Question 1

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

To answer this question, I have separated it into 4 sections: genre, narrative structure, form, and style.
Genre:
A key part of constructing a particular genre is creating characters that are believable and suit that genre. We researched a lot about characters (particularly females) in action films.

• This is a venn diagram of typical characteristics of characters in action movies. The intersection is the traits possessed by the characters in 26 that we created.

• Normally action films have themes of good vs. evil, defying authority, morality and fighting for survival.
• There is normally strong iconography, such as guns, the fact that action films are normally set in towns or major cities (i.e. London, New York, etc.). The heroes often wear dark clothing (to be inconspicuous) and have high key lighting on the protagonist to show they are the "good guys"

Narrative structure:

Form & style:

Examples of titles in our film that we talk about in our soundcloud voiceover: 

Summary:

• Our film conformed to certain genre conventions, such as form and style of action films.
• However we did go against some genre conventions like characters, because generally action films have male protagonists but we decided to have 3 female protagonists of varying ethnicities.
• Our opening does conform to the typical narrative structure (as shown in the Prezi) but our whole film would challenge that convention because the disruption happens before the film starts.
• Overall, our film does follow some forms and conventions of the action film genre but it also challenges them.

Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

For our film, we decided to have 3 female protagonists, 2 of which were Asian. We researched the representation of Asian females in film, and this is my interpretation of our findings.

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We wanted to challenge these stereotypes to increase the diversity of representation in action films, as this is a very heavily male dominated genre. Even within the film industry, there are not as many women who have directed action films as there are men, so we wanted to make more of a balance, and more equality. We think that our film will appeal to a range of audiences, female and male, because of the universal themes such as triumphing over adversity and good vs. evil, and the interesting storyline. We want women to read our representations as showing that female characters are just as complex as male characters, and can be beautiful and strong and intelligent, and those characteristics are not mutually exclusive. Their femininity does not limit their ability to be intelligent or fighters. Echo is very ruthless, which is not a typically feminine trait, but that does not make her any less of a woman.

However, outside of Hollywood, British Asian female representations in UK film making has been hugely successful in recent years, with films such as Slumdog Millionaire, Bend It Like Beckham, and East is East. However, action films are normally made by Hollywood, so we took a successful representation of British audience so it would have a national appeal, and applied it to a globally successful genre, to appeal to a large audience.

Statistics taken from It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2011 by Martha M. Lauzen, Ph.D.

Character inspirations (who aren't sexualised): 

Summary:

• There is only a small percentage of female protagonists in film, even less are action heroes and even less are Asian in Hollywood, so we decided to represent those social groups in our film.
• A lot of female action heroines are sexualised, which we did not want.
• We wanted to represent a wide range of female personalities (more accurate representation of women).
• We also wanted to not stereotype our Asian characters (more accurate representation of modern London).

Question 3

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

Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

We did a lot of research into our audiences to find out how we could tailor our film to appeal to them, as they are the audiences that go to the cinema the most often.

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Our representations of Asian women are devised to reach wider audiences, such as British Asian and Asian girls, like other successful British Asian films with strong female characters, like Lalita in Bride & Prejudice, Jesminder in Bend It Like Beckham and Roopi in It's A Wonderful Afterlife.

Summary:

• Action films are very popular with this audience
• Our film has similar themes to film extremely successful with this audience (e.g. The Hunger Games, Charlie's Angels).

Question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

Applying the theory that we learnt about uses and gratifications, we made these decisions to appeal to our audience:

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We tried to include all of these elements in our film to target our audiences, but our opening was very female heavy, and the only male in it was disposed of very quickly. With hindsight, I would maybe have extended our male character's role, or introduced another. We also only had one action sequence, which was very simple and not very thrilling, so with more time to work on our piece, I feel as though we could have had a longer and more extensive fight scene. Our characters were also introduced very briefly and the audience might not be sure if the characters are good or bad, so I feel as though our characters could have been developed further. However,  I feel that due to the time constraints in the brief, we were unable to address all of these points in the opening, but would have in the rest of the film.

Question 6

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

During this project, we used a variety of technologies to develop and construct our film opening. Here are the examples of what we used:

Hardware used:

• Tripod - we used the tripod to film high angle shots and panning across all 3 of us in the 3rd last shot. The tripod helped us get stable shots and we were able to film in any space that we wanted to.
• Lighting - we used lights from the Seward Studio, because wanted it to look high key but also get a sense that this is taking place at night, shooting after 5:30 until 10, getting a dangerous & ominous look to our film. 

