Monday, 2 April 2012

Dear Moderator...

This work has now been marked.  Please ignore any posts made after this date.

Thank you!

Friday, 30 March 2012

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

This process has taught us many things. Firstly, we have learnt how to edit the clips into a full opening sequence in a program that was not necessarily familiar to us. Furthermore, handling the camera boosted our technical skills by very much being forced to 'learn on the job'. Any problems that arose only made us more confident in solving them next time. By having hands-on, practical use with the camera for a long period of time, we developed our camera angles by learning the positioning of different shots.

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

Once finished filming we used many online/computer technologies such as photoshop, and youtube. While using these sites we had to upload what we'd taken a picture of or filmed and cut it down to the size we needed. While on photoshop we had to crop and then reserve the image so that it would fit correctly onto our blog and then while on youtube we had to convert videos to quicktime, and then upload to youtube, this process took a while but once on youtube it meant copying and sharing our videos for feedback was a lot easier. Two other computer technologies we used were garage band and itunes. On garage band we found background music that we cut down and distorted to fit with our opening scene, and our main song 'teddy bears picnic' we found on youtube and therefore had to convert to mp3 to work with itunes which we then copied onto final cut pro which was the main editing process for our film.

We used the main filming camera to film only our opening scene, as it had the best quality however while using the camera was a useful technology, we did experience some problems during the filming process. On our first day of shooting, after filming the first main sequence, we discovered that is was in fact taking pictures not video clips. This of course did not help our very time-sensitive situation. These shots had to be re-filmed. After this, later that day, the camera ran our of battery which of course stunted the whole plan for that day. As a result of this, we made arrangements to reschedule for a different day. All of these factors held us up but we managed to be flexible and organised in solving these issues. Dispite the faults mentioned, the camera was easy to use, playback, monitor and transfer clips onto the computer afterwards for editing.

Thursday, 29 March 2012

Who would be the audience for your media product?

For our film opening and whole media product we have decided that the audience we feel would enjoy our film would be young adults from the ages of 17- 25.
This is because, the film is based on a family going for a picnic in the woods on a nice day which the audience can relate to and put themselves in the characters shoes.
Also we did some research and from what we found out, young adults from the ages of 17- 20 tend to like watching thrillers more than any other film. Therefore we thought that we would aim our film for that age group because they are more likely to go to the cinema and watch it rather than the older generation who wouldn't go to the cinema or the younger generation who are too young to watch it and wouldn't have money to go and watch it.
Therefore we feel that choosing young adults as the audience for our film will promote our film greatly and give us good views on it.

Friday, 23 March 2012

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



Screen Gems is an American movie production company founded as a film studio in 1999 meaning it's quite modern, and well known. We feel this company would be great for our film to work with as because it's so modern it matches the modern theme of our film making it much more realistic for our audience. This film company would also be great to work with our film as they've previously distributed thriller films which are extremely similar ours. Such as 'When A Stranger Calls'. this company however is extremely well known within America and we have worries that our film would do much better in England than the USA. However we are willing to take the risk and distribute our film with this company. This is because the films that they've recently distributed such as 'Underworld' and 'The Vow' have done extremely well across the world, and not just in one particular country.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?


One of the main social groups within our film is 'Family'. We've represented a typical day family as a mother, father and young child. We've chosen this as we feel this is how our target audience see a family now a days, and therefore we wanted it to relate to them as much as we could. One of the main reasons why we've chosen to include main characters within a family is because we noticed that thriller/horror films we've researched don't really include any meaning it would be a new type of storyline compared to any other film. The family within our film seem very tight and together meaning that when the young girl does go missing this makes the scene even more tense and intriguing for the young audience who'll be watching.


the family to the right is the family from 'Insidious' another film much like ours, we've been looking back to this film for inspiration throughout and therefore some things are very similar. This however masks us know that our film would most likely be as successful as theirs. The only problem would be that the audience may not have like the film 'insidious' and therefore not watch another film like it.