First Cut

Audience Profiles

Typical Male Audience

Picture One

I would like the typical male audience to be sociable, outgoing and up to date. This could be reflected in their appearance for example in picture one their fashion and style is ideal for our typical male audience because if they are up to date with their fashion then they are with their technology and that's what we are aiming for with our audience because its important our film trailer has a buzz created about it via viral marketing, YouTube etc...

Typical Female Audience

Picture Two

More or less the same with our female audience, I would like young females that keep up to date with their fashion for the same reasons, however, I want our female audience to be people who look up to famous figures such as Lana Del Ray and Miley Cyrus purely because these celebrities are slightly more adventurous and outspoken and if we aim to target these audiences then there is a slight chance of these celebrities tweeting about the film to get more publicity.

Target Audience

My target audience for my film trailer 'Valerie' will be of the young audience that are interested in music, socialising and fashion because they are the age group that have the disposable income to buy films or go socialising at the cinema. I would put them at C2 and potentially at C1 because they have junior managerial jobs which means that they don’t have as much responsibility as a B grade and therefore have more free time to socialise.

The genre of our film trailer is social realist and therefore will be aimed to intrigue and draw people of high social class in as they would want to know more about how others that aren't as privileged live.

The Inbetweeners

We will be aiming our film trailer at typical inner city and suburban city areas as although these might not have as much disposable income they are young adults that are the most socially active on networks such as Facebook, Twitter etc.. where they will share the film trailer and by viral marketing will create more of a buzz for our film.

Production Update : Editing

Thursday 17th October, In todays lesson we edited our shots taken of Valerie and Tyler together aswell as the dancing shots of Holly around her Uncle. The shots taken of Holly dancing around Dan were very light and you could see shadows of ornaments alll around and therefore we added effects such as 'ghosting' on Premier to darken the feel as this was a dark part of Valerie's life. We played around with saturations, highlighting and cooling tools in  order to get the dark feel we wanted. We also edited the ambience sound and diologue of Valerie and Tyler meeting for the first time because there was alot of wind sound causing the noise to sound bad.

Production Update: Filming

Monday 14th October, Today we filmed with both our main characters from the times of 9am-12pm which meant that we had some important shots to get done as it's difficult to get both our characters availability at the same time. I filmed shots of Valerie dancing seductively around her uncle in order to give a disturbing vibe out the the audience that there is not a normal loving relationship between Valerie and her uncle. We also filmed shots of Valerie's temper towards Tyler which were important as these were the shots intended to leave the trailer on a cliffhanger of romance. Are they going to end up together or not? Dan also filmed some shots of when Valerie and Tyler first met, we decided to film these shots by a misty river on a miserable day to give the trailer a feel of the film. Important shots of Valerie and Tyler with their more happy moments were filmed in meadows of them laughing and joking also.

 
We experienced filming from difficult angles where there was a lack of space which we found difficult however we over come this by using the zoom tool on the camera.

Production Update : Editing

Tuesday 8th October 2013

In today's lesson myself and Dan spent two hours editing the shots that we filmed in Dobbs Weir on Thursday 3rd October. We added in titles to some shots to make our production look more professional and also added in some effects to boost the effectiveness of the shots. Dan used YouTube tutorials on how to create a darkened eye effect which we made more noticeable in our editing by darkening the image.

We also introduced our main song theme which is Back To Black by Andre 3000 and Beyonce from the Great Gatsby soundtrack. We decided to add parts of this song into our trailer because it's got a dark melody and fast tempo which reflects Valerie's life experiences.

 

Production Update : Filming

Thursday 3rd October we decided to film shots which involved Dan acting as an angry man which is in connection with Valerie. Went went to the Dobbs Weir location of the river and filmed shots of Dan searching for Valerie and calling for her in a creepy voice. We filmed a handheld shot of Dan's point of view in the woods and also some extreme close ups of Dan expressing anger for the camera. 

Production Update : Editing

Tuesday 1st October we edited the shots we took of Holly previously. We added in effects called 'Ghosting' in some shots of Holly when she is taking the drugs to give the audience more of a feel for what she is experiencing. We changed the speed of some shots to make them more fast paced and create the whole 'trailer feel'.

