Alex's Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
For our media piece we looked at a variety of different genres and films but in the end settled for sports based family comedy with some action based sequences. The films we looked at included Cool Runnings and Donnie Darko and the influences are clear in our production. Cool Runnings is a comedy aimed at families with a sports theme and we took influences from Donnie Darko for the bikes and type of locations for the film.
The conventions we used included in our film were using dramatic sequences to excite the audience. We also used mysterious characters and left a lot of unexplained aspects of the plot and characters, this was a deliberate decision as we wanted to create a sense of mystery around the opening scenes in order to get the audience wanting to see more.
To challenge the existing conventions we decided to have very little dialogue in our production, as we wanted the action sequence to be the main part of it, and thought that lots of dialogue would take the focus off of that. We limited ourselves to a small scene with dialogue that we thought we could develop the newsreader character as the film went on.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our media production focuses on one main demographic, the male teenager
They are represented in a competitive way and are shown to be so in the production.
Many of the characters run each other off the path or even actively assault them with bricks. This reinforces the competitive nature of the characters in a big way and shows that they’re not beyond the use of violence in order to win.
The methods we used to represent the characters included clothing, the way they ride the bikes and the dialogue.
The main bike riding characters are dressed casually and in a style that reflects their age group, which is 15-18. The main colours are dark and muted with the main character set out with green and the antagonist in red.
The newsreader character is also dressed in dark clothes but to portray his profession he is dressed more formally. He is also the only character with dialogue, this accentuates his social status. The biker riders in the film all have different niches in their appearance to show the different personalities. The main character has a green item of clothing to make him stand out; there is a rider who is wearing a helmet, this denotes his emphasis on safety and shows him to more cautious than the others; there is another character who is nerdy looking and wearing glasses, and represents a stereotype of a person who is a nerd.

Who would be the audience for your media product?
Our films main audience, would be, hopefully, families. The production is a family comedy and so would attract this audience. However as it would also have comedy and jokes aimed at older audiences as well, teenagers and adults would also come to see it as it is fun for all.
The film also was a focus on action and suspense, which again is an incentive for older or teenage audiences.
We have a number of relatable characters in the film in order to appeal to a wider audience and we tried to represent a broad demographic with characters that have a lot of scope to develop over the course of the film. These means that hopefully anybody would enjoy watching the film.

How did you attract/address your audience?
We wanted to attract a wide audience to our film and so we chose to have characters that the audience could relate to. We also left a lot of things open to interpretation in the film in order to make the audience more involved in the film. The characters’ backgrounds aren’t explained in much detail. We did this deliberately to create a sense of mystery around them, and this should have the effect of on the audience of wanting to see more and how the characters develop and the plot is explained more as the film would go on.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
There has been a variety of different technologies that we used in order to create our production these included:
• Film Camera
• Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 video editing software
• The Blog
The film camera was easy to use and didn’t take long to learn, however I had had some limited experience in my own time and from the preliminary task so the learning curve was not as steep as it was with the other equipment. The camera skills I learnt included: how to record, play back and zoom.
The most useful technology I learned to use was the Adobe video editing software. At first I found the editing difficult as I had never used it before but as I had a similar programme on my home computer and one member of our group had used it before I soon overcome these difficulties.
The blog was another technology I’d never used before, but because it is a relatively simple website, it wasn't difficult for me to learn how to use it effectively.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
There many difficulties that we had with the production of the preliminary task, which we tried to rectify and improve on when it came to the main production piece.
One of the problems we encountered with the preliminary task was the lack of planning we put into it. It was obvious from the absence of quality from the production that we had to plan the main task a lot move thoroughly in order to gain a good mark.
The preliminary task also gave us a good opportunity to familiarise ourselves with the equipment and software we would be using for the main task. This was useful as we had never used the equipment before and it was good that were able to learn this before the main task.