Evaluation Activity 2 - How does your media product represent particular social group?

How does your media product represent particular social group?      


                   
This is the main character who is called Aran (the antagonist). I believe that he can be compared with Bruce Willis as they both don't speak much and are main characters. Moreover they both let their actions do the talking. This is identified with Aran because he only had to say three bits of dialogue throughout the whole movie.
   Their costume is also pretty similar as he normally just wears casual clothes which is similar to Aran to show their relevance to society. There is the odd movie where he does much formal roles such as RED (2010) where he is a retired lieutenant but at the beginning of the movie, he is dressed casually.
    Their role in the movie is also very similar in which they got to kill other people even if there is no justification and then they can just move on to the next target. This is shown in our film by that letter that Aran received with a picture of his next target which was actually me.

               


One way they both differ though is the genre which can be identified through the use of props. In all Bruce Willis movies, he tends to have a number of guns as weapons which is something that I have identified to be linked with Action or American Action movies. Whereas Arans main prop is a knife which is linked with the urban/action genre. This product is also used in similar films such as the ending of Kidulthood. A film that shows a lot of guns being used is the Die hard series where they went through an unfathomable amount of guns.

  Although they are similar movies and similar actors, the target audience may be different because Bruce Willis is a much older gentleman appealing to the older audiences whereas Aran is younger and attempts to appeal to the younger audience. In hindsight, maybe it wasn't a great idea to set Arans character around Bruce Willis but it was a risk worth taking as he is a well respected actor.

Evaluation of sound - Evaluation 1

  I will now evaluate the use of sound in  our opening two minutes. Sound is split up in a number of ways in media studies:

    Firstly, we have Diegetic Sound  which is sound that the actors can hear as well as the audience. An example in our opening two minutes could be when Aran tells Tom to stay down in the alleyway.
    The opposite to this is Non Diegetic Sound which is audio that only the audience can hear and the actors won't be able to hear. Again using our film for an example; the audience can hear what is supposedly Toms heartbeats when he is running but I doubt that he can hear his own heartbeat so that is an example of non-diegetic sound.

One strength of our sound is that our music was used very effectively and helped dictate the pace of the video. An example of this is the next day when there is a fast paced tempo showing that Aran is in a rush or was in a rush because he just killed someone but it gradually slowed down showing the start of a new chapter.
   One weakness of the use of sound in our opening two minutes is that we didn't block background sound well enough and because of this, Arans dialogue was rather distorted. This applied especially in the next day when Aran was overlooking the M25 as his dialogue was blocked off by the cars on the motorway. This tells me that we were focusing too much on the music and not enough on the dialogue.
   Another strength of the use of our sound again was the production of our music. For this, I believe we have Mohamad to thank. This is because he knew what music he wanted and where. He worked extremely hard in order to get the correct sound and so he used three different sound applications to get what he thought would suit the specific areas of the film. These applications were Traktor 2, MP3 Direct Cut and Mix Meister Fusion 7.

Traktor 2

Mix Meister 7

     

MP3 Direct Cut

    Overall, I believe that the use of sound in our overall video was excellent and helped the movie make more sense. This was particularly thanks to the non-diegetic aspect and Mohamads Ideas. Despite this, I believe that the distortion of Arans voice was a huge shame but fortunately there was only three bits of dialogue within the whole opening two minutes so it didn't affect the video as much as it could have done.

Here are some screenshots of the sound editing:

                                   
                                    

Film Evaluation- Storyboard

 In this post of my evaluation, I will look at our storyboard as opposed to the real filming and seed whether both are similar and whether our storyboard was successful.
   The first problem with the storyboard is that I was supposed to be the character who dies but we changed that to Tom who preferred filming so I had to do the editing.

                              
                              
This shot was very similar to the one we planned but the costume was different and the reason behind this shot was different but it was still at one persons point of view  The dialogue is very much similar but instead of footsteps, there are heartbeats.




We completely went against this description but but we still used the idea that the camera should be behind the actors shoulder.




This part of the storyboard is right where I die (which is replaced by Tom) and the title comes in.

