Max Warby Media Blog Year 13

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

When creating our film we used a lot of conventions that are apparent in real media products. We felt that using conventions from films that are proven successful is only a beneficial idea as the aspects of these current, popular films have obviously worked.
MaxAl Productions (our group) decided on using an action based genre for our film, we decided on this down to the fact that we all felt action was the genre we felt we were all most interested in and knew the most about, therefore we hoped that when it came to planning and shooting we would be struck with more ideas compared to if we had decided on a romantic comedy!
The first convention of a real media product that we used was the use of a fitting actor. When looking for an actor to star in a fighting film you want to cast someone who has a rugged and street look to help enhance the characters authenticity and subsequently you need the audience to believe their role. We felt that the choice of our main character was key, we wanted to cast someone who is ‘hard’ with fighting experience and the ability to act with a detached sense of emotions. We came across Louis Palmer, someone with a chiselled body that looks great on camera and quite a ‘street’ look about him, instantly we knew the casting was a fitting choice. We used a real media convention here as if you look at casting in Hollywood films you’ll notice that different actors have their films that they specialise in, resultantly proving that the producers of films cast people according to the image they want to represent e.g. Hugh Grant often stars in romantic-comedies, Vin Diesel in fast-paced action.

We also wanted to use the media convention of a suitable song that coincides with the mood and tone of the film. We noticed in different films, different songs are used to create the desired effect. We wanted to create a streetwise feel with a dark edge and therefore went with the song ‘Reach’ by the artist ‘Skrein’. This song is of a grime genre and epitomises street music currently in the UK. This song has also been used in the film ‘Adulthood’ which focuses on a street feel therefore proving it is the right sort of music we need.
In action films you see a lot of quick cutting and interesting cinematography to create gripping fast paced action. We looked at films such as ‘Never Back Down’ and ‘Fighting’ for inspiration and guidance when creating our film, we noticed after scouring these films for ideas that they included a lot of crucial editing to create the desired fast pace. We then mirrored this real media convention into our piece by using challenging shots e.g. 360 shots with a camera on wheels. We also used really quick and sharp editing in Final Cut Express.
Another real media convention we decided to use was this use of props, style and objects. In action films you often see cars. We decided to include an old Mini Cooper in racing green in our trailer to mirror the convention used in blockbusters. We also wanted the audience to create a link between our trailer and ‘The Italian Job’. Clothing was another convention we wished to use, when researching into the action genre we saw that fighters had a unique dress sense, rugged and simple. We dressed Louis in a vest with dark jeans throughout to create his image of effortless masculinity.
It is hard to use all conventions of real media products in your project though, in action films one of the main conventions is the use of special effects. This is something we couldn’t use due to not having access to a special effects studio!

