Our AS Media product is the film opening of a movie from the action/crime genre. Every genre has typical ingredients. In most films, there is a stereotype of a character or a group of characters, what I will talk about in the second question. But we can find in all the parts of filmmaking things which are typical of a genre. The parts of film making are: Cinematography, editing (SFX), mise-en-scene and sound. When we started our research, we were not sure which genre we want to enter. Therefore we looked on lots of different genres and tried to identify the ingredients. We then looked at which of them we can use as well, as our possibilities as AS Media students are limited. During our research we decided to produce a movie in the action and crime genre. This might sound strange, because we can not do any special effects or anything as students in a boarding school. But during our research we discovered some interesting facts about the openings of action and crime movies which gave us the confidence to produce our coursework in these genres as well.
As I said before, every genre has it’s own ingredients; and so does the action and crime genre. But the opening sequence actually can be different to the rest of the movie, it is some sort of introduction. Therefore I think the ingredients for the action and crime genre can be completely different to the ingredients of the opening.For example, Ocean’s 11 is an action and crime movie, without any doubt. But if people have a closer look to the opening sequence, they realize, that there is no action at all in that particular sequence. It is the exact opposite. The first seconds, there is just this one shot of a nearly empty room. The viewer can see a small window and an empty chair. After a long time of silence a man sits down, but the camera does not move at all, it stays in the same position.
The man, who is Ocean (G. Clooney) starts a conversation with a woman. We would expect that the conversation is brought the to the viewer by shot/reaction/shot, but actually it is not. The cinematography does not change, it stays on this one shot. The editing is very slow, although we would not expect this to be the case in an action movie. But this is literally the “calm before the storm”. It gets faster and more interesting during the movie, but the opening sequence is very simple.
We did this in our movie as well. Bewteen the start of the movie (after the titles) at 11 seconds to the finish of the second shot at 28 seconds is a lot of time. Two shots in 17 seconds, that is very slow. But it is the "calm before the storm", that is what we wanted to achieve. The two shots are shown below.
The "calm before the storm" gave us the confidence to enter that genre without having any fast moves or special effects. We used the form of the opening of Ocean’s, but at the same time we created something new, a new product with a new storyline. I think that although our film fits into the form of the genre, this might be seen differently in the future. The media business develops and changes all the time, very fast. What ever is new now will be old next year and so I think the genre might change as well. Every single product changes and develops the genre, because every product is different and has something new.How does your media product represent particular social groups?
What is a stereotype? A stereotype is a conventional image for a particular social group or person. We can find stereotypes everywhere. They are in our everyday life, we have them in our heads. For example, for some there might be “the football fan”, which is a negative stereotype, not every football supporter is a hooligan; a stereotype can be positive as well. We don’t just have stereotypes in our everyday life, we can find them in the virtual world and so we can find them in movies. Every genre has it’s own stereotypes in the main characters. In a love story, there is always this nice understanding guy, and so there are stereotypes in the action and crime genre as well. The stereotype of a man in the action and crime genre is different. During our research we were inspired by the series “Hustle” and we found great stereotypes in that.
The idea of the cool guy fascinated us. The pictures above are some screenshots from trailers from Hustle. It is always the look that makes the difference. In the first picture a young, pretty, nice guy sits in a casino and his face tells everything. He is confident stares to one point behind the camera, it is a bit mysterious, he is obviously watching someone, but we don’t know who. The second picture shows, that the stereotype does not necessarily needs to be a young man. There is a young woman and an old man and it is clear that they fit into the stereotype as well. In the third picture, there is the stereotype of the pimp. Another gangster, who wears the costume of a pilot walks on an airport with two stewardesses, on on each side. In the fourth and last picture, there are no people in it, but it shows the action of the stereotypes really well. A sporty car just drives out of the garage. But he does not have a ticket, the car is so sporty (small), that he can go under the barrier. It shows the action of these people, it is very smart, although not 100 percent correct. Of course people need a ticket, but he is just “too cool” for one. These people skip things and break rules, but often without harming anyone else, this makes it acceptable for the viewer.On the one hand, he is the bad guy, he is the thief and in real world he would be wrong. But it is not the real world in a movie and so the viewer can like him. He does things which are against the law, but he does them in a smart way. We found this stereotype during our research in lots of different movies, for example on the Ocean movies, in 21, etc.