Production Update: Filming

Thursday 26th September we filmed shots at Dan's house which is a typical suburban house. We filmed shots of Holly from various different angles so that we could pick and choose which suited our trailer most. We used props such as vodka bottles, scattered tobacco, credit cards, loose change and white sugar crushed up to form lines on the table in order for it to look like class A drugs. We smudged Holly's make-up to make it look as if she doesn't take much pride in her appearance.

We also filmed shots of Holly coming into contact with Dan (the angry uncle whom gives the impression to the audience he is abusing her sexually, physically and mentally) and when she opens the door she is greeted with vulgar language which indicates the sort of environment she lives in.

Locations

   This shot is from Dobbs Weir river where we will film some shots of the angry man who is trying to find Valerie. We used this location because it reflects our genre of social realism because of the electricity towers, warehouses etc... It shows the audience our film is set in the suburbs of London where urban meets rural.

We also chose to film some shots next to the river because of the atmosphere around rivers and on a dark and dingy day we want to give the audience a sense of foreboding. We will use pathetic fallacy to gain the atmosphere in our shots.

Characters

Dan is an important character in our production as we want to have a scary/disturbing side to our production and therefore we decided to create a character which has an alcohol addiction and is supposedly violent. We have used make-up to give Dan a bruised eye socket which hopefully leads the audiences imagination into thinking that this man is capable of anything.






Holly is the actor in our production. She plays the main character, Valerie. We chose Holly because of her distinguishing features such as her red hair, freckly skin and also because her ability to perform well and professionally without wasting time. Holly is also a talented dancer and we hope to incorporate her dancing skills into our production.

Billy plays the role of Tyler, Valerie's soul mate. We want Tyler's personality to come across as loving, gentle and understanding of Valerie's situation. In our production we want to have shots of Tyler with Valerie and dialogue of deep emotion. 

Analysis of Social Realist Trailers

Fish Tank

 I have taken inspiration from the film ‘Fish Tank’ which was directed and written by Andrea Arnold, released on 11 September 2009 and produced by BBC Films and the UK Film Council. The reason in which our trailer will be similar to Fish Tank’s is because the genre is the same, Social Realist, and because of this we will have similar props e.g. cups of tea and the string bag), hair and make-up, costume, dull lighting, actor’s performance and settings(for example in Fish Tank they filmed in Barking, London). As you can see in the print screen above the setting is exactly what we aim for in our film trailer ‘Valerie’.

There are other aspects of Fish Tank that inspires our film trailer, for example, the nominations and awards they have won we would have those sorts of nominations on our film trailer because the audience know what sort of categories they like and we want to attract the same audience as Fish Tank (e.g indie).

Also, the Fish Tank Trailer has a pattern of fast flowing shots of different aspects of ‘Mia’ the main characters life. How our trailer will be different to Fish Tank’s trailer is that gradually over the shots you see Valerie’s life improving slightly since she’s met a nice young man but will also leave on a cliff hanger, a common convention of film trailers, to create suspense.











I also took inspiration from Series Two of Skins created by  Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain and run on 11 February 2008. I chose Skins because of the settings and characters. The settings in skins go from one extreme with shots of a council house estate to very expensive posh houses which creates a picture of the reality of UK's society.

The characters in Skins are around the same age as Valerie and so we took note of some of the shots skins have of how the characters look and are dressed and we will be shooting similar shots.

The last media text that I took inspiration from was London to Brighton because of the camera angles they captured of the characters

Costuming

For our main character, Valerie, we have decided that in the shots before she meets Tyler she will be dressed in simple, unflattering clothing in order to represent that she is from a lower class family that lives on a low income and have very little disposable income to buy brand new fashionable clothing.

Inspiration taken from FishTank and Skins.

However, throughout the trailer Valerie starts to look more presentable since she's meet Tyler and therefore her costuming will become more appropriate and fashionable.

Tyler's costuming will be more common however trendy wearing such things as jeans, plain tops and trainers. This will be to represent that he is from a well supported family background.

Extra's such as the boys hanging around in social housing estates will wear tracksuit bottoms and hoodies, to conform to the social stereotypes of 'chavs'. We want to include these extra characters because it will give the audience a sense of what foul play Valerie has to deal with in her day to day life compared with Tyler.

