Final Task

Our Ident

Each member of our group made one Ident for our film opening - we ended up choosing my Ident as we felt that it had the right mix of bold animation and some understatement which tied in with the more independent aspect of our film as a whole. I applied the idea of using a gold colour scheme for the one we chose which we all agreed would be a good idea as it would help it stand out, and I feel that we have been successful in this aspect for the particular Ident we used. To create all of our Idents, we used Final Cut Pro X - for the one we have chosen, we used a 'fold' title effect. We also added an audio clip which Sam performed on the ukelele.

Preliminary Task

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 4

Who are your audience?

Above is a sample survey carried out by a seventeen-year-old male that is a privately educated student, in their penultimate year of secondary school. Having questioned a fairly broad age range of people, I think it is safe to deduce that our target audience will be someone similar to the person questioned above. We aimed to dress our character in clothes similar to those of people our age, and his behaviour and dialogue were also supposed to be relevant to our audience.
Based on our collected data, I think that it is safe to deduce that our target audience fits comfortably into the 15-25 year-old category. They are most likely a student or young adult, probably either currently in higher education or entering/leaving higher education. Of the people that we sampled, the most complimentary and excited by our piece were most definitely people of a similar age to us. Although the themes of our piece would most likely encourage the diversion use and gratification, the actors we used were relatable to teenagers, meaning that personal identity could also be a reason for viewing our piece.
Although several films of similar genres to ours can be classified as 12 or 12A's, if we were conforming to the guidelines of the bbfc, we believe that some of the themes that we chose to include in our piece could be too violent for viewers younger than 15. When asked, the majority of our audience associated our piece with films such as Drive, Collateral, and The Bourne Identity. These films are all classified as 18’s or 15’s, suggesting that our original predictions were correct.

Evaluation Question 6

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

Blogger.com – This was very useful for displaying our progress, planning, constructing and evaluation.

YouTube.com – We used this to research thriller openings, which helped inspire us. It was also used to display our preliminary task and our final piece.

Google.com – Arguably one of the most useful forms of technology, as it allowed us to search for and access images, music, and information about similar films for our research section.

Final Cut Pro X – This was used to construct our film, our recce and preliminary task, and also to edit them using things such as filters, titles, colour balancing, and sound balancing that were available with the software. For example, we used an expander to make sections of our dialogue clearer, and we used frame matching to equilibrilize the colour of certain shots. It also had a built-in automatic save feature, meaning that our work was less easily lost.

Apple Macintosh iMac desktop – I found this computer extremely easy to use, and the display was very clear, making editing easier, as we could see problem areas that required correcting.

Sony HD Camera – We used this to film our piece and our recce. We learnt how to use it whilst shooting our recce, and I found it easy to manipulate in order to achieve the necessary shots.

Tripods – We used this to steady the camera, and this in turn helped achieve key shots, such as the wide-angle opening shots of Tower Bridge and the surrounding areas.

Microphone – These were most definitely essential, as even though we had minimal dialogue, the lines that we did choose to include were very important for the audience to hear, therefore we used microphones.

Kaiser Video lights – We decided to include these, as some of our locations were badly lit and therefore required lights, but we also used them in naturally well-lit shots, as it created a better atmosphere, and helped reduce graininess.

Imdb – This was used a great deal to acquire information about directors, films, and production companies, it therefore contributed the most to the research and planning sections of our piece.

DaFont – We found the font that we chose to use in all our titles and the main title of our piece from this website, it was called ‘Bank Gothic’ and we felt it was distinguished from any of the fonts that could be found, both on Microsoft Word and Final Cut Pro X.

Free play music – We obtained the majority of our sound from this website, most importantly, our main music track, called ‘Ascension from the well’ by Peter John Ross. It was useful because it had a wide range of copyright free music.

I feel as though the thing that I have learnt the most about the technologies that we included is how to manipulate them in order to achieve the desired effect. In some cases, such as with Final Cut Pro X, I found it slightly harder to be fully confident with using it, but once I was competent enough, I felt as though it was a lot easier to create the final product that we had envisaged.

