Evaluaton Question 1

HOW DID CHASING SHADOWS DEVELOP AND CHALLENGE  FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS 

I have produced a mini director's cut describing the  conventions of my genre ( Horror). 

CONVENTIONS IN CHASING SHADOWS

Our key objective when producing chasing shadows was following the conventions of of a horror/pschopathic film. In order to make this successful we had to have an inspiration and these were the films insidious, conjuring and scream 4. 

Image taken from Chasing Shadows 

Image taken from scream 4 

As you can see we followed the conventions of a horror movie, using a similar costume to the antagonist in the horror movie Scream 4. This was effective as the audience were instantly able to establish the genre of the film - horror.  In addition, the use of the mask keeps the killer unknown and this is what generates fear within the audience as "we fear the unknown" a majority of horror films ensures that the identity of the killer is unknown so again, this is another convention we used. We didn't challenge the conventions as we wanted to ensure that our movie was clear. 

SOUND 

Sounds & Music are essential in a horror movie. The use of scary sounds create a scary, mysterious atmosphere and builds tension. We acknowledged that it was vital to import scary sounds at times when the guy in the mask appeared. 

• Sound of heartbeat 
• Scary monster scream 
• Scary sounds that gradually when the tension increased (during the dream ) 
• Creepy doll music at the beginning to create atmosphere 

All of these sounds were included in our film opening to follow the conventions of a typical horror movie. 

STORYLINE 

Our first initial storyline included a range of events that occurred between the guy in the mask and Marcus. Alternatively, in the opening of a typical  horror movie, little action takes place and to be honest it's normally boring as the opening of a horror movie normally establishes the location, characters,protagonist and antagonist. Before our rough cut was produced we had to delete many scenes as we realised we wasn't following the conventions of a horror movie, we tried to include to much action and w were forgetting that it was THE OPENING 2 MINS of a horror film. After we had discussion we made an agreement of a final storyline which was 

Marcus friend persuades him to go home however Marcus has to leave

Marcus ( Protagonist ) Is in detention completing his work

• 

  Marcus falls asleep
  
  

  
  

Marcus has a nightmare and this is the first time we see the guy in mask 

Marcus Wakes up surprised and learns he has overslept and he is alone

Tries to go into the lift to get to the lower ground to see whether anyone is around 

As Marcus comes out of the lift the guy in the mask from the film appears behind him, Marcus is unaware of this but the audience are. 

Marcus hears a loud unusual sound and turns around instantly only to see an empty lift - this creates suspense  

We thought that this storyline is more effective as it contains less action making the opening more conventional.  

         

        ORDER OF TITLES IN CHASING SHADOWS 

We followed the normal order of titles as we realised a majority of horror films follow the traditional order of titles. The traditional order of titles where the distributor ident is followed by the production

Music by in Chasing Shadows 

A film we were inspired was insidious so we followed the titles in Insidious 

Music By in Insidious






You can identify the similarities such as the red font used in both our titles.

Evaluation Question 2

                   HOW DOES CHASING SHADOWS REPRESENT PARTICULAR SOCIAL                                                                                GROUPS 
               

Here we have an interview of Emmanuel who plays Marcus' friend in Chasing Shadows. He shares his opinions on the different representations of social groups that are displayed  in Chasing Shadows. 

WHAT IS REPRESENTATION ? 

Representation is the description or portrayal of someone or something in a particular way. As it's 

a teen film we decided to create an accurate representation of teenage  afro black african/black 

caribbean boys.We displayed this representation through the character Marcus and his friend. 

Black teenagers are typically revealed to be badly behaved in school by refusing to conform to 

school rules. Furthermore, they tend to not care about the importance of education. 