Production Schedules

To help Daniel and I keep on track of what filming and editing needs to be done we have created a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel which has the four months in which we are allocated to do our production and we have colour coordinated carefully to best plan our time. This will help us meet deadlines which are crucial for big movie makers in order to keep the budget down.
The dates in Green are filming days, blue are editing days, yellow is emergency re-shooting time and the red dates are the first cut and final cut deadlines.

Our production schedule

Storyboard and Animatic

Here is our storyboard, we created a storyboard for our film trailer to give us some idea about what sort of shots we are going to have and also to help us prepare for the actual filming.

We also created an Animatic to give us more of an idea about timing. This is all preparation to make sure we get all measures right first time as in reality film makers don't get a second chance because of mistakes and mistakes mean a tighter budget that might affect the quality of the film.

Production Planning

Me and Dan's film trailer idea for the storyline was about a vulnerable young girl called Valerie in her teen years whom is a victim of domestic, drug and alcohol abuse. We wanted fast flowing shots of the 'darker' moments in her life and gradually as she falls in love the shots become of Valerie starting to change until she realises what impact she has on the man who has helped her to recuperate her life. We finish the shots on a dramatic cliff hanger where the audience don't know whether Valerie and her lover will end up together.

We decided to present our ideas in a presentation to show to our class so that they can give us constructive criticism and, if we have missed any, they can spot any limitations we might have.

Feedback from our presentation:

The class pointed out to us that we had two genre's going on. Rom com or Social Realist. We decided on social realist because of the main character's challenged background. They also pointed out how we going to pull off the drug addiction, violence etc... We responded that we didn't want to include any actual violence in our scenes as it would be very tricky to pull off the actor's performance however to represent violence we will use other methods such as make-up and hair to suggest Valerie has a black eye. Classmates also suggested that we should have some rainy shots and use scripting instead of a voice over.

Wiley 'Heatwave' Music Video

This is our version of Wiley's 'Heatwave'. We lost a few shots through uploading them however we eventually made the music video look better through the editing and repeating some shots.

Knebworth House

As preparation for the second year of Media Studies we had to take a trip to Knebworth House to film a summertime music video. My team included Me, Dan, Ellie and Mollie and we chose to create a music video to 'Heatwave' by Wiley as it's a summertime song. Our main aims were to practise lip syncing shots and some shots with dance choreography.

 Most shots we were very happy given we only had an hour to shoot at the Knebworth House and then a second hour at the park where it rained the whole duration of the time we were there. Which highlighted for us the risks of filming a summertime music video in England and also taught of the harsh deadlines we might come across in our final production. 

Famous films such as The Kings Speech, St Trinians 2, Nanny McPhee, Batman the Movie, even TV programmes such as Eastenders and Midsomer Murders have filmed at Knebworth House.

FINAL CUT!!

Reprisal's Final Cut

Q7: What do you feel you have learnt in the progression from the preliminary exercise to the full product?

Look back at the preliminary exercise we did at the start of the year I think I have progressed significantly in skills such as:

· Scripting

· Planning

· Working with others

· Photographic Ability

· Editing Skills

At the start of the preliminary exercise I didn't have very many skills in any of these areas as Media was a new subject to me so my skills especially in editing skills have improved enormously. I think that I have learnt the most skills in editing and team management as they were my designated roles for the group and I felt most passionately about them because I am a perfectionist and I knew that I wouldn't submit the production unless it was as good as it could get. I learnt specific skills such as cutting for match on action which was crucial to giving our final cut the professional look. I learnt many editing skills, for example, how to change a shot to black and white in Premiere. We did this because the shot was a point of view shot from the mysterious man’s point of view and because of his disguise (the tights over his head to disguise his facial features) covers his eyes and therefore the audience would get a feel for what everything looks like in his perspective.

Planning is one of my strong points and therefore this production has just developed my skills in planning. One of the ways in which we did this is by creating a storyboard. By doing this we were able to script what we wanted the actress and actor to say. This also helped us to plan filming around the storyboard.

My Team working towards the Final Cut

Working with others was an enormous part of the post-production stage. We had many fallings out over the ideas for production and then more throughout the actually production stage. However, because we all had to pull through to get the project done to the deadline we decided that some things weren’t worth arguing about and that we should over film all our ideas and then when it comes to editing we decide which shots look best and that gave us a variety of shots to choose from if the original ideas didn’t work. Furthermore, this all developed our editing skills as we had to cut tightly to a time limit of 2 minutes which was difficult because the amount of additional shots we had to consider.

