Evaluation

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

For our opening sequence we used conventions that any rom-com use, except we changed and developed this to give our own unique style. In a rom-com/romantic comedy you have to make it obvious who are the main characters, as they will be the main focus of the film and you will be concentrating on them the most. Naive City is the title of our film and we think this works really well for a Romantic Comedy because at 17 you can be very naive about love, and the city to me can be a romantic place.

We pretty much knew how we wanted our opening sequence to be, and as a group we decided that doing it in split screen was the best thing for it, though none of us have ever used this tool and we were slightly scared it would look like a thriller or a action film, but this is what we really wanted and I’m glad we used it. In most Rom-Coms you would expect to see amazing sunshine, expensive cars and large houses; ours has none of this (not by choice) and looks very urban, the weather is quite grey and the houses and cars are pretty average, though for our generation it is more realistic. The titles took some time as we had to decide what we were going for, so again we thought of the genre and who would be watching it and decided to go with a traditional title that are very gender specific; we decided that the colours would be blue-boys and pink-girls. This matched very well with the film and we very much like it. We then as a group decided on the transition the title would appear as, we chose one that made the titles appear on the screen and fade out, again we liked this and as a group really could see it coming together. The song was the main concern for the title sequence and we became very frustrating as we couldn't use the original song as there is copy write restrictions and we were in a bit of despair if we would find another song that would work so well like the original one would, so as we started to look around for solutions we thought to record our very own version of the original song; at first we were worried as it was different but after a few tweaks we think it fits with the regular codes and conventions of any Rom-Com. Our version of the song we had a soft guitar riff playing over and over again and It personally creates a happy vibe for our opening piece. This overall developes the codes and conventions, I think.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

teenagers would be the particular social group, we placed the teen element using the two main characters getting ready on a typical morning also by setting up these enigmas like a guitars in the corner and photos of friends on the wall, though we were careful not to offend anyone as we want the people to relate to it. The people that will relate to it the most would be in the age bracket of 15-19 and hopefully will relate to the two characters, whether it is similarities, to themselves, clothes, whether it be saying they like the outfits or places they have been that we have shot in; we feel as a group that we have made it very relatable.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

This decision was rather easy as we knew that Nickelodeon would be best distributor for our film. The reason this decision was made is because Nickelodeon has distributed alot of rom-com romantic films like, Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging, Yours Mine And Ours, also most of Nickelodeon's films are targeted for teenagers so this was a easy choice and we feel that it was a good one as it suite our genre and target audience.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

We decided the audience for our film would be 12-19 year olds, the reason we decided upon this age group is because we felt we wanted teens as well as young adults would want to come and watch our film. We also decided on this age group because we didn't want to create a film that we wouldn't go to watch so we catered it to our own individual taste.


How did you attract/address your audience?

To attract our audience we wanted to really relate to what most teenagers are like and what they do, so through our two main characters we thought of starting the film with them getting up to start a typical day, as most teenagers could probably recognize part of themselves in the two main characters and how they get ready, also we've used places most common to teenagers e.g. Shopping Centre’s and taking public transport (bus) hopefully teenagers will be able to address this situation and really see themselves.


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

As I mentioned earlier we used split screen and that none of us have used this tool before, well that was called Final Cut Pro, and because none of us had used this particular editing programme before we were overwhelmed and some of us found it frustrating, but we soon got the hang of it after edited a few scenes together. Another programme I haven’t said that we used for the first time was, music maker, although none of us used this programme we found it rather easy also it took us the shortest amount of time and it only required one of us to manage everything and it helped us allot to record the song for our title sequence; although I didn’t edit as much as others I learnt that too many people trying to do one thing can be very difficult and also how to use new programmes.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Preliminary task has shown me that storyboarding and organisation is very vital in producing an excellent media product. The task itself took us a hardly any time at all though i would say we underestimated what lied a head in completing the other larger part of the coursework as we really relied on a lot of things maybe too much, hopping no one would interrupt the footage, and that everyone would arrive on time and that the actors would be ready and nothing major would come up to ruin our plans, also the weather could of ruined the entire thing. The Mac suite was most day over booked and we would have to change our plans entirely, though shockingly we managed to everything on the dead line still leave us time to change things if needed.

I am very happy of the overall sequence and though we did have our differences in the group, I think we worked very well and really spent time and allot of effort to make a title sequence we can be proud of.