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Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My film, ‘What Happened to Peter Smith’ follows a group of 5 schoolkids: Tyrone, Cherish, Lucy, Simon and Rajesh as they are interviewed by Detective Sean Mann about the disappearance of Peter Smith from Lucy Patterson’s party. Later on in the film we see the characters describe their last interaction with Peter and, unintentionally, their true colours and motives behind the murder of Peter.

 Throughout our opening sequence we took common conventions of the mystery drama genre. We carefully chose which conventions to follow and which we intentionally chose not to stick to. Despite our film being a mystery drama we were also inspired by the conventions of teen drama and crime drama. We referred closely to form and style, genre codes and narrative structure and media theories such as Barthes’ narrative codes.

Below I have analysed the form, genre, narrative structure and style of film openings.

        

Below I have made a slideshow showing how we used relevant media theories:

          

Here are the close ups we used as enigma codes:

                    

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

Due to our fairly large ensemble cast it was easier to convey the representation of ethnicity that we had intended. As our story took place in current day London we felt that it was important to have a wide variety of ethnicity and similar to other films that choose to represent ethnicity we thought it was possible to stick to and still subvert some common stereotypes.

Our choice of costume and makeup, dialogue, behavior and the overall demeanor of the characters were very important as it was how we wanted to obviously reflect the various ethnicity. 

Below is an emaze showing how we chose to reflect ethnicity in our opening sequence:

                  

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

The choices within institution are very vital to the production and exhibition of the film, these are arguably the two most important aspects of the film as it is what makes the film a film. The ownership model varies depending on the type of film, our film is a good example of the independent ownership model. We chose Screen Gems as our production company and Film4 as our distributor. These slides will show the decisions we made of institution and the reasoning behind it.

Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product

The target audience is a decision that needs to be made very early on as the decision influences almost all of the decisions made later on.

I have created a Prezi all about our target audience below, please see it.

            

Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience

Attracting and addressing the audience is a key part of a film as at the end of the day, people won't watch a film they they don't want to watch. It was very important for us to consider how we were planning to attract and address the audience as we were producing the opening sequence so we needed to make sure we hooked our audience.

The mindmap below shows how we considered the uses and gratification theory and how we related that to aspects of our film.



It is important to get feedback as it is a relatively objective form of evaluation of the video that gives a fair and balanced reflection of how effective the video was.

Here is our feedback video and a feedback text I received:

From this feedback video we were able to learn that the characterization in the video was effective as all of the characters could be remembered, we were also able to learn that our music worked well to convey the genre. They said they "loved the music"

From the feedback on texts again I learned that the characterization was effective and the continuity techniques made the storyline seem very intriguing. 

Both forms of feedback had nothing to say when asked about what we need to work on, although the people giving the feedback may have been very nice as they are our friends but I think it might just reflect how effective our video was.

I agree with the feedback and I feel that the way we introduced the characters was very effective and allowed the audience to remember exactly who the characters, that are central to the plot, are. I also agree that the continuity techniques that we used helped make the sequence appear "really intriguing".

Sian and Meera's needs for entertainment were gratified by the music in the video that they "really liked" also there need for escapism was gratified by the intriguing continuity techniques and camera work which immersed them into the world of the film. 

Question 6: What have you learnt from the process of constructing this project

I feel that over the course of this project I have learned a lot and increased my technological skills. I used some of the software and hardware when I did a project at GCSE but doing this project allowed me to have a much more in depth experience with it. In my opinion my group worked well with the technology we had, it did not hinder us it only helped us.


Hardware

Below is a slideshow showing the hardware that we used:



Below is a slideshow showing my technological learning curve in terms of using hardware:




Software

Below is a slideshow showing the software that we used:



Below is a slideshow showing my technological learning curve in terms of using software: