Hello, my name is Josh Healy. In this presentation, I will be evaluating the video project that group, TMMT productions, has made as a part of our AS media studies. Our video is the story of a teenager who gets bullied in school and is a bit of a geek. He wants to do something with himself and tries to follow his dream of becoming a superhero. The project is only 2 minutes long, so has clips of him in his room, in school and in his costume. Our group has worked on the project since February on filming and editing, often having to rerecord shots numerous times and on different occasions to get them to what we want. We all had different roles within our group. In our group, I was the director of the film, making sure the shot angles were right and the shots we were filming we correct to what we wanted to show for the scene. I also had the job of setting up and arranging all filming times and dates.
challenge forms and conventions of real media
products?
Our media project is the opening to a superhero/comedy movie. Our movie would more follow the codes of a comedy movie than a superhero movie. A superhero in a movie is stereotypically strong, brave, popular, cool and likeable so to speak. A superhero is usually someone who people would aspire to be like, but our superhero is a geeky kid who gets bullied in school. The fact that a geeky kid wants to be a superhero is what the comedic factors of our film are built on. The only props that would be similar to those in a superhero movie is the superhero costume that our character makes. A lot of the time in Comedy movies, you get smart people who are somewhat socially awkward, which is true about our character. We have short clips in our movie where the voiceover is saying something like, 'I've been training harder than ever before" and in the clip, our character is massively struggling to hold up the weight he is trying to bench press. This type of shot would be typical of a comedy. Also, our whole movie is shot during the day. This is typical of a comedy as it gives a light hearted feel, that nothing overly serious or bad is about to happen. If the movie was shot at night it would be given a much more sinister, serious feel. The location of our movie is mostly in our character's room or school. This is the type of thing we would see in other superhero comedy movies such as Kick Ass and The Amazing Spiderman. The last shot of our movie, with our character looking over the city he lives in the type of shot that you would often see in Superhero movies. It gives the effect that the Superhero is really special and gifted, which in our case, the comedy factor comes from the point that our character simply isnt that.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The video we have produced for our media studies represents a number of groups. Within our video, we have a teenage boy who feels like an outsider in his everyday life. This is I'm sure something that every teenager, myself included has felt before. For people in their teen years it is often hard to find their identity and it is easy to feel left out and get lost in certain ways. Our main actor is bullied by people from his school, bullying is also a modern day issue that many people have been a victim of throughout their years of school and growing up. We felt that when coming up with our character, we wanted someone that would appeal to young people. We wanted someone who everyone might not directly relate to, but at least know someone like that and have felt some of the similar things they have felt. The character in our video is somewhat a geeky character. He was partly made as a geeky character as it is in a way what we expect of someone in their teens who wants to be a superhero. Another way that our video project has linked to people in their teenage years, it is about a boy who has a dream in which he follows, even if it can be seen as a bit silly. I'm sure there are many people with dreams that other people may think are stupid, or that they themselves think are too farfetched. A morale of our video, is if there's something that you really want to do, why not do it?
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
I think a media institution such as Universal Pictures would distribute our media product as they distributed movies that would be the same sort of movie as ours, such as Kick-Ass and a movie I studied Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Our media product is one of comedy in a way and Universal Pictures have distributed many comedy movies in the past 3 years such as Ted, Identity theft, Bridesmaids, Paul and Get Him to the Greek.
Who would be the audience for your media product?Our finished media product has a very wide range for possible audiences, for men and women from the age of about 12 upwards, but the most likely audience of our movie would be teenagers and young adults, considering the movie was made by people of this age and only has people of this age in it. The social groups that we would have represented in the movie, as I have said before, would be a very fine tuned audience, as they could possibly relate to some of the things going on in the film.
How did you attract/address your audience?
I feel we would partly will have attracted our audience through creativity. Having a superhero theme for a project such as this requires a lot of time and effort to even get started and a good amount of time and money was spent into getting all the parts to the costume amongst other things. We feel that the idea we chose was quite an ambitious one, and one that worked well. Our movie is clean with no bad language or violence so is suitable for people of any ages, as long as they are old enough to understand what is going on in the movie. we hope the comedy superhero concept, similar to one of a movie like Kick Ass would attract a wide audience, and not just the teenagers that would have been socially represented in the movie.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
I have learnt a lot about the technologies used in a media film during the construction of our project. We started off using the school cameras, but we decided to see if we could use an iPhone camera. When recording one of our shots at the start we recorded with both the school camera and an iPhone, then when looking on FinalCut, we decided the iPhone looked much better. This helped our recording a lot because as well as having a better quality camera, we no longer had to always take the cameras out of school. One of the members in our group had their own tripod, so we ordered an iPhone tripod adapter off amazon so really we could record any time we want. This made the process of getting ready to film much easier. Then when we had our recordings done, we put them all into FinalCut to see what we could do with it. Even through just trying random things that might not work on FinalCut has taught me a lot about these technologies and how to use them. When it came to titles, we found it quite hard to get what we wanted at the start, but after some experimenting, we got what we wanted. The transitions that we added in between shots was what made our movie work so well. Overall I didn't do the actual final editing parts myself as we had all assigned each other separate roles, but I got my understanding of the technologies used in media from trying things out, seeing what works and suggesting ideas to the editor of our group.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
I feel from my preliminary task to where I am now, I have learnt a great deal about shot types, continuity, and creativity in media studies.
When doing shot types during my preliminary, it didn't always click with me what would look best, and i couldn't always imagine it in my head. I've got to the point now where I can more less map out where I want a shot to be done, and what exactly I want it to look like and what I want the shot to say. My knowledge of camera shots has also grown considerably, and I have learnt that if you have an ambitious idea that might not work, you may as well try it out, even then it can be decided on after. In our movie we used a green screen for a shot near the end, but after editing we decided that it wasn't quite what we wanted it to look like, but it was definitely worth the try. We tried shots of other things, such as our main character collecting parcels from the postman, but whilst it was good it was more time consuming than we had hoped, so we instead came up with our character buying his costume parts in a shop, showing him just walking in before a transition and him coming back out.
Continuity is something that I have really been introduced to during the year. For the preliminary we had a problem with the 180 degree rule of one of our shots, only to notice we had done it right just before we went to rerecord the shot. Our group has been very wary of breaking the 180 degree rule during our project. Anytime we were just about to take a shot, we would say about the 180 and think it through first. If we weren't 100 percent sure if the rule agreed with the shot, we would have taken it from 2 angles just incase to make sure. Continuity was something an issue with small things, such as our main actor getting his hair cut during filming times, but overall it wasn't noticeable. We had taken quite a few practice shots that we didn't like before we got the shots we used, so by the time we got around to it we were quite aware of what we were doing in terms of continuity.
In terms of the movie itself, we wanted to be creative in terms of the movie story, and the shot types that would be involved. Each member of our group was open to the opinions and ideas of each other and I feel we overall worked very well as a team. I am very happy with how our video turned out.
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