Our film is a Mafia style film and follows the conventions set by most mafia films, after looking at the film Pulp Fiction the first convention i noticed is the way in which the mafia gang members dress. They always dress in smart suits, even when going out on a 'Hit' this is also the same in our film as in the poker scene all the poker players are smartly dressed even though Joe Messina, William King and Walt Dixon are only there to take care of Leo Ramone. The films that influenced the way our characters dressed in our film, along side 'Pulp Fiction' was 'Reservior Dogs' 'Godfather' and 'Goodfellas' as all the gang members in these films dressed in smart, high end suits, which showed the gang they were in was a very rich powerful gang, and this is what we wanted to portray in our film.
Another way in which our film is conventional is that the Don of the mafia will always send out his lower level gang members to deal with his competition, and his more close personal friend or family within the Mafia if the job is of great importance. In Pulp Fiction, 'Mr Marsellus Wallace' sends out his two best men 'Jules Winnfield' and 'Vincent Vega' to get a suitcase that belongs to him, and also to make a point by killing the men who stole it, to show that he is not the one to be messed with. Similarly in our film 'Alexandro Messina' sends out his little brother and sister, 'Joe and Luciana Messina' to deal with the important matter of taking care of 'Leo Ramone'.
However our film slightly challenges the conventional the Mafia in other films take care of their problems. In 'Pulp Fiction' the 'Jules and Vincent' take care of the problem by both of the men firing a full clip of a pistol into the men. Where as in our film 'Leo Ramone' is poisoned quickly and quietly which doesn't occur often in a Mafia style film.
Like many other Mafia films, our film 'Omerta' also has sub genres besides just being a Mafia / Gangster film, Action, Thriller and Crime, because if we were to film the entire film there would be a lot tense, action filled moments.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
In our film men are the most dominant and powerful like the majority of the mafia films. This is shown by the Mafia gangs are completely made up of men, but in our film and in 'Pulp Fiction' there is a powerful women character within the story. In 'Pulp Fiction' the women is the wife of a powerful Don 'Mr Marsellus Wallace' called 'Mia Wallace' as she has quite a bit of power thanks to her husband. As we find out in the beginning of the film, the last man who touched her got thrown out of a window. Which shows that her husband is very protective of his wife, so 'Mia Wallace' has a lot of sway over the Don as he will do anything for her, and can twist him to her way of thinking. Similar in our film 'Luciana Messina' is also a very powerful character as she is the sister of a very powerful and feared Don, and with a click of her finger could get 'Alexandro Messina' to get rid of someone bothering her. So in both films the typical stereotype is being broken as there are two powerful female characters.
However it follows the stereotype of men doing all the dirty work, like taking care of competition and making the money, and the women of the mafia just do as they are told, and use the money made by the mafia, for example in 'Pulp Fiction' 'Mia Wallace' goes out to an expensive diner and orders a '5 buck Milkshake' which was a lot of money for just a milkshake as you can gauge by the reaction of 'Vincent Vega' when she orders it. But again our film slightly breaks this stereotype with 'Luciana' as she also handles some of the dirty work, like helping out her older brother 'Joe Messina' take care of a rival Don 'Leo Ramone'.
I believe our film is more for the male population, mainly because the men appear more powerful in our film, and because of this there will be far more action scenes within the film, however with the added character of 'Luciana' I believe that this will also attract a female audience as well.
The two characters also dress quite similar as they both wear suit and tie, even when going out on a job. This shows they are both very powerful characters, and have become quite wealthy in the process.
I believe our film would be produced by a major Hollywood studio like Paramount because they have done similar films, like 'The Godfather' for example, and I think with the story line in place it would need a high budget to be able to make the film as good as it can be.
I believe there could be franchises/merchandise made out of our film because it being similar to 'The Godfather'. Mainly because 'The Godfather' has had so much merchandise made from its film for example the games it makes or the little collectable figures.
Who would be the audience for your media project?
