Evaluation: Holly Smith

This year for my media coursework I worked in a group of four with Chloe Giltrow-Shaw, Sarah Fowler and Rebecca Thorburn. We created a social realism hybrid film teaser trailer, two film posters and a magazine front cover for Empire magazine. Working in a group of four proved difficult at times but I am proud of our final product and glad that we managed to work together.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The genre of our film which we made was British social realism. "Social realism has shown us to ourselves, pushing the boundaries in the effort to put the experiences of real Britons on the screen, and shaping our ideas of what British cinema can be." British gritty films are slowly become more popular as people break away from the simple narrative storyline of the Hollywood films and experience juxtaposition, intellectual British films.

To create the atmosphere of a British social realism film, we used typical conventions of a gritty British film such as the locations that we used included urban areas with cobbled backstreets and areas which had a lot of surrounding buildings. We used these sorts of locations for both our ancillary tasks and filming to follow through with the theme of gritty and imply to the audience what the genre of the film is.

Another convention of the social realism is a dark colour palette. Whilst filming we did not use any lighting equipment, instead we just used natural lighting as it is a more realist look to the film. It also made more sense to do that as we put colour filters on top of the film whilst editing to give it a grittier, darker and grainy look. Giving a social realism film a gritty edit is a main convention as it gives a more realistic look and therefore gives the implies to the audience that the issues involved within the film are more realistic than in a Hollywood film such as Spiderman or Ironman which people are unable to relate to. For example below are the film posters for the 2006 film 'Kidulthood' and the 2010, yet to be released, film 'Ironman 2'. There are quite obvious facts which can be seen which define the films of their category.

If you look at the 'Kidulthood' poster it is quite obvious that the genre will be social realism. It is not quite so obvious that it could be a British one as some of the actors are of mixed-race and perhaps trying to appeal to a non-British audience. However the convention of a social realism poster is still the same. There is the use of dark filters edited into the poster to create a grainier, realistic look about the poster and film. This is the sort of look which we have tried to create when we were making our trailer and ancillary tasks; you can see it here in our ancillary tasks:

The Ancillary Tasks

Other conventions we used to create the typically look of a social realism film which our audience would recognise was through the use of mise-en-scene. We used props such as the alcohol bottles, cigarettes and "drugs" to create a scene which is expected in the social realism genre. We also used money rolls to give the image of also the thriller genre aspect of the film, we created the money rolls ourselves by cutting up pieces of newspaper and covering them over with a real twenty pound note which I think worked very well.

Props like these can be seen in the trailers for films such as 'Trainspotting' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUOTs55KY40 and Awaydays http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPDoOVW1gXs

Throughout our project we have tried to follow the stereotypical conventions of the social realism genre to appeal to the audience's "same but different" familiarity liking, however at one point we have broken it too by creating a female protagonist within our film which is very unlike regular social realism films as they usually consist of male characters and perhaps one female character who is represented as being in Propp's theory the damsel in distress. However in our film, we have completely changed this around by making the female character the protagonist and the male character (in the trailer) perhaps the damsel. Even though female protagonists are not very common in British films, they are in Hollywood films such as Kill Bill, Charlie's Angels and Jackie Brown.

These characters in Hollywood films could be described as being sexualised more than they should be which we thought, as a female group, is quite degrading for women that all they are be shown as being is sexy. It can be seen in these posters that all of the actresses are wearing quite short, tight clothing which is what they constantly dress like throughout the film perhaps implying to women in the real world that you need to dress/be sexy to succeed and be powerful in the world. We decided as a group that we did not want to give off this image to the women who would be watching this as we wanted the film to appeal to them not repent them and therefore we create a character who showed more power and intelligence than one who showed too much skin. So we decided to dress our actress in heels, a leather jackets and leggings which were all black. We decided on this sort of outfit as we thought it gave off the image of the girl grieving for her sister which could perhaps gain sympathy for the protagonist and also gives the image of revenge through her clothing. The black also reflects the whole mood of the film as it is a moody, dark social realism film. We did have to change the outfit slightly during shooting as it would not of been practical to wear the original outfit we wanted our actress to wear with the lace body suit due to the weather conditions however I think the outfits we have used throughout the filming such as the black hoodie which she wears works quite well especially with the hood up as it gives off that rebellious teenage image which is what we wanted to create. Here is the outfit we were originally going to use:

The trailer will, we hope, attract a wider audience as women will be attracted to it from the feminism aspect and men will be attracted to it by the thriller/violence aspect.

