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

We have chosen to have our film distributed by Film4 as they have previously worked on very successful films such as “The Inbetweeners Movie” and “Slumdog Millionaire”. Film4 is a free digital television channel available in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and Switzerland, owned by Channel 4.

On its first day of release, “The Inbetweeners Movie” made over £2.5 million in 409 cinemas. set a new record for the most successful opening weekend ever achieved by a comedy film in the UK, overtaking “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason” and “The Hangover Part II” after earning £13,200,000. It stayed in the number 1 position in the UK film charts for 4 weeks. As of November 20, 2011, the film’s total box office gross is £45,028,695.

Channel 4 is the creator, owner and distributor of the program “Skins”, which is what we wanted to primarily base our media product on, therefore decided Film4 would be an appropriate choice. Film4 broadcasts many mainstream Hollywood movies to over 18 million households. By having a largely popular film company distribute films, then our product would therefore be potentially aired to millions and millions of people, gaining interest and consquently gaining profit.

Marketing is also important to our media product because this is how it will become well known. Word of mouth marketing will mean more people will talk about the film, and therefore spread the word and again, help gain profit. 

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

 

My media product represents a group of teenagers, mainly from the UK, aged around 16-19 years old. We are going to achieve this by using cultural signifiers such as hairstyles, clothes, make-up and dialogue along with including stereotypical events that occur in modern day teenage life.

The actors in the media product have been visually made to look between the ages of 16 and 19. The girls are wearing make up, some have fairly heavy make up on as it is taking place mainly at a house party. However, most of the extras faces are difficult to see as we wanted to keep them as unknown characters. This is because we don’t want to introduce too many people in the first 2 minutes, or the audience will get confused with who the main focus is. The main character is the only actor who gets their face shown fully at the party, so then hopefully the audience can make the link. The girls are also be wearing more ‘revealing’ clothes than usual as another indicator of the “house party” and the “crazy side of teens” aspect. The boys are wearing casual clothes, but appear as if they put more of an effort into looking nice than they usually would do. The main male character has the same look, because we didn’t want to show him as anything other than just a normal person at the party. He isn’t a boyfriend or anyone special, so by having him dress the same he is blending in. Portraying the actors in this way means it reaches out to the target audience, because it’s portraying teens in a true light, with a slight bit of exaggeration as only expected in media products such as this one.

As the opening sequence takes place at a party, and then a few weeks later aswell, we are dress the main character (Emily) in two different outfits. At the party, she blends in with the other girls by wearing similar amounts of make up and similar clothing. However, when she discovers she’s pregnant, it takes place as if it was a few weeks after the party. To make this clear, we have her with no make up on. We have decided to do this because she is in her own “home”, therefore we’re making this clear by showing she’s comfortable without make up. To emphasise this, we have her dressed in really casual clothes i.e. leisure clothes. She also has her hair all up in a bun to show she hasn’t made an effort. Also, this scruffy look mirrors her feelings as she feels down and confused, and like she can’t be bothered.

We have decided to not include dialogue in this opening sequence until the very end., where the main character discovers she’s pregnant and only says 2 words; “oh shit.” We’ve chosen to do this because we felt it would have more of an impact to not say much. Also, by using taboo language we are representing teenagers accurately as this is language commonly used in typical ‘rebellious’ teenage culture.

We use a drum and bass song to accompany our piece because we have found this music is popular with the group of people we are trying to represent. From talking to friends and peers, we realised that music is a massive part of a lot of teens lives, as it’s something they can relate to and enjoy. We then thought that it was important to make sure we use music that will appeal to our target audience, which is why we chose Chase and Status as they are a modern band, whose music career is rapidly growing in success, so they are perfect for our piece.

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

Our media product is an opening sequence that uses and develops forms and conventions of real media products. We had researched into opening sequences and learnt the conventions, for example characterisation, setting, genre and narrative. We have established characterisation by having the very first shot of only the main character. We then alternate the scenes between a party sequence where you can’t really define peoples faces, and then back to the close ups of the main character. By doing this, we are helping the viewer understand who the film is going to be based around. We also decided to keep the face of the ‘love’ interest as hidden as possible so the viewers would realise he perhaps isn’t going to be a massive part in the film.

close up (under the sheets)

close up (Juno)

We established the genre of ‘teen drama’ by taking a topic that is quite delicate, especially for teenagers, and portraying it as a dramatic thing. We create this ‘drama’ by having the main character swear at the end, which reflects her frustration and anger, although done in what some consider a comical way. The comdeic aspect wasn’t initally intended, and we wanted to be careful with how that came across to our audience. However, feedback was generally positive so we decided to keep that in, feeling quite confident it wouldn’t cause contraversy amongst the audience. Not just the fact it may be an issue due to dealing with such a sensitive issue, we didn’t want the audience to be confused as to what the genre of the product was. But as said before, most people completely understood and realised it was a dramatic piece.

under the sheets (genre/narrative)

Juno (genre/narrative)

The narrative is gradually made clearer throughout the opening sequence. For a start, the audience may not understand what is going on, as the pregnancy test isn’t show straight away. However, as the product develops this is made more obvious, and how it happens also shows. We did this to try and create a bit more mystery in the piece, to keep the audience interested. (another reason we didn’t show the male characters face.)  