In our action/crime product we have four actors, three people on the phone and a barkeeper. In the sequence the viewer can see a man in a bar, calling two other people. They talk about “the operation in Dubai”.With the three people on the phone we represented people from the upper class. They are the typical stereotype of gangsters who the audience likes in an action/crime movie, the clothes they are wearing and their whole appearance is showing this really clearly. If we compare that screenshot of our film above with the screenshots of "Hustle" we can see things which are similar in both of the picture. On the one hand it is the whole set, the sun is shining, it is nice and warm, on the other hand it is the detail on the actor, the conficence they show. We tried to show this also with the other technical areas of film making. The music we chose fits on the one hand into the genre, but on the other hand the music tells about the characters as well: Cool and fast. In the editing we tried to show the stereotypes as well. There are some quick shots in the beginning. The footsteps and the shot from the back shall show on the one hand one side of the characters. Fast. But the characters have another side, the cool side. This is represented by the long pan shot of me walking on the road and talking about the travel data. The character has a cool voice and he knows exactly what he is talking about. The barkeeper represented might fit into the lower class, but she might become more important during the movie and it might turn out that she is actually the fourth gangster. This change would make the movie more interesting, but we decided to represent her as a lower class person in the beginning because a different range of classes makes the movie more interesting, even if it is just a small detail like the barkeeper.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
For the distribution of our product we would ask a big publishing company like Warner, Universal or 20th Century Fox. The pictures below are their company logos. Interesting is, that none of them are independent, they belong to News Corporation (20th Fox) or Time Warner (Warner Bros.) and NBC Universal (Universal Studios).
If we cooperate with one of these big companies, the percentage chance on a success with the movie are much higher. But as a small or new company it is very difficult to cooperate with one of these companies, because they have lots and lots of partners already and they are successful with them, so there is not really a point for them to take the risk to cooperate with a new company, unless it looks like that movie could be an even greater success. Also, the markets of all of these companies are different. Whilst 20th Century Fox produced some animated movies recently, for example Ice Age or Avatar with many special effects, Warner Bros. entered a new market recently, the market in teenagers. That is very intelligent, because teenagers are most familiar with the new ways of media and so there is great potential. Warner Bros. published movies but also TV series such as The O.C. which was a high success all over the world. Universal Studios, another big company, works differently. They are the company which is most likely to cooperate with a british film production company. Recently, they did several cooperations with Working Title Films, on of the biggest british production companies.We know now the markets of these companies, now we need to decide, which one is most likely to cooperate with us and which one is most likely to support us where we need support. Warner would be a good choice, as they published some teen movies recently, which is our audience as well. But we also need to think about their relationship to Britain and so Universal might be most likely to publish our movie. We should not forget, they have experience in the action/crime genre as well, they published Ocean’s 11.
The media business is changing, we can see that there are less and less companies, the small publishing companies start cooperating with big ones now, it is the form of monopolies. The companies might distribute our movie if they think that the movie will be a success. Everything is about money. Before people normally ask publishing companies to cooperate before they start producing the movie, all they have to convince them is the storyline and the storyboard, maybe some possible photos of the locations to film. We have done all these things on our blog. Also, very important is the impression the publishing company gets from us. Therefore, a legitimate manner and a legitimate picture of the company is very important. This all starts by the company logo. That is, why we spent so much time on the company logos, so that we get them well done. Below, there are the final pictures of them and we used these in our movie as well.
Who would be the audience for your media product?
The audience is the group of people who are reached by something, for example a film. The audience is absolutely essential in the film business. At the beginning of producing a film, you need make sure, that there is an audience for that product. In the film business everything is about money, and you just get the money, if there are a lot of people who pay for watching it, so you need to have a big audience. For every product, there is a target audience. These are the people who are most likely to watch that product.
For action and crime movies, the people in the target audience are young men between 15 and 30 years. The target audience has watched other films of that genre before, for example Spooks. Therefore, here is an embedded a trailer and a scene of Spooks to give you another idea about it.
The BBFC classificates all the movies published. If thez classificate the movie as universal, everybody can see it, which means, this would be a greater audience. But in our movie, where special effects and fights will happen further in the movie, I would reckon we would get the "Aged 15 years and older" classification.