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Alongside our teaser trailer we had to produce two ancillary tasks. One of the ancillary tasks was to create a film poster and the other was to create a magazine front cover promoting the film. We chose these two ancillary tasks instantly as firstly, we have access to a very good Digital SLR and a keen photographer in our group. Secondly, I am familiar with Photoshop CS4 and finally we just felt these two would be the most enjoyable and we all felt confident we could create strong pieces of work if doing these two tasks.
When looking at creating our two ancillary tasks it was vital to pick up on key themes and features that would appear in our film and apply it to the two promotional tasks. You have to tie the image, values, ideology, brand and genre of the film into the magazine cover and the film poster. This was relatively straight forward for us, we knew our film’s genre (thriller/action) and we knew our storyline, in short it was about a man seeking revenge on an unjust prison sentence, he does this by fighting himself out of trouble. When carrying out research for our film we had to look at typical apparel, settings and music in similar films, we took a lot of inspiration from ‘Never Back Down’ and used it as a framework to create our product. Often in these films we saw the main fighting figure as topless or in a vest, this is something we thought was crucial for our fighter to be in so that the audience can associate with him and what he’s about a lot quicker, it is also a chance to construct meaning via mise en scene. In our poster and magazine front cover we therefore wanted to put our main character, Mickey Stanton (Louis Palmer), in a vest. We decided on this as it’s easily associable with a fighting background and helps creates his poor, rugged image. He is also wearing the vest in the trailer footage and creates a visual link to help the audience distinguish who he is.
As a group we wanted to look at ‘Empire’ magazine for inspiration when creating the magazine front cover. After scouring the internet and comparing many covers we started to get a feel of what was needed to make a strong cover, we then travelled to the filming location and took some shots of Louis in his vest, standing against a brick background. We got him to pull up his fists in a boxing position and show anger in his face, along with tensed muscles, this is a well known connotation of a fighter e.g. Rocky posters. We wanted this picture to sum up Mickey Stanton’s personality instantly for the consumer. When looking at ‘Empire’ magazine it was clear that all the previous cover stars were very much in character when posing for the front in order to promote their films, this was what we wanted for Mickey to do too, his clenched fists and boxing stance helps the audience instantly know he is a fighter. His face shows anger and hunger for revenge and visually he is very tensed up and dressed as one would imagine a fighter should be.
When conducting audience research before our film via structured and unstructured questionnaires and asking what the audience thought a fighter’s apparel should consist of, the two answers we got most were ‘topless’ or ‘in a vest’, this is why we decided on one of the two throughout our footage as it’s a known image, one that the audience are familiar with.
When creating our magazine front cover, the colour schemes were slightly more easy to decide on as we had ‘Empire’ magazine as a template to base our creation on. When looking at ‘Empire’ it was clear that the films put their own slight twists on the colour schemes sometimes but asides from that the ‘Empire’ colours were dominant on the page. We used a medium-long shot of Louis on the magazine cover to give the audience a close up and personal introduction to the character. I looked through ‘Empire’ magazines and the different headings they had on the front covers and decided to caption our magazine front cover, ‘EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH YOUNG BRITISH STAR’, this was written in a layer format over Louis middle section. At the top of the page, above ‘EMPIRE’ I put, ‘CAGED’ and ‘WORLD EXCLUSIVE’, I did this as after some research into the magazines, some had done a similar thing to instantly show the consumer what this edition is about. Alongside the image and the colours, we edited onto the image some graffiti sprays and some graffiti writing to add a more authentic and ‘street’ feel to the cover, this was done to help associate the cover with our film, our film is very ‘street’ and a typical location is down an alleyway so the idea of the front cover of the magazine to be shot against a brick wall with graffiti around it is strong as it helps reinforce the image we desire to create with the film. The fonts used are typical of ‘Empire’ magazine and so too is all the colour schemes.
For our film poster we decided to put Louis in the vest again to create an easily noticeable trait. We put him sitting in an outdoors background with not much around him. In the image we wanted him to be tensed up but slightly slouched with quite a vengeful look on his face, we wanted him to look quite scary yet a hero. It’s very important to publish the right pose as it’s the first introduction to the character and you need to create an image that gains the response you want, we wanted the audience to see him as a hero but angry. In this picture he looks slightly vulnerable yet his facial expression shows some aggression and his apparel suggests he is quite capable of managing himself. When I was researching a lot of similar films posters I noticed a few things they all had, obviously we had to put the title, the release date and some credits at the bottom, but also, a lot of them had a tag line. After much deliberation and research I decided on the line ‘when you have nothing, what is there to lose?’, I felt this was very prominent and summed up the message in the film nicely.
We layered a graffiti background over the initial image of Louis sitting down and created an effect that looks like Louis is merged in with a graffitied wall, this fits in with our aim to make the audience realise the part of the world this fighter is from and suggests that he is from a less affluent area where one is more stereotyped to be in a fighting culture. The fonts we used we are all quite representative of graffiti to once again tie in with the less wealthy culture and highlight his rough background. When carrying out audience research we found out that the most typical background of a fighter was a less affluent area and therefore it was a very easy decision to base the footage and the ancillary tasks in a poorer area, the graffiti helped us highlight this. The credits at the bottom were inserted as they are in many posters and so too was the certificate. The colour schemes we used were grey and red to create a strong, confident and prominent font, the colours also hint at blood and manliness and this too is something that helps us draw visual parallels with our actual film.
When creating our ancillary tasks and teaser trailer we wanted to research into other films and their promotional packages, consequently we looked at the ‘Never Back Down’ promotional package for inspiration.

The target audience of this film is men and women (predominantly men) from the ages of 18-30 and we aimed to target this section by creating a magazine front cover and poster of things that stereotypically interest men e.g. fighting. We wanted Mickey to look cool and give him a desirable factor and I think we created this down to creative research and planning.
In conclusion, I believe our main aim was to link the 2 ancillary tasks to the main teaser trailer, something which I believe we have accomplished via recognisable mise en scene and character familiarisation. The colours and fonts used for the ancillary tasks are constant and recognisable and the ‘look’ or ruggedness and ‘street’ is most certainly constructed throughout the 3 pieces of work.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

