Miss Hammond's Lesson

In today's lesson we did about audience. You need to know as much detail as possible about the audience to be able to attract them, here is the basic information of our target audience which we need to know:
Age of audience - 13-25 years
Gender - male and female
Where they're from - UK, Cities
Socio-economic group - mostly category E, some D's and C2's and possibly some C1's
Existing or new audience - existing
Particular group - students
Interests/lifestyle/values/attitudes - busy, social lifestyle, being with friends/in groups, shopping, cinema, meals, going out(town), parties, driving, Facebook, TV(American shows/reality, comedy shows), fashion, sport, music, drinking, smoking.

We also learnt about the six social categories. I mentioned above that our audience fits into category E, here are the criteria for the six categories:
Category A - professional, higher managerial people ie. MP/surgeon
Category B - middle management, administrative ie. bank manager
Category C1 - junior manager, supervisory ie. personal assistant
Category C2 - skilled manual people ie. plumber/machine worker
Category D - semi-skilled/unskilled ie. cleaner
Category E - casual workers, pensioners, unemployed ie. seasonal worker

These categories help to narrow down who it is exactly that will view your text. This links into the niche market, a specialist/specific market. The niche market is mostly used in advertisement because adverts are aimed at a specific type or group of people. Sky's specific channels like history, sport and drama would use niche market adverts that link to these channels ie. sports channel would advertise energy drinks, sports games, sports clothes etc.

Storyboard

Here are the first 11 still shots from our trailer. We might change these when we start filming if it doesn't look right or if we have difficulties with the location.

Mr Ford's Lesson

In Mr Ford's lesson we learnt about post modern media. We see media reality as reality, we can't tell the difference between real things and the images of them. A good example of this that Mr Ford showed us from Mr Smith's blog was René Magritte's Cest n'est pas une pipe. If asked what this is most people would say 'a pipe' but Magritte says 'This is not a pipe' below the pipe because actually it is an image of a pipe, it is a representation and 'does not satisfy emotionally'.

Post modern media is when the representations get 'remixed' and the maker of the text deliberately show that what they have done isn't real. They represent media reality. Quentin Tarrantino is one of the most famous post modern media film makers. In his film Kill Bill in one of the scenes he shows a birds eye view of the setting but this view makes it clear to the audience that they are filming on a set as there is not ceiling and you can see the top of the walls separating each room. Also the use of blood is very fake and dramatised to make it clear it's just a representation and not real. However most of the films audience would probably just see this as funny, to see blood squirting uncontrollably out of someones arm but its done for a reason beyond that, to make it obvious that what you are seeing is fake and not reality.
Other examples of media reality: the Cadbury's gorilla advert, The Mighty Boosh and Pulp Fiction.

It is unfortunate that as we want our trailer to feel as real as possible we won't be able to use this concept in our work but it does really interest me so I may research into it further to see if I can find a way of using or making our trailer post modern media.

Miss Hammond's Lesson

Last week in Miss Hammond's theory lesson we went over the basic keywords we should know to do with media. There were a few I didn't know about:
Denotation - literal meaning, what you immediately see
Connotation - assumptions, linking what you see to something
Anchorage - linking text to image
Ideologies - beliefs/ideas that are challenged or upheld
I will need to start using these terms when talking about media text including the trailer.
We also recapped the narrative theorists used in media:
Todorov - all films begin with an equilibrium (a calm/normal state), then a disruption, an action or conflict, causes the disequilibrium (unsettled state), and finally the conflict is resolved and the calm state is restored as there is a new equilibrium.
Barthes - suggested narratives use five codes: action, enigma, semic, symbolic, cultural. The most known is the enigma code which means the narrative will create mysteries as it goes along.
Propp - researched Folk Talkes and found they always featured 8 specific character roles: villain, hero, donor, helper, princess, her father, dispatcher, false hero. These can easily be related to films and programmes from today's era.
Levi-Strauss - binary oppositions - the ideologies of the opposition/conflict.

Music

We've been looking for the type of music we want for our trailer and I was listening to this song, Litteboots-New In Town, and thought it fits the kind of feel for the first scene of our trailer where the girls are getting ready.

To Do List...

By the end of this week we aim to...

-Finish storyboard
-Research/decide type of music we want
-Analyse filming that has been done
-Choose picture for poster background

Practise Filming

On Saturday and Sunday I did some filming at my friends party. It was mostly just a practise to see if the location and lighting that was available works. I did about 10minutes of filming, whilst I was filming I did notice that in some rooms the lighting wasn't very good/bright enough so not much showed up on the screen. Later today I'm going to load the tape onto the editing computers and look at the quality of the filming and see what I can improve. On the Sunday me and my friend were cleaning up the house and found some leaked berry juice in the fridge which I filmed a bit of because it look like blood so I will also have to see if this looks realistic enough to use in our trailer and maybe just use flashes of it if we want to use blood.