Q6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During the construction of our media product we used many nessesary modern technologies, for example before the filming we conducted alot of research and planning on what we wanted to base our film and even more importantly our opening on. For this we used various search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. We learnt that without these search engines we wouldnt have been aware of the many ways we could create even more tension and atmosphere in our production such as when we used the idea of repeating the sound of the news report saying 'and the killers still out there' this we found from one of the websites we found on google.

 

 

 

The most useful piece of technology we used in the production  and post-production process was Premier Pro Version 6. This software allowed us to:

• Edit all of our shots including sound and special effects
• Taking out bad shots and importing the reshoots back in
• Time stretch the shots making the shots more dramatic
• Create titles to play over the shots

Premier was vital in helping us to create a sense of tension and atmosphere within our production and for us was the most important factor as otherwise our production would have no purpose or effect. We used specific eiditn skills such as exponential fade when our victim walked out the room we didnt just want the sound of the news report in the background to cut out so we faded it out until she got to the top of the stairs.

 

Blogger has contributed massively in our production as we have been able to log everything to do with the production onto blogger and analysis where we have made mistakes and where we need to improve and also what we have done well. Blogger is an easy way of accessing our work from both teacher and student’s point of view and the simplicity of it has helped us to be creative in however we wanted to be.

 

Throughout the construction of the film opening I have constantly been using my iPhone in every film shoot for communication, evidence for filming by photos and also in researching different sounds on YouTube. Smart phones are very useful technologies as they are portable and efficient which makes the process of production faster, especially saving time texting or skyping ideas or changes to Mollie and Dan.

Q5 : How did you attract/ address you audience

The setting attracts our target audience of young adults as it is set in a house which looks to be from a normal middle-classed family on a typical suburban estate. This would come under the social interaction section of the Uses and Gratifications Theory as we set our target audience to be of the standard middle class typically from the suburbs. This attracts the target audience as they can identify with the young girl and connect to what she is doing and feeling. 

 

Our example of Social Interaction

As our film is of the genre mystery/horror we want the audience to feel some sort of emotional appeal towards the young girl babysitting and therefore have included scary tones to the ambiance sound which will create tension between the target audience and the young girl and hopefully make them want to see what happens to the girl in the rest of the film. This relates to the Entertainment section of the Uses and Gratifications Theory.

 

 

 

One way in which we wanted to attract our audience's attention was through the titles. We deliberately made them stand out, bold and eye catching. The font was downloaded off of www.fontspace.com/category/scary and imported onto Premier to create the titles and then adjust them to where we wanted them to be placed onto the frames.

Q4 : Who would be the audience for your product?

The main audience we wanted to attract to our media product would be teenagers or young adults of around the ages 15 to mid 30's. This is because many of the current or recent horror/mystery films in cinemas are mostly seen by young adults in couples or within groups of girls or boys.

We thought to aim the film at both females and males as the film is not of a genre where it is mainly interesting for females, for example Mamma Mia and therefore both will find the storyline interesting.

I should think our films will be targeted at the middle class citizens; this is because it will be affordable for them in cinemas and also on DVD. Also, as a teenager myself I know that people of my age are starting to drive and have solid jobs which can pay for things like cars, smartphones etc.. which are a great way of getting publicity for our film. Also, young people will be excited at the all the new accsessable places they can go and a cinema is one place they can take their friends as say a celebration for passing. 

Every minute of everyday 100,000 tweets, 684,478 pieces of content on facebook and 3600 photos on instagram are shared over the internet. The majority of content shared on the worldwide internet is published by young people as they are more connected in the modern world and this is mainly why we have chosen the younger generation as our film will be talked about by many more people and this may be seen by other young people which will hopefully encourage them to go to the cinema to watch Reprisal.

 The victim in the film is a young girl of a middle class background which means the middle class can relate to the victim in the storyline.



5 Daughters BBC Programme

Our audience is aimed at the type of people that would watch other mystery/horror TV Dramas. For Example, the TV show where we got our inspiration for the background news report from 'Five Duaghters' on BBC which was a true the true story of the five girls who were murdered by a serial killer called Steve Wright. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipswich_serial_murders

Our audience won’t need to be the brightest of people however they will need to have some educational background and standard knowledge of basic English to be able to enjoy the film.