By moving away from this stereotypical aspects of British social realism we are creating a 'same but different' film which still keeps the familiarity which people love but gives them something different too to keep the industry running.

How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary tasks?

The brand image which we created for our film was that of social realism with the connotations of the dark and gritty feel to it however we wanted to give our audience more than what they expected, and this is why we created a hybrid film. A social realism film with the element of thriller within in it not only to attract a wider audience but to keep the audience interested and wanting more.

To get this social realism look we brainstormed ideas of what we thought were included within films such as 'This Is England' and 'Kidulthood' and we decided that we wanted the trailer to be filmed in an urban area with lots of cobbled streets which reflects the British feel of this film. We used these locations in both our trailer and ancillary tasks as we felt that they reflected the working class area which we wanted to represent within the film. The use of the red bricked houses within the ancillary tasks helped give this interpretation of British life so therefore when the public saw the poster they would be able to establish that it was a British film rather than a Hollywood one. Here are some examples of the locations which we chose for our trailer:

We decided to choose locations like these above as they do look a bit gritty and dark and this is just what we wanted for our trailer. The locations are also quite secluded which was good for two reasons, one we would not get too disturbed whilst filming by people walking past and two, because we wanted to give the image that this girl is lonely and singled out due to the killing of her sister and I think we definitely achieved this through the location sites.

Here are the locations which we used for our ancillary tasks:

The bricks and cobbles proved a very realistic and genre enhancing scene for our photographs and we all thought they look particularly well especially once we had finished editing them into our posters.

The text for our ancillary tasks was quite difficult to choose as we decided that we wanted to have a text font which reflected the social realism aspect of the film. Eventually we decided on the font 'Base 02' which we found on the website http://www.dafont.com/ here is a scene shot of the font:

We decided on this font as we felt that due to its worn down look it reminded us of blood splattering off the letters. And as blood could be described as being a connotation of social realism and the thriller genre we agreed on it. Even though the text font does look worn, it is still easy to read and is bold which is very important so that it is easy for the public to establish what the film is called from a distance on a poster. Here is what the title to our film looks like in the text font 'Base 02':

The word 'vendetta' means 'a feud between two families or clans that arises out of a slaying and is perpetuated by retaliatory acts of revenge; a blood feud.' This is why we chose the title of 'vendetta' for our film as it gives the audience an insight into what is to occur within the film and also gives off the genre slightly too. It works as the film's logo as well as the overall title as the word and text gives off lots of connotations to the audience about the film's plot and perhaps even genre. We used this font as the text on all of the posters, the magazine cover and in the trailer so there would be constant repetition of the logo and more people would recognise it. By repeating the font, we were keeping our brand image of a social realism film, other ways we did this was by using the same filters whilst editing the trailer and photographs to make the images seem more grainy, gritty and more realistic which fitted in well with our genre. We kept the constant use of the same colour palette by using red, black, white and grey in all of our images and font colour. On the posters, the colour red was used for the font colour to make it stand out more on the black and white background and also to give the connotation of blood which implies to the audience that the film contains bloody violence. On the magazine front cover, as you can see, we used red to highlight the article about Vendetta but the rest of the writing on the page is either yellow or blue because we wanted our article to stand out from the rest of the page.

If we were to produce our film in reality we decided, as a group, that a company such as 'Working Title Films' would be the one we would choose to produce our film. They have produced many British films such as 'Bridget Jones' Diary', 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' and 'Love Actually' which are not classed as British social realism films. In fact there is only one clear British social realism film which is 'Billy Elliot' (2000).

