM AND NARRATIVE 

This diagram demonstrates the functions we wanted our sequence to perform and how we were inspired by key influence Heathers,  the pictures being stills in order taken from our opening and the opening of Heathers

 After the equilibrium and disruption of our opening we would have the recognition of the event marked with the trend of revenge sweeping across the whole school. Attempts to repair would be Eve preventing the murder and the new equilibrium would come about after the tearful reunion between the students followed by their arrest save Eve's. This is the black comedy aspect of the film - their redeeming character arcs are fruitless in the face of the law. These character arcs, specifically Eve's are one convention we followed of teen dramas. Characters in teen films like Veronica from Heathers, tend to come of age throughout the film, becoming more mature, considerate people, Eve being no exception. Another way we followed conventions of teen drama was with characters. We had the typical roles of:

• mysterious female protagonist like Veronica or Effy from Skins
• sleazy male (sometimes jock) like Tony from Skins
• outsider who wants to fit in like Oliver from Submarine 

 More detailed narrative techniques and use of theories can be found under Question 5.



Binary opposites - we included people reacting in different ways so the audience can choose whose side they are on

 STYLE

 

This video includes detailed annotations analysis on the specifics of the style of our film, looking and titles, mise-en-scene, editing, camerawork and sound.

We were particularly influenced on style by the Requiem for a Dream trailer.



Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

This post explains our decisions about representation for our opening and the rest of the film.

Click to zoom on our decisions about the basic representation, this diagram represents the process and influences we went through to come to our final idea.

The bigger issue with our representation in the whole film (click for synopsis), however, was that we were presenting teenagers committing cruel illegal acts of revenge - obviously not something we wanted to promote, we combatted this with the tearful recognition of their wrongdoings and the comedic justice with the police who come in at the end. We feel it worked more as a kind of satirisation of teen pressures to fit in nowadays. As Mean Girls used jungle metaphors to symbolise teen culture, we wanted to hyperbolise the impact of trends amongst teens and the need for independence whilst also wanting to fit in, using the revenge plot.

Question 3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

This is a visual representation of the processes we went through to choose E One Momentum as our production company, each company is connected to relevant films it has distributed.

To pick a distributor, we first limited it to UK distributors. This was because our film was designed to feature British schools and teen culture so a UK company would be more experienced and appropriate.

We picked the qualities we felt were particularly important of our film, namely the target audience of 16-24 year old females and the secondary audiences of males of the same age and parents; the strong female lead and the sub-genre of black comedy.

E One Momentum seemed an obvious choice as it catered to all these needs successfully:

• It distributed Chalet Girl - targeted at our core audience and with similar themes of coming of age
• It distributed Girl With a Dragon Tattoo to all our audience demographics, this being a film with a strong female lead similar to ours, and themes of crime
• It distributed the King's Speech, initially targeted at parental age people but a success with people of all ages, they would have expertise at getting our secondary audience of parents to see the film
• It distributed Seven Psychopaths - managing to make the rare genre of black comedy successful in the mainstream market as we'd hope to do with our black comedy

 Our production company, X PRODUCTIONS, would be an independent London production company connected to mostly to British indie films with a catalogue featuring films similar to Submarine and Four Lions, distributing sometimes gritty films of less mainstream genres and successful at targeting the 16-24 audience.

To market the film we would use traditional methods such as posters and theatrical trailers, but drawing inspiration from the campaign of Seven Psychopaths in in recognition of our technologically savvy audiences we would explore online and viral techniques. Seven Psychopaths used a dummy lost dog campaign, so we would consider perhaps a false school website or facebook page which would post updates with pictures and teaser clips about the shocking acts of revenge happening at the school.  From Momentum's campaign for Seven Psychopaths, we know that viral campaigns such as this are within their capacity, and a facebook page would be simple and cheap but also very effective at targeting the 16-24 year old audience, who are the most prolific users of facebook.

This dummy poster circulated the internet and included a link to one of the film's character's Twitter

Question 4 - Who would be the audience for your media product?

This slideshow has profiles of core and secondary audiences.

We would mainly target them through online and viral campaigning
since the 16-24 age group are surrounded by new media and have a
vast online knowledge and presence. Similar to Heathers, which
explored the clique culture of the time, we would market our film
through new media to specifically target the modern teenager.

Question 5 - How did you attract/address your audience?

We hoped, with our film to create an entertaining, comical film, which our audience could in some way relate to. I have tried to explain how we tried to achieve this.