Our film is more targeted to male population from the ages 18 and up who like their Mafia / Action / Thriller films, mainly because there will be a lot of violence and swearing within the film, which may disturbed younger viewers. Also there may be a quite a few female viewers because there is a powerful women in the film and also the love interest between Marco Ramone and Marlyin Johnson.
This is based upon our questionnaire results showing that majority of people who would see are film are over the age of 18, male and like other mafia films such as 'The Godfather' but there was also quite a few females who would also like to see the film.
We gave the film an 18 because of all the violence, swearing, criminal activities and drugs that appear in the opening and the rest of the film if we were to film it all.
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We showed a preview of the film to a few people that fit our target audience and recorded there responses on what they thought was good about the film. They said they liked the Music, props and costumes as they suited the genre, and overall said it ran smoothly and would pay to see the whole film.
How did you attract / address your audience?
The way we attracted our audience in my opinion is that we tried to keep it similar to the style of film we were aiming for, so with the costumes and the two rival family's, but we also tried to add in bits of our own like the subtle killing of 'Leo Ramone' over the over the top torturing in other Mafia style films.
In both of our opening scenes the audience is put in many different positions, and characters points of view. In the first scene we put the audience in an over the shoulder shot of everyone around the poker table to establish who is there. Then cuts to a long shot to show where each character is sat.
Further on into the scene we put the audience within 'Walt Dixons' point of view when 'Leo Ramone' drinks the poisoned drink that was served to him by 'Luciana Messina'. This is an important shot as the character the audience is asked to put their feet into actually would have become the hero at the end if we were to film the entire thing.
What have you learnt about technology from the process of constructing the product?
We had to chance to film with a Sony HDV 1000 camera which was great mainly because it is a professional camera and it was nice to use it over a little camcorder. I believe the quality we got from the camera was really good but the sound we got from it was a little too quiet, we attempted to use a zoom recorder but we didn't manage to get a good recording of the sound from that either.
Overall the filming process went really well, except for one or two bad camera framing, and there was a shot where we left the tripod in the background and didn't realise till we were editing the film, but that was easily sorted out in Final Cut Express. Another problem we over came was for the poker scene we only had a table top, so before we filmed we built up a stand made out of bricks found within our location, which was very lucky because without that table there would have been no second scene. We did not use Garage Band, but we used a program called 'Fruity Loops' to made a sound track to go over the first scene as we could only find one piece of music and we used that for the second scene.
Once all the filming was done we used Final Cut Express to edit the film all together which was another challenge in it self as we did a few takes of each shot in case things went bad, so it was hard to choose the right shot to make it flow. We didn't really use many effects, only things like fades to made the film flow nicely, and we use a freeze frame, and made the shot go gray to show you who the important characters are.
Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to you final product?
Looking back to the preliminary task i can see that what we have done now is a vast improvement to what we did back then, first of all we did a lot of planning for this film as we had written out different copies of the script, a complete shot list so we knew what we were doing and when. Also we had a lot of fun researching our film genre as we got to watch things like 'Pulp Fiction' 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'The Godfather' for inspiration. We took things from these films like the suits all the gang members wore, and things like gambling and poker. However all these films included guns, and intense torture sequence's which we decided to leave out mainly because we would not have been able to film these, and if we attempted to i believe it would have ruined the film and made it look horrible.
In our end film we used a wider variety of shots like match's on action shots, panning shot and point of view shots, whereas in the preliminary task we only used things like shot reverse shots mainly because it was just a conversation and there was not much we could do.
I felt much more comfortable with the equipment the second time around mainly because i had used it once before and was familiar with it, also before we went out to film our project i had a quick tutorial on how to use the HDV 1000 camera from my tutor, which really helped.
I believe overall our film was a success in the fact it did what we wanted it to do, and it looks really good. However on problem was that we had to scrap the third scene because the day we finally got everyone who was in the scene, and all of the group who worked on the film together it rained really heavy and the scene was an outdoor scene, and we could not film as it was too bad weather for what we had planned and also the equipment we used was very expensive.
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