Even though 'Working Title' is a British company it is beginning to produce more Hollywood films than British as the company makes more money with Hollywood films as more people would rather watch them compared to British. As 'Working Title' is an international company if they produced 'Vendetta' it could be shown in different countries all around the world as it is not just a social realism film, it is also a thriller which would appeal to a wider audience and the issues would not just be significant to the British population unlike most British films such as 'This Is England'.

'Billy Elliot' was produced by 'Working Title' in 2000, it was a British comedy of a boy who wanted to dance, it addressed real issues such as loss, unemployment and the miners strike of 1984. The estimated budget for this film was a typical British £5 million, and on opening weekend in Britain made £1,541,109 and in the US made $215,681 which does not seem too much but shows that other countries are becoming more interested in our cultural. This is positive news for our film because if 'Vendetta' was produced our brand image is quite similar to 'Billy Elliot' as it follows the same gritty look and shows real life issues to the audience.
Audience
The main age group which this film trailer is aimed at is 16-25 year olds as these are the sorts of people who mainly would go and watch a British film as perhaps anyone older or younger than that would prefer Hollywood. Also, this age group is who films have always been aimed at as they have the most money and the most time to spend on leisure such as going to the cinema. Overall we said that the age group should consist of people from a socio-economic status of C-D which is lower middle class-working class as perhaps these are the people who could relate more to the British social realism films however with the rising in popularity for British films and the economic downfall perhaps now anyone from high social classes could relate to the issues addressed.

When we had established which target age group we would like to aim our trailer at and why, we constructed a questionnaire which we gave to people who were included between the age of 16 to 25 years old as research into what we should include in our film and whether it would have a positive or negative effect on our target audience. Here are the questions we asked the group:

1) Age:

2) Sex:

3) Do you prefer a male or female protagonist (leading character)?

4) Do you enjoy social realism films? (E.g. This is England, Billy Elliot, Trainspotting, Green Street)

5) How often do you watch films?

6) Do scenes of drug/alcohol abuse shown in films distress you?

7) Do you know people involved in drug taking/alcohol abuse and violence?


The questionnaire was quite forward to establish what the group liked and did not as we needed to understand the sort of people we were aiming at and what they would enjoy to watch. All of the people which we gave the questionnaire to were between the age of 16-25 and consisted both male and female people so then we could get a good opinion from both gender sides. The questionnaire gave us a very interesting and helpful insight into what our target audience wants from a British social realism film for example over half of the people who took the questionnaire said that they would prefer a male protagonist rather than a female one. One thing which we, as a group, were not expecting was that some on the girls who did the questionnaire preferred male protagonists over female. When we talked about this as a group we thought that perhaps this was due to the constant use of male protagonists in British films and that perhaps the target audience is now use to this and the thought of a female protagonist seems slightly unusual and odd. However this is what we wanted to achieve, we wanted to bend the rules a little and give the audience that 'same but different' aspect. The questionnaire also helped us see that we had picked the correct target audience to aim at as all of the people said that they enjoyed social realism films and also that scenes of drug/alcohol abuse did not affect them. We found this useful as we felt now that we were able to show scenes of drug or alcohol if we wanted to so we were open to the option without upsetting or distressing anyone in the target audience watching the trailer. Overall we found the questionnaire very useful as it showed that we had picked the correct audience age group to aim at and it also helped us establish what they do and do not like within the social realism genre.

When we completed our ancillary tasks and teaser trailer we did some audience feedback to establish what could be improved on our project. We picked a group of people all within our age group to watch our trailer and fill in a questionnaire about it. The same was done for the ancillary tasks. Below are the questions which we asked to the people about the teaser trailer:
1) Do you think the product is typical of film trailer of the social realism genre? If so in what ways is it similar?

2) Does anything make it different or does it stand out from the typical? How?

3) Does the video help establish the genre of the film? How?

4) Name two interesting/impressive elements from the video?

5) Could this product be stronger – if so how?

6) Do you think the pace of the video is typical of this kind of product?


And also here are the answers which the people gave which we filmed as evidence:









Here is the website address if the video does not work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlui8nWQcnI


From this audience feedback we were able to understand that we picked the correct age group to aim at as they were impressed with the use of genre and hybridity within the trailer and how we had manage to include a lot of the typical conventions which they easily recognised. They gave us some very positive feedback which reflected our previous research of what our age group liked combined with our research on existing popular social realism films.