   One strength of the storyboard was that it helped us gain a vague idea of what our movie was going to be about. This helped things to be easier at the filming stage Moreover it gave us a good idea of what film shots to implement. As we had a good foundation which was the storyboard, everything was a bit easier than it could have been.

   Despite this, our storyboard had a lot of flaws. The three picture comparisons above are the only thing you can compare between the storyboard and the actual film. This shows that a lot of things have changed since the production of the storyboard. Moreover the comparisons above are not 100% the same. For example the dialogue will be completely different when the actual shot may be similar.
   Another problem was obviously the fact that I was supposed to be the victim in the storyboard which wasn't the case when it came to filming.

   My conclusion is that although my storyboard was rather helpful when we were thinking of an idea, we didn't really follow it and we were filming through trial and error rather than looking at the storyboard. Moreover, the whole plot changed which would have affected the relevance of the storyboard as a whole. This is probably the main reason why the storyboard wasn't as useful as it could have been. Many things we had done was improvised on the day which in hindsight tells me a number of things; firstly, we were not too confident in the filming and secondly we still didn't have a sure idea of what we were going to do. Fortunately, we were quite pleased with the video but I believe that the storyboard didn't play a big part in this.

Our chosen Film production company - Revolver Entertainment

                             
This is the film production company that we have chosen. Only recently, it has gone into administration but was known as a medium sized film production company specializing in the production of many English movies but more specifically; urban movies.
    Such movies that they have produced are

This itself is an urban action movie that goes against certain products that an action movie must have such as the main character is a girl who kills people.

Here is a fairly famous British action movie.

As you can see, Revolver produces a lot of action movies and so it is perfect for our movie.                                                    
                                         

Film Tiltle and Font Evaluation Activity 1

     After a long time of thinking, we have finally thought of a name. We have already finished the filming and almost finished the editing so we were running out of time but we have decided to call it the pursuer. It was me who thought of the pursuit but that had already been taken and then Mohamad said the pursuer which we all believe goes hand in hand with the story line. Aran's character is very much like a pursuer in the opening two minutes which shows a picture of his next target with a money reward which is actually me. At first I thought that having the word "the" in a title of a movie may not be the best idea but the pursuer is perfect for our movie so I'm not too worried.
    Although I have done a blog on font; I done it at a time where we didn't know the title and so it was very difficult to decide what font we were going to use but we have decided to use a bold tahoma style with a chrome finish which shows that this person is going to kill people but is professional in the way he does his business.
                   

Here is a screenshot of our title with the bold font titled The Pursuer.

This was the final chosen font of our movie but below are some of the examples we were contemplating:

                                                             

  We chose a rather plain title so that the transition would be much easier and effective to the next day whereas the fonts above are too dramatic for us even though the one in the top may have looked the best.                        

How My Research Has Impacted The Decisions I Have Made

My research has been very helpful with the development and decisions that I had made in the opening two minutes of the movie for the following reasons:

1) Audience Profiling
    I have done 5 different blogs on audience profiling with a similar genre and it helped me in a number of ways.Firstly it helped my group and I decide what age rating would be appropriate for our movie as similar films such as Hot Fuzz and Green Street had ratings of 15 and 18 but all the others also had a rating of 15. This helped us make the decision that our movie will be a 15 rated movie.
   Another thing that audience profiling has helped me with is to find what my target genre was going to be and the film that helped me the most with this is Green Street. This is because I believe that our movie would best resemble Green Street in the sense that there won't be any female characters. The majority gender that watched this movie was male so we knew that our target gender would be mainly male as we also wouldn't have a female character. If the movie were to be longer than the opening two minutes, we would probably have a female character but one wasn't really necessary for this opening scene as it will be an action scene.
   A final thing that I have identified from my audience profiling is that all classes would be interested in watching my movie which I was rather surprised about. I will use Green street as an example again. This is a movie that I personally won't associate wit the upper class but the upper class watched it as much as the middle and lower classes.