Poster Background Idea

This is a picture which advertised the most recent Skins series, we are going to look at the skins series to give us inspiration as they experiment with different camera angles, they have a teenage cast and use typical stereotypes for some of the characters. this is similar to ours as we want to have teenagers in our teaser trailer. In skins the friendship group seems to be mixed, you wouldn't like necessarily think that they would all be friends, so this challenges some stereotypes of teenage groups. We have included this poster as we think it illustrates the characters straight away and tells you a little bit about them, we may look at this sort of style of photograph for our film poster, showing you all the main characters. I think what makes the photograph effective is because its an action shot, which makes it easy to recognise with because it relates to the program.

Shot/Editing Ideas

These two clips gave us an idea to use similar angles and editing for our trailer.

Prom Night

The Prom Night trailer starts with a group of girls in a hairdressers. A range of different angles are used for example over the shoulder, mid shots, and side views. The sequence in which these shots are shown is: side/mid, mirror view/mid, mirror.over shoulder/mid, tagline, mirror/over shoulder/mid, mirror/over shoulder/mid, side view/mid (only focused on one girl), over shoulder/mirror/mid, tagline. This opening sequence helps to introduce the characters and also gives a clue to the story as we hear the girls in conversation. Our trailer will also feature this range of angles of the main character and her friends getting ready for her party. In between two of the shots a tagline on a black background is seen which reads 'The Preparation' and after the scene in the hairdressers the next tagline which links to the next setting is 'The Anticipation'

Mean Girls

Institutions

Today I researched the different institutions who produce films of the same genre and target audience as our film.

• Alliance Films, Newmarket Films, Original Films - Prom Night
• BBC Films - Tormented
• New Line Cinema - Final Destination (and sequels), A Nightmare On Elm Street (and sequels), The Cell, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and sequels), Friday The 13th.
• Lionsgate - Hostel, Saw (and sequels), Blair Witch Project (2), Cabin Fever, My Bloody Valentine, The Descent, Serial Killing 101, Teeth.

We've decided to use Lionsgate as our production company as we have seen more of the films they make than the other institutions we researched and think they make more films for our age range than the others. We will show the Lionsgate logo at the beginning of our trailer.

Trailer Inspiration

The 'Tormented' and 'Prom Night' trailers inspired us most when coming up with our storyline, we liked these movie trailers, as they seem pretty normal at the start of the trailers but then things start to happen which makes you instantly recognise the genre of the film. They use quick shots from lots of different angles with quick editing, the trailer picks up in pace, with suspense building music to captivate the audience, keep them watching and leave them wanting more.

Prom Night

Prom Night uses

• a teenage cast,
• the events happen at a party/prom,
• they show the characters getting ready,
• use short clips and quick editing for the horror scenes,
• suspense building/changing music,
• has one protagonist and one antagonist,
• the antagonist is a known villain,
• tag lines,
• white flashes in between shots.

All of these techniques etc we have also decided to use in our trailer.
Tormented

Tormented uses

• teenage main characters,
• storyline is based on revenge,
• uses party scenes,
• quick editing,
• suspenseful music,
• character roles,

All of which we have taken inspiration from and will be using in our trailer.

Pitch

A2 Pitch

View more presentations from laurenlaura.

Here is some of the feedback we got after we presented our pitch to the class.

• need to research/think about the kind of music/soundtrack we want
• dialogue?
• continuity of costumes/makeup because it's all set in one day/time space
• distinguishing who the killer is - show obsession

We now also need to think about

• institution
• film name
• poster background/photo ideas
• storyboard
• list of shots/camera angles
• music
• dialogue

First Lesson-Induction Week

In our first Media lesson we chose our groups and which brief we want to do. In our group is Laura Foster and Lauren Harrison.
The brief we chose is a promotional package for a new film, teaser trailer. From the three options of the smaller tasks we chose the website homepage for the film and the poster for the film.

The genre we've decided on for our trailer is horror/thriller. We chose this genre because there are always a lot of horror/thriller films out in the cinema and seeing the trailers in the cinema and on TV inspired us and gave us ideas for our trailer. Horror/thriller is also a very popular genre with the adolescent audiences, 13-25, which is the target audience we want to promote to.

We made some notes on our brief to give us a guideline of want we need to research, and what we have noticed the features are already;
Teaser Trailer- Short clips of film, 2-3 minutes long, Horror- dark, infrared, quick editing/clips, tag lines, quick flashes of white or black backgrounds, fading, suspense building music, not revealing the killer.
Website- Character pages, download wallpaper/photos, games, music, trailer, actors interviews, behind the scenes, competitions, info on directors.
Poster- Characters, still image of film, directors/actors/producers/composers of music/production company names, website.