Our Final Film

This is our final film 'Recurrence'.

Evaluation: Question 7

7) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=pOW9NEpZDoE

We decided to present the answer to this question as a group. After discussing what we each thought about this question, we put all of our ideas together and recorded ourselves as we each talked about a different part to the answer.

Evaluation: Question 6

6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hupGUM9Z8Bo&feature=youtube_gdata

I have also presented my answer to this question in a movie maker clip.

Evaluation: Question 4 & 5

4) Who would be the audience for your media product?
5) How did you attract/address your audience?

[I wanted to combine questions 4 and 5 because I thought that explaining who our film is targeted at and how we addressed the audience should go into the same answer.]

We decided to rate our film as a 15, as we were aiming at older teenagers. Although we think this film would appeal to most age groups in this category, we wanted to focus on certain elements of the opening in order to attract our chosen target audience. We felt that we would need to make the characters in the opening scenes relate that that target audience. When the scene changes from the title to a mother and her teenage daughter arguing, we thought that the body language shown, portrayed what was happening, without needing the sound to back it up. We all agreed that this scene in particular would relate to most teenagers and parents of teenagers who may have experienced tension and arguments in their own family lives. The following scene shows the girl running away from home which we hope will make the audience feel sympathy for the character and want to continue watching to find out what happens to her. We also used certain elements within mise-en-scene in order to make the audience feel like they could relate to the teenager. We made sure that the character was wearing something that was simple, so we decided that the character should wear jeans and a jumper. We didn’t want the girl to stand out too much, since she was meant to just be an ordinary girl. As we mainly wanted to relate to teenagers between 15 and 19, we thought that it was best for the character’s age to be unknown to the audience. I think we made it clear that she was also between the age of 15 and 19, which means that a teenager who is watching, may feel relatable if they think that she is the same age as them.

Evaluation: Question 3

3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoSFQamyKOw&feature=youtube_gdata

I have presented my answer to this question in a movie maker clip.

Evaluation: Question 2

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In the opening scenes of Recurrence, we wanted a particular social group to be represented, in order to fit with the audience that we are aiming our film at. The main social group which is represented is a family, which is clearly under stress and unhappy. As the audience will see throughout the opening, it is a broken family, where there are two parents divorced with a teenager who is left in the middle. We thought that our opening puts across the stresses of a modern day family when the parents are no longer together.

As the film begins, you see a girl who is standing in front of a big house. We wanted to leave the audience unknown to whether she lives in the house and is from a well off family or whether she works at this house, as it is meant to be set a long time ago. We thought that the switch over to the present tense would leave the audience wondering what bearing she has on the rest of the film and what might have happened to her in the past.

When the scene changes to the teenage girl and her mother arguing, we thought that the audience would be able to tell that it has moved to the present tense. We thought that the modern house and the typical teenager attitude would give off this impression. The body language between the mother and the daughter portrays a lot of tension and built up frustration through the facial expressions and hand gestures. We wanted to portray the modern lives of a broken family and what effect is has on the people involved.



Evaluation: Question 1

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

Through analysing and doing deconstructions of the openings of psychological thrillers, we got a lot of ideas about how to do our opening. When planning the opening of ‘Recurrence’, we wanted it to have more substance than many thriller film openings because we wanted to include enough story in the opening scenes to draw the audience in. Although we wanted to stay mainly on the normal conventions of a thriller, we wanted to also develop them. I think that we managed to expose the audience enough so that they realised the genre was a thriller, but I also think that we made them really wonder what is going to happen throughout the film.

When discussing our film with people, we found that lots of people asked themselves these questions...

·         Is the film going to be old fashioned?

·         Who is the girl?

·         Will the film have flashbacks from modern day to the past?

·         Will the whole story be in the past?

·         Will the girl from the opening scene reappear?

·         Why are they arguing?

·         Does the mother know she’s gone?

·         Where is she going?

·         Whose house is it?

·         How does she have a key?

·         Where is her dad?

·         Is there a relationship between the girl and her father?

·         Why is she acting like she has never been there before?

·         Why is she in the same place as the other girl?

·         What is going to happen next?

At the beginning of the task, I did a deconstruction of the film opening of ‘Road to Perdition’. After doing this, I thought that the opening of our film should have more content relevant to the story. In Road to Perdition, the opening starts with a clip of the end of the film where a boy is standing on the beach. The shot then changes to a clip where the boy is cycling through the town, going the opposite way to everybody else. I think this represents him taking you back to the beginning of the story. The long opening doesn’t really give you a full sense of what genre the film is. In contrast, we started with a clip from the past, whereas Road to Perdition started with a clip from the future. In ‘Recurrence’, we wanted to start the story immediately from the outset. We also wanted to subtly convey the girls’ family situation to the audience to help them empathise with how she is feeling. I think doing the deconstructions really helped us to realise what we wanted our film to be about, what target market it should be aimed at, how much story we wanted to include in the opening two minutes without giving too much away and how we would portray to the audience that it was a thriller.