Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Distributors:
Europe: Momentum Pictures, they're a well known British distribution company. They've distributed low budget films such as Let the Right One In (2008), Amelie (2001) and Welcome To The Punch (2013), all critically acclaimed films, which did well in the British box office. Welcome To the Punch was a film we looked at in terms of budget analysis, it had a modest £8.5 million budget, its slick camerawork and use of stars like James McAvoy and Mark Strong, its return at the box office was strong.

America: Mirimax Films, who have a good market in America , distibuting British films like The Queen (2006), The Tempest (2010) and Pride and Prejudice (2005). They have worked with both of our production companies before  so some kind of working relationship is in place, something we could use to our advantage.


Production Companies:
Fox Searchlight/Studio Canal: A division of 20th Century Fox, it specialises in producing British films like Notes on a Scandal (2006) and Sunshine (2007). Most of their films have a $10 million or lower budget, however they would be working in co-production with Studio Canal which have produced cross Atlantic films such as Mulloholland Dr. and U571 both grossing well and being well received critically. The reason for choosing these two production companies is because they have worked together before and would give us the budget needed for our film which would be between $10 million and $20 million

Titles:
The titles in our opening follow the traditional cinematic format. Starting with the production company followed by who the film is by. This is followed by the above the line actors, 'Matt Gadsden', 'Alfie Shea' after that the crew feature; the DP, the casting. After that you get the creative side; the director, writer and editor. We knew to do this from analysing the titles of such films like Casino Royale (2006)

Advertising:
We would use a viral marketing campaign,using banners to advertise our films on well known websites like IMDb. Films like Limitless (2011) and Prometheus (2012) had a strong viral campaign, producing featurettes with characters from the film, this is something we wouldn't do, our genre of film having a more conventional advertising campaign (billboards, TV trailers).

Our Production Company:
SMart Productions is the name we gave to our production company. The logo is plain and not misleading, it does not show that we normally produce high budget blockbuster and it looks different from other companies logos, making it distinctive.

Production Diary

Task	What we did	Date of completion
Initial pitch and presentation	We produced several different ideas for an opening sequence including film titles, what the films about, and what will happen in the opening sequence.	24.10.12
Mood board of initial ideas including inspirational shots from real films	We created a mood board which contained shots from movies with the same – or similar – genre. We included shots from these opening to films which of which we will create to a similar effect.	7.11.12
Evidence of how planned openings fits with research into codes/conventions, genre, audience	We produced a prezi on how our opening will fits with the codes and conventions of a spy film	26.10.12
Titles	We have established our individual credit titles	25.10.12
Group Pitch	We produced a movie pitch which outlined our genre, included two openings to existing movies, and opened the narrative and characters. We also discussed setting and target audience.	25.10.12
Class feedback and peer assessment on pitch and amendments planned	We pitched our ideas to the class and received feedback sheets. We scanned these sheets and put these on our blogs	4.11.12
Script	We have produced the script for what is happening in our opening sequence. We made our script too long for the permitted time so we slightly altered it to fit the time.	7.11.12
Timeline of opening	We have constructed a timeline of narrative and dialogue.	10.11.12
Analysis of existing student openings	Looked at a variety of different types of openings but mainly thrillers that were similar to ours so that we would know what we could do to improve our own opening.	13.11.12
Story Board and music research font research	Using the template for the storyboard we created the storyboard and took photos of each part of the storyboard and added a voiceover to explain what was happening in each shot. And we also did our music research and found a piece of music that worked well with the different scenes in our opening. We also did our font research were we were able to narrow it down to a few titles that would work best for our opening and when we did this we also did our	15.11.12
Risk assessment sheet	We created our first risk assessment sheet for our original filming	24.11.12
Risk assessment sheet 2	We had to create a new risk assessment sheet because of some changes that had to be made because of problems with the filming.	27.11.12
filming	We filmed the majority of our opening and made some changes to the original	01.12.12
Filming day 2	We filmed some more exterior shots and did most of the editing and added the music.	08.12.12
Editing week one	After our first week of editing we had a rough draft of what our final opening was going to be like. But the music we had chosen didn’t support the opening as well as we would have hoped.	10.12.12
Editing week two	In our second week of editing we had an adjusted some of the scenes to make the cuts flow and make the video smoother. We also found a new piece of music that was better suited to our theme, genre and helped to create more suspense.	17.12.12
Gathering feedback	After we had the finished product and made many changes we decided to get feedback from students and teachers.	12.01.13
evaluation weeks 1-3	We finished our evaluation talking about how our film fits into the codes and conventions of our theme and genre and we talked about the different aspects to do with audience and how we created our movie idea and our opening.

