Evaluation Activity 2 : How does your media product represent particular social groups?

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

For this activity I will be comparing the differences and similarities between these two characters from my Chav character from my film on the left, and Sam from Kid Adult.

Similarities in Camera shots and Mise en scene:

My chav on the left has a black hoody like the one on the right from kid adulthood this could show that the character has a darker side and can be a dangerous person.

They both have their hoods pulled up over their faces to hide themselves this could show that they are secretive and do not like to be seen in public places. They both also have some part of their faces covered to show the connotation of the darker and lighter side to that person.

Both of the shots that show my chav with that of Sam from Kid Adulthood are low angle shots which connote power and authority which makes them look menacing.

Differences in camera shots and Mise en Scene.

My chav wears an American baseball cap under his hoodies hood, but Sam doesn’t wear a cap this could show that my chav is a more stereotypical chav than that of Sam and he does not conform to some of the ideals of the stereotype.

The ages of the two characters are very different due to Sam being in his early 20’s and my chav being still at school in lower sixth form. This could show that Sam is more mature due to his older age.

The one other minor difference is that of race my chav is white and Sam is a mixed race.

The setting where they live, Sam lives in a council estate and goes round London, but my chav is still at school and is mostly there.

There role in the film

My chav in my film is meant to be a show off that has no real intention of hurting anyone but Sam out of Kid adulthood is a murderer and is a very violent person in general. But what they both share in common is that of wanting to cause trouble and make everyone else’s life a little bit worse.

eval activity 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)

Activity 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products (i.e. Of film openings)?

Title of the film picture. This is the Title of the film Picture which tells the audience what the name of the film is.

This picture of our title of our video it is done in a bubble styled font which is similar to that of a lot of other musicals films for example in the right picture above there’s the title picture of another musical film called Hairspray. This musical was seen as a very feminine and romantic film; also the music accompanied by this part of the film is almost a form of old pop music of that era. Another example of this would be High school musical which is a romantic pop music based musical. In this way we differ from other musical films due to our music at the title of our film being a form of soft rock. Also our title for our film at the beginning is and is on a horizontal line like writing on a word document. In the picture on the right the writing is still legible but it also is not totally on the line and different letters are at different angles. This interests the audience’s eyes as it seems slightly unorganised. For our video this could have made it more interesting by maybe having a effect on our title for example we could have had light bulbs inside the writing like in the film High School Musical, or to have neon lights effect on the title to attract the audience’s attention.

The setting/ location Picture.

This picture shows the setting of our video which was in our school grounds.

The setting for our film was based in my school where I do my A-levels. The setting of a school has been used before in many films of different genres, for example the film “High School musical” is based inside a high school in America. Or there is the film “School of Rock” which is again based in a school but it also is about rock which makes it more similar to our type of film that we have made compared to a film that is about pop music. Another difference that our setting has to a lot of films that are based in schools is that most are based in America due to the funding usually coming from American companies and are more stereotypical in films.

Costumes and Props picture.
This picture shows one of our scenes with a group of our actors playing a stereotypical character called a “chav” this group have clothes that they are typically seen in which reinforces the image of the stereotype. For our video we used many different costumes and props due to our movie being based on the stereotypical groups inside a school in the UK. This means that we put a lot of research time and effort to get the look of the characters right. This means that we try to get the Mise-En-Scene for our characters to conform to these specific stereotypical views. Also due to getting the characters costumes to fit their characters gives a sense of verisimilitude which allows them to be immersed into the clip more easily. Our costumes compared to that of other films that are in the same genre in my view are generally different due to the fact that we made our costumes and props over the top and almost too stereotypical. For example in our picture we have 3 guys all in hoodies and American style baseball caps, and all of them are looking ominous which you would not normally get in other films due to it being controversial and too stereotypical. The only exception I can think of is that of the “Chavs” in the film “Hot Fuzz” where they are depicted in the same light.

Camera work and Editing.
This picture shows group of the stereotypical group “Chavs”. This picture gives the impression that the “Chavs” are powerful and are a group not to be messed with. This is due to the fact that is filmed in a low angle shot which makes the audience feel subordinate and less powerful. At our school we have to work with the equipment that we are given to film and edit our videos. We had to improvise on some of the equipment that we used. For example we stuck a handheld camera to a wheelie chair and used it as a form of steady cam. This meant that we could get reasonably smooth shots of a scene at the same height. This allowed us to film our transition scenes with ease, as all we had to do was wheel this chair round the school and film as we went. For our transition scenes we speeded up footage from different locations, this gave the effect of going to different places at high speed. The effect that we used is called ellipsis which means the speeding up or slowing down of time. Using these transitions also gave the effect of continuity editing which made the video smoother to watch, as you would not jump from location to location.

