Wednesday 27 April 2011

Evaluation

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

To make any successful short film you need to know how to incorporate at least one of these elements of conventions. In our group's case I think we had all three elements to help us with our short film production and pre-production.


The Black Hole:

Black Hole is a great short film and we decided to challenge the message of the film and turn it into something different. The Black Hole's message was about greed but we channelled our message to show that "there will always be someone bigger than you" which in a way is a common convention in the film industry. I cannot say that this film had a large amount of conventions which are common in the industry but the ideas we gathered helped us a lot in planning stages. We also did not develop any of the conventions from the film. The message of the film was what appealed to us the most before we started the production journey.


New Boy:

This is probably the short film we used the most conventions from. We used conventions from this short film because when we were developing our ideas we decided to move on to another message consisting of bullying. In our ancillary task mis en scene was our main priority and we used the classroom setting as shown in New boy and we developed the bullying into physical instead of mental. In our final product we used very effective shots we seen in the New Boy, shots like the 'over the shoulder shot' are very effective in making the audience see what you see and also show some of the emotion being portrayed.



The Bullying Effect:

This is very similar to New boy mis en scene wise. When we were developing our ideas we came across The Bullying Effect. The name of the film is a clear indication of the message. The shots used in this short film made the main actor seem more segregated amongst the class. shots consisted of 'close ups', 'over the shoulder shots showing kids laughing behind her. They are all very creative shots but we decided to challenge the conventions and channel our thoughts to a more comic delivery, so we made sure the shots we used gave a sense of humour to the audience. We used a very effective camera pan movement when the first person walks in signifying that there was no reason for him to sit next to the main actor when there is so many seats still there. A very uncommon convention in the film industry as the characters are usually introduced straight away. We also used the point of view shot for the audience to see what the main actor saw. We used this convention as a lot of hollywood films use this convention for intensity.
Before we had made our decision we had been very stuck on what non-diegetic music to use and the Bullying effect seemed to have straight forward, powerful music which we thought to use. 'Let the drummer kick that' has very powerful lyrics which would be very good in getting an emotional side to the audience out but as we went on, it became apparent to us that using this convention would drain the comedy we wanted to show in the short film so I decided to make an original in Garage band.


The Waiting Room: This is the start of our film and we decided to use the wall to lead it into the reveal shot. A convention which is not very common but worked for our short film. The convention however is very common in the music industry. I think it is a very great way of starting the short film because of the mystery. Another convention used in this clip is the non-diegetic music. Most films start with their soundtracks so that people have something to remember them with. Its always catchy and repetitive and I feel that ours meets the criteria.

This is a very common reveal shot which we used after looking at a film called Training Day. Its common in the film industry as it gathers up mystery for the audience, makes them wonder what will be happening. It is most important at the start of films because the audience can almost predict the rest of the story from the start so it has to be very clear. I can say that we used this convention to make our short film more professional and less realistic as possible.

In this scene we challenged the point of view shot so common in the film industry. We opted for this shot so that the audience can also see the actors face as well as where he is looking.











I personally really like this camera movement as we pan around his legs as he walks and the camera slowly tilts up. A shot I think should be more common than it is in the film industry. It has the same effect as the reveal shot because it creates mystery.










The close up is probably the most common of our used conventions as it shows people the emotion of the actor and also allows people to pick up what the actor is saying with their body language. The close up we used so that the audience can realized that the actor was confused why the man came and sat with him with all the other chairs free.









Here we did a pan movement on the chairs for comical reasons and this we challenged as usually in the film industry they put dialogue to show a comical effect but we just used the shots which we thought would work and they have.

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