Audience

Producers need to ensure that the film reaches the audience it's intending for. All films will have some sort of markteing campaign attached to them such as; Posters, print advertisments and trailers.

Audience research is a major part of any media company, using questionnaires. Media producers bascially want to know the income/bracket status, age, gender, race, location.

Mainstream- is the largest and highing selling films, and are sometimes considered the lowest form of cinema.

Shooting Schedule

We have now come up with a shooting schedule which is convient for everyone, this will be tomorrow night, 25th November, at around 5pm, if we don't finish, or need to do any final adjustments we will do so on the weekend.

StoryBoard

We have now finished our storyboard, there will be a picture up very soon!

Group Blog

In our last media lesson, we were given the choice on whether we wanted to make another blog, but created by the group as well as our individual blogs. We felt there was no need to make another blog, as it will only contain the information we all have on our own blogs, also we don't have a great deal of time to create this, therefore hope this doesn't affect our mark.

Opening Sequence

Plot outline/summary- Girl is at home with her mum and dad before they leave to go to a party. A murderer is secretly behind a wall, in the garden. The murderer is waiting for the parents to leave. The teenager girl is on a chat messenger at the time talking to her friends, she hears a noise and goes to look.

Opening sequence- Establishing shot of a street light, making it ways down to see the the girl walking down the street..

Characters - The girl who gets stalked, and the stalker. Played by Myself and Richard Parrish

Locations- Two streets, leading to the girls house, The girls house.

Costumes- Everyday clothes, and a hoodie.

Props- The dark, A house phone, gloves, doors.

Lighting- Getting dark, to dark. Dimming of the lights inside the house.

Our Film Name.

My group and I have chosen then Film Name, this will be 'Persuit', Richard parrish a member of the group created a list of Film names for the film, we decided on using this as it gives different impressions on what the viewer is about to see. The Film name will be in Red or White bold text, which will appear at the end of the opening sequence .

The Group members are; Jordon McGowan, Chelsea Langdon, Melissa Ece and Richard Parrish.

Narrative Theory

The plot- the way the story is told.

The sequence of events put together within a text.

Narrative may be reduced to a simple sequence.

Equation:-

Equilibrium > When everything is in order harmony (balanced).

Disequilibrium > Something happens to upset the order harmony (un-balanced)

New Equilibrium > Equilibrium restored > harmony restored order.

.

Narrative theory was developed by Walter Fisher.

Narrative theory, is the study of narrative or story, written or otherwise. The founder of narrative theory is Aristotle.

Another narrative theory is by Todorov, he suggests that all the narratives follow three part structure. It begins with equilibrium, everything is balanced until something comes along to disrupt, and then it reaches a resolution when equilibrium is then restored.

Representation & stereotypes

Representation refers to the construction in any medium especially the mass media of aspects of 'reality' such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. Such representations may be in speech or writing as well as still or moving pictures. There are four key themes in racial representation; exotic, dangerous, humorous, pitied.

Stereotypes are simple and one dimensional. Filmmakers often rely heavily on stereotypes, because they're a quick and simple way to establish a movie character's traits.

Half Term

In half term, my group decided to create our script and storyboard.

And i was set to do the storyboard which I have created, I will soon get scan the storyboard and post it as a picture on here for you all to see.

Our script has yet to be created by one member of our group.

Yesterday's Media Lesson

Codes & Conventions; we looked into detail and we discussed if we're going to use this in the making of our film. We decided to stick with codes and conventions in the end.

Codes-

Technical codes- camera angles- framing, lighting.

Verbal codes - Everything to do with typography language/written or spoken.

Symbolic codes- everything that links with our cultural reference/ experience.

Conventions-

The widely recognized way of doing something.

Film Stills

P.S I Love You
Bridget Jones
Final Destination
Titanic

Group Production Roles

Pre Production

Name Task/role .Task/role
------------------------------------------
Chelsea .Producer .Researcher
Melissa.Script Writer .Researcher
Jordon .Story Board .Reseacrher
Richard .Locations .Researcher
.& Prop Fixer


Production
Chelsea .Planner/Producer
Melissa .Director
Jordon .Director
Richard .Camera Man, Still shots

Post- Production
Chelsea .Editor .Share Roles
Melissa .Editor .Audience Researcher
Jordon .Editor .Poster Publisist
Richard .Editor .Share Roles

Title Sequence Anaylsis- Silence Of The Lambs.

I have chosen to do the title sequence from the “silence of the lambs”, I decided on doing this as I have yet to have seen the whole film.

Before the film starts there is a main image which is a big close up of a woman’s face taken at eye-level. The use of big close up enables the audience to have a very good view of the expression on the woman’s face, The woman is directly addressing the camera, this makes the image more striking and attracts people's attention. The woman’s mouth is being covered by some sort of moth-like bug, which at first glance appears to be harmless, but in fact there’s a skull on the moth. This skull signifies death and it seems as if this moth is trying to prevent her from speaking.