One of our points of focus for attracting our audience was Katz and Blumler's Uses and Gratifications Theory, from this we had several aims:

• inform viewers - parents, our secondary audience, look to be informed about the culture their child is interacting with, people are interested in teen culture, as we have seen with the widespread success of films and TV programmes like Skins and Mean Girls. Teens who don't immerse themselves in party and drug culture may also seek to understand this attitude to life
• we wanted our core and secondary younger audiences to identify with the events and characters involved, either the scene is the kind of experience they are used to, or they can understand and empathise with the reactions of different characters
• entertain the audience - not only should we have fascinating and identifiable themes, we wanted to create a quality opening that would actually be enjoyable to watch. To achieve this we used several techniques:
• Todorov's narrative theory: in our opening we created the equilibrium of the party and then disrupted it with the overdose, leaving the audience wondering about the consequences and how a new equilibrium would come about or what would happen next
• Continuity techiques: this created a seamless narrative so the audience could be immersed in the action, for example, even our sudden change of mood to the overdose montage, when the lights come on is transitioned with the matches on action of pressing the light switch and the stereo's power button
• Enigma: probably the most important narrative technique, we used this in several ways through the sequence
 
• 

  

  The first CU of Hannah seen: disturbingly large pupils

   for one with the slow reveal of Hannah's face, leading up to the dialogue which reveals she is overdosing,
• also at the point when Eve is leaving the party, the audience follows her, but are restricted from seeing her face till the very end, building up suspense. NOTE on this journey we also use ellipsis to stop the viewer getting bored and speeding up the action with no detriment to the shots
• we also drew on Roland Barthes' enigma code, leaving the audience with several questions about the sequence: 'did [Eve] cause the overdose? If so, why? Did [Hannah] die? How could this be resolved?'

Sub-genre: although the black comedy aspect of our film does not come across much in the opening sequence, it inspired our arguably most memorable final smiling shot which most of the enigma came from, it introduces the audiences to the notion of comical aspects and distinguishes it from other, more serious teen dramas, making it a successful USP for the film. Since the cult classic teen-oriented black comedy was released over 20 years ago, we thought it was time the genre hybrid made a comeback!

Eve's smile

escapism - our sequence allows the audience to entirely escape their everyday lives since it starts with a POV shot, immediately allowing them to immerse themselves in the action and allowing each viewer to assume a role in the film - as if they themselves are walking through this dreamlike party

a recorded interview with a 17 year old female and male, discussing their reactions to the final opening

Question 6 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of contructing the product?

The following sections feature the technologies that we utilised and how they helped us generate Vendetta:

HARDWARE

• Canon 550D camera
  This allowed us to shoot in HD and use a manual focus to create a sharp or blurred effect easily. It also allowed us to shoot in 50fps, useful since we could later slow down several of our shots without losing quality as you might with the standard 25fps
• Canon Legria DV-30 camera
  Although we practised with this camera on our test shoot, we decided that the image quality was far superior on the 550D so despite the need to manually focus we used the 550D
• tripod
  It is important to always screw the camera on tightly so it does not slip whilst framing shots or fall off
• Arri Redhead 650 lights

  

  We always wore gloves to avoid burns

  We chose these over the 750 because they were less bright, creating a more realistic set-up. We used a fan when no dialogue was being filmed to cool down the room
• PAG light
  We used this to for the POV scene as it allowed us to highlight what Eve was looking at without losing quality of the strobe
• Strobe light
  This created the party atmosphere. We increased the flashing speed so that when shots were slowed down, the strobe still appeared to be real time which added to the POV effect

 SOFTWARE

• Adobe Premiere Pro CS5
  
  

  
  
  

  This video demonstrates the most important features we utilised in the program

  
  
• Adobe After Effects CS5
  

  
  
  

  This video shows how we used After Effects to remove grain from our shots
  
• Livetype
  We used this to create our titles. To make the background we used a preset background of water, desaturated it, reduced the brightness and increased the contrast to make the smoky effect. Then we picked a font using www.dafont.com to use for the titles. We used an effect called "ghost" to make the titles fade off, however this effect had preset motion, so we had to rewrite some html to change the direction some titles faded off to. 
  
  

  

  How we changed the direction the title ghosts off to

  
  
• Adobe Audition CS5
  We used this to record some voiceover to add to the panicked sound effects and to record voiceover for walk-throughs, audience feedback and the director's commentary.