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation 
Question 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Costume:
The suit he is wearing shows that he is a professional, probably high paid. He takes pride in his appearance as shown in the image above. We wanted to convey the fact that he is suspicious and i think the costume does this well, differing social attitudes following the recession has led to unease towards high paid professionals. This higher social class links to the conventions. The appearance is ambiguous, most audiences will think that he will be the films antagonist because of his shifty looks.

Appearance:
His slicked backed hair and well trimmed app links to the audience thinking that he is a high paid professional, for his appearance we took inspiration from Michael Douglas' character in Wall Street, Gordon Gecko, in that film Gecko was a deceitful, scheming business man and we wanted to reference that in the piece.

Setting:
The house used in the clip is clean and clutter free, this shows that he probably lives alone, presuming he lives in the house. The house looks quite spacious, to do this we showed him in mid shots which revealed the house to be quite big. This goes along with the idea that he is well paid. We wanted his house to look pristine, taking the idea for this from the film American Psycho where the main character, a well paid businessman. His pride of place reflects his own self determination and drive to do well, the shady shots of him, tell the audience his wealth may not have come to him through the most moral of means.

What he does in the clip:
His actions in the clip show him to be a suspicious character, he looks around to see if anyone is watching him and he does the lock on the door. The audience has no idea what he is afraid of but the shots of the briefcase tell them that it is probably something to do with that. He has no dialogue, which makes his role even more ambiguous.

Other Characters:

Gordon Gecko

In Oliver Stones 'Wall Street' (1987) the main antagonist, Gordon Gecko, played by Michael Douglas is a duplicitous stock broker, at the time Wall Street suits had come under fire because of economic problems in the country. This links into our character, society at the moment antagonises most high paid executives. His appearance is very similar to our character, slicked back hair and professional suits make cover up his criminal behaviour

Patrick Bateman

In the 2000 thriller 'American Psycho' Christian Bale plays the psychologically unhinged hedge fund banker who indulges his tortuous and sadistic fantasies throughout the film. The film satirises high paid business men and there evil ways. Bateman's apartment is obsessively clean and his pride of place is a character trait is something we wanted to transplant into our character, it shows a lack of personality, making him seem like an uncaring character devoid of emotion.

We considered some other characters but their influences were only minor they included 

Calvin Candie (Leonardo Dicaprio)

Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz)

Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen)

Location

We also tried to find a location that matched some of the places you see these characters in, mainly Patrick Bateman, we went for as simplistic a look as possible as shown in our set photos.

 

Evaluation Question 6

Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Question 4 & 5

Evaluation Question 7

The journey from preliminary task to our final piece was somewhat of a long journey that involved a lot of learning in various areas, the areas I feel I have progressed the furthest in are camera work and editing. I feel that my progression is really demonstrated in the wide variety of camera shots and the continuity of the camera shots within our final piece. Below are stills from our final task that we feel exhibit some of the varied camera shots that we used these include high and low angle shots as well as mid shots, close ups and longer shots. When this is contrasted to the preliminary task, which only used a handful of shot variations you can see the personal experience I gained operating the camera and directing both pieces.
My personal experience gain also regarded the ways in which the camera can show plot points or show important information about the character  in the first screen shot below the high angle of the shot alludes to the fact that someone is watching and or spying on our first male character but it also shows the characters presence as he dominates the shot drawing attention and signifying power.
The second still was used more as an expostulation shot to really deliver the full levels of violence directly to the audience as research showed our target audience were fans of violence, like that of Quentin Tarantino movies.
The third still is a close up, during this process the use of close ups became very important to show how significant particular objects can be such as the door latch which shows the insecurity and the worry of the character, these are concepts that during the preliminary task we simply didn't think of.
During our preliminary task our comprehension of camera wasn't in depth enough we relied only on a handful of shot types, only mid to long with a few close ups at the end for the 'match on action'

The editing between the two pieces comes along massively, flaws in the flow of camera work resulted in choppy editing that required black outs with text to fix the continuity resulting in poor placement of credits like so:

The editing in our final piece flows well and consistency isn't an issue. While both both pieces use straight cuts Hitlist uses them to much greater effect. Our editing in Hitlist flows smoothly throughout the entire piece with each shot being almost seamless.