Our task was to make a 2 minute opening scene, at first we had a bunch of random ideas that we jotted down on paper. At the end we came up with a stereotypical teenage love story. Aftermath is a dark teen drama, which are about two teenagers who are madly in love. The two lovers have a strong relationship between them, but for Henri that was not enough. While Henri and Lisa have been seeing each other Lisa finds out that his beloved boyfriend has been cheating on her; so Lisa decides to pay a visit to Henri and as seen in the opening scene Lisa hits Henri with a cold hearted slap. Now that Henri has experienced this unpleasant encounter with his dear lover, he goes through a time of depression and is stuck in a deep hole.
In many ways our product is very similar to Twilight, for example our storyline varies quite a lot from Twilight for instance the love story and conflict between the two genders are still there, but the vampire twist is removed, so if you think about it Twilight is just another stereotypical love story with vampires and wolves. In Twilight costume was a big factor throughout the film, my partners and I analyzed teen drama movies such as Twilight, 17 Again, Sex Drive and Superbad. The movies that I have listed above have many characteristics that are similar such as costume; the majority of these films have a specific costume to represent the characters so we did the same with our actor and actress.
Characters:
Henri Yueksel as himself
Lisa Mitchell as herself
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Aftermath is a dark teen drama which is about a young teenage girl and teenage boy. In Aftermath the social group that we represent are teenagers and their love problems in life. We represent the teenagers in our movie through Mise-En-Scene, Sound, Cinematography and Editing. If you look at Lisa closely she is wearing school uniform so this implies that she is a student and also a teenager. The teenage girl from Twilight (Bella) is similar to Lisa; Lisa. In Twilight Bella’s school does not have a school uniform but the fact that she goes to high school implies that she is a teenager.
Lisa and Henri
Bella and Edward
Sound was a big factor in our media production, when we watched the opening scene of Twilight there was music in the background; this was to set the mood for the audience for the next scene. When we started to put all the footage together we decided we wanted something slow, we tough about a song by Kings Of Leon called Closer, but we found out that we were not allowed to use copyright music so therefore we had to create a composition or download a non copyright music. We noticed that movies like Harry Potter and Twilight had their own original soundtracks and compositions, at the beginning we thought about doing this, but unfortunately we did not have enough time to do so.
Kings Of Leon Only By the Night (Closer song that we used)
When we were editing our movie for the scene were Henri gets slapped we increased the volume of the slap to make it convincing so that the viewers had a rough idea of what was happening between Lisa and Henri.
Increasing Slap Volume; also shows coldhartness of Lisa
The editing in our movie explains the opening scene and represents Henri and Lisa in many different ways for example, for example Lisa is portrayed as cold hearted in the 2 – minute sequences unlike Henri who is hopeless. We don’t really show a lot of scenes with Henri and Lisa; this is so that we get our audience to think about what has happened between Henri and Lisa in the past, it is a bit like the Twilight saga where the opening scenes are the ending ones and that is what we aimed to achieve.
Adobe Premier Element 2.0 (Editing Software that we used)
The Cinematography in our movie shows and expresses the depression that Henri is going through, for example when Henri is in the small church and the camera is at a point of view and you can see the reflection of Henri’s face form the knife that he is holding. Mise-En-Scene is also mixed with Cinematography in this scene because of the darkness in the room and the unique camera angles.
Point Of View Shot
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
When we researched films that have a similar gender to ours we only really found one film that had the closest similarity; this film was Twilight. Twilight was distributed by Summit Entertainment so we presumed that if we gave our synopsis for our story to Summit Entertainment them it might be possible. My group had researched Media Institutions such as New Line Cinema and the films that they have distributed where varied, for example horror films such as Friday The 13th was distributed by them. In Friday The 13th the only real similarity that our product has is love relationship with the teenagers. 17 Again was also distributed by New Line Cinema. 17 Again is a teenage comedy drama so it is different from other films. At the end we decided to think about what we though would be a good Media Institution to distribute our product, so we thought of 20th Century Fox. The reason we chose 20th Century Fox is because it is one of the most well know distribution companies in the world and it also has relations to companies such as Fox Atomic, Fox Interactive, 20th Century Fox Television, 20th Century Fox Animations and so on.
