Our media product is true to its genre traits. We tried to keep the characters similar to those of other films such as The Godfather and Scarface. When we decided to do a mafia gangster style film we felt that an original Italian-American would be best because they have easily recognisable traits, interesting plots and create a sense of escapism within its audience as they are transported back in time. Traits such as thick Italian accents, violent fight scenes, drinking and gambling can all be found in “Omerta”. The central character of Alessandro Messina can be compared to the central character of Vito Corleone in The Godfather of which I analysed very deeply .
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Its common knowledge that action and violence films mainly appeal to male audiences, and a film such as “Omerta” will definitely attract a mainly male audience as the film is mostly male dominated. But in contrast to previous Italian-American gangster films, a woman takes on a major role. Lucianna Messina is more involved in the mafia lifestyle than any woman in films like The Godfather, but is the stereotypical Female Fatale character, sweet and innocent on first impressions but deadly to deal with! Hopefully the addition of Lucianna will draw in some female viewers, but may also bring in some younger male viewers too.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
This film would be p
roduced by a major Hollywood studio because it has the potential to be a blockbuster. The mafia genre has not been revived for some time now and as proved with Disney’s Pirates Of The Caribbean, revival of a long dead genre can prove financially beneficial! The film needs a large budget to include some of the stunts and scenes that are in it and could benefit from big name actors or directors. Paramount, now owned by Sony distributed The Godfather Trillogy, and I think that they would be perfect to produce and distribute out film. I don’t think “Omerta” has the potential for franchises or merchandising that some films gain. General things like posters are fine, but things like action figures are unsuitable for the film.Who would be the audience of your media product?
As found from our audience research, it was mostly males around our age (17-19) that have seen old-style mafia films and thoroughly enjoyed them, with the odd occasion of females watching them and commenting there were no characters they could relate to. This partly influenced our decision to give Lucianna Messina a more involved role. Other targets of our audience were older men around 40-70 who were around to see the release of films like The Godfather I and II, Scarface, Pulp fiction and Reservoir Dogs.
The classification for the whole of the film would probbably be either a 15 or 18, we plan to build in alot of violence into the storyline and this would involve bad langauge and of course abit of blood!
http://www.bbfc.co.uk/recent/films
How did you attract/address you audience?
Again, as we found from the audience research our main target audience is males aged 15- 30, but the film will attract and older audience also. Females can also be targeted through the characters of both Lucianna Messina, as she can be relatable, and the younger male such as Marco Ramone, or even Alessandro Messina characters may also attract a female audience as they may be labelled as “Eye candy”. The violence in the story will attract the male audience, but as we are aiming for the film to be a Certificate 15, it cannot be too bloody or graphic.
The story is mainly told from the point of view of Marco Ramone, but the opening of the film is told from the point of view of Joe Messina. This develops a bond between the character and the audience. But seeing the impact of certain events between both parties in the story gives the audience a feel of being caught up in the middle of the events and the feud. The audience will know what will happen to the characters before they do, which will create some tension as they will empathise with them.
What have you learnt about technology from the process of constructing the product?
This is the first time I have used any camera equipment of this standard, the quality of the picture was brilliant and definitely better than any standard video camera. Really the size of the camera was unsuitable for the size of the room in which we filmed the poker scene, we could not really get the camera into the confined spaces and this spoiled our plans for the shots, so we had to do the best we could.
The filming process for our group was quite easy, we had a detailed plan of the shots, script and characters, we had sorted the setting out and everything was ready to go. Filing went very smoothly and there were no real issues in editing. When it came to filming the 3rd scene, all the elements were against us. The weather was bad and the camera could not handle the rain. Our actors had to be somewhere else and the sound equipment would not work. But, in editing we had discussed that the clip would not fit in the film anyway. So it was not a huge loss that we could not film anyway. So the 3rd scene was scrapped, and the two scenes rearranged so they followed on.
When editing the film together we used Final Cut Express, a software package I am not all too familiar with. Andrew was great at using this package and knew lots of shortcuts and quicker techniques to produce the end result. We loved the way we could use a freeze frame to bring up character names and actor names and change the stills to black and white. We did use some colour correction to make the film look older, which gave a better effect.
Andrew also created some of the soundtrack to the film. The first part was made using Fruity Loops, the second part used from some open source music, we looped a small part of the track that we liked the best for the second scene on the film.
Looking back to your preliminary task what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
Looking back our preliminary task and comparing it to our final task I think we have all developed our planning skills a lot further. For our preliminary task we didn’t plan at all and just made something up on the spot where as the final task had to be thought through in so much detail and the script wrote, and then re-wrote again to suit the actors more or the shots. We all enjoyed doing this project and it was great to get some of our other friends involved in the whole thing. We all decided that we needed to do something different rather than a horror/thriller movie and we thought a old mafia film would be a great challenge, and it really was!
I think looking back the shot planning was a little basic, we could have done a little better by having a practise with the camera first and walking through the scenes. But every one of us would now be able to pick up the Sony HDV 1000 camera and be confident how to set it up and in how to work it. Recording separate sound was also a challenge too; Josh and I had some knowledge on how to work these types of recorders, but had never used them for this purpose. So in this respect is was pretty helpful that we had some idea how to work them.
Obviously when we had finished our film, we were all very proud of the work we had created, alot of our friends outside of our media group wanted to see it too so we posted it to Facebook and Youtube for everyone to see. Most people on our Facebook accounts would be the correct target audience and we thought this a good way to see if they were really interested we also filmed some audience feedback, here are some of the comments;
Laura Bentley: Wow. Thats Brill!!!
Jack Wordsworth: Good Characters. You All Seem Extremely Shady!
Lisa Copley: Its Fantastic. Joe Is Very Scary!
Andrew Kerr: "I Like The Production Logo, It Was Really Good And I Like The Dog. The Costumes Fit The Genre Really Well Too."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4y2iDInTyA Audience Feedback By James, Daniel and Andrew
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPDyPV0exrM Audience Feedback By Jonathan
I think that our final product fulfils the task brilliantly; it is suited to its audience and includes all the conventions of a normal Mafia film, but ads in some unique features and characteristics. The story is thrilling and enticing and leaves the story open ended for the audience to be interested and want to watch the rest of the film.
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