Because we are still students and still young, we thought and we think that our audience is the best audience to produce for. We are part of the audience so we know the best what is going on and can work the best storyline out. Over the year, we did not just work on our product and hoped, the audience will enjoy it. We asked people from the audience for feedback. These are people partly from inside the class, but we also asked people from outside the class to comment. They then posted their feedback on our blog as well. After people gave feedback, we talked about it in the group and improved our film if necessary.
How did you attract/address the audience?
The majority of the today’s younger generation, which is our audience, wants to be entertained. We attracted them in this way: We wanted to entertain them with an interesting and obvious storyline. It takes places in the present and the viewer does not need to know about any other things, if the movie would be set in the past, the viewer would need to know what was going on at that point of time, which makes him think. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but if the viewer does not have the knowledge, he does not understand the storyline and does therefore not enjoy the movie. But the attraction starts earlier, the attraction starts with the title of the film. Although the title is the last picture of our opening, the viewer sees the title before he wants to watch the movie. That is why we chose the title “A Diamond’s Glimmer” we think and our feedback from the audience said that this is an attractive title for an action and crime movie. We also used different the technical areas of filmmaking to attract the audience. The music of our film is a central part of the opening and so it is one of the main attract-features as well.
If someone speaks in public, he addresses the audience. A movie is produced by a director and the director gives a message to the audience, but he does not appear in the movie, he uses the characters for that. In our movie, the characters address the audience informal. That is, because the characters themselves are informal.
After the one character gave the travel details, the boss in the bar does not say “Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Something.” The boss asks straight the next question, for him, there is no time to loose. The characters don’t have a last name with which they could call address each other more formally.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Over the year, I used lots of different media sectors. Some of them were new to me and I got introduced to them, with some others I worked before and I could improve my knowledge. The internet was part of our everyday life as we needed to post everything we did on the blog. Blogging was a new experience for me.
At the beginning, I find it hard to talk about everything on the blog, because it takes a lot of time, but over the year I got used to it. For the research, we used the internet as well. Here, the IMB, Wikipedia and Google were central parts of our research and we learned how to use these websites more effectively.
The TV is used very differently in Britain then in Germany. It is not that the channels are different, also the programs varies. I took watching the British TV not just as an opportunity to study TV Drama, I also tried to spot the differences between German and British TV. These are quite significant, for example, more people watch Pay TV here than in Germany, but Germans have channels such as the BBC (ARD and ZDF).
I had already some experiences in working with camera, tripod, computer and software. But you always learn if you do something. I never worked with a Microsoft computer before which was a new experience for me.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
How did the feedback you received help you to make a better film opening?
The feedback is absolutely essential in the process of film production. Even professionals go up to their colleagues and ask them, how they find it and how they could improve it.
We had the advantage, that we, as students between 16 and 18 years, are a part of the target audience. We therefore did not just ask anyone about our feedback, but we asked people from the target audience to comment on the movie.
We asked for feedback in different ways. For example, we sometimes asked people to comment on our blog. Some of the feedbacks we got as a comment are below:
“The music syncs perfectly with each shot, also the voices of the people was loud and clear which is a good, however there is a shot where one of the character is on his phone, you can see his lips moving but there is no sound instead the person he is talking to on the phone is heard. Other than that it’s a great opening.”
“However, the sound was a bit off and the voice recording sounded too much like it was recorded in a room and not the same place that it had been filmed.”
“The video that your group made is really exceptional. As I saw it for the time it felt like watching a very high quality movie.”
We got positive and negative feedback. Both are very important. The positive feedback made us feel proud and happy and we were willing to put more effort into the product. With the negative feedback, we got to know what we could improve. One thing which was often said was that the voice over sounded not realistic. Another thing mentioned was that the shot when the viewer could see the mouth moving of a character, but he wasn’t talking.
We didn’t just ask our classmates for feedback, we also asked our teacher to give us critical feedback. She watched our movie and then we had a big discussion about it. She said that she liked our graphics. Although we didn’t use any effects on them such as black/white, they still look good and without effects more realistic. But she also mentioned that the titles would be difficult to read, we therefore added another white stroke to them, what we mentioned in another post on the blog before.
Finally, we asked our classmates what they would think about our final product. In the video below, there is some final feedback.
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