2) Opening 2 minute annotation.
   I have done about 7 blogs annotating the opening two minutes of other movies. It has helped me understand what should be included in the opening two minutes of a movie. For example Hot Fuzz would open via giving an introduction of the main character; Sergent Nicholas Angel played by Simon Pegg so this piece of research effectively helped me gain some ideas about my movie way back in September.
    Something else this has helped me with is to identify different camera angles, movements and mise-en-sine. From these opening two minutes, I could see different camera shots being used in practise and also films abiding to certain rules such as the 180 degree rule.

3) Film Certificate Research
   What I found from this is reassurance that my the certificate rating for my movie should be 15 as my movie would include moderate language but it does involve an action scene which includes a knife.

                  

4) Prelimination Task
     This was helpful to me mainly because of the experience of filming. Moreover it showed us who was a good actor and what shot types should be required and where.

5) The Storyboard

The storyboard and the production of the storyboard was very helpful in the making of our actual movie as it gave us an idea of what to do. In my evaluation, I will look into points of comparison between our storyboard and finished project.










































 v
                                      

Cast/Actors

Cast

This is Me

Not much information is given to the audience about me and you don't see me directly but see me in a picture that Aran (the main character) is holding in his hand. This is the actual picture that Aran will hold in his hand on the next morning but it will be in black and white to give it more emphasism. I will be the next target for Aran. The reason I was good for this specific role is because it was just a picture and I tend to get out of character whilst filming so I didn't mind just a picture of me being taken. This was why the preliminary task was so important.



This is Aran. He is the main character; The Pursuer. Although he is the main character, he works under the authority of a boss who doesn't have to be seen in the opening two minutes. Arans job is to hunt people down and kill them. The reason Aran is perfect for the role is because he is the biggest and more importantly, , he can stay in role all the time which we found out in our preliminary task.



 

The final cast member is tom. We have chosen him to be the victim. The reason being is because he is the smallest height wise and so this builds prevelance on Aran who we are trying to show to be the main character.

Scripting

As our film is of an Action genre and the opening two minutes consists of an action scene, we have no need to include much dialogue as we wanted to show that it was fast paced and I believe that dialoge would slow down the pace of the movie as it is a chase scene.


Aran: Stay on your fucking knees
    This will be when Aran catches up with Tom and punches him to the ground. This shows that he is strong. 

Aran: Job done.
This is when Aran has killed Tom and confirms that he has killed him.

Aran: Yes, Yes, I'm Ready
    This is towards the end of the movie where Arans next assignment is set.

The main reason we only have Aran speaking is because we want the audience to identify that he has more prevelence than Tom and is the main character. Moreover as it's only two minutes, we don't really want to give much away which is what my research from action movies has tought me. We may include dialogue for Tomin order to give Aran more prevelance. The reason why the dialogue is going to be so blunt is for the audience to identify the true personality of the Aran's character. We want him to show his words through his actions. Someone who we can compare Aran's character to is Bruce Willis who does more action scenes than speaking in movies such as Die Hard which I have anootated during my research.

Costume research

Costume

In our opening two minutes, we really only have two characters; Tom and Aran. Tom is the victim and there is Aran who is the assassin. That being said we had to find something that denotes assassin qualities as well as something that a victim will wear. I played a big part in this area as well as make-up and fortunately Aran and Tom both had the clothes i had visioned them wearing. 

Tom:

    Identifying costume for Tom was quite simple.What I thought would be good for tom is casual clothes to make the audience feel as if  he wasn't expecting what was going to happened and so I want him to wear a jumper, dark-blue jeans and trainers. Something like this would be good:

                 

Aran:

     Finding the right costume for Tom was much more difficult but then I thought that an assasin is denothes as doing his job quietly and then though of the dark which then lead me to the colour black which is when I decided that Aran should wear a Black Coat, Black Scarf, Clack Shoes and Black trousers which will hopefully look like a uniform. 