Setting was slightly harder to show because we included 2 different places in the one opening sequence. So in this sense we challenged the typical idea of establishing setting. However, we think we did it quite effectively as we clearly showed the 2 separate places. By having the main character in clear focus, and moving her around the room in different clips, it becomes obvious that she is a bathroom. She is also wearing different clothes to what she was at the party, which is what defines the 2 separate occasions. However, in our audience feedback, we got told that this wasn’t made as clear as we originally thought. Hopefully this wouldn’t be the case all the time, as in our feedback Emily didn’t bring up the fact she was confused about it at all.

Overall, we thought the ways in which we had interpreted and used the typical forms and conventions of a real media product were effectively portrayed in our own media product. We wanted to make sure above everything that our product wasn’t confusing, and showed a clear picture of the story to follow it, and we feel this is what we have achieved. 

Thank you!

I’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone who helped us out with the production of this opening sequence. Everyone involved was such a big help and without them we wouldn’t have been able to create anything like what we have.

Especially thank you to Emily Thompson and Ryan Whomes for agreeing to be the main characters. Had they not have been as co-operative as they were, we would have had so many problems with filming!

And finally thank you to Charlotte Cavender and Heather Paxton who were my group for this work. Together I believe we’ve made a successful media product, and hope everyone else enjoys our work!

[Cast and crew- left to right] Emily Thompson, me (Emma Child), Ryan Whomes, Charlotte Cavender and Heather Paxton.

“Under The Sheets” – Finished Media Product

This is our final media product.

Audience Feedback

Thank you to Charlotte Cavender for recording and leading the interview.

Also thank you to Alice, George (media students) and Emily (non-media student) for providing us with their feedback.

Editing – 4

Today was the last day of editing!

We all worked solidly for as long as we could because we wanted to finish so badly. Thankfully, it paid off.

effects used on new clips/different camera quality

We got the new clips of the party sequence and cut them all into quite small clips in order for them to fit in with the other clips. We added the blurry effect

onto these aswell to keep with the ‘drunken memory/flashback’ idea.

We also added in the extra titles we needed today.

We included the important ones within the actual filming, but didn’t do all of them, so we decided to make it look more professional we would add these titles in during editing.

titles

‘Under The Sheets’ main title

We also added in the final main title “Under The Sheets” at the end. We chose to put it at the end of the opening sequence rather than at the beginning because we took ideas from a lot of films that we had watched and inspired us, and this is what they did so

we decided it’d look more professional if we did it this way.

All of the titles are smooth transitions, clear to read text and simple writing. We haven’t done anything ‘fancy’ with them because we didn’t think it would really benefit the piece that much. We also imported the Chase and Status song ‘Time’ into Final Cut Pro, and cut it where necessary, and luckily it fitted in really well with the clips and titles. We found a point in the song where it would be appropriate to cut, so Emily could deliver her line, and again we were really lucky because the timing in line with the footage was really good and fitted brilliantly.  Now we have finished editing the piece together, we are really happy with the work produced and feel a lot better about it now than what we did before we had today’s session.

We are now ready to burn to dvd, which is the final step in the production of our opening sequence.

Filming – 4

As discussed previously, in an editing session we noticed we still needed around 15 seconds extra footage in order to reach the 2 minutes required. 

We figured the best way to fill this time would be to add more clips for the party sequence, and vary the shots and camera angles. We asked about 10 people to come and be extras for this, most of which weren’t involved with the original party sequence as though the audience would notice having all of the same people throughout the house, and wanted to vary it a bit.

We filmed in other places too where we didn’t have the chance to last time. Most of the filming from the first filming session took place in the living room of the location. This time we were able to film in the dining room, stairs and landing, which gave us the chance to vary camera movements and angles.

There were minor problems this time, with the main issue being lighting. The last  time we planned it so it would be dark outside, however that was a good few weeks ago, and now it’s lighter in the evenings whereas before it was dark when we wanted to film. So because it wasn’t naturally dark, we had to try and block the outside light as best we could, and this was quite difficult. It also meant the quality of filming wasn’t as clear as the other footage. So now the quality isn’t consistent throughout the piece, however in editing we are going to do whatever we can to try and resolve this issue.

Music Change

Originally, we were going to use the song ‘Titanium’ by David Guetta, however after attempting to cut it to fit what we have so far is proving to be very difficult. We were also starting to question whether it was suitable, and whether or not it fitted as well as we originally anticipated. For these reasons we have been listening to other pieces of music similar to ‘Titanium’ which could be more suitable. After listening to many, many songs we had the idea to listen to a few from the band ‘Chase and Status’ as their songs are drum and bass, and all have the climax in the song we wanted.

After discussing it all together, we decided the song ‘Time’ by Chase and Status ft Delilah would be appropriate, and after playing about with it on Final Cut, we found it was a lot more fitting to our product with little editing which meant it would save time, and would look better in the end.

Editing – 3

After finally filming the final sequence we needed, we got together all of the clips and began editing them all together.

We needed about 45 seconds of footage to reach the 2 minute mark, so during filming we filmed just under 10 minutes. This gave us the freedom to chose clips we wanted, to try things out and have the choice to cut things out we didn’t like.

We used the same effects which we discovered earlier in editing and added them over the clips, as these are all part of the flashbacks.

Emily unzipping Ryan’s jacket. An example of the effect discussed above. 

We have now created an order, and used the original idea we had of having the clips alternate between the bathroom and the party. We have been looking at title designs for the main title “Under The Sheets”.

Aftet editing for a few hours, we discovered we still need an extra 15 seconds until we reach the required 2 minutes. We tried to re-use some footage from the party, but it didnt look professional enough, and we thought it looked bad. So, as a group we decided to organise another day to film.

This means we have been put back a little bit, however we will work really hard in order to meet the deadline and have the product at a high standard.