Software used:

• Edited our final film using Adobe Premiere Pro, which was easy to use. Premiere Pro is fast, precise, and the end product was exactly what we aimed for.
• Using Adobe After Effects to get the security camera effect following a YouTube tutorial, edited the screen to make it look like the guard was watching the security camera: 

• Grading - wanted to have a lot of contrast between our dark clothing and the white of the walls, making the audience question who we were, whether or not we were "good" or "bad", etc. This was extremely easy with the technology that we had.
• Hindsight: would have changed the lighting at the actual shoot so there isn't a harsh concentration of light reflecting off the door, so it would be easier to correct later.
• I now know how to make footage look like it is security camera footage, how to colour grade our footage to make it look darker and give it the right ambience for our film.
• Advice: plan the action sequence thoroughly, if the actors are not already fighting experts, make the action sequence simple unless you have a lot of time to train them.
• Advantages of technology: After Effects did make the footage look a lot like security camera footage but it took a lot of time to render, and was not extremely easy to use. Camera footage was slightly grainy but is probably more to do with us not lighting the shots correctly.

Social networking:

• We had a group on Facebook, where we would post our research and planning documents: 

• We also had a message thread to organise our shoots, change our film opening or to tell the other group members quickly about any ideas that we may have had:

• This was incredibly beneficial to us as it was quick and easy to contact people, and we had a log of everything we had discussed so we could look over it if necessary.

The technology that we used hugely impacted our film, as we would not have been able to achieve as much as we did without it. With the time constraints that we had, it was very important that our project was finished quickly and any changes that we made could be executed in a short amount of time, and Premiere Pro made that possible.  

Question 7

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

Preliminary exercise brief: "Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule."

Our preliminary task was very important because we have to worry about the storyline a much, so we got to perfect our application of continuity techniques. The techniques we focused on the most were:

• Match on action:

• 180 degree rule and shot reverse shot:

Main task brief: the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes. All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source.

We filmed our opening in the Seward Studio in school, because it the right facilities and look for our film. To film here, we had to get permission and book the studio. This caused lighting problems because we were very restricted to when we could film in the evening/night. 

Whilst editing and filming, we decided to make a lot of script and shot changes to improve the flow of our opening, so our storyboard is very different to our final product.

Our animatic was extremely helpful, as we saw what our final product could look like, and we were able to change any dialogue that we thought would not sound right or change the order of shots or anything like that, so it reduced the amount of changes we would have to make later on. It reduced the shooting time, so we did not have to reshoot as much, which meant that we had more time to focus on the look of our final piece.

At our first practice shoot, we mostly spent time focusing on pictures for our animatic, which in hindsight we should not have focused on as much, and instead focused on trying to achieve the right lighting for our opening, as this caused a lot of problems later. When it came to our actual shoots, we would focus far too much on each individual shot so we did not have time to shoot everything at once, which is one of the reasons we had to have several reshoots. Another is that we realised that we did not have enough master shots, which was an essential continuity technique that we did not consider as much as other continuity techniques. Some elements of our shoot we planned extremely well, like our shoot schedule, which was important because of making sure that the extra actor could leave as soon as his parts were finished, and whenever we were not in shot, we could film and in our re-shoot we had we planned out exactly what shots we needed re-shoot beforehand.

All of the members of our group had used Adobe Premiere Pro before, so editing was fairly easy. Most of the trouble that we had in post-production was due to lighting and lack of footage, but these problems were solved with re-shoots and Adobe After Effects. We did also have a problem with our lack of master shots in our preliminary task, but did not have a chance to re-shoot, and because we did not need to focus on lighting in our preliminary task, these things we learnt how to fix for the first time during the making of our film opening. We also re-ordered shots very often to make certain things not look like jump cuts and get rid of small continuity errors, and had sound bridges to make our sequence have a seamless narrative.

Audience feedback video:

Our audience feedback taught me a lot about our project, like what could have been improved and what worked particularly well. From this, I learnt that our secondary and core audience would both want to watch the rest of our film because they wanted to know what happens afterwards, which is what we aimed for.

Mila, Shobnam and I are all friends, so in the pre-production of our film opening, we were able to discuss and adapt our idea very easily. We did, however, have problems with communication, which made our planning a lot harder, and the amount of work that we did individually was not even. We then learnt the importance of keeping in touch with our group and communicating any problems that we had. Overall, I am very pleased with the final product and our group in general.