ALL BAR NONE

Question 7 - Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to your final product?
Overall from the prelim to our final product I feel that we have improved greatly in many different aspects. For instance, our knowledge and understanding of different camera angles and shots has improved as we noticed from comparing the two videos.
Our understanding of editing has also improved. For our final video we learnt how to change the settings to make our film look older. We also changed the color of the video from color to black and white. I think overall me and the rest of my group have developed our skills and knowledge from basic camera skills to editing and changing a film in order to achieve what we want.
I believe that we have fulfilled the targets we set when filming our prelim. We have definitley used more faster shots and our edits have worked well to flow nicely into eachother. Our film also contains a lot of shot reverse shot which is what we'd of hoped to achieve at the end of our preliminary task.

As you can see from the images there is a great difference between our opening sequence at the top and our prelim at the bottom. Not only has the color and contrast changed but the camera angle is also another skill we have improved on.

Question 6 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

 Whilst constructing our opening sequence the majority of our work was based on using this two way computer to the left. Where we would import our video on the left, edit it then put the new improved video on the right hand screen to watch.

To film our opening sequence and our preliminary task we used this canon camera. We went from learning the basics about the camera, how it works what buttons are where to developing how to use wide shots, extreme close up's, zooming in and out etc. Without the camera our opening sequence wouldn't have worked so all of it relied on this.

Powerpoint was another technology we used to present our presentations of our films to the rest of the class. This worked well as we used a different slide for every different piece of work.

 Blogger is the same website we used to keep track of our work, post regular updates and keep on top of our work.

Finally we used youtube to comapare our video with current films and to find ideas to use in our film.

Question 5 - How did you attract/address your audience?

Question 4 - Who would be the audience for your media product?
For our media product our main target audience would be men or women around the age of 30. They would be interested in history, old films, board games and problem solving. They may be interested in films to do with crime, horror, history and mystery. Our ideal audience would be into jazz music or any type of music with a high sort of tempo. This film would appeal to this ideal person as it fulfills all their interests and would leave the them on the edge of their seat.

The picture to the left is the sort of person my ideal person describes. A middle aged women who's lived a bit to know what sort of different and old films there are to discover.

Question 3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
A production company is something that spends time and gives money to other companies in order to find their film. 




Our production company is called Macromedia. We could of possibly thought of using Universal to distribute our film as its a well known company and would of made our film well known, quickly. However with low funding and not very well known actors we are unable to do this so for now we will put our film on Youtube and hope that people will watch it and enjoy it. I think our film would mainly attract american's as our social group is american women. I also believe that the best place to distribute our film would be over the internet as most people from our survey said they prefer watching films over the internet and it also gives people from all over the world a chance to see our video not just a small sample of them.


A few videos which are similar to ours are The Big Sleep, Sunset Boulevard, The Black Dahlia and many more. The people included in our titles are Harry Mercer (as the detective) , Helena Griffiths (as the waitress and suspect of murder) , Ellie Birch (suspect and singer in a bar) and Emma Johnson (editor). 

Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups? 

For our 1940's film noir we decided that the social group would be based mainly on American women. We came to this decision as the majority of our film is based on women from different class backgrounds who face problems involving another male character. The screen shot above is showing the contrast between the more innocent women behind the bar who's dressed in white, then we have the femme fetale in the background who's dressed in black implying she's more dangerous. We've done this dilibritly to confuse the audience through our use of mise-en-scene so the audience begin to doubt who they can trust.

We've successfully achieved this by our use of costume things such as the red lipstick indicating danger, the waitress in white implying her innocence. However we then brought guns and knifes into it showing the audience the change in personalities throughout the sequence. The attitudes also indicate this as we have the waitress as a more sweet and gulliable character where as the singer comes across as more deciving and evil.

We used a voice over of the detective as the narrator giving the audience more information and a bigger insight into what sort of charatcer he is, letting them play the detective role.

 Here we have Hiliary Swank from the film The Black Dahlia. We have compared the femme fetale from our sequence to Hilary Swank as they both hold a strong personality and show a more sexy and dangerous side.

