Evalutaion(First Draft)

Question 1:

Our film is pretty much a usual teenage drama. We tried to achieve an Adulthood type of film. To achieve this effect we used teenage cast, which represent an everyday youth. We set the film up in a familiar to everyone settings, which are typical to this type of genre, because of this our audience can familiarize themselves with the film. There aren't any significant objects, the reason for this is that we wanted to make the film as realistic as possible and fairly simple. Straight away we wanted to use a snare and other narrative codes, so that the audience gets into a film more. Our main two characters are typical teenagers you can meet everyday and familiarise yourself with them. Other films of similar genre are casting young actors to attract bigger audiences to watch their film. We decided to shoot our film around the skate park area in Windsor, we chose this location because it had the perfect surroundings for all the shots. The paths and benches around the park area were ideal. Twisted path way worked perfectly for our chase shots, because they are surrounded by bushes and that creates that feeling of suspense, not knowing who’s going to appear from behind the bush first: The victim or the attacker? As I mentioned before we tried to achieve some narratives codes in our film, whether we achieved them or not we will find out soon enough. In the opening sequence of our film the viewer isn’t who is she/he looking at, so that’s where we tried to create a snare. Because our final piece can only be 2min to 2min 30sec long we couldn’t really achieve all hermeneutic codes, if we could make a longer film we surely would a variety of different codes. When it comes to sound we used an upbeat, soundtrack which we made ourselves, we tried to fit the soundtrack to the movie as good as we possibly could, because we couldn’t just snap any music into our chase scene for instance.

Question 2:

In our film we tried to represent teenagers in a stereotypical and negative way. They way we did it surely appeals to young people this film is aimed at. After watching our film I’m sure at least 2 out of 10 youths can say: “I’ve seen it happen” or “This has happened to my mate” etc. The group we tried to represent young males aged 16 upwards, we showed a typical hoodie picking on a smaller and vulnerable boy. Our main characters is shown chasing and mugging the younger and smaller male, we didn’t use any dialogue in our film because we thought that the images would speak better for themselves, throughout our film one of the youths is represented in a negative way, and the second one the audience was suppose to feel sorry for. Because the victim is smaller and younger than the attacker he gets “bullied” by him. The way we achieved a stereotypical representation is we showed a youth wearing a hoodie, so that everyone presumes he’s a knife carrying killer. We used a cast of Polish teenagers, this is another stereotypical representation and especially because the youths are Polish everyone straight away presumes they are nothing but trouble. Our film ends on our victim getting beaten up and mugged, because this is the way it usually ends.

Question 3:

To distribute our film we will probably try a company such as Cipher Films or other small production company. The reason for this is that our film is a small budget film similar to other film of this genre, which are aimed at much smaller and specific audience. When it comes to advertising of our film the campaign wouldn't be massive, we would probably have few posters around the areas where youths hang out. And similar to Adulthood advertise on social websites. The reason we would choose Cipher is that they are the company behind Adulthood and Kidulthood, so they can help us reach our target audience and they already have the market to distribute films such us ours. We don’t think any of the major production companies will take our production on, because our film is aimed at a niche target audience. So this is way we would look for support in smaller and independent production companies, which specialise in productions such as ours.

Question 4:

From the research we conducted we found out that our main target audience will be young heterosexual males aged 16-22. We target our film mainly at mainstreamers and aspirers, our target audience will be people from a middle and working class backgrounds, people who can relate to the situation we portraying

Question 5:

Pre-Production:Casting young and convincing actors/actresses, similar to the people we are trying target. Because of that our audience can familiarise themselves with the group of people in the filmProduction:During the production stage we used variety of different camera shots and techniques to keep the viewer stimulated and interested, we didn’t use any unconventional shots because our deadline was approaching quicker than we expected, we could have done it but at the last minute we decided to divert from our original idea which was a great idea, because our initial idea didn’t go exactly how we wanted it to go.

Post-Production:

At the post production stage we had to be careful, not to ruin the film with sloppy soundtrack or editing. So, to maintain our audience we decided to make a soundtrack which would reach our audience in a best possible way, we wanted the audience to somehow relate to the soundtrack and to like it at the same time. We decided to create the soundtrack that will best represent the climate of our film, we created an up beat and at times dramatic soundtrack. At the beginning of our project we decided to make a film in a horror genre, but during our half term we completely changed the concept of our film. How we came to this decision we don’t know, we just came to it out of nowhere, we decided that our first idea wasn’t exactly going how we planned.

As I mentioned before our film is about a young male getting attacked, it ends inconclusively, the reason for this is that we wanted our audience to ask the question: What’s going to happen to the guy that attacked him? Is he going to get arrested?

Question 6:

There was a variety of technologies we used. To film the sequence we used a HDD Sony camcorder. Which was a best alternative for our because it wasn’t as time consuming as a tape camcorder, on a HDD camcorder all we had to do is to convert the clips to MOV files which didn’t take long, but on the tape camcorder we would have to capture the clips we wanted which takes longer and can easily go wrong. After filming we used Final Cut pro to edit the film. At the first it was quite hard to get used to the new software, which no one in my group used before, but obviously before doing any serious editing we had instructions from our teacher on how to use the software properly. Overall the software performed quite good, after a while it was quite easy to edit the film, software looked scary to use, but it turned to be pretty simple at the same time. The hardware we used to edit the whole thing was a MacBook Pro, to create our soundtrack we used GarageBand, this peace of software includes loads of music loops and samples which make it really easy to create a nice piece of music. The only drawback to this is that other groups that used the same software could have created a similar piece of music to ours. .We used the Internet to perform our research and look for props in case we needed any.

Question 7:

Since our preliminary task we have improved our filming techniques, we now remember to remeber for instance a 180-degree rule that we forgot about during the preliminary task. Production stages, and we since then learnt to plan everything very carefully during pre-production we planned choosing our location more carefully, this time we made sure that this location is perfect and accessible. We didn’t plan our shots carefully enough during the preliminary task, this time we planned the shots and executed them exactly the way we intended to. We chose actors and such much more carefully. Our storyboards were much more detailed than they were during the preliminary task, which helped us a lot. During the pre-production we learnt that we had to choose the location, which has appropriate lighting to our shot, it had to be big enough to execute all the shots with precision. Also with choice of location we had to find the location appropriate to the story which we didn’t do during our preliminary task. Our shots were much more professional and executed the way they were suppose to be executed, this time for most of our shots we used a tripod instead of handheld shots. During our main film we tried to get everything done perfectly not just to look good, but to be perfect. At times we worked over and over on one shot just because it either didn’t look good enough or didn’t work with the rest of the film. Overall the biggest improvement was camera techniques and following the rules like continuity and 180 degree rule. Casting was also much more selective, we wanted to use actors and actresses appropriate to the story etc, luckily all of my friends offered to help straight away. At the post production stage we also took much more time on editing, we were very, very detailed about our editing. We edited the film with precision and professionalism to get the best results, at times we either had to cut some of the clips, slow it down, add credits to some of the sequences, we had to experiment with various techniques to make the film look and feel as professional as possible, we also remembered our previous unit so we used sound to maintain temporal continuity etc. In order to create a story we had to join all the clips in a sequence, which we tried our best with that.