Q3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

 

It is very important in film distribution that you pick the right company to distribute your film, in our case we were looking for a distribution company that has already got a good reputation for distributing films of the horror/mystery genre. For example, Lionsgate or Twisted Pictures would both be first in line to distribute our media product for the pure reason that these companies have sufficient investors behind them which means they are a reliable distribution company and also because of their track record for distributing previous horror/mystery films such as for Lionsgate they have recently released Texas Chainsaw which is being viewed in cinemas in the UK and the USA which opens up the potential audience to a larger population over in America which means our profits would more than certainly be increased. 

However, we as a group we decided to use Twisted Pictures Distribution Company to feature in our film opening as the main film distribution company as we think Twisted Pictures appeals more to a young audience of older teenagers as well as adults of up to around their 30's. The Unrated Director's Cut was released on January 22, 2008 in America and March 3, 2008 in the UK, on DVD and Blu-ray which is exactly the release strategy our group were going for, just before Christmas when it’s the optimum time to buy the DVD for our target audiences Christmas presents.

Q2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?



Our Georgie Holtby playing the victim



Drew Barrymore starring in Scream when the phone rings










In our media product we represent the social group of teenagers. We do this by having a typical teenage girl sitting in on a weekend night and babysitting a younger sibling. We used props such as a mobile phone and the television to emphasise the typically social activities of a teenagers as teenagers in this day and age usually always have their mobile phones on them. We decided to use a young adult/teenager to play the victim as teenagers are usually the most vulnerable and at danger then some of the other social groups we could have picked for this part. The inspiriation for his social group came from the film 'Scream' where Drew Barrymore plays a role of a typical teenager sitting a night in when her phone rings however in our media product we have challenged the stereotype of the teenage girl being glamorous and sexy as the costume, hair and make-up of our actor is used to show shes a 'plain-Jane' sort of teenager and we wanted this image for our actor to emphasis the innocence of the victim.

Q1: In what ways our media product uses, develops or challenges forms and convention of real media products?

EVALUATION!

Paranormal Activity Handheld Shot

One of our handheld shots

One way in which we found our production uses the forms and conventions of a film with the horror/mystery genre is that we included a handheld shot of the mysterious man walking up the stairs and into the bathroom. The handheld shot in a horror film is usually used to create tension and atmosphere and that’s why we have decided to include it. It also helps create a sense of foreboding. One real media product that we can compare our handheld shots to is 'Paranormal Activity', this is because paranormal activity is film full of a families own footage of the mysterious happenings in the house and therefore filled with handheld shots which we can compare to our handheld shots.

Scream Costuming

Our Costuming of the Mysterious Man

We found by looking at the Mise En Scene that our costumes were conventional and challenging to the normal forms of a horror film. This is because we have one scene where the babysitting girl wears quite casual clothes with leggings and a baggy top and typically what you’d expect in a horror film if someone is going about their daily lives however in the second scene the girl is obviously wearing sportswear such as trainers, tight top, leggings etc... As she is jogging and you wouldn’t usually see this sort of scene and therefore costume in a typical horror film. Also, the mysterious man is dressed all in black with his face covered which uses the conventions of a film of our genre such as in the film 'Scream' the man that nobody knows the identity of is covered with a mask and the one of the victims is at home dressed in her causal/everyday clothes.

The last thing we evaluated in detail was the sound and in particular dialogue. We thought the dialogue challenge the normal conventions of a horror film as throughout the whole opening we have virtually no dialogue and this was done purposefully. The reason why this was done on purpose was because we were fully aware of the fact we aren’t very good actors within our group and therefore didn’t want to risk the quality of actors performance. The only times we have dialogue is the screaming in the bathroom which works well and at the end of the running scene when the girl casually meets her mate however we do not like this element of our opening and plan to cut that scene out. 'Sinister' is a film that we believe has challenged the convention of dialogue as there is lack of flowing dialogue.

We believe that for our film opening it would be quite risky as a horror/mystery for us to challenge too many conventions and forms of a horror film as if we did then the film would lose impact of tension and atmosphere. This is why most of the elements in our film opening have used the popular conventions such as handheld shots, creepy music, a news report in background sound and a title sequence that fits into the film genre.