As a group we used audience feedback throughout our planning, production and even once our practical coursework was complete. Audience feedback is a vital part of production because in short, whether the audience likes your product or not determines how successful it is, therefore the people you need to trust are the audience, the one danger you can sometimes face though is creating a compromised film, this is where you take on lots of contrasting wants for the film and merge them into one creating a film that is neither here nor there which resultantly looks weak. We made sure we went with a majority vote when making decisions and we were lucky enough to have big proportions supporting the same ideas when carrying out our research.
We went about audience research a few ways in a trial and error method. First of all we decided to take a flip video camera out and about and ask random people who fit the criteria of our target audience (18-30/male) some open-ended qualitative questions about our genre of film. Questions would range from, ‘what is your favourite action/thriller film?’, ‘why did that work?’, ‘what makes a film stand out for you?’ etc. These questions were unstructured and although the benefit was we had footage to refer to and we got detailed opinions, it meant we lost the ability to group results and correlate them in order to find the most popular choices. We then decided to use a structured questionnaire, the questionnaire we used had an array of short questions with a multiple choice format to answer, this made it very easy for us to group results and see what are the most popular choices, again, the problem with this method though is that you don’t get any detail when grouping your findings. We handed this questionnaire out to 30 people, 20 given to men and 10 to women (due to us believing that men will make up the majority of our audiences), the ages ranged from 18-30 (what we believe the most popular age groups viewing our film will be). Due to the pros and cons of both of these methods we then decided to use both instead of settling for one so we could share the pros amongst our findings. We used the unstructured interviews for finding out opinions and longer questions like why/how/what/where/when? We then used the structured questionnaires to find out things like ‘what is the most appropriate time for a trailer?’ ‘what stands out for you in a trailer?’ etc to allow us to pinpoint certain necessities that we need to take note of and capitalise on.
After completing all of our practical coursework, including our ancillary tasks. We then undertook some post production research to see if we had fulfilled our aims, we did this in the form of structured questionnaires so it would be easy to correlate figures and create some statistics that give us a firm answer. Overall, we definitely fulfilled our aims. We gave the questionnaire to 20 people and each 90% said it was ‘very good and effective’ which was the highest category, 94% said it ‘fulfilled the aims of a film under this genre very well’ which was also the highest category.
Audience research is very vital to the media coursework as a whole and I feel that this is one of the things that enabled us to produce a lot stronger work compared to my AS year. The product is a lot more audience shaped with a lot more opinion put into it.
Concerning the ancillary tasks, we again used a 50/50 mixture of unstructured interviews and structured questionnaires to give us a wide range of feedback. The questions we asked provoked a truthful reaction and allowed us to work with a very open mind and adapt a lot of different opinion to make a popular product.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The use of media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages was very constant throughout the duration of our production process.
The use of technology was very crucial right from the very beginning when we began using a Flip Video Camera to capture some audience research on film and have footage we could refer back to. The Flip Video Camera was very useful as it is pocket sized with a very simple USB point on the side that connects it straight to the computer for uploading.

Technology was also seen when creating our audience questionnaires, Microsoft Word was used, we also acknowledged the fact we could’ve used Google Forms here. We also used technology in the shape of the internet, myself and the other 2 members of my group used e-mail to organise our schedule, we created a Facebook group to discuss ideas and YouTube was watched daily when trying to find inspiration for our work.
When creating our work we also used www.blogger.com to post our planning and share our ideas, relevant video clips, pictures and evaluate our work. We used www.issuu.com to help integrate our drawn storyboards onto our blogger pages.

For our filming we always used a HD camera, we felt that the difference between a normal and HD camera was quite significant and wanted to take full advantage of the film-making facilities around us. When uploading our footage onto the Macs and specifically ‘Final Cut Express’, the HD footage was of a much higher clarity and looked a lot sharper and clean cut which subsequently gave us a much more professional visual feel to our final piece.
For our poster and magazine front cover we used a digital SLR camera (Canon EOS) to generate very clear shots and once we had our selection we put them into Photoshop CS4 where I worked on editing them in the fashion of our inspirations. Other software programmes we used were; Final Cut Express and LiveType.

Once we had footage we had to import and digitise it into Final Cut Express, digitising can be quite a lengthy process but once it is uploaded you realise it is worth the wait when you see the abundance of different ways you can edit your film. We used a lot of effects on Final Cut like ‘distorted fade’ and ‘cross fade’ etc. The effects really helped make our film look more representative of a professional piece of work and allowed us to add some nice visual touches. LiveType was used solely to generate the text that appears in the teaser trailer.
In terms of the music in our trailer, I found a song on Myspace music from an artist called Skrein. I messaged him asking for permission and he replied with the go ahead for us to use his material, from here we used a programme to download the file off of YouTube to iTunes where we could import the track into Final Cut.
When researching our genre of film and viewing teaser trailer of a similar style we saw a lot of fast paced editing alongside some jerky and distorted effects, we the mirrored this style into our creation. At first it was quite tricky to get to grips with the interface, however, the first time we used this was last year in our AS piece so this year we were already very familiar with the use of Final Cut.