This is a quick slideshow showing the various representations of our chosen social group  

STEREOTYPES




Representation portrayed through the character Marcus 

Marcus is 16 years old and in year 11 however he has to conduct his revision in college due to his unacceptable behaviour in secondary school. He is an arrogant, rude individual who doesn't care about his school life. Most of the time he refuses to do his work during lesson so he is always in detention completing his work -  never learns. Marcus' negative attitude is conveyed through his costume and dialogue. Marcus wears his tie over his jumper with his shirt tucked out and his cap backwards. This reinforces the fact that he is refusing to conform to the school rules. Furthermore, Marcus uses colloquial terms such as "fam" and this reveals to the audience that he is from a working class background. Alternatively, the fact that Marcus remains in his detention despite the fact his friend persuades him to leave challenges the typical representation of a black male teenager as he is determined to complete his coursework. 

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 4

      WHO WOULD BE THE MAIN TARGET AUDIENCE FOR CHASING SHADOWS ? 

In the early stages of brainstorming ideas for Chasing Shadows this question popped up and I said "well this is easy" this is because Chasing Shadows falls into the category of a teen film so obviously it would our film will mainly appeal to teenagers.  

It was only after  conducting research about the history of teen films I realised that our film can't just appeal to "teenagers" because it's too broad. What specific age ? What Gender ?  etc. All these questions must be answered when thinking about the target audience of our film as chances are, all teenagers might not  enjoy our film therefore we must pick a target audience that will and advertise it to them.

SO, WHO ACTUALLY WATCHES TEEN MOVIES ? 

A teen film is a film genre targeted at teengers and young adults, this is due to the fact that the plot involves special interests and themes that relate to teenagers. It is no secret that parents also watch teen films as well. This is because they tend learn about the behavior of a teenager and the things they go through and this improve their parenting skills as they will a greater understanding of a teenagers life. Furthermore, another popular reason why a parent might watch a teen film is to reminisce on the days they were once a teenager and have a laugh. 

The genre of a teen film also  determines your target audience for example :

Teen Wolf 

Genre - Teen Drama,comedy, supernatural 

Audience - Teenage Audience 12-34, mainly girls 

Project x 

Genre - Teen film, comedy 

Target Audience - 18-25 males 

Final Destination 3 

Genre - Teen Film Horror

Target audience - 16- 23

WHAT IS THE TARGET AUDIENCE FOR CHASING SHADOWS ? 

CHASING SHADOWS

Genre - Teen film,Horror, Psychopath

Target Audience - 15-20 males 

We came to a conclusion that this will be a suitable age to aim our target audience as the psychopath aspect of our film requires maturity and intelligence to avoid confusion and we thought that 15 and above will be the best age to cope with this gory and gruesome scenes that are displayed. We also established that there are a lack of females in our film so males will be able to relate to our film more and thats why they are our main target audience however, we do not exclude females from watching our film. 

FACEBOOK PROFILE OF MEMBER OF TARGET AUDIENCE 

The reason why the person Mensah Montana would be a specific target audience member is the fact that he is 17 years old who lives in London and likes: Teen Films & All horror films including Paranormal Activity.Another bonus is that he likes the film distributor revolver entertainment. Revolver entertainment is an independent distributor in the UK. They generally distribute UK urban films set in the urban sides in the Uk. The films they distribute normally have a low production value and involve inexperienced upcoming actors - just like Chasing Shadows. So it's likely he will like Chasing Shadows therefore we must advertise to people like him. 

Evaluation Question 5

HOW DID CHASING ATTRACT MY TARGET AUDIENCE 

TITLE : The Title of our film is CHASING SHADOWS. Chasing shadows appeals to our target audience as shadows is a feature that appears to horror movies so instantly the public are are aware that our film is a horror/ thriller movie and this will persuade them to take interest in film. The verb chasing hints that the "shadow" is troubling the protagonist and this is why the the protagonist is tracking it down .

Mise en Scene : The mask, knife, dark lighting etc all create a scary, mysterious atmosphere making our film opening effective as it would appeal to horror/thriller lovers. 

Location - The opening of the film is set in a empty college, this will attract an audience of students who attend school/college as this is a place they spend a majority of their time at. We picked this location as it's a convention of a teen film.