Use of creative technologies -Skills I have learnt
During this project I learnt a range of new skills and enhanced some too.
Throughout the project we used many different websites to research, plan and create our project such as:

• http://www.blogger.com/

• http://www.creativecommons.com/

• http://www.youtube.com/

• http://www.empireonline.com/

• http://www.imdb.com/

• http://www.wikipedia.com/

• http://www.google.co.uk/

These websites helped us a lot to research other existing products and compare them to our own ideas of what we wanted our trailer to be like.

Blogger.com was helpful website as this is where we posted our research, ideas and final project. It is very accessible, easy to use and does not cost any money to use it therefore anyone can post blogs on it. This was helpful as anyone in the group could post their work or ideas on our blog whether they were at home or at college and anyone could look at the work which kept the whole group up to date.

Whilst creating our ancillary tasks we used a digital stills camera to take the pictures (similar to the one below). Whilst taking these pictures, we found that they came out a little too light because the natural lighting was too bright therefore we edited the pictures with the program Photoshop on the apple Mac. We used Photoshop to give the photographs more of a gritty look by putting filters on them, this was so that the photographs would fit the genre better. I have already used Photoshop as I created a magazine for my AS media coursework so I understood what tools to use to make our photographs look more professional. To create the posters and magazine front cover we decided to use InDesign as we found it much easier to construct them on InDesign rather than Photoshop and also InDesign provided many more tools to help create a professional ancillary task. Again I knew how to use this program as I used it last year so I felt that my skills in using it came in a lot of use this year.

Also as well as creating the ancillary tasks, we had to make a teaser trailer by using the video camera equipment. I was not as experienced in this field as I had never used a video camera before. Luckily, some of the other people in the group had done so they were able to show me how to work it and get the best shots. Most of the time when the group was filming I was not able to because it was during the time when I was in a lesson however I did get a slight taste of the filming aspect but I mostly tried to edit to make up for not being able to film. To edit the video we used the new program Final Cut Express which I found very difficult to use at first however after a few times of using it I began to enjoy it.

There was many different tools to get use to and to have the eye of making the cuts fit all together which I think we all found difficult and frustrating but by working together as a group we managed to make the whole trailer work. We used tools such as filters over the footage to give our trailer a darker, grittier look to it to make it look more realistic and link it back to our genre and I think it works very well and reflects the idea of social realism. The use of the diegetic continuing footsteps at the end of the sequence when the 'coming soon' is shown was something we did through Final Cut. We had to copy the sound which was already at the end of the trailer and stretch it along and adjust the tempo to make it sound as though the character is still walking away from the camera/audience. We added many different effects into our trailer to give it a more interesting, fast paced look to keep the audience entertained and wanting to watch more. Effects we used included cross fades- to show change in time, jump cuts -to give the trailer that fast paced look which we wanted and fades to black -to create tension on the trailer and imply to the audience that something had happened which they do not know about making them want to watch the film. This program was very good to use once we got use to the tools and how to use them and I think it helps us produce a very good project however we did have lots of problems at the start regarding uploading our filming and also the sound being out of sync with the images but except from that, I enjoyed using this program.
Here is our trailer which we created by using Final Cut Express:



Conclusion
Overall, I think that our project was a huge success. I believe that we managed to create the brand image that we were aiming for through the use of mise-en-scene such as the costumes and props, the lighting, the editing, cinematography, locations and the non-diegetic music. I think that we, as a group, managed to create a good quality project consisting of a 90 second teaser trailer, two film posters and a film magazine front cover. Even though this trailer gives the impression of the 'same but different' it still gives that hint of familiarity which audience love to recognise and with our film being a hybrid of social realism and thriller that will attract a wider audience therefore making it more of a popular film on release.

I think that our trailer works very well together with what we could fit into the 90 seconds slot, it gives the outline to the plot, the genre and perhaps what is to come within the film which is what a teaser trailer should do and I think that we have definitely achieved that.