The film starts off with an establishing shot of the woods and lake, giving an eerie feel to the viewer. The music uses tension and release, a trait commonly used in the music industry to build suspense. The building of the music, from low to high pitch, and from quiet to loud adds to the tension created in the opening scene. As Agent Starling starts to run, the pace of the music quickens in time with her footsteps. When the agent is called, a tension peak is reached with this digetic sound, but the viewer is quickly alerted to the reality of the situation when they realise that the voice is in fact that of her commanding officer, and she is in no danger at all. The sound of the birds in the opening scene signifies death to the viewer, as vultures and birds are often associated with death. The mist can be perceived as oppressive and it seems as if it obscures your perception off events.

In the opening shot there is no camera movement. The camera, still in one continuous shot, pans down and to the left deeper into the forest from the tree creating a high angle establishing shot. The camera then settles on Agent Starling in the distance working her way up through the forest towards the camera. As she reaches the top, we can hear that she is out of breath, the camera retracts slightly as she pauses and looks around. The camera then follows her from a distance, creating a long tracking shot. The shot then cuts to close up of her face as she runs, then zooms out slightly into a mid shot of her head and shoulders. The shot yet again cuts, this time to a side angle mid shot from her rights hand side, the camera still moving with her, as she runs through the trees with the crunching of the leaves underfoot apparent in the sound. The camera is still following her as she runs until someone off screen shouts her, and then runs into shot towards her, as a consequence she turns around the camera then moves towards, with Starling bending over, exhausted, making the commanding officer look very powerful.

The four words pinned to the tree - hurt, agony, pain, love-it, instil in the viewer a sense of wonder, and leaves them asking why these words are there, and they also add to the tension and suspense at the start of the thriller.

Agent Starling is dressed in male clothes and we see her surrounded by men at the end of the opening scene, this makes the viewer feel as if she is out of place and in a male surrounding. Her clothes are sweaty and some may feel that she is incapable of doing a man’s job. In the title sequence the viewer is unaware of the situation. Initially, it’s thought that she may be running away from something or someone, but the reality is revealed when we see the climbing frame. It then becomes clear that she is perhaps part of the police force or army and this is confirmed when her superior addresses her as ‘Agent Starling‘.

The lettering used is another feature of the opening sequence. The letters are bold, black and uppercase. The boldness of the letters imposes a sense of authority on the viewers, which may be showing danger or the authority inflicted on Agent Starling by her male colleagues. Black signifies death and secrecy which are two major themes of this thriller.

Psycho, the famous shower scene.

In our media lesson last week we looked at the famous shower scene from the film psycho. We were asked to count how many cuts and the different camera angles used.

After that lesson i went home and researched it, I found out that the shot took 6 days to produce from December 17 to December 23rd 1959. There was around 50 cuts and the seen runs for 3 minutes. Most of the shots are extreme close-ups except for the medium shots in the shower directly before the murder took place and directly after it.

Story Board

In our previous lesson, we created story boards. We learnt how to create them, using either a pen or pencil.

We paired up, and created our very own. Storyboards are a sequence of images or drawings that describes the planned content of a film.

Storyboards should include the use of dialogue, characters, movement and not forgetting the camera shot. I enjoyed creating them.

^^ There is an example of a storyboard, I found this on a website which helped me to create my own storyboard. Here is the hyper link; http://accad.osu.edu/womenandtech/Storyboard%20Resource/

For homework we were asked to look at the following websites, these were very helpful aswell.

longroadmedia.com and

6thformnoodle.blogspot.com

3rd Week In Media

In our media lesson today, we analysed the title sequence from the famous film pyshco, and vertigo.

The opening scences of Pyscho has no use of camera or image. The music contains ostinati of staccato notes, therefore it makes it very dramatic and creepy to make the atmosphere tense, then the music starts to go slower. the Font throughout the title sequence doesn't change neither does the colour. The use of colour is very dark which makes it incredibly creepy and dull.
The image is dull, which consists of horizantal lines and vertical lines to create the title "Psycho", the image is very dramatical. The camera shots are very long. Its seems to have a very negative impact by using dull and dark graphics and colour.

Saul bass was an American Graphic Designer, He was born in 1920, and originally brought up in New York. He was known for his motion picture title sequences. Saul is also remembered for the most iconic icons in north America such as; The bell telephone logo. He designed title sequences for 40 years. In 1958'a Vertigo, his first title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock, Bass shot an extreme close-up of a woman's face and then her eye before spinning it into a sinister spiral as a bloody red soaks the screen. 1959's North to Northwest, the credits swoop up and down a grid of vertical and diagonal line like passenger stepping off elevators.

Here are some of the title sequences;

Pyscho,

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad world,

The war of the roses and

Goodfellas.

"My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it" - Saul Bass

My First ever Blog! :)

Hello, My name is Jordon, and this is my first ever blog account! I set this up for media studies to contribute to my As level result. This is the first year of using blogs so its a whole new experience for us all. Im so glad to be using this instead of pen and paper!