Evaluation 1
- 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)
- 2. Our product challenges the way traditional action films take place, by lowering the amount of violence but keeping fast paced, edge of the seat action somehow involved with the narrative. Also, our product involves younger characters right in the middle of the conflict and actually being subject to the aggression of the anti protagonist. Usually films involving younger within the conflict have them being caught in the middle of the conflict by circumstance or has a less aggressive narrative and is aimed more at younger audiences, such as spy kids. Our product is one of the fewer which actually has the conflict revolving around the younger characters, which creates an aurora surrounding the main characters of them being out of their depth to the extent that their chances of even surviving are very low, but they will come out successful in the end.
- 3. Dot to dotWe called our film dot to dot to represent the fact that viewers are not going to just pick up on the narrative in the first 20 minutes of the film. It’s not a film that people are just going to watch, but it will have a “eureka” moment when the audience picks up on the hidden narrative moments before something occurs. This is relevant to the first shots we see of religious objects, and they will be later revealed to be part of the hidden side of the narrative.
- 4. Location Once again we used religion related areas to relate to the hidden side of the narrative. We started with our establishing shot outside the church, then panned down to see Emily approach the church and then enter with a mach on action shot. The scenes follow Adams escape through an urban area, we used this area because urban areas are where parkour scenes are usually filmed, and this is the kind of fast paced action that we wanted to show in our project.
- 5. Costumes and propsWe used the general stereotypical and cultural codes to convey to the audience what kind of characters we had in the film, such as Emily was wearing normal clothes that a teenage girl would wear to show that she had formally lived a normal life. She also was carrying a bible close to her body and had a necklace that had a cross on it to show that she was religious. As for Adam, the clothes were just normal for the same reason. For our villain who was going to chase Adam, we had all black clothing for mysterious and shadowy connotations, and the photo of Adam was vital to show that the attack was premeditated and not just for the sake of robbery or something else. I personally think that all our props and clothes where just right.
- 6. Camera work And editingIn our original draft, we noticed that the scenes were not fast paced enough to reach the kind of excitement that we wanted in our film. We considered several options, and in the end we decided that we would re-film our whole film, this time, including more shots to make it faster. Some of these shots were first person and low angle shots. With some dialogue now in the film, we decided we would use over the shoulder shots for this. We did have a timing problem with the dialogue, which required to dub Emily’s line “I can’t keep doing this”, meaning she can’t keep running away. We were impressed with the result and continued to edit.
- 7. Title and font styleThis is one of our less thought about subjects as such, we only used basic fonts on the idea that this would suggest that our main characters Emily and Adam came from a basic life and are not special people, just victims of circumstance. We found the best way to convey this would be a basic ordinary font such as the one we used.
- 8. Story and how the opening Sets it upThe story is telling of two teenagers (brother and sister) who are torn apart by their only remaining parent, their father, goes missing. This is followed by repeated attacks from very suspiciously dressed figures each of which results in a very close escape by the two characters. The story would progress with the characters eventually uncovering a massive conspiracy involving their Father’s past. The opening shows one of these attacks which takes place several weeks after their father goes missing and our two main characters have been making a low budget cross country journey to escape from their pursuers.
- 9. GenreThe genre is an action – mystery sort of film, combining district 13 and Sherlock Holmes . We can see this by the enigma related objects in the opening and the fast paced chase scene.
- 10. How characters are introducedBoth main characters are first seen entering the church, looking tired and Adam somewhat depressed. The first scene of dialogue is Adam trying to encourage Emily to leave the church and follow him to wherever he intends to go next. This brings out both of the characters true attitudes toward there situations.