Here is the shot in our piece when the title appears at the end of the opening sequence. This shot conforms to the conventions of film in general as the title appears at the end of the sequence once all the credits have rolled. It also conforms to the conventions of the coming of age movie genre as the title appears over a sequence that shows the character going about their life, and their routine. Our titles appear over our main protagonist on their way to school and the title of the film appears at the end of this routine, as the character reaches his school and heads for class. The font that we used is similar to the font used in the movie Napoleon Dynamite, having a hand written doodle type effect. This type of font is used quite often in this movies that are aimed at a similar audience to ours, a niche audience of around 15-20 years of age.Our opening sequence suggests that it is a coming of age movie, as it does the genre typical convention of introducing the characters by showing them go about their ordinary (or in some cases different) lifestyle. Our nerd protagonist's (pictured above) personality is revealed almost immediately as we see his incredibly ordinary morning routine. The various nerdy items like the Harry Potter scarf also reveals that he is likely a nerdy character.
The locations in our piece are very typical of a coming of age movie as a coming of age movie often starts with the protagonist going about their routine. Because this routine is often following the character as they prepare for school or work, typically we see their home. Our title sequence opens with the viewer in our main protagonists house.
We also follow our character to his school, which is again typical of coming of age movies as they establish the character and the kind of lives that they lead. Typically we follow the character from their home to their place of work, as we have done here.
Throughout our piece, as demonstrated by this picture, you don't see our main protagonists face until the final title reveal. This isn't exactly typical of the coming of age genre as normally the main protagonist is established within the first few minutes so that we can attach to them almost immediately. An example is the opening of Juno, where we see a close up of the character in the first few seconds. This establishes immediately that she is our main protagonist.
The story of our piece is about a typically nerdy character who befriends a popular character through some situation, like being paired to work together on a project. At first the two work together begrudgingly, but they slowly become close friends throughout the course of the film. The popular character would be ridiculed by his 'friends' for befriending the unpopular nerd. By the end of the film our nerd character will accept his nerd nature and the popular character will leave his popular group in order to carry on being friends with the protagonist. Typically coming of age movies base their events around friends, like Superbad which focuses on a group of unpopular friends in their pursuit of coolness and acceptence. By the end of the film they accept their friendship group and decide to not try chasing after popularity. This is the kind of revelation that our main protagonist would go through, realising that he doesn't have to try and impress the popular kids. The cool protagonist would also realise this and decide to leave his popular group and join with the main protagonist. The opening sets this up by introducing the two protagonists and represents them in two contrasting ways, showing that one is the typical 'loser' and one is a typical popular guy. As can be seen in this shot our popular protagonist is introduced almost immediately. The audience can see his face and so know the character instantly. By watching his routine the audience learns that he is a 'cool' character as he comes back from a party at first, and we see him concerned with his appearence.
Before the shot pictured above of our main popular character fixing his hair we have a shot of our main nerdy protagonist leaving his house. As he is leaving we cross fade to the shot shown above. We used cross fades when we changed between the nerdy character and the popular character, occasionally simply using a jump cut. Typically in the introduction to a coming of age movie they simply use jump cuts to go between the different shots. So our opening sequence doesn't conform to the convention of using few special effects in cutting between scenes. However some coming of age movies do make use of special effects in the opening, like Juno's doodle looking opening sequence and Superbad's dancing silhouette opening.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
On the left is a picture of the character Napoleon from the film 'Napoleon Dynamite'. On the right is a picture of Matthew Dale who played our nerdy protagonist. They have a similar 'loser' or 'nerdy' appearence, wearing glasses and seeming very un-photogenic. In this photo Matthew is wearing similar clothes to the outfit that he had during the filming of our piece. Although this picture of Napoleon doesn't show much of his outfit, we can see that he has a smart shirt on and a tie. Napoleon conforms to the 'geek' stereotype in this picture, meaning that he is likely a more intelligent character. Matthew's casual appearence suggests that he is more of a 'nerd' character, meaning he is more of an outcast or a 'loser' not having the intelligence that comes with being a 'geek'. Napoleon's role in the film 'Napoleon Dynamite' is being the 'geeky' protagonist who is teased and abused by the more popular characters of the movie. His character is a very exaggerated geek stereotype being a zenith of geekyness. This is similar to the character that Matthew plays although Matthew's character is more a 'nerd' stereotype than a 'geek'. Also Matthew's character isn't an exaggeration of the stereotype being more grounded in reality in order to make him more relatable.