                                                                

                                                         

Video Diary

5/1/13
Today was the day we first started filming. We were feeling rather confident after our preliminary task which we done in October but the mistakes and problems that we encountered then helped us gain the experience when filming this. For example in the preliminary task, we had failed to abide to the 180 degree rule where Mohammed looked as if he suddenly switched positions. Now we are being extra careful whilst filming.
     Today, we decided to start filming the end of our opening two minutes where Aran receives a phone call for his next mission. We started with the ending because the rest of the filming had to be at night and we were all available during the day so we could at least make a start. Filming itself only took about an hour for this specific section but costume was as important today as we needed to make sure Aran's character didn't giveaway too many clues so we decided to dress him in all black. Our location for the ending of our two minutes was on a bridge located in Leatherhead over the M25. Aran was the only one needed in this scene where he received a phone call giving him his next target. We used a number of shots including close-ups, extreme close-ups and medium shots as well as long shots. The reason for this is because we want to have that element of choice when editing where we can see which shots better as opposed to having one standard shot. We also used the bridge to our strength as we ended it when the camera was overlooking the bridge. Aran was dressed in a casual hoodie and chinos as you must remember that this is the end of the movie but for the rest of the movie, he is dressed in all black.

Here is a picture of the bridge at the time of filming overlooking the M25.

                                                   
   What today was also used for was getting grips with the camcorder which Mohammed had acquired. The good thing about this camcorder was that it has a specific feature called anti-shake which reduces the amount the camera shakes but we will find out whether this is an effective process during the editing stage in a few weeks. We do have a trigram but thanks to the anti-shake, we didn't really have any use for it but we may need it when we actually begin filming the action scenes.

This is the camcorder we used which also had HD  as well as anti-shake.

10/1/13

     My input today was to get all the costumes and props prepared for the others to film. For example, I had the fake blood ready which I gave to Mohamad and I instructed Aran to wear all black. Prior to the filming , I quickly went to the location(which can be seen below) and checked whether it was still in the same state that we left it when we first decided that it would be our chosen location. One prop that none of our group could get hold of was a fake gun although we got extremely close. Despite this, the fake blood was still a good prop.

     Today we actually filmed the chase and fight scene where Tom was the victim.  Instead of the gun, we replaced it with a knife which Mohamad got from his house that had a yellow handle. It worked as well as a gun would have but in hindsight possibly even better because our movie is an urban action movie and a knife may be more suitable for this. We would put the red food colouring in a small capsule which Tom would have to bite but they told me that a problem was that they would have to continue the acting with the remains of the capsule in Toms mouth and it wasn't comfortable so we had a contingency plan which was to use a syringe which hopefully will work as well as a capsule. Today, we just done the fight scene in the alleyway where Aran punched Tom and that is where Tom spits out the blood.

                          

15/1/13

    Today we filmed a big chunk of the movie. Mohamad bought his laptop where he had already started the editing of the ending and the "punch" scene. As they were filming, I was continuing with the editing but all I could do was small bits and bobs but we still cant make any major alterations because we don't have enough clips so the real editing will begin after the filming but I could still help by fixing the small shakes that are visible though Mohamad has been doing an excellent job of editing as well. We also got the mixture of soundtracks that we were going to use and where. I starting putting the sound into the bits we had filmed as it finally felt as if it was taking shape.

    We got Tom to wear Jeans and a hoodie to show that he was the victim and wasn't expecting this fight whereas Aran was wearing all black which I stated in my earlier blogger wouldn't give much away about his character.

    Today's filming began with Tom limping very fast to show that he had already been hurt into this water-fields alleyway where he was being chased by Aran. The shot type we used was a point of view shot which really emphasized the idea that Tom was running away from someone. There was a number of shots during the actual fight part of the scene where the main intention was to give Aran as much prevalence as possible in order for the audience to identify him as the main character. The good thing about Tom and Aran is that Aran is significantly taller which made our job much easier in giving him this prevalence. We also see Aran punch Tom where he then falls on the ground and tries to recover using the walls of the walkway as leverage.