Production Company : The beezer productions logo engages our target audience as it's quite scary due to the grey and black background followed by the doll music which played during the production ident. 

PROMOTIONAL PACKS 

We created a poster to make our target audience aware of Chasing Shadows

chasing shadows poster

The poster is a clever holodram of Marcus and the guy in the mask 

Here is a brief blurb 

 

Here is an interview from a member of my class expressing her personal opinion of the film In addition,  she also told about how she found out about chasing shadows so we were able to asses how effective our promotion was. 

Evaluation Question 6

Evaluation question 7

                                  PRELIM VS OPENING OF CHASING SHADOWS 

PLANNING 

In the prelim my group and I just used a script - there was no planning or anything, we just got the cameras and started filming. We made up the shots we used as we went along. Furthermore we didn't plan our costume, mise en scene, post production or storyboard so there was no representation or conventions displayed in the prelim. 

Production Schedule (late post )

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Due to the lack of time we had we failed to make a CRUCIAL change to our film. Firstly, when doing titles we never learned to do titles on the application motion, so we did our titles on final cut pro. We chose the colour white as we wanted to keep it simple however, the white clashed with the colour of the atmosphere so we changed it to BLACK. Unfortunately, this clashed with the classroom scenes and so we changed it to red as we thought the red would add to the horror of the film the red looked bloody. Sadly, when receiving feedback from peers minutes before the deadline they argued that's the red didn't work as it was just too bright and noticeable. We noticed that other groups did there credits on motion and the colour of there titles didn't clash with any of there scenes and this was because it was professional. I tried re do our titles on motion but time ran out so we had to settle for the bright red unfortunately.

My experience

ITS FINISHED 

Now filming and editing has come to a close it's safe to say that the opening of the film - Chasing Shadows is complete ! It's been a rocky road, there has been a lot of ups and downs but overall I enjoyed filming Chasing Shadows and I am very happy with the end product - I can't wait until we go to the cinemas where our film will be screened.

I enjoyed filming chasing shadows as we had a laugh on set, sometimes I flopped my lines or missed my cue this was annoying yet very hilarious. I also enjoyed editing chasing shadows, it was amazing to see how much a variety of shots made an impact in a scene. Furthermore, I enjoyed choosing and importing music into the film as it created atmosphere for eg; at the beginning of the film there is spooky music and this creates and scary atmosphere so the audience are aware that  our film is a horror movie. I also placed sleepy music when Marcus was sleeping in order to create a sense of  humour - I did this to engage the audience as I realised it would be quite boring if there was no humour in our film. Lastly, I enjoyed showing our film to peers to and receiving positive feedback, it made me feel proud of al the hard work we put in.

On the other hand there were a few things that I didn't enjoy when filming Chasing Shadows. Due to the fact, that we had one video camera we had to film every shot a multiple of times to get the scene from different angles in order to get a variety of shots. This became very repetitive and tiring because we had to repeat scenes numerous of times. One scene that was particularly annoying was the lift scene and this was because the lift kept on closing whilst we were trying to film, we were repeatedly pressing the button to prevent it from closing. In addition trying to maintain an empty college was a mythhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh !!

Even though we filmed on a friday when there was no school other media students kept on patrolling the colly whilst we filming and they appeared in shot so we had to re-do the shot. It got to to an extent where we had to change the floor we were filming on because people kept on walking around.  Lastly, another annoying film was doing re-filming shots after receiving negative feedback from our rough cut ! This put us at an advantage as everyone started editing however we still had to film.

