Finished Product

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

7) looking back to your preliminary task from Grady Wing

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

As we began planning for our opening sequence we didn’t know very much about making a successful opening sequence. So we did our research and viewed a number of different opening sequences so we could get our heads around it and think about what we needed to do.

Research
In class we look at the opening sequence of Dirty Harry and then we had to pick one to look at ourselves, I picked The Hunger Game as it’s my favourite film. We then wrote analyses on each of the opening sequences which are both further down in my blog. Both of these are action films and that’s why we thought it would be good to do an Action/Thriller opening sequence. We watched videos off the internet that would help us make our opening sequence as we had to follow so key media rule for example we had to follow the 180 degree rule. This is where you must not cross the centre line whilst you’re filming. There is some much information that helped us from the internet.

Planning
We did all the planning as a group as we had to decide on key things for the opening sequence; for example, location, costumes, props ECT. Connor has already had experience on filming and editing, also he has his own camera, tripod and editing software which he was familiar and confident on using. Also we didn’t need to wait around for equipment; we could just get on with it. Connor was more confident on editing all the clips at home on the software he had instead of the MAC’S. Also he is aware of all the shots that we could do, so he was in charge of the camera and editing.

We was fortunate that Connor had a top quality camera that we could use for filming, it was a high spec HD camera; Panasonic SD60 a lot better than ones we could of borrowed from school. With this camera we were able to film in 1080p HD and 50 frames per second in 35x zoom if we needed to. Below is a picture of the camera we used.

As Connor had past experience on editing and had the software at home we decide as a group that he would editing our opening sequence at home and during the editing process bring in parts of the sequence so he could get our opinion on it and see if we wanted to change anything. He planned on using Adobe Premier Pro CS6 which is one of the best editing software’s. But he had some problems with that software so he had to change to Sony Vegas pro. This isn’t known as the best software but it’s not bad because of the SVP is all Connor used in the past and was confident with it. This did not affect the final product at all.

Once Connor had put all the video clips together he brought it into school to show us and check that we was all happy with it, then we have to choose the right background sound, non diagetic sound had to be added. But there was some background noise was lost when we did this for example my heavy breathing and the snapping of the branches as I was running away. This would of added suspense to the sequence but we managed to use suitable music to do this.

Evaluation
For the final part of our AS media coursework was the evaluation. We realised that we could use different methods to collect feedback instead of just using conventional method. We found out that we could use different ways for example collecting feedback off social networking sites, using video displays as this would be a more exciting way to do this. Also posting the video on YouTube would allow people to view it and then leave comments on what they thought about it and we could make some change from the comment and take the advice on board.

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

As we had the target audience in mind we had to then attract and address them, to be able to do this we had to make sure that the audience relates to one or more of the characters in the film. In our opening sequence I represent a teenagers, which is the target audience. With the target audience as 15+ teenagers the audience can relate to be well.

This is a picture of me, the Protagonist in the clothes I’m wearing during the opening sequence. I represent an average teenager that is taking his dog for a walk through the local woods. My outfit enforces my youth as young people all wear skinny fitted jeans and as I’m wearing a Jack wills jumper as Jack Wills is very popular brand. Also it shows the IPhone headphone as most teenagers walk around with headphones in.

We would need to attract the right target audience and we did this by using the right stereotypes of Action/thriller films. As we decided our target audience would be 15+ males, we would need to follow the stereotypes in right way to attract the right target audience. Also we need people’s views on target audiences so we could improve our opening sequences.

As we was editing we needed to get some feedback and opinions of the films other than ourselves. As most of our target audience age goes to our school we decided to show them our rough cut of our opening sequence and ask them some question to see what they thought. The main question was how we could make it better and other question like what did they like and what didn’t they like. From this we would get some good feedback and this would help us change our opening sequence and to attract the right target audience.

We decided to hand out questionnaires to different people in our school that fitted the target audience. We used these results to improve our media as we would make it appealing to the right target audience. After they had filled out the questionnaires we part all the data we received into pie charts to record people’s opinion.

We collected the results using various media technologies such as social networking site, such as Facebook, and more traditional methods such as questionnaires and face to face interviews. To the right is a picture of an interview with Luke Sowinski and Chris Formby, who are within our target audience and in my school year. Getting his view on our opening sequence gave us a good idea on what our target audience would like, and what we could improve to make the opening sequence better/ more appealing towards our target audience. Also by the use of new media technologies, this allowed us to get feedback off different people quickly in an ever changing chirstechnologically revolving media industry.

The questions that we asked were :

1) Now that you have seen our opening sequence, what did you like about it and why?

2) How would you rate it ?
• Really liked it
• Liked it
• Needs improvement
• Didn’t like it at all

3) How would you improve it?

We recorded question 2 in a pie chart as it was the main question we wanted people opinion on. The pie chart shows the results from the question, the majority of people that answered the questionnaire said that the really like it, and 40% said that they really liked it and one person said they didn’t like it.

From recording our result this way it is a lot clearer and easier to see what people think of our opening sequence. We couldn’t do a pie chart for the other questions as they were your opinion.