Here we have Scarlett Johannson who we've compared to our ingenue. They both hold quiet and senstive personalities which indicate the innocence of both characters.

Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?                  

For the title to our opening sequence we have challenged the conventions by bringing color into it creating a neo noir. We decided to create this effect for our film as we wanted a more stronger representation of women. The red colors also worked well as they made the more deadly features stand out more for the audience. 

Comparing our title to the one on my left we can see the obvious contrast between the two 'Behind closed doors' we can tell was set back in the 1940's. The contrast of the colors look archaic and old whereas we've included these features as well as some of our own, for instance the red and blue florescent colors bring a more modern feel to our sequence.

Here we have our next title. The font on the left is the font we decided to choose for all of our title sequences. However the font above and the one to my left both share some of the same similarities. This shows how we've brought more of a 1940's feel to our sequence showing a clear contrast between times.

 Our main location was set in a bar where the three characters were based. We tried to give the bar a 1940's feel with the singer in the background and the detective schmoozing the waitress.

 The image below shows how we have tried to keep to the same sort of conventions as a film noir.The image has been taken from a famous scene from the film, The Big Sleep. It's a scene where the detective and the femme fetale share a conversation. We've developed this further by bringing in a third character.

Our next location was based in a bathroom. Where we see one of the femme fatales planning to kill the detective. What we are unaware of is who actually did it. Here we have shown another shot of how we've made our sequence a neo noir with the red lipstick being seen as a deadly sort of prop.

Our last location was an alleyway which we used for a few of our scenes. Here we have a wide over the head shot which includes three characters. We have used low key lighting on the detective and his 'close source' showing something bad is happening. Then we have chosen to use high key lighting in the background where the waitress stands indicating to the audience that somethings about to happen.

Our first prop was a blood stained shirt which we used on detective, Harry. We wanted to show the audience he was dead as briefly as we could. This shot is again reiterating the neo noir we have used.

We then used a 1940's waitress skirt and blouse for this characters role, Helena who played an innocent waitress. However she is down as a suspect for the murder. We created this sort of personality for this character as we wanted to keep the audience guessing and the tension to be quite high throughout our sequence.

Our next character is seen as a more feisty and suspicious character. For her we decided to use red lipstick to show danger and of course reiterate our use of neo noir. Her hair was pinned up and we then used a scarf around the neck and a grey pencil skirt.

The next prop we decided to use was the knife which shimmered behind the detectives head. This was used as an indicator of what sort of person this waitress can actually be, and keeping the audience guessing whether she was capable of the murder or not.

We then used a gun as another prop indicating crime and also death. We had the ingenue seen with this showing a contrast between her innocent personality and what she may or may not have done to our detective.

Our final prop was the poison which was used by our femme fetale. This was used in a bathroom scene where our femme fetale was planning to 'kill' our detective.

During our bar scene we decided to use high key lighting around our ingenue behind the bar again indicating her innocence then we used low key lighting around the background where the femme fetale is showing indangerment and fear.

Here we have used an over head shot of Harry the detective in the middle of a 'deal' with a close source. We decided to use this camera angle as it includes all characters in one shot but also sets the mood and scene of the sequence. High and low key lighting has also been used here.

Next we have the femme fetale who was played by myself. I was dressed in more darker colors as my character held more of a dangerous and darker personality. The red lipstick also reiterates this.

Here we have Helena who played Bonnie our waitress. We dressed Helena in bright colours such as white and purple to indicate to our audience what sort of character she is. Her personality is sweet and quiet however we challenge the conventions with this during our sequence.

Finally we have our shooting schedule which helped us a lot throughout organizing our opening sequence. We arranged scene for a certain day and tried our best to keep to each bit of the schedule. I think the shooting schedule worked successfully as it reminded us of the things we needed to do and kept us organised.

For the detective we had to stain a shirt with fake blood to show the audience he was dead. We decided to do just one shot of blood trying to make it look as realistic as possible.

 The gun was used as a prop to show the audience what sort of weapon the femme fetale may have killed the detective with. We chose to use a gun as the main murder weapon as we felt it represented the 1940's the best.