 

 

Evaluation Question 5

How do you attract/address your audience?

Narrative + Genre

From the questionnaire, the clearest things established to us were the similar media products to ours – three titles repeatedly cropping up were Drive, Collateral and the Bourne films. It was also suggested from the questionnaire that most people seemed to understand the story behind our film and they saw it as either a suspense thriller or a crime thriller – which we also saw this film as.

The fact that the crime and suspense aspects of the story were the main aspects that reached through to our audience suggests that they saw it mainly as a genre film like, for example, Drive and Collateral. Both of these films are notable for not using exposition in their opening. The opening of Drive, for example, sees the main character beginning a getaway mission while in our film it sees our character beginning his assassination mission. In Collateral, the film begins with the main character as he is leaving LAX airport without an explanation – our film echoes this in the sense that when our main character moves from A to B it is not immediately explained why. Both these films also have strong stylistics and aesthetics – in the opening scenes of both, wide shots of the Los Angeles skyline are frequently used to establish the location as they focus on immersing the audience in the location rather than following generic plot conventions – and our product followed suit, introducing the film with a river view of London. In this way, we have blended escapism – as we follow a suspenseful and dramatic narrative – with realism, as we are immersing our audiences in what are most likely to be familiar locations to them. 

The general narrative of the opening scene is straightforward though one or two of our viewers felt that it moved quickly and they were pushed to keep up  - this feedback is not totally worrying to us, however, as it was our intention to put the audience in the middle of the story and not focus on story exposition. The possible consequence of this – that the audience have found the film simply confusing – has, we feel, been avoided, as the majority of feedback to our film was positive in the narrative aspect.

We drew upon the influence of actors such as Ryan Gosling when it came to casting and creating our main character, feeling that an actor like him would have widespread appeal to the age bracket that we were marketing this film at.

Our story mainly involves fairly young characters who would appeal to audiences within the 15-25 age bracket as we wanted our audience to be attracted to it through personal identification. Feeling that the personal identification theory would be a good way of appealing to our audiences, we also casted an actor to play the girl who is killed who is the same age as the people we are marketing this film to as we felt that we wanted the characters to be relatable to a teenage/young adult audience.  Part of our opening relied on a shock factor to draw in viewers, and so we felt that killing of a girl of a fairly young age would be an adequate way of doing so. This is the aspect of the story that we feel may have led to all the comparisons our film received – to Drive, Collateral and the Bourne films – as the violence/action in each of them is generally unexpected, surprising and shocking. In Drive, one of the main female characters is one of the first people to be killed in the film, while in Collateral the entire third act revolves around a woman in danger. In The Bourne Supremacy, the main female character of the first film in the series is killed in the opening scene. 

We believed that our choice of location would appeal to our target audience of 15-24 year olds as  London Bridge is very urban and high-tempo and thus appeals to youths who want a familiar, modern, busy setting. They are therefore attracted to the film as it seems like it will be full of action as opposed to a more rural environment in which one might expect a slower-paced film. Furthermore, a great deal of cinemagoers are city-dwellers as there are many more cinemas in the city than in the countryside so said cinemagoers will be attracted to the city-based setting. The urban setting also reflects many other city-based thrillers such as Drive and Collateral so viewers may see the film hoping to have the same experience as with those films.


We chose our actor (Callum Ruddleston) because one could certainly say that he is attractive so would attract young girls and possibly older girls too to the film. We had also modelled our main role on Ryan Gosling's role in Drive and Callum looks quite like Ryan Gosling so this degree of familiarity may further draw audiences in.

The visual mood of the film opening and its cold colour palette suggests a steely, serious, gritty element to the film. The close ups of the main character makes the audience focus on the main character and sympathise with what he's going through and the decisions he has to make.

The synth-based soundtrack suggests that the setting of the film is modern and possibly dystopian. It is slow and brooding and slowly builds tension. The modernism of the synthy soundtrack should relate to our young target audience and connect with contemporary music trends.

Here is a focus interview I conducted to gain some feedback on how we attracted and addressed our audience: