As I have been doing some research on lots of different film openings, I now have an idea of the key elements that are needed in any opening of a movie. In the beginning of most films, we the audience get introduced to some or all of the main characters. This makes very clear to the audience that who and how is any character known by as the main character, one of the reason is the camera returns back the character very often. And so we tried to do the same thing in our opening of our movie. Henri, the main character wakes up early in the morning, goes outside, all of a sudden remembers his past love, in which we show as a flash back, of girl slapping him. And so he goes to the church, thinks about what he has done wrong, gets a knife out, holds it tight above his head, but we don’t actually show if he kills himself or not. Also by cinematography, we have professionally shown a range of different camera angles, such as high angle, low angle, shot reverse shot, and many more.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our genre is teen/horror and so I do not think it will be suitable for kids aged 14 and lower. Our 2 minutes opening film has sadness, emotions and feelings and so it is suitable for any one male or female aged 15 and over. The movie is based on a young couple; so obviously, the same age group is going to be the target audience for it. Also there is and sad/romantic music in one of the scenes, which also represents the particular social groups which is teen/horror. Another key element which made our media product which represented the teenage social group was the use of sound. Sound normally sets the mood of the scene, at first we had used a copyright music, which we found out that we are not allowed to use copyright music, but the background we had chosen was perfect for it, but unfortunately we had to remove the background music, and looked for another background music, after 2 weeks of searching for the right kind of music, we decided that, we are going to add a music which will represent the character, (Henri), and will show the audience what kind of person he was, and so we added some rock based music for the background sound.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Because, Aftermath, is quite similar to Skins the drama series which has got the same genre type (teen drama) and is produced by Chris Clough. This gives me an idea based upon Skins the drama series that the kind of media intuitions might distribute my media product will be Secondary schools, colleges, universities and, local offices are the media institutions where we would distribute our media product. This is because; these are the places where we are mostly likely to find them, as they are our targeted audiences. Company Pictures is the Production Company used to publish this drama series, is one of the largest independent film and drama productions companies in the UK. This Company has also published other drama series such as Wild at Heart, Life is Wild, Shameless, and according to my research on this company, their main target audience are mainly teenager and some adults. We also hope that 20th Century fox to produce the opening of my film, this is because I have also been doing some research on what kind of films do 20th century films produce, and I found out that 40% are comedy films, 40% are horror films and 20% are action films. This is another way where I can find my target audience by letting 20th Century fox produce this film.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product
Teens aged 15 and would be the best target audiences for this 2 minutes opening scene of the film Aftermath. This is because, before making the opening scene, we as a group planed that we wanted people who are mature and who can easily understand what mostly happens when he/she are in love. And so after weeks of research we decided that teenagers who are over 15 and over must be able to understand and feel what is happening through, emotions we have added using some of the key elements of the media language, such as cinematography, sound, mise-en-scene and editing. Teenagers normally like drama series like skins, this is because it shows the audience the life based upon a group of teenagers, and the way they all behave and react to things ate all true. The trueness of it drags them to keep watching from one series to another, and so far there are 4 series of skins. We are using the same concept in Aftermath of using 2 teenagers who were in deeply loved each other, but later they break up for some reason. This is a typical thing as a teenager, and so the audience as teenagers love to watch it, because it’s majorly true.
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
We attracted our media product to the audience by using the media language, such as cinematography, sound, mise-en-scene and editing. For cinematography, we used high angle shot (to show which class the character is), mid range shot (to show the action happening), close up shot (to show emotions, and face expressions on the character’s face), and many more. For sound we used, ambient sound (the sound you as an audience expect to hear), sad/romantic music (to show what he character is feeling towards another character), background rock music, (shows the type of a person the character is.) madly in love, but very much in love. For Mise-en-scene (all the things you see in the scene), we used clothes, a room, a church, a knife, which I am sure the audience must of found very scary, as they don’t actually see what happens at the end of the scene. I have also found a great video on youtube, which deeply explains the Filmmaking Techniques used.
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
I have learnt that there are lots of ways in which different media product are shown, e.g. these days you can watch a movie, where you want and when you want, where as in the olden days, they did not have this technologies. E.g. in an Iphone, there is multimedia in it. You can watch movies, make a phone call, send an e-mail, listen to music, and browse the internet and many more. Also for making the 2 minutes of the opening movie, we had learnt how to use editing software, for graphics, we had to learn how to use Photo Shop, which is known as the best graphical software to use. Using the blogs, to keep thing, using embedded videos, so we can shown then on our blogs. Using the video camera with a tripod was another process, in which we had leant about. One of thing which I found very difficult was using the video editing software. I have used professional video editing software called Sony Vegas Pro, but for this our media product, we had to use the provided video editing software which was Adobe Premiere and it was completely different to what I had being using for home use. There was only one thing which was the same, the layouts of the tools in the program. But then I had been playing around with it for couple of weeks, I now do know the basics of this program with the help of my teacher and my team, Shamedia.
