Lauren's Media Studies

Dear Moderator, My name is Lauren Mason and welcome to my blog. It is a record of the work undertaken as part of the G321 AS Foundation Portfolio within the OCR GCE course in Media Studies. I worked together with Grace Ryan to produce a film opening in the romantic-crime genre. The project lasted four months, commencing in September 2016 and finishing in March 2017. I hope you enjoy my work and find it both successful and interesting. Please use the navigation bar to access my work as organised into labels: Actors, locations, costumes & props, audience research, extra filming and editing, film opening research, planning, post production, preliminary tasks, film opening and evaluations. There is also a link to the St Marys School blog hub. Yours faithfully Lauren Mason

Here is the final cut of my film opening titled: 'Insiders'

 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Above are 9 key frames from my film opening – Insiders. I will refer to them throughout my evaluation from frame 1-9, reading left to right. At the beginning of my opening, we made and edited a film ident as seen in frame 1. This ident relates to our film as the ‘clank / whoosh’ we used to suggest our film opening has an interesting story line and is different as it is not the normal jingle. The use of the pink font and the grey background suggests that our target audience is not just men but we are also targeting females. In the first 30 seconds of our film opening we set the scene with an establishing shot walking through Covent garden, which confirms the romantic comedy convention used in most films nowadays. We were inspired to add the title of the location and time onto the shot, to remind the audience that this film opening although romantic, is part of...

How does your media product represent particular social groups?  We wanted our main character to be recognisable as part of a particular social group, someone who our audience can aspire and relate too. Our film opening has a strong female lead, similar to both Focus and Mr and Mrs Smith who also present a strong, independent women as one of the key roles. Although Isadora is an attractive character in our film opening, we didn't want to objectify or use the cinematography to sexualise her in a way that focus does, in the scene which we have used for our inspiration. Margot Robbie, in the robbing scene, wears a tight pink dress to purposely attract attention to her body, however due to the way in which we want to portray Isadora, and the weather, we would dress her in stylish yet appropriate clothing for the weather. We would like our character to have a inspirational effect on our audience, however with a comical element, which is clearly present in Focus.  We too...

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

Who would be the audience for your media product? Earlier on in the year whilst researching our target audience, Grace and I created a mood board of our target audiences likes and dislikes. Likes:  Dislikes:  Here is a drawing of our target audience and a explanation of thier taste - where they might shop, their  favourite music, favourite tv programme etc.  We think that a target audience similar to this will enjoy our film opening because they would be very similar to the characters in the way they dress, shop and spend their  free time. We know that our film opening is not going to attract every audience there is but we are almost certain that we will attract a audience with similar interests to this drawing. 

How did you attract/address your audience?  script: Our film comes under the sub genre of an ‘Urban Fairytale’ so we ensured we used the typical conventions of this, to attract our target audience, For example our protagonist commits crimes to join a group and receive acceptance from them.   Due to our film being a 12A we aimed it at women and men from the ages of about 12-25, as it has romantic yet crime conventions making it more appealing to both genders. Throughout creating our film we received frequent feedback from people of different ages, including teenaged girls so we could include our audiences interests and adapt our film to their preferences. One point of feedback we acted upon was the cutting out of dialogue. Initially we had much more dialogue between the characters, however the feedback we received told us our audience were not interested by it. Our film was set in a contemporary landscape, the busy shopping centre of Covent Garden in London, typica...

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

Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product? Script:  Since our preliminary task we have learnt alot in terms of cinematography and editing and developed these skills which we believe is shown in our film opening. Our preliminary task involved someone opening a door, walking across a room, sitting down and exchanging a few sentences of dialogue between two people. We had to incorporate shot reverse shot, 180 degree rule and match on action, into our short film to learn how they are used. Overall I enjoyed learning about the new camera techniques and getting used to filming. I found it more difficult than I expected to stick to the rules, for instance the 180 degree rule, however in my film opening I will now know not to the 'cross the line'. Whilst doing this preliminary task we used a range of different equipment and software most of which was new to me.When film...

Last week Grace and I had the opportunity to show our film opening to a group of people (37) who were 15 and above. The showing was very successful and gave us avaluable response and what to improve on. They also insured us that our film opening was of good quality. We had everyone fill out a survey aftet they had watched our film opening. Here are the questions we asked on our survey:  Do you think the sound is effective? Is there anything you would add? Do you understand what is happening in the film opening? Does it make you want to watch more of the film? Is there any way we can improve it? What would you rate the film out of 10? These were the results and as you can see from the pie charts they were a very mixed set of results:

Grace and I have been editing our film for around a month now, and whilst editing we have encountered a number of problems. One of our problems is the lack of transitions between shots, whilst filming we focused on the actual scenes not the moving or change of scenery between scenes. Now we are editing some of our shots seem jumpy as we do not have a smooth transition into the next shot. Another issue we have encountered is the amount of background noise. Due to our location we were unable to control the amount of noise in the background, whilst in some scenes the sound of violins adds to the ambience, in other scenes we have found it hard to hear what the actors are saying and have had to record a voice over, to place over the top of the scene. Although we have encountered problems, we have found ways around these problems. Our next step is to find some music that we both like to add to the beginning and robbery scene of our film opening and once we have acomplished that we are ...

Here is Grace and I's rough cut for our film opening. We showed our rough cut to the focus group and got some great feedback! There is some improvements we will need to make, like making some of the clips shorter and deleting the irrelevant clips, also once we add sound it will be completely different!

Here is the storyboard for my final film opening - Insiders And here is the shot list for my final film opening