Our film 'Connect Four'...

My name is Tilly Hawkins and my candidate number is 2097.

I worked in a group with Sarah Olivier, Connor Harper and Jack Bezant we worked very hard to help make our film opening and evaluation the best that it can be.

This below is my final film opening and I am very proud of what we have accomplished.

Question #1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Monday, 18 January 2016

Question 1

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

Title of The Film 
The title of the film is connect four. The film title represents the three main parts of our film. Connect four represents the four friends within the friendship group and how they are all connected together. Connect four is also a children's board game which the group play.

Setting
The movie takes place in a small town with the majority of the scenes in a small log cabin at the back of one of the friends gardens. The log cabin offers the friends a place of solidarity, companionship and refuge. It allows us an insight to the characters feelings and emotions away from other situations. The log cabin is a unique location for filming as there are not many films in the teen/coming of age genre featuring it. Although, it is similar to The Goonies because the friendship group congregate at a house.

Titles
For our titles the main inspiration was Napoleon Dynamite. They used different objects to spell out the titles moving them in and out of the camera view abruptly.

Napoleon Dynamite titles...

Our Titles...

Challenges to common stereotypes:
Our titles challenge the normal stereotypes of a normal teen/coming of age titles. This is because in a normal other film of this genre they tend to follow the teen characters and give a small insight into their personalities (for example The Breakfast Club opening scene). We have challenged this by focusing more on how the titles are presented to show the characters personalities. By having the titles on the games it shows the characters are a fun, close-knit group.

Camera Work and Editing

Story/Narrative 
The majority of the films follow Todorov's idea of equilibrium, disruption, resolution and a new equilibrium. The diagram below shows our films narrative structure compared to 21 Jump Street...

Genre
Characters:

1. Kurt Saint - teenage boy, long hair, jeans, trainers, white complexion, troubled background, middle class. 
2. Jacob Burted - teenage boy, short hair, jeans, trainers, hoody, white complexion, sporty, student, single. 
3. Alex Maplin - teenage girl, long hair, jeans, trainers, white complexion, student, popular, likes to shop. 
4. Katie Shane - teenage girl, long hair, skirt, white, student, shy, likes to study, has little friends.

All our characters were modelled on the breakfast club characters...

• Kurt Saint = John Bender 
• Jacob Burted = Andrew Clark 
• Alex Maplin = Claire Standish 
• Katie Shane = Allison Reynolds

Costumes

Throughout the film you see the female characters wearing make-up, this is a stereotype for female teens and that most teenage girls wear makeup. And we also dress the characters differently throughout the film to help represent what their character is like. So for Jacob he will wear sportswear to show he likes sport and the 'popular girl' Alex will wear really fancy clothes to help represent that she is within the popular group these are all very strong stereotype. There is the stereotype that the more geeky characters generally don't wear as much make-up and don't care as much of what they look like compared to the more popular one.

Themes:

• Friendship - The enviable friendship between the four characters.
• School life - Some scenes of the film take place inside a school.
• Love - Kurt is madly in love with Alex but when Alex goes to a party and gets with loads of boys Kurt gets angry and breaks up the group.    



Friendship	School Life	Love

Question #2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

We have included many different social groups within our film including the main groups which are; teenagers,  geeky girls, popular girls, sporty boys and musical boys. I created a presentation to help demonstrate how these social groups are represented in our film and how were influenced by the media:

Question #3: What kind of institution might distribute your media product & why?

This is a voice over of Connor talking about our film like he has actually directed it in real life and is presenting it at the British film festival where Studio Canel approached him and wanted to fund the film. It also says how Connor would have marketed our film and where it would be released first.

Question #4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

This Prezi is to show what our 'dream' audience would look like and what their likes and personality would be like. 

The core target audience for our film 'Connect Four' are male and females between the age of 15-19 years old. Who are fairly shy, very sociable and love watching teen/coming age of film. 

Our secondary target audience is the teenagers (Core target audience) parents, who will come with their teen children to the cinema to watch our film. We made sure that our film is very versatile so that the parents would also enjoy our product.




This graph above shows the percentage of what age groups go to the cinema the most likely. And I have concluded from this chart that the majority of people who are going to the cinema are 15-24 years old.

Question #5: How did you attract/ address your audience?

We have tried our hardest to attract all the different types of audiences like our core audience of male and female teens as well as our secondary audience which is the parents of the teens. We have designed different types of devices to attract the different audience members of our film. Below is a table of how we targeted all of the different audience members through different methods.

What we included in our film to attract our primary audience:
- We included friendships and relationship problems because the audience likes to relate to these sort of topics

The different audience members	The methods we used to attract or address our audience
Fans of teen/ coming of age films	We have created YouTube pop-ups  on vidoes which are associated with teen films or programs to help target directly our core audience.
15-19 year old Males (Primary audience)	We chose to use social media platforms to predominately promote our film as they are both free and accessible to all. Here is the link to our film's Facebook page, here we will post updates and teasers of our film before its release date in early April 2016. https://www.facebook.com/Unofficial-Connect-Four-1678556379051740/ We also decided to use Twitter as well as Facebook and so here is the link to our Twitter page. https://twitter.com/connectfourthe1
15-19 year old Females (Primary audience)	We chose to use social media platforms to predominately promote our film as they are both free and accessible to all. Here is the link to our film's Facebook page, here we will post updates and teasers of our film before its release date in early April 2016. https://www.facebook.com/Unofficial-Connect-Four-1678556379051740/ We also decided to use Twitter as well as Facebook and so here is the link to our Twitter page. https://twitter.com/connectfourthe1
Parents of the teens (Secondary Audience)	We have decided to help target the parents of teens to watch our film by

Below is a screenshot of our Facebook page which we made to help market our film and attract our target audience...

Then below is a screenshot of our Twitter page, which we created to help target our core teen based audience also...

What's in our film opening which appeals to our primary target audience is...

- We include friendships and relationships in our film which our primary target audience can relate to due to it being part of growing up. Our audience will see that relationships and friendships are shown in our film and will be attracted to the film because they find these topics relatable. 

- Another reason that people are attracted to our film is because it is unique and quirky, there are not many films which honestly highlight the problems that teenagers face on a day to day basis. 

Audience Feedback

I sampled a group of teens and asked them to watch our film 'Connect Four' and report back to us with feedback about our film and if they would be interested in seeing our film. 

I created a survey made by https://www.surveymonkey.com/.

Which I then distributed to these teens we asked and analysed the results we received back from them. There was a few older people than teens that took part in our survey but mainly we asked our primary target audeince which is teens.

Below are screenshots of what my feedback survey looked like for the film audience and what questions we asked our audience to complete:    

As you can see from the results of my survey below 77% of the people that completed our survey were female. It was to help us to determine which gender took part in our survey the most but men did still fill out our survey.

Below this is a question to help us to determine whether the primary audience we thought would like our film actually did. And we discovered that nearly 90% of the people we asked said that they did enjoy our film opening and the other 10% said sort of meaning that they wouldn't rule out watching the rest entirely.

We asked in our survey for our audience to rate our film opening out of a possible 10 marks, this is to help us see whether we were successful in attracting our primary audience and they also enjoyed it.The highest mark we received was a 10 out of 10 but this was only just over 20% of the audience we asked. The majority of people we asked gave our film 8 marks out of a possible 10 marks which i think is a very positive response. 

We also asked for people to honestly say whether they would watch the rest of our film 'Connect Four' after watching the opening scene. The feedback we received was that over 88% of people said that they would want to continue watching the rest of our film after released. And only a small minority of just under 12% said they would maybe watch the rest of our film.  

Out of the surveyors that we asked to give back survey, only 10% of these people were out of the age of our primary target audience. But the other 90% of people who completed our survey were in our primary target audience age of 15-19 years old. We asked for their ages to help us determine who would like the look of our film opneing enough to fill out our survey.

During our survey we also asked what they liked and disliked about our film, below is a list of what this feedback was...

Likes:

- It was very unique and fun

- I enjoyed the creativity with the titles and is evident that you worked hard on the mise en scene suitable to the plot and genre of the film.

- Enjoyed the narrative and the time lapse was very effective 

- Very original idea

- Loved the creativity of the credits

- Liked the variety of frames and the sequencing 

- The titles were very creative were they are placed.

Dislikes:

- The lighting was a little off at some points.
- The voice over was a little fuzzy at times
- It seemed quit long and dragged a little
- Seems a bit dark at the very beginning
- Credits distracted from the film opening
- The voice over seemed a little off balance at times 

Question #6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?

Throughout this process I have learnt a lot about how to use technology and its importance in the media and film industry. I feel like I have thoroughly improved my technology skills from when I started the year to my current film opening and this is my video blog response to Question 6. 

Question #7: Looking back at your prelim task, what have you learnt in the progression from that to the final product?

Below is my original preliminary task...

And here are some screenshots of shots throughout my practice preliminary exercise:

The brief for our prelim task:

A continuity task involving filming and editing of a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character.With whom they then exchange dialogue with.

The brief for our film opening task:

In groups create a film opening lasting 2-2.20 minutes. And must include characters, a plot, location, themes and a genre.

Film poster criticism

Film Poster Criticisms

After producing the film poster for our film, we were told that it did not look like a film poster and that the poster looked as if it was promoting a band as opposed to a film.

We chose to create our poster like this because of the inspiration we took from the posters of films similar to ours such as The Breakfast Club, The Goonies and Stand By Me. We managed to find many similarities between all of the posters used to promote these classic teen films and so we used the research we conducted to aid us in producing our own film poster. 

Here is our poster:

Here is the poster for The Breakfast Club:

Our poster has many similarities to the poster used to promote the classic teen film The Breakfast Club. Our poster similarly features a group of teenagers standing together appearing united and has a tagline hinting to the narrative of the film. It was because of this poster, and others we found when conducting our film poster research, that we chose to create our film poster in this way.

                    

This above is an improved poser from the criticism from our teachers and we made it look more like a film poster and not a music video poster.