Title font and style. Here we have a picture of the font and style of the writing that we used throughout our video. The font that we used is a form of bubble writing, this is commonly used in musicals as it is usually has a romantic theme or childish appeal, for our video we are trying to attract these sorts of people so we used this form of writing. The style of font is similar to that of “Hairspray” and “Highschool Musical”, which we based our film on. I have used the colour yellow for our font colour due to it being a bright attractive colour that will attract the audience’s eye.

Story and how the opening sets it up.
Our video is about a rock band in a school that may be about to be sabotaged by a group of Chavs. The old singer of the rock band (harry) is replaced by our main character (George) and now harry has made new friends with a group known as Chavs and plans to get his revenge on his old colleagues for kicking him out of the band. He will try to sabotage the bands performance at the battle of the bands competition. This sets the story up to be about a ride of old friends becoming enemies. You do not see this in many musical genre films but I thought it would make the story line seem more packed and exiting.

Genre and how the opening suggests that.
Our film is a musical based film. This is shown in the 2 minute opening by there being non-diagetic sound track that overlaps the footage, this music being a form of soft rock which can be associated with musicals. Also in the ending part of the video there is a scene of a rock band rehearsing for the battle of the bands concert and also that George is mixing on the turntables. In the scene after George is playing on the piano the last cord of the song in acoustic version, which shows the main focus of the film is to do with music and his band. Our video has also used some of the common stereotypes of musicals for instance the common one on having a handsome man playing the main male character which is stereotypical of most American musicals, with the exception of in Hairspray where they cast a more moderately sized main actress rather than that of a stick thin one. In our film we have the more hansom approach with our main character to attract a young audience that will like to have a person to idolise.

How the Characters are introduced.
In our video we introduce the characters by having a subtitle of the name of the stereotypical group name at the bottom of the screen. This allows the audience to quickly identify the type of person that character will be like. The only exception of this subtitling is George our main character due to him not being in a stereotypical group. Because we have not labelled each and every character that has appeared in our film it will make it easier for the audience to read just the stereotypical group and not be overwhelmed by a massive wave of subtitles. The reason why I have not subtitled George as a stereotypical group is due to him being in more than one scene so the audience should get the idea that he is the main character of the film.

Special effects and how they were used. For my film we had no shortage of special effects that I used to enhance the experience of the audience for example the use of the fading characters at the beginning of the film makes it appear that the film is slowly coming and will start any second. Also the use of the transition scenes was done with special effects by speeding up the scenes to give the effect of travelling really fast through the corridors. Also I have used an effect where there is a flash after the transition scenes to help cover any editing problems of then going into the next scene this then allows for continuity editing. I was going to include 4 pictures of the different stereotypes with different backgrounds, but I ran out of available time to use to put these pictures in, otherwise I would have gone over the available 2mins 5seconds max time limit.

Problems with transitions

We were editing the final cut of our video we found that we had a problem with one of our flashes between one of our scenes. This was due to the fact that a piece of our video had been copied from a later part of our raw footage that we had taken earlier. This part of raw footage had already been deleted, so was difficult to discover. It then used that clip to cover the transition and overlapped the main clip in the transition, so you got a ghost image of a boy playing on the sound mixing boards.

The way in which we solved this issue was to use adobe premier elements to put the transition a split second earlier so it would not use the image of the boy on the mixing decks and would get a image instead of the corridor so it would not have as many continuity errors in that part of our video.

The only problem with doing this is the fact that it does make the footage seem more disjointed due to the shortened clip of the corridor this makes it harder for the audience to accept the video and cannot be as fully immersed in the video.

costume design

music is soon to be added.

Today I have added the music for our video which is a soft rock based genre type of sound. this was relitvely easy, but we did this on my co-workers apple laptop which has specific software which can be used to put sound onto a video relitively easily. The only problem that we had was that the piece of music that we were using was short by about 2 seconds so we had to copy a piece of the music from a earlier part of the track and sloted it in the right place. This meant that we did have to get the two sound clips perfectly allined so that there was no gap in the sound, which would have made it seem like bad continueity editing. we then ultered the sound for the ending scene of the film where george is playing on the paino, by lowering the volume of the first couple of notes which makes it a more smooth transition audibly and makes it less jaring to the audience.

editing more and more but finally finished it XD

We finally have finsished the major parts of editing the video which means that we can upload it to youtube and start to evaluate the video. When we were in the final stages of editing me and my co-worker had several issues with editing the video the first

Adding credits to the beginning of the film.

For our film we needed to add pre-film credits which tell the audience who the main characters are and who has made this film. we have also added names of the different stereotypical groups to the video when those groups appear this also gives the audience a idea of the different groups of people. This took around an hour to do as we had to do this to the frame. This gives the clip a more authentic feel to the video and