We thought that if we ask 20th Century Fox to distribute our product then it would advertise our work in the television programmes that I have listed above. This would not only increase the popularity of our product but also give our product a chance because there are a lot of competitors around the world.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
Aftermath is a dark teen dram; Twilight is also a dark teen drama and it mostly attracts teenagers and women; because our product is similar to Twilight we believe that our product will attract many young teenagers and also women. Twilight does not only attract women but also men, the main reason for that is that Twilight has an attractive teenage actress and I think that because we have two attractive actors and actress we should be able to achieve the same goal as Twilight.
Films like Harry Potter and Twilight have SFX such as flying, jumping and fighting large monsters, these types of things attract young people because it has a lot of action and drama, unfortunately our opening scene does not have these SFX so it cuts down the number of audience that watch our movie however I am sure that if we had enough money and could continue the story we would use some of these things. A lot of people around the world are attracted to stereotypical storylines that are based on teenagers, this is probably because the older generation would like to know what it is like to be a teenager in this generation or maybe to relive and also remember what it felt like when they were.
Teenagers
Cue to see Twilight
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
Aftermath is a dark teen drama; at the beginning our genre was horror, but however we found this difficult to do, so we changed our genre to a dark teen drama, which is most similar to Twilight (New Moon). Because Aftermath and Twilight (New Moon) have a same type of genre (dark teen drama) we have minor similarities, for example the audience that we are trying to attract and address are teenagers and also there are two couple madly in love, we also attracted our audiences by making our actor and actress wear brand name clothes such as Abrecrombien & Fitch or Polo (Laugh Lauren).
As you can see the actors is wearing brand named clothes
In most of our scenes we don’t have the two characters talk because then it would have given the storyline away, and our task as a group was to get the audience to be drawn in and wonder what’s going to happen. Our theme colour throughout the scenes are black and white, this is so that the mood of throughout the scenes merge with the genre. Because our film is based on teenagers we wanted to attract a wide range of teenagers (ages from 12 to 18), so we decided to not put any sexual scenes or swearing, we did this so that we could attract as many different audiences as possible. To achieve this we had to go to the bbfc (British Board Of Film Classification) website to find out what kind of factors were needed (visa versa) to conform to our genre (dark teen drama).
Information About BBFC
For furthermore information visit http://www.bbfc.co.uk/
BBFC (British Board Of Film Classification)
Our Goal
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
What I have learned about technologies from making our product is that good research is important, for example to finding out what kind of media institution such as 20th Century Fox, Summit Entertainment, Spyglass Productions would distribute our product around the world. To make our media product as realistic as possible my group analyzed and researched what kind media institution distributes our types of films; for example Twilight was distributed by Summit Entertainment so we though of doing the same.
My greatest difficulty using technology for our media product was using the software called Photoshop. I have used Photoshop in past years, but only the old version so I had some difficulty but not huge ones. To make our Title for our film as stylish and as realistic as possible we researched different movie titles such as Harry Potter, Twilight Saga, More Than A Game and so on.
Film Titles (Front Cover)
Twilight "New Moon" (Dark Teen Drama)
Trailer
Film Title
Harry Potter (Teen Fantasy Drama)
Trailer
Film Title
More Than A Game (Documentary)
Trailer
Film Title
7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
Throughout our media production what I have learned to use very well is Photoshop. At the beginning of our media product I was new to Photoshop, but with luck my group had two experienced people that used Photoshop and they were Ahmed and Henri. My friend Ahmed was the person who made the designs up for our title and his first logo was the picture that you see below.
THIS IS OUR FIRST TITLE THAT WE CREATED AND USED, BUT AS A GROUP, AND WITH MRS. DOWNSE’S HELP WE DECIDED THAT THE TITLE DID NOT MATCH OUR FILM.Because our first Title did not work we changed it, but this time we all had a go at using Photoshop and our second Title that we created looked like this.