On the top left here is a picture of the actor who plays our cool character Ryan Ashton and on the bottom is the character Jesse from the movie Superbad. They are both wearing very casual looking outfits which makes them appear as typical teenage characters. Jesse's main role in Superbad is to be somewhat of an antagonist to the main protagonists, bullying them and making fun of them at various points throughout the movie. He is a popular character that is quite similar to ours, valuing social life and partying over education. Our character would abuse our main protagonist and show a general dislike to him just as Jesse acts towards the main protagonists of Superbad, antagonising them and abusing them at every chance he gets. As can be seen in the photo of Jesse, he is wearing a designer T-Shirt. This is similar to the kind outfit that Ryan would wear in our full piece, connoting his popularity and coolness. Jesse conforms to the popular guy stereotype in the way that he appears, wearing designer casual clothes, and the way that he treats the main protagonists being somewhat of a bully. However these characters differ in the fact that our popular character will show some remorse when teasing Matthew's character, as if he is being forced by his peers. Our character will also befriend the nerdy stereotype character, whereas Jesse never really becomes friends of the main protagonists in Superbad.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Go to http://youtu.be/aAK9Ss-Kf2U for my response to question 3
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
Here is an illustration with notes around it with some ideas about what an audience member for our production would be like. The audience for our piece is likely to be a small part of the large teenage audience, most likely of around the age of 15-20. This portion is likely to enjoy movies similar to Juno or Napoleon Dynamite. The individual that goes to see our movie would likely be able to relate to one of the main protagonists in some way either they think they are similar to one of the characters or know someone who is similar to one of our characters, as the characters of our piece are very grounded in reality. The audience member may wear designer clothing but is also just as likely to not be concerned with the type of clothing that they wear. They are likely to enjoy TV shows like IT Crowd and The Inbetweeners as these shows have a similar style to how our movie would be. It is most likely however that our audience will be largely comprised of people similar to our 'nerd' protagonist. This is because our piece focuses on presenting a realistic depiction of what school life is like. Our piece doesn't try to poke fun of a social group meaning that people from varying social groups may be able to relate to characters in our piece and not be offended by how that character is presented. They would be most likely to enjoy indie or alternative music that is similar to the music that plays during our opening sequence. This would then attract the audience to our piece, due to how they would likely enjoy the music that plays throughout our opening sequence. Due to the fact that our most of our audience will be people similar to our main protagonist, they will likely wear very casual clothes that are unlikely to be designer. This is similar to our main protagonist. However there may be audience members who are similar to our popular character, meaning that they may wear designer lines, which is likely due to that fact that our film appeals mostly to the teenage audience. Our audience members will also be likely to be very knowledgeable in technology, having the latest gadgets, again similar to our main protagonist.
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
Go to http://youtu.be/YIE-ms4BlFw for my response to question five
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Once we discovered that using the iPhone would not produce the quality of film we wanted we searched for other viable options. We decided to try using a team members iPad 2 to try and film. We chose this for the same reasons that we chose to try and use the iPhone, the quality of recorded footage and the convenience of having easy access to it, simply having to ask the team member whenever we wanted to film. We found that while the quality was a little lower, the footage caught was steadier than that of the iPhone.
We used iMovie to edit together all the footage that we captured using the iPad 2. By using iMovie we learnt what the programme is capable of, how to import footage captured on another apple device and how to edit together to footage that you have imported onto the Mac. We realised how time consuming and difficult editing can be, as we were already behind schedule when we entered the editing stage.
We also used GarageBand to create the soundtrack of our piece, meaning that we had to learn how a new piece of software worked
We also used photoshop and corel draw to create the company logos, a programme many of us were already fairly educated in, but it meant that we learnt about exactly what those programmes are capable of.
We made use of Blogger to try and keep teachers up to date with how our project was progressing, a site which was new to many of us, meaning that we learnt the basics of how to best use Blogger.
We used YouTube during the evaluation process to annotate videos and upload new videos with our responses to the questions.
7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
Looking back upon our preliminary task it can be said that the groups general knowledge of technology has increased as can be seen in our use of apple products to record the footage for our second piece.
When editing our preliminary piece we had limited knowledge of iMovie, so since our preliminary task we have learnt how to more effectively use iMovie.
As we had used iMovie for our preliminary piece, it helped to us to gain a basic understanding of what could be done with the programme.
We learnt how to make use of techniques such as match on action and elipses, which we used frequently in our final opening sequence
With our preliminary piece it can easily be said that we struggled with filming and editing as we struggled to film and edit within the time limit given. While we struggled to produce our piece in the time limit again on our final piece, our new knowledge of how the programmer iMovie worked meant that we were easily able to catch up with the deadline.
We have learnt not to try and aim to high when producing our piece as we had rather unrealistic expectations of our preliminary piece, meaning that when we were finished we were somewhat disappointed. We knew for our final piece what is realisticly achieveable and so did not aim for something that would not be possible.