7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
I feel that holding a video camera and just taking some random shots is not the way of filming, there is a purpose for each shot which represents something. Such as low angle majorly shows that a character or that object is worth less, has not got the authority, or is a lower class person. Terminology is very important in order to do media studies, without it, things would get really complicated. And so that’s what I have learnt in the preliminary task. Form there it was a huge step for me to learn how to edit any footage properly, as before I didn’t use any effects, captions, transitions for my home made videos, but now as I have learnt that these key elements are very important, I will be using them next time even ever I will be making home made videos. Another major thing I have improved on is the way I Photoshop things. Having some experience of using Photoshop is a very good thing as it helped us with our Production logo, and Movie title logo. I didn’t not take very long to think about a professional looking Production logo, as it took me around 2 weeks to complete the Production logo, where as making the Movie title logo was a nightmare and took us several months to finalize the Movie title logo. This is because we made lots of changes to it. As you see the pictures below (labelled by order). (Picture number 1) was our very first creation; it has lots of blood splattered with a plain background. Instead of the letter “T” (aftermaTh) I planned to use a knife, this is because in our opening scene we do use a sharp slaughtering knife. First I had to search on Google for the perfect knife which took me around half an hour. And so I found this, (Picture 2) a great knife. Then I had to decide how I am going to use it. So then I decided to crop out the knife then rotate it 25 degrees. And then I resized it so it matches with other letters of Aftermath. Unfortunately my other two Shamedia group members Henri and Sultan thought that the blood spatter was a bit too much, so I removed it, but then it looked to basic. And so we decide to change it completely. The process of thinking started again, where I and sultan thought of another idea of having something really touchy and cheesy. It was an idea which we think would make the audience melt, and idea which would draw the attention of the audience toward it. And ideas of making the audience feel for this movie. It was a bright red rose flower, (Picture 3). As you can see now we have removed all the blood splatter and the font of the title name. Again I searched for a bright red flower, but I could not find any so I went and took a picture from a pot of rose flowers. And photoshoped it, now it had this feeling of love, feeling of emotions and much more to it. Then I was playing around with different fonts, and so Henri thought this font wound suit it, so I asked my teacher if she thought it was good or not. When she saw it, I could easily tell that she loved so and so, I planned to use mixed colours to give it a professional look. Sadly we had another problem, the critics though the style of the movie logo did not suit the opening movie scene, so now we had to change it again. Because the critics wanted that went with the opening scene, I had came up with another great idea of taking a picture of the location where we shot Henri confesses in church in depression, and using it as a creepy background. So I went and took a picture of the church, and made it into black and white. When my teacher saw it, she got really excited and gave me a bit of advice of using the feathering tool, as it makes it look like a ghost effect and blends the blackness to the dark background colour. I decided to keep the same font, and I really wanted to give it a bit of blood effect, so again I used on of the brush tools, set its diameter, choose the right blood colour for it, and splattered underneath the movie title. Now I had good feedback coming from everyone, all the teachers, other group members and especially the target audiences.
8) How did the feedback you received help you to make a better film?
We posted 2 x 2 minutes of our opening scene. This is because in our first post of our 2 minutes opening scene we received some feedback which we as a group though were right and need some changing, so we decided to make some changes to our 2 minutes opening scene. Here are the feedbacks below for our first post of the 2 minutes opening scene.
Anonymous said...
Oh its amazing!!! I live it i want another video! good filming
Anonymous said...
It's amazing really good! I like the heartbeat effect!
Toprak Tosun
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
Mrs Downes said:
Graphics- GREAT
Opening- GREAT
Too much black and white, try to add some saturated colour instead.
Need to be exactly 2 minutes
Jenny said:
needs to have less walking and more colours. Otherwise it’s very good.
I loved the aftermath with the bright red flower.
Vidur said:
Increase the music slowly at the beginning of the scene. Other than that GREAT!
Pietro said:
like the aftermath, it looks good the caption should of been in a different style.
Lisa said:
it’s too long and feels a bit boring because it’s just a guy getting up and walking to some place, however the bit where the girl slaps the guy is amazing.
Kim said:
needs more info about the girl (Lisa), the rest is all good.
Gabi said: I like the bit when Henri raises the knife above his head. As it create real tension.
So now we have decided to add 20th Century fox animation to make it look more professional, and we changed our main background music because the music we choose before was copyrighted so we had to look for a copyright free music which would suit the genre of this opening scene and finally we changed the title logo for the film “Aftermath” now it looks more creepy and attractive.
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