Graces media studies

Dear Moderator, My name is Grace Ryan and welcome to my blog. It is a record of the work undertaken as part of the G321 AS Foundation Portfolio within the OCR GCE course in Media Studies. I worked together with Lauren Mason to produce a film opening in the romantic-crime genre. The project lasted four months, commencing in September 2016 and finishing in March 2017. I hope you enjoy my work and find it both successful and interesting. Please use the navigation bar to access my work as organised into labels: Actors, locations, costumes & props, audience research, extra filming and editing, film opening research, planning, post production, preliminary tasks, film opening and evaluations. There is also a link to the St Mary's School blog hub. Yours faithfully Grace Ryan

 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Above are 9 key frames from my film opening – Insiders. I will refer to them throughout my evaluation from frame 1-9, reading left to right. At the beginning of my opening, we made and edited a film ident as seen in frame 1. This ident relates to our film as the ‘clank / whoosh’ we used to suggest our film opening has an interesting story line and is different as it is not the normal jingle. The use of the pink font and the grey background suggests that our target audience is not just men but we are also targeting females. In the first 30 seconds of our film opening we set the scene with an establishing shot walking through Covent garden, which confirms the romantic comedy convention used in most films nowadays. We were inspired to add the title of the location and time onto the shot, to remind the audience that this film opening although romantic, is pa

We wanted our main character to be recognisable as part of a particular social group, someone who our audience can aspire and relate too. Our film opening has a strong female lead, similar to both Focus and Mr and Mrs Smith who also present a strong, independent women as one of the key roles. Although Isadora is an attractive character in our film opening, we didn't want to objectify or use the cinematography to sexualise her in a way that focus does, in the scene which we have used for our inspiration. Margot Robbie, in the robbing scene, wears a tight pink dress to purposely attract attention to her body, however due to the way in which we want to portray Isadora, and the weather, we would dress her in stylish yet appropriate clothing for the weather. We would like our character to have a inspirational effect on our audience, however with a comical element, which is clearly present in Focus.  We took our main inspiration for our film opening from Focus, therefore our mai

I have created a moodboard of my target audiences likes.  Here is a moodboard of my target audiences dislikes.

Script Our film comes under the sub genre of an ‘Urban Fairytale’ so we ensured we used the typical conventions of this, to attract our target audience, For example our protagonist commits crimes to join a group and receive acceptance from them.   Due to our film being a 12A we aimed it at women and men from the ages of about 12-25, as it has romantic yet crime conventions making it more appealing to both genders. Throughout creating our film we received frequent feedback from people of different ages, including teenaged girls so we could include our audiences interests and adapt our film to their preferences. One point of feedback we acted upon was the cutting out of dialogue. Initially we had much more dialogue between the characters, however the feedback we received told us our audience were not interested by it. Our film was set in a contemporary landscape, the busy shopping centre of Covent Garden in London, typical for an  ‘Urban Fairytale’, which creates a very middle

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?

Last week Grace and I had the opportunity to show our film opening to a group of people (37) who were 15 and above. The showing was very successful and gave us avaluable response and what to improve on. They also insured us that our film opening was of good quality. We had everyone fill out a survey aftet they had watched our film opening. Here are the questions we asked on our survey:  Do you think the sound is effective? Is there anything you would add? Do you understand what is happening in the film opening? Does it make you want to watch more of the film? Is there any way we can improve it? What would you rate the film out of 10? These were the results and as you can see from the pie charts they were a very mixed set of results:

Whilst doing our editing for our film opening we have already encountered many problems making it more difficult. As a result of our location there is a lot of background sound. Although this is useful in some of the shot sequences, when the characters are talking it makes it more difficult to hear them, so we have therefore had to use voice overs.  In many of our sequences we did not get transition shots, therefore making the clip seem jumpy at points. As a result of Lauren and I having to leave the inside of Covent Garden we were not able to get all the shots we wanted, making the opening scene less effective.  We have carried on looking at the robbing scene from 'Focus' to see the type of music and time of shots they have use for inspiration.  We have been using free play music to look for nondigetic music to add to our film opening, although we have not yet found one that is suitable for our opening. 

This is our rough cut of our film opening. We showed it to a focus group who gave us a lot of good feedback! Some of the short clips were inconsistent and not really relevant to our film, so we will need to cut them out. We now have a lot of sound editing to do.