Derailed is about two married business executives who are having an affair and are blackmailed by a violent criminal, they must turn the tables on him to save their families. Its genre is drama/thriller, which is the same as our movie. It has the element of suspense as well as the bribery, which is also featured in our film. Here is the trailer of the film. At 0:55 the elements of suspense really kicks in and a lot more similarity can be seen. Obviously it also shares the theme of a train! I really like the last 20 seconds of the trailer when it sounds like a train pulling off. As we only got to do a 2-minute film, our film was obviously not as suspenseful as Derailed yet I believe that there are aspects that make them very similar. We also got the idea of the writing from the titles of Derailed.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our film doesn’t give much away, and that is the essence of it, it is what we aimed for in the beginning. We therefore wanted the main character to be the quintessence of this genre – mystery. The character wears black, has his hood up and is wearing a sling, all of these things trigger a question in the audiences question; “who is he and what is he doing?”
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There is no real telling what the area Santo (main character) is around is like. The actual area we shot our film in was middle-upper class, however we tried to conceal this by not showing too much of the area he was in, we did this by using close up shots, mid shots and blurring some of the scenes. Like this one here.
On the platform, a wide range of people could be seen, from all social areas. This added to the ‘unknown’ effect of our film, as it didn’t, again, give anything away. The audience, at this point, is completely oblivious to the social class presented in this film.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
We have studied a few media institutions in our media lessons. The main ones we focused on are Working Title and Film 4. After looking at the types of film each institution distributes, I believe our film would fit in well amongst the films with Working Title. Working Title, the company most known for their British romantic comedies (Wild Child, Love Actually, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones) has more recently been moving onto thrillers and drama.
Recent films that Working Title have produced which fit in with our film, for example, have a mystery factor and are quintessentially British, these would be films such as Frost/Nixon and Burn After Reading.
Hidden Agenda - Crime – Drama
Frost Nixon – Drama – History – Suspense
I think that by having a film distributed by Working Title, there is already a guaranteed success. Working Title is renowned for its quintessential British factor. L’ignoto not only has typical British scenery, but it would also help Working Title to develop its genres from romcom’s to thriller and suspense.
Many Working Title films are featuring in the cinemas at the moment, for example Frost/Nixon, Burn After Reading, Wild Child and The Boat That Rocked. By having a reputation already, it would help to sell L’ignoto to the public and in cinema chains, and possibly, give it a better chance of reaching DVD’s. Working Title also puts many of its big successful films onto TV channels such as Sky Movies 1, Sky Family, Sky Horror and so on, so if L’ignoto was supposedly distributed by Working Title, it would give great hope to the fact that it could be not just in the cinema, but on TV’s as well.
Who would be the audience for your media product and how did you set out to attract your audience?
This is our questionnaire:
As you can see from the document above, we created a questionnaire to help us direct our film at the correct audience. Firstly I will talk about the results for the boys.
It appears that the boys are most interested in the whole thriller, mystery, suspense and action genres, which I suppose is rather obvious.
What was interesting, is that for the last question – which films they would like to see more often in cinemas, most boys, if not all, put that they would like to see more action/mystery films. This was quite shocking as far as I was aware; there were plenty of films to suit boys.
The girls on the other hand, put quite the opposite, minus a few exceptions, they all said that they preferred the typical Working Title, quaint English rom-com films and would like to see more of them in the cinemas. And as was the case with the boys, I presumed that there was plenty to suit both sexes.
-Motorbike/moped in opening shot
-Loud car engine heard in the background
-Main character is a male, which relates the audience to the film itself (this could also attract a female audience)
-All close ups of people are male
-Train station – quite a boyish aspect of life
-Black colouring, blue writing
-Police sirens and connotations of prison
The age gaps listed were from 14 – 20+ however the oldest person was male, 22.
For every boy, whatever the age, they listed the same information. However with the girls, it showed that younger girls (14-16) preferred the girly, romantic comedy films, whereas there was more flexibility when getting to an older age, there seems to be a bigger gap for change as many of them wrote that they go to the cinema to watch action/suspense/mystery films.
Due to these results, we didn’t just want to limit ourselves to a male audience, as we wanted to increase the target audience by as much as possible.
Main audience for L’ignoto – Age: 15-22 Gender: 80% M 20% F
I think the certificate for our film would be 15. Although the film seems innocent at the beginning, there are connotations that it may erupt into a more intense film.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Apple Mac’s – As I have had some experience with Mac’s, I didn’t find it too hard to operate. These are the only computers we have access to in our Media classroom so we were pretty dependent on them.
Good – as there is some programmes that are not accessible on a normal PC. Therefore by having a Mac we were able to use programmes that benefitted our group, for example, iDVD, Final Cut Express and Garage Band.
Final Cut Express – clearly this was the main programme that we used to create our film. At first, it was quite tricky to use, but as we became more and more familiar with it, it was really useful and became quite easy to use. It had many benefits to our film, and not the obvious one, which was putting it together and arranging it, but it also created the effects throughout the two minutes. We made the whole film slightly more lighter, and yellower inside but darker outside, this was to create a more eerie effect.
Garageband – Honestly, Garageband wasn’t a huge success for our group. We struggled to find music for our film so experimented with Garageband for a bit and in the end, we were not very happy with the final product. We didn’t feel that there was much choice, and that it was infact quite hard to construct a simple two minute tune as we had to cut and edit it, and in the end it didn’t work very well, so we decided not to go with this and went for an actual CD instead which I feel works very well.
Livetype – this was probably the second most important application we used. It helped us so much in the film and helped towards the mystery/suspense feeling because of the edgy writing (see below). And although it may look quite confusing, it was the easiest application we used. There was lots of variety of writing that could have worked, but in the end we went with one called ‘Frigid’, which I think, works very well. The only slightly irritating thing about Livetype is that when we didn’t like something we had done, we had to start again rather than simply editing it.
Like I said before, I have definitely made technical advances myself. Not only in the actual filming and editing but behind the main film, there was the putting together of the blog etc. As you can see I have used various websites, one of these is www.issuu.com.
This is basically where you can upload documents onto this website and it translates it into a interactive book. Before starting this project, I would most certainly not be able to understand what a website like that was, but now I use it quite regularly.
On the planning side of L’ignoto, one skill I have definitely gained is better planning skills. We all felt under pressure to get this done, and by having good planning skills we managed to finish a few days before the deadline. We did this by simply writing down what we would do in each lesson and made sure we stuck to it, and consequently we got all of it done. This is a skill that has definitely developed as my planning skills and timing was not as good in the preliminary task and we, as a group, consequently suffered.
On the filming side, I think there are noticeable differences with the way my preliminary and my coursework is filmed. My coursework has been transformed from just simply footage to something that actually has a meaning, and our group did this by incorporating skills that we have learnt over time. Before doing this piece of coursework, I never knew the importance of continuity, mise en scene, music, good editing and how getting one of those wrong can make or break a film.
I have followed our film through planning, filming, editing, adding music, changing the colour of the scenes, adding the titles and putting it onto a DVD and I have enjoyed doing so, its been a good learning curve. I have come away more knowledgeable on the production of a film, from deciding on shots to use to putting it onto a DVD, and i am pleased with the end product!