22/1/13

    It has been a full week since we have filmed because it has been difficult gathering everyone together. I have noticed that a lot of groups finished in a day but we want to take our time in order to get it perfect. Moreover, I can't really talk about the camera shots that we are going to use as we have used a number of shots and angles and will later decide which shot is best.
     Mohamad once again bought his laptop where I was editing whilst he was filming the death of Toms character. As we didn't have a gun, Aran used a knife to kill Tom against the white wall of the walkway. As soon as Aran kills Tom, he receive a phone call which we had to shoot a number of times as we kept going over the 180 degree rule for some reason and f because we wanted to see what would be the most effective shot.
     It has taken us seventeen days but we have finally finished our filming and now we still have a lot of editing to do because of the vast array of shots we took.
     We still haven't thought of the title and time is running out so we must really think. I will be able to edit everything apart from the beginning without the title.             

Editing stage.


28/1/13
    Today we fully focus on the editing. As Tom and Aran were the main actors in the fiming, we had decided to give them the day of as we made a start on the editing. The first thing we had to think about was the title and where we were going to put it. We decided that a title should be named when all four of us is togethet and that we would place it straight after the death of Tom and the next day as this will help the audience identify that it's a new day and the movie officially starts from this point.
    We started the beginning of the editing where Tom was running and the camera was in between his eyes to show the audience that they are currently viewing the event in Toms perspective. We decided to add an effect which was to make the camera blurry. the reason for this was to show that he was in distress, to add suspence and most importantly to dictate a high tempo to the scene ad indicate to the audience that an action scene is currently occurring.

Here is the blurry picture when Tom is running to the alleyway.

     The next thing we done today was edit the fight scene and we started by choosing which shot type we wanted when Aran first saw Tom and we decided that we'd go with the over the shoulder shot as it made the  way that Aran was running more dramatic. When Tom got hit, we thought that a good effect to include is an x-ray type effect, This would show that Tom was hurt which gave us the excuse to use the fake blood when Tom spat it out. We decided to have a medium shot for this so the blood would be visible.  

Today was rather successfull as we have edited around 56 seconds of filming in one day, I thought it would be much harder but we must also focus on the non diegetic sound. The final piece of editing we had dome today was the extreme close up of the clean knife which followed with a black screen and then the knife will reappear with blood on it.

We start on the left where there is a clean knife, then black screen (dramatic cut) and then the dirty knife.

31/1/13

Today we continued with the editing. We were all here today and all worked hard. Today we once again added the x-ray effect on the knife to emphasis the death just like we emphasized Tom being hurt, We have found it to be a rather effective effect. What else we done today was film the conversation between Aran and his boss where he says "Job Done" we chose to do close ups and extreme close ups as we didn;t really want to give any facial expressions away. We only had time to do this much but it sets us up nicely to complete it within the next two weeks. 

Here is a screenshot of the x-ray knife

   04/2/13
   Today we have finally decide the title to be The pursuer and the reason for this title is in another blog. We included it after Aran killed Tom because it would slow down the pace of the film and to show the end of the action scene with the transition to the next day. We decided to fade the title away into the next day as my research into film shot types told me that fades can indicate time jumps so it was a good place to include a fade shot. Today we also put the the ending in which I had edited a couple of weeks ago. The film is starting to feel finished and we are on time even though other groups have finished.
                                          


  Filming :
  7/2/13
   It's been 3 days since we've finished the editing of the filming and we aren't happy with it so we re filmed the ending again today. I believe that this could have been because we filmed it first and we didn't know how the rest of the filming would pay off and so it was a gamble that didn't pay off.
   We were supposed to include the music today but we couldn't because of the re filming but we are still on track to finish within the next 2-3 days.


Editing
9/2/13
     Today was the longest day by far but we have finally finished the filming and editing. The peoduction of the sound  took a number of hours and then implementing it in the movie took as long. Before all of that we had to edit the end once again but it didn't take too long this time as we knew what we wanted.

    We then started in the production of the sound and the softwear we used was Traktor 2, Mix Meister and Fusion 7. Mohamad was familiar with the programme so that saved some time but we were being very specific adding extra strings and basses in specific areas. All the music we used was non-copyright with some of our own original sounds.

Traktor 2:

MP3 Direct Cut:

Mix Meister Fusion 7:

Finished Project.
                       

         

             

                           This is the finished product of our opening two minutes of our movie.