Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or


challenge forms and conventions of real media


products from your genre?

In our media project we tend to follow a lot of the conventions of our genre because it provides the audience and us some familiarity with the genre itself. Our genre which is Social realism needs you to follow the conventions because it can dissolve the barrier between genres and make it all a bit confusing. We use mise en scene and certain camera shots to get the tension and genre across, as well as voice overs and sounds.

We tried to keep the short film as realistic as possible hence the genre Social Realism. We kept the costume to the minimum and to the conventions and didn't use any unusual or unrealistic props. One of the conventions of social realism is the way that they generally look at stereotypes for what they are, without making them unbelievable. This is shown when we decided about a costume for our main character Marcus who is a stereotypical drug dealer who lives a life of stealing and drug abusing.  When playing Marcus I used a hoody to portray the sort of person he is. We also used jeans and scruffy looking shoes to also get across the same sort of message. For props it was quite simple what we needed, all we needed to do to follow the conventions was make sure that all props were believable and could be seen in real life. We used 2 props which were the drugs (flour) which we kept in a 'jiffy bag' and used a fake plastic gun to shoot the protagonist, which we added in the sound later.

When it came to location we decided to consult some real media texts to get a feeling of what sort of location we should shoot at, we decided after seeing the real media texts and also through our discussions about what would look best, we decided we would like to have our whole short film, filmed in a rough area where its quite secluded, were there is graffiti, litter and its quite dirty. We found a perfect lane which ticked all those boxes and helped us follow the conventions.


Once we had decided on props, costume and location, all we needed to do was to get our storyboard right and make sure that our shots were complying with the conventions. By looking again at similar real media texts in our genre we took pointers as to what shots we could use when storyboarding and then shooting. We used a lot of Close ups, Point of view and Establishing shots. This provided the audience with a feel of being a part of the action whilst giving them an insight into our interpretation of what it is to be a drug dealer.

Editing was the last thing to do but was by no means the least important, because this was when we could compile our shots together into a feasible and interesting final project. In this section we did challenge the conventions a little because we used fade to white effects to show that the story had gone back in time to a flash back. Then we challenged it again by changing the lighting in the flashback to show that it was different to the current day. This challenged the conventions but I still feel it did not alienate the final product to any other social realism short film that we had previously used to help us keep to the conventions.

How effective is the combination of your main product

and ancillary texts?

When we created the film we took a still photo shot for the ancillary task, which was to create a poster. We took the photo with a similar background to the film make sure that we keep the same principles and conventions as we had in the planning, producing and the editing of the film. By taking the picture at the time it also gave the audience a detailed and accurate insight to what the films about, but at the same time keeping them interested and intrigued into what the story is about. So I think the main project and also the ancillary tie in very well because they both show the sort of film it is, and the poster creates a preview of the film itself.

The second part of the ancillary was to create a review of the film which looks like its from a magazine. Again we used the film and our poster to make it relate quite well with the whole project, we used a lot of screenshots of the film which we put onto the review to show the relation between the two. Again i think that this part of the ancillary ties in well with the rest of the project.

 

What have you learned

from your audience feedback?

When we put up our short film on youtube and also got some of our classmates to view it we found that a regular comment we got was the fact that we hadn't made it clear were the story changed from present to past. This was a problem we adressed before the final showing of the project, we changed it by entering in some text detailing the time and what point of the day it was e.g. '10:32 later that day'. we have learnt that even though we may know what is going on in the story and how we want it to look but we need to look at it from an audience point of view and question ourselves whether or not the part, effect, shot etc. makes sense and if not make sure that it is changed to make it clearer.

Initially in the research stages we used alot of web 2.0's technology to help us find the research we needed, for example we used social networking sites and also media players, we used youtube to do this because it offered both of these two things. It alowed us to look at both proffesional and other a-level created projects in our genre and get a idea of what our film should look like to a certain extent. Using this information we built up an idea of what we wanted when creating the project, in terms of shots and plot etc.