Overall we manage to attract our target audience by relating the characters to the audience through costume, as many young people wear Jack Wills clothing and have IPhones. We did this people we thought that people could see themselves as that character and linked to the target audience very well. With peoples feedback that are in the target audience helped us get the opening sequence right as we could change things based on their opinion.

4) Who would be the audience for your media product?

The target audience for our media opening sequence would be males around the age of 15+.  We all decided this target audience from personal opinion and market research. As we are around this age we thought that it was the right target audience for our opening sequence. Target audience is key to a film as if you don’t get it right your film wont get many views if its aimed at the wrong target. When thinking about the right target audience you must think about the culture of the target audience, our target culture would be English or people from the UK. A target audience doesn’t just mean that that targets audience will enjoy the film, other people out of the target audience might like the film but the advertising of the film is aimed mainly towards the target audience.

Once the target audience has been decided it is important to get the age rating right, if our age rating was an 18 but our target audience was 15+ this wouldn’t be very good.  We would classify our film as a 15 as this would fit our target audience of 15+.

 

Overall the target audience for our opening sequence is male aged 15+, as this is the audience that we thought was best fit. Also we would also like the film have a age rating of 15 as this would allow our target audience to view it. 

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

After a film is finished and been through all the postproduction then it is time to distribute the film. A filming distributing company does this as their job is to get the film by so many different people, they do this from using; adverts, cinema and DVD releases. The film crew work with and along side the distributers to find the right release and audience for the film and this is know and called Synergy. 

This is a picture of the distribution process within the media industry. 

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To distribute our opening sequence we choose Warner Bro’s, a company that has high repatriation so that when the audience see there logo before the film starts they know that they are going to see a really good film.  The warner Bro’s are famous for disrupting all of the Harry Potter films, as well as other films. The Warner Bro’s have distributed many Action/thriller genre film so we picked them because of this.  Warner Bro’s would find the right target audience for our film which is for 15+, as people have enjoyed and liked the film they have distributed before would be likely to go watch ours. 

This is the warner Bro’s logo that you may of seen on many different films in the past. And you will be seeing this at the start of our opening sequence. 

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

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

Opening sequences have many different genres and with a thriller/action film they start slow and build up to suspense and then get into the action. We did some research on some action/thriller films to get a good idea and the films we looked at were; The Dark Knight and The Hurt locker.

Opening sequences have a job to do as they need to keep the viewers’ attention and make them want to keep watching. Also they have to set the scene and genre without giving the storyline away too much. In our opening sequence we showed the view the scene by showing different shot of the woods and used a time lapse, this showed where and when the film was taking place. By using different clothing and colours we showed youth, innocents of me and black and evil for the attacker.

Our opening sequence was in between to different genres of action and thriller. It was set in Helpston woods with me as the teenager with a dog and Jacob as the attacker wearing a communist Russian mask of Lenin to build up suspense so the viewers didn’t know who the attacker was. We used long shots to build up the suspense so the audience didn’t get bored because the opening sequence is most important to get the audience’s attention. Filming as a whole I thought went very well, and was very effective as we got all the right shot us needed and we worked well as a team as we was able to finish all the filming in one day. After all the filming was finished we had to start think about the editing, we decided that we wasn’t going to editing at school using the Mac’s as Connor is very good at editing at home on his own laptop as he has done a lot of bmxing videos. Over the course of editing Connor would bring in samples of the film as he edited to see what we thought about it and points he could change. He managed to get all the filming done very quickly and rendered it in HD standard. Once we had a final cut we showed different people our film so we could be different opinions on it.

One of the main problems that they said was that you could see me walking over the bridge twice and also walking around the corner, this was an editing problem but we decided not to change it as it wouldn’t have made much difference.

There were some problems that came up whilst editing, many times the format that we filmed our clips in wouldn’t work on the software we was using to edit. We then tried to convert them in to different formats like MP4 and JPEG, but they still didn’t work. We manage to solve the problem by switching editing software to Sony Vegas Pro. There are some minor glitches in the film and a small typo where studios is spelt wrong but apart from these everything ran smoothly and we created a very good and effective opening sequences.

Here is a picture of the mask that was worn during our opening sequence.

We decided to use a mask so you couldn’t see the face of Jacob and also this can be seen in other action and thriller films. The Dark Knight in this film there is a bank robbery at the start where the robbers are wearing clown masks to hide their identity’s so they can commit the crime and remain anonymous. We also did this by using the Lenin mask so you wouldn’t be able to tell who the attacker is. The picture below shows the masks they used in the bank robbery in The Dark Knight.

Our title sequence I thought worked really well as it wasn’t all at once it was split up around the film so that people didn’t have to see a long list. When I walk on scene it showed my name and the same with Jacob but his name. Also all they writing were the right size and clear for anyone to read and mostly at the bottom of the screen.

Overall I think our opening sequence as a whole went really well and was effective. Also we work really well as a group and worked as a team to get everything done and did the job we had to do at the time.

Review Video

This is a quick review video myself and Jacob have done to let you know how our opening sequence went.

Opening Sequence Analysis

Here is a video of our opening sequence analysis where we spoke as a group about our completed opening sequence but I was unable to attend during this video as I was Ill on the day.