NEW MEDIA

• Facebook
  We used facebook for several things: to coordinate work at home, making plans and organising actors. We had a special group for the project and a message forum for all the actors to ask questions and find out details. The 'like' features also allowed us to research the interests of real members of our audience.
• Youtube
  This was incredibly useful for researching clips and trailers. We found our music on youtube and comment and message features allowed us to ascertain whether the user would let us use the song. We also exhibited the opening on Youtube.

 

Question 7 - Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

The following demonstrates the relevance of our prelim to the final project:

This is an example of a match on action which we practised in our continuity sequence and took forward into our opening

 From our prelim, the most important things we discovered were:

• use easy, accessible locations, for flexibility with timing and re-shoots
• lighting is very important and makes shots much sharper - visible in the difference between shots from the prelim and final piece.
• setting up and framing shots must be done very carefully - in the prelim pictures below, there is too much space next to the girls' faces
• use actors who are confident in front of a camera to avoid giggling as we did in our prelim
• film several distances of most shots to have choice of variety when editing and to allow for continuity errors - in our prelim we differed from the storyboard in some shots because it looked much better on screen so it was good to have options. This is also useful because master shots of most shots are always helpful to create a seamless narrative when editing, if some shots don't work next to each other, you can cut to a master shot without losing story
• we planned our shoot schedule and shot list meticulously, taking a long time over it, however, this made the actual shooting much easier and we finished very quickly



These are stills exemplifying our use of the 180 degree rule and shot reverse shot (final shot not pictured) from our prelim and final piece

With this in mind we made careful decisions about every aspect of the project, most importantly:

• location: originally, we were going to use Ella's cellar for the claustraphobic feel it would provide, however, though it might have looked good, it would have been to difficult to fit all our actors in and navigate around safety with lighting and camera kit. In the end we went for Alice's, we emptied out the room so we effectively had a blank canvas to create the exact effect we wanted and since it was one of our houses we knew it would be available whenever we needed it.

• planning:
• we alotted a whole day to testing and positioning our lighting for the shoot since we wanted to get it exactly perfect
• we created a storyboard with post-its and later with pictures so that we could refer to it for framing shots
• we enlisted friends who do drama to act in the opening as we thought it would be a beneficial experience to them as well as us
• we made diagrams mapping each scene and transferred this to our location so we knew exactly how to direct actors on the day
• we sent actors costumes and directions for the shoot in advance so they had plenty of time to prepare
• we made detailed scripts, shot lists and shoot schedules for ease on the day of the shoot

• the shoot:
• we asked the actors to arrive an hour before the shoot started to allow time for lateness, makeup, food and perusal of the script, with the group arriving an hour before
• we shot several distances of several shots like that of the unconcerned smoker, and master shots from many angles - this was good because we ended up using more mastershots than we originally planned
• we shot any pieces of action all the way through from every angle even if we planned to change perspective. This was particularly useful for the 'get over here' scene as we planned to cutaway there but discovered this would not work in the edit suite

• editing and technology:
• although we planned to film most of our opening on the Canon Legria DV-30 camera, we ended up using the Canon 550D for all our shots instead as we liked the way we were able to focus and found it more effective than on the Canon Legria DV-30 that our prelim was shot on. You can tell the difference clearly in the comparative pictures above.
• we used individual sequences when we were editing without the whole group and only made changes when everyone was present so we were all happy with the opening at all times
• as in our prelim, accepting changes to the original plan, and sacrificing shots no matter how much we liked them was important to maintain a clear narrative

• evaluating the piece:
• we tried to feedback to each other all the way along, politely discussing any disagreements
• we also got audience feedback at several stages before and after the final piece was finished to make sure were on the right track with our editing, narrative and general style

• the team: as we are all friends, working in a team was very easy, we were respectful of each others opinions and managed to avoid major disagreements. From the prelim, when none of us wanted to be in front of the camera, we learnt we had to compromise, for example I agreed to be the overdosee since it made the most sense as I know how to put in contact lenses and nobody else did.

• improvements: although the prelim was very helpful, we did make some mistakes in the production process for example...
• we did not check to make sure we had a spare battery and charger for our camera and it ran out of battery before we had finished filming. Luckily, however, we managed to get all the shots we needed of actors outside the group so it was not a major problem
• we did not leave enough time on our second shoot and had to leave before we got a usable shot of Eve smiling, causing us to have to reshoot