Music and sound editing

The sound effects we used were

• slow heart beats 
• fast heart beats 
• Rap music that Marcus raps to
• music that was quite creepy an unpleasant 

the music we got was from sound cloud we got a 

dub step beat that was fasts and catchy. 

we got a few sound effects from YouTube like the heart beat. 

we took some music from sound cloud

The Idents

The idents were an important Factor in making the film. we chose to do it 2 times and change the idents many times. This is because the first pair did not fit the Film and the second ones were more simple which was what we were aiming for. The first production ident was to hard to read. The writing was red and thin and it finished to quickly, therefore we changed it to more thick writing and simple text so it's easy to read. I also changed the Beezer Production ident as it was childish and unprofessional and it looks better if it is on a simple background with simple text.

(Unfortunately there are technical difficulties uploading the idents) 

Conventions Of A Teen Drama Title Sequence

The Lift Situation...

The was a issue regarding the lift scene that we have in our opening.

We used two different lifts when filming our lift scene thinking that it would look ordinary,  however our media teacher Marissa spotted it when we showed her the scene.

The reason why we chose to use two different lifts is because we were filming during a lunch break and the ground floor was being occupied by a host of students walking in and out of the library, and into the canteen. We decided to film the whole lift scene in one floor, so we used the lift on the right for the character Marcus to enter and the lift on the left for Marcus to come out of. The main things that exposed our lift scene difference were the size difference of both lifts, the latter lift was much bigger and had a different front look, it also had a huge dent which differed to the other lift, making the scene very unprofessional and confusing.

When the mistake was spotted by Marissa we had doubts on whether we could film the whole lift scene again to correct our mistakes because it was so close to the deadline and we were a bit unsure if we would have enough time to film and edit it again on time. We came to a conclusion to film the scene again during a time where lessons would be taking place and the ground floor would be more isolated, it was a very good decision as now, the scene looks much more continuous and more enhanced.

DEADLINE DAY

Today is the deadline day for our film opening and you could say we are under stress.

Oh look, were actually under 'stress'.
But No - Our faces don't look like that right now. More like...

Bernard Mensah 

Saheba Yasmin 

Tasnia Khanom 

Mohammed Madey 

• We have yet to put music into the film, however we have a planned a schedule and the opening should be finished before 3.
• The editing for the film is complete and all the clips that we need are in the film and they are edited so the story is complete. The only thing that needs to be done is the music
• The sound effects need to be placed into the opening in a effective order 
• There is music as well that needs to be put into the opening 

(put in pictures of editing process of music editing)

Mistakes We Have Made.

-There were many mistakes we made when filming, some were easy to spot and others not as much.

The flow of our film kept on being ruined by the lack of continuity of protagonist's (Marcus) motion...
For example in the scene where Marcus looks out at the corridor it shows him to be looking to his left, then straight towards him then left again, which looked very odd and unrealistic. We had to film the short scene again the following day in order to avoid this small but enormous mistake.

Another mistake that we kept on doing subconsciously throughout the filming phase was looking at the camera whilst filming, which is very impractical and inept, thus needing to do more filming and editing in order to cut out the mistakes.

Although we grasped the 180 degree rule proficiently, we filmed the entire classroom and dream scene from a wonky angle and it was easily spotted by our teacher Marisa; We didn't take notice of it until she told us and therefore had to rework the scenes, we had to make sure the camera was at a straight angle when filming to not repeat the mistake. However, we did find that the wonky angle shot was effective for editing, though we didn't use much of the clips, it gave us more variety when choosing what type of shots we could add to editing.

My mini evaluation of the filming and editing process

VLOG - CHASING SHADOWS

Our Deadline Is Tomorrow!

We are just doing some last minute editing. We put in our titles, screen idents and distributor. Furthermore, we also done some last minute improvements. We filmed a Vlog to to keep you updated.

 

We are also hoping to finish the editing on time to do plenty of Blog post editing by Friday.

Distribution Ident

We decided to name the production company 'Max Mount studios' because the words represents 'big' and 'development' which connotes to what we want the film to percieved as, a small independant film wanting to develop and make it big. 'Max' defines to 'at the most' (adverbial context) and 'Mount' defines to 'grow larger'- this portrays how we want our film to grow larger as much possible.