1. In what way does your media product use, develop or change forms and conventions of media products?
We chose the genre of our film to be a gangster/mafia film, I analysed the opening to another well-known mafia film called 'GoodFellas', it was great to watch because I realised a lot of our film will be similar to it, including costumes, in our poker scene we have well dressed women, well suited men. Another convention would be the accent, we have incorporated an italian-american accent into our film, Jordan Sims (Alessandro) practiced this a lot to make the film more recognizable, without it, it wouldn't be a good mafia film.
We have also developed forms and conventions in our media product, we have done this by including a woman who is actually important and has a role in the first few minutes of the film, Kirsten Barman (Luciana) plays Joe and Alessandro’s sister, usually in mafia films the woman plays a house wife or a mother who does what was expected in the days of the mafia, we have tipped this convention on its head by giving Kirsten an important role, she is after all the one who poisons Joshua Nutt (Leo).
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our media product represents one main particular social group, males. The mafia film genre has always attracted a large male audience and does represent a vast amount of male people in the days when these films were made, the typical male would be out working and “bringing the bread home” whilst the woman sits at home cleaning and doing other housework and looking after the children. In our film the
male is out “winning the bread” but in a different way, in the mafia way, The mafia film genre has always attracted a large male audience and does represent a vast amount of male people in the days when these films were made, the typical male would be out working and “bringing the bread home” whilst the woman sits at home cleaning and doing other housework and looking after the children. In our film the male is out “winning the bread” but in a different way, in the mafia way, this links into the target audience because most of the target audience is male, which some will relate quite well to the part about men going to work.
3. What kind of media Institution might distribute your media product and why?
If our 2 minute opening was to become a full film, I’d expect the film to be distributed as a TV movie, I believe there are too many mafia genre classics (such as the Godfather, GoodFellas) to even compete with even with today’s technology, and in my opinion our main story line is typical of all mafia films, someone dies and someone avenges their death, still it has some of its differences and hence why people would watch it especially people who did like the classics and fancied another for their collection, but still it is very similar to classic mafia films, I believe it would revive the genre as not many mafia films have been released recently.
I also believe it has opportunities for merchandising definitely, with lots of thing in the film being easily replicable and could definitely be sold as a collectable if the film got a big enough audience, such as the cane that Joe Copley used in Scene 2, this would be of definite interest for people who love the genre, also the obvious merchandise would be posters and soundtracks, this would be for an interested audience but not necessarily for the fanatic.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
Audience wise I believe the main audience for our film would be men aged from around 40 – 50, I say this because they would have been young when the Godfather was released, so they will be very familiar with the genre, also it’s a manly genre, lots of violence, guns and crime in general is a typical man film.
I believe another audience we will have, all be it not as big as the one above, is women who want to watch the film, not for the story line but to see a leading role go to a women and also to see the eye candy of young men in suits.
I think the classification I would give to the OPENING of our film would be a 12A, no strong language is used and the worst thing in it is probably the gambling, where as if I were to give a classification to the whole film it would definitely be an 18, it would contain strong violence and language which would not be suitable for viewers of a younger age.
http://www.bbfc.co.uk/recent/films
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
I think when we created the film, we wanted the audience to be an audience, an on-looker to the entire film, this is why in both scenes the camera is
set up as a third person, apart from in the poker scene where we establish the characters, the audience (as an on-looker) will be witnessing everything, which will create suspense because they feel like they are part of the film, the impact from this would give the au
dience (hopefully) the feeling that they had just witnessed a full on mafia crime film, without any of the real life drawbacks, it would probably terrify people of a younger age and depending on the person, females as well.
Some parts of the film would definitely appeal to our main audience of males from 40-50, the gambling scene would be a good thrill for them and they would probably enjoy it before getting down to the nitty-gritty parts where people get hurt and crimes are committed.
When we finished our film we showed a preview to our target audience, to see if we had chosen the correct people, we put it up on Facebook and YouTube to broaden how many people watch it and give feedback.
Jack Wordsworth: "Good characters there. You all seem extremely shady lol."
Ian Greasby: "brill very good quality film"
Daniel Stammers: "Overall really good, it fit the genre really well."
Andrew Kerr: "I like the Production Logo, it was really good and I like the dog... The costumes fit the genre really well with the white shirt and black tie combination."
6. What have you learnt about technology from the process of constructing the product?
We learnt how to use the Sony HDV 1000 camera, which was great because it would be the same equipment they use for real TV shows in the media industry, which gave us experience for if we want to enter that form of work, a weakness to this equipment was definitely the lack of good quality sounds, we tried to use a boom-recorder but the directional microphone just didn’t want to work so we had to stick to the HDV 1000’s sound, which picked up the littlest of things, and didn’t really pick It up at a loud volume, such as in the poker scene where Joe is speaking, the sound is quite quiet if you don’t listen to it in a quiet room.
As for the filming process I think it went pretty well, it only took 2 days to do all of the filming required, minus the time cleaning up the set, and we only had a few little snags on the way, some of our framing was out of place but that was easily cleaned up using Final Cut Express which we used to crop our shots, not over doing it so the quality of video still remained crisp, another problem was when we left a tripod in shot but that again was easily rectified.
Software side we used Final Cut Express to edit the film together, which was quite easy once you got used to it, especially if you have had experience in editing film before, it allowed us to crop shots to fit the right framing, do nice freeze-frames that let us tell the audience who played who, I also used some software at home such as After-
Effects from Adobe and Fruityloops Studio, After-Effects I had used before so I was able to create a decent title scene for our film, and Fruityloops was a new piece of kit to me, but in the end I got an alright soundtrack for our first scene, some challenge I faced for this was finding some good copy-right free samples to use in the track.
7. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full project?
I think when we got told the task, we knew straight away we were going to do something different, not a thriller/horror or even try a comedy, mafia was it, the planning stage wasn’t the best in my opinion we could have planned more about the camera angles and where it would sit in each scene, but that wasn’t a major flaw.
Researching the mafia genre was great, allowing us to view classics such as the Godfather and Pulp Fiction, and we knew it was a good genre to do, especially with costume designing and planning out the way the film would be edited and put together really excited us, we couldn’t wait to get filming, I think our planning was more than sufficient for our film and I believe it was the concrete base to our final outcome (which I think is terrific), and yes I believe our use of specific shot type have improved, we thought about them a lot during filming and tried to perfect the technique.
I was quite confident at the beginning, especially for editing, I was a little wary of the camera at first but it soon grew on me, and I believe our final product is definitely fulfilling the task, it leave a very open-ended story to unfold for the audience.
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