Evaluation Task 2:

In what ways does your media product represent a particular social group?

In the opening scene of our thriller our characters represent particular social groups and we used stereotypes in order to portray these groups, mainly with the use of costume and setting.
 

The young girl and business man are father and daughter, thus both are white upper class citizens with a reasonable amount of disposable income. This is shown in the setting of both characters. The girl is shown during a wide shot to be in her large garden thus infers that because she lives in a big house she has a substantial amount of wealth. The bathroom and corridor that the business man's scenes are shot in both display a reasonable amount of luxury. The wide shot of the business man leaving his 'house' show how grand the building is, again emphasising that they are from a wealthy social group.

 

 

 A wide establishing shot shows  that the young girl is dressed in  black dungarees, a cream flowery shirt and Nike trainers. The girls clothes do not depict a large degree of wealth therefore contrasts with her surroundings and backgrounds. This infers that she does not indulge in her fathers money which may explain why she defies him and hangs herself in protest to his actions. Her hair has two small plaited pigtails in it and she is wearing a cross around her neck while also carrying a Bible. Her attire suggests that she is reasonably eccentric but with a modern twist. Her hair and the use of the Bible depicts the idea that she is quite innocent and naïve. The cross and Bible automatically put her into a religious social group, but her clothing and hair suggests that she may be a hippy as well. Hippies have a very established social group, and many times through out history have taken extreme actions during protests. Additionally extreme religious groups  take drastic actions in order to prove a point or cause chaos, therefore by combining these two social groups the girls motives to commit suicide becomes very poignant. We have used stereotypes in her clothing and props in order to create a meaning quickly so that the audience make immediate assumptions and judgements.
 

The business man belongs to a very specific social group of the white upper class who have a large amount of power over the rest of the country. This corresponds with recent statistics from BERR that 93% of owner managers and self-employed people are white. This leads the audience to immediately accept the power of the businessman. He is dressed in a smart suit with polished shoes along with an over coat  thus implies that he has to seem well dressed in order to show his status while having the income to pay for the suit. By using close ups to portray expensive watch, pen and ring this emphasises the luxuries the man can afford thus again conveys the social group he is representing. By using extreme close ups of the words in the contract, we are able to represent the idea that the man has considerable power as he is able to demolish large Churches.
 

Evaluation Task 1:

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



Final Piece

This is our final piece.

Editing Final Lesson

Final Editing Lesson

In our final editing lesson we added the titles to our sequence. We started by choosing the font that we thought fitted the most with our sequence's atmosphere and then we picked the font size. We chose to have the titles in white so that even though the font size was relatively small it would still be visible to the audience. We then placed the titles into our scene. By looking at other film titles we had an idea of what titles to incorporate so that it would seem more realistic. Therefore we added numerous titles to our sequence, which was quite time consuming as we had to place them in certain areas of the screen so that they did not interfere with the action but were still readable. By adding a fade effect to the titles it made the transaction between each more fluid. Having completed this we turned our attention to the soundtrack and sound effects. We searched through different soundtracks until we found the right one, and then we slowed it down by 50% in order to make it sound more creepy and mysterious. We then placed it onto our sequence using Final Cut Pro. After this we searched for a sound of a neck cracking and added it into the end of out sequence. We had to time it correctly with the fall and make it subtle enough to be realistic but loud enough to be heard. We let the sound play for a long time and as at the end there was the sound of a rope creaking which created the idea of the body swaying. This sounded really realistic and added to the whole atmosphere of the piece. After some deliberation we decided to cut the music at the end when she is dangling from the branch as it drew more attention to the neck cracking sound thus really portrayed the finality of the girls death. At the end of the piece we placed the name of our piece, Gradual Decline, on a black background. This worked really well as it was after the action of the hanging thus conveyed to the audience that the opening was over and the rest of the story was about to take place. 

I am really happy with how our scene has cut together and our group worked really well during editing as we each contributed different ideas that, when combined, looked really good on screen. 

Editing Lesson #5

Editing Lesson 5

 

 

 

As we had completed all the cuts in our scene we turned our attention to the sound. We had to use the sound from the mike rather than from the microphone that was attached to the camera. In order to find this sound, we had to listen to each clip of sound and detect which one was the clearest. After this we deleted the sound we did not want, and copied the sound we did so that it was doubled up thus was extremely clear and loud. This was incredible time consuming as we had to do this for each clip and ensure afterwards that the sound image where then linked back together. This will help us in the future as this repetitive task is necessary to ensure that the sound is correct and will be important the next time we cut together a piece.

 

Once we have finished this we will turn our attention to the titles of our sequence and this will be the final thing we will add to our piece
so that it is finished. 

Editing Lesson 3 and 4

Editing Lesson 3 and 4

 

 

 

We began the lesson by watching the whole clip through so that we could get a bearing on how we left our sequence. We started cutting our sequence which involved a lot of work as we had to go over each section numerous times in order to ensure that the cut was as smooth as possible. We made sure we cut on movement as it looks more natural. We especially focused on this during the businessman s washing hands scene and his signing of the contract. This took us the two lessons to go through every clip and cut them together as we had to be a precise as possible. We also had some arguments over how long clips should be but these were resolved quickly 

Editing Lesson 2

Editing Lesson 2

 

 

 

During our second editing lesson, we immediately began to shape our thriller by placing the clips into the order we wanted. We did not focus on making clean cuts or making the sequence run smoothly but instead on the order of shots. Later we will be able to finalise the cuts but during the beginning it has helped us get an idea of what our piece will look like.

 

We began with the business man as we decided this would be the better sequence to start with. As we had labelled each clip with the exact content of the footage it was easy to place the clips in the correct order. Although we use our story board for guidance we did re arrange the shot order so that it flowed in a more succinct manner. We discussed as a group how to put together our piece and we worked well as a team and had very few arguments!

By the end of the lesson our whole sequence was placed in order so that we could go back and finalise each cut later.