THIS WAS OUR SECOND TITLE THAT WE CAME UP WITH; AS YOU CAN SEE WE CHANGED EVERYTHING SUCH AS THE KNIFE AND ASLO THE DESIGHN OF THE TEXT. WE THOUGH THAT THIS WOULD BE OUR FINAL LOGO, BUT IT DID NOT PLEASE OUR VIEWERS ENOUGH IN OUR CLASSROOM, INCLUDING TEACHERS LIKE MISS BLACK; SO WE THEN DECIDED TO RE-DU THE LOGO. WE DECIDED THAT THE ROSE HAS NOTHING TO DO IN OUR MOVIES SO THEN WE DELETED IT AND DID NOT INCLUDE IT IN OUR THIRD AND LAST TITLE FOR OUR MOVIE.When we were making our Title for the third time we didn’t want any mistakes, so we went back to our media project and researched what we could include in our Title instead of a rose. At the end we decided to include the Michal Kirk (the small church) and leave the design of the text as it is. As I was the most experienced with the editing program (Adobe), my group changed what they did so Henri went off to fish our opening scene and Ahmed and I started on our new Title.
STEP 1
STEP 2
What myself and Ahmed have done here is change the colour of the picture
to black and white. The reason we decided to do this is so that our media product
had some kind of connection with our Title.
STEP 3
In the pictures above myself and Ahmed have made the edges ghost like. This is
To give our title a mysterious look which I believe that we achieved.
THE FINISHED TITLE
8. How did the feedback you received help you to make a better film opening?
Our first project was about 2 minutes and 30 seconds long, but before we wanted to post our product we decided to get feedback for our very first project. Meny said that it was too long and the walking scenes were boring so we decided to cut the long walking scenes and speed up the walk. This helped us to cut the time up to 2 minutes and 12 secnds so we improved in a small section. After we posted the produbt into our blog we got 6 comments which said:
Anonymous said...
Oh its amazing!!! I live it i want another video! good filming
1 February 2010 11:22
Anonymous said...
It's amazing really good! I like the heartbeat effect!
Toprak Tosun
1 February 2010 11:28
The girls; said...
Really good work guys. The music is really effective and the shots are all continuous.
I thought the whole clip had a lot of walking in it which can make it seem a little boring but for a movie opening the editing is very good and precise and it was interesting to watch.
Well done guys :)
Lisa Mitchell
2 February 2010 01:01
Comment deleted
This post has been removed by the author.
2 February 2010 01:17
The girls; said...
I really like the video! I think it is the best film production in our class. I don't have to give any bad feedback. Good work!
Posted by Annabell
2 February 2010 01:18
sharambourne said...
freaking awesome, loved it man really good shots and camera work and the heartbeat at the end was really good as it added effect but my favourite part was part of lisa slapping henry in the face I thought it was quite funny.
well done guys
Charlie Lambourne
2 February 2010 01:48
Our teachers (Mrs. Black and Mrs. Downes) decided to give us constructive critisism, they said:
Mrs. Downes: Originally I felt that the storyline was weak; I thought it was very well filmed but that Lisa did not appear enough and I did not understand the storyline. The graphics were good and the shots were great - like the reflection in the knife shot.So I told the group what I thought and they made some fundamental changes.
Mrs. Black: I thought that the graphics did not have enything to do with the film and also the title does not match the story; however the way the boys filmed and edited their product was very well done. The music that they put on was very good however it was copyrighted by Kings Of Leon therfore they were not allowed to have that in their product, but I am sure that they will improve on the critisim that I have given theme.
When we reproduced our second product we knew there was much to imrpovce on and the feedback helped us especially Mrs. Downses and Mrs. Blacks. We knew the walking scene was still to long so we cut the unesisary scenes and choosed the most importand angles for the walk and also added music to make it as interesting as possible.
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