Evaluation-Ian Uttley

Evaluation

1. In what way does you media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of media products?
Our film incorporates generic conventions by referencing to older films through shots and story structure to identify the product with its genre, for example in the last scene of our product the main character starts to train in a boxing gym which does reference to all other boxing films like “Rocky” and “Ali” which both have scenes which take place in a boxing gym.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The main social groups in our media product are male dominated and in particular males who are in the sport of boxing. The main character, Mike, at first seems like a particularly passive person with the way he act around his boss of whom is stereotypically macho. However later on in the scene it becomes apparent that all the males, including Mike are stereotypical in their anger towards each other in the press conference. Another social group is also shown briefly in our product and that is the journalist and are represented as well presented and somewhat noisy in which to get the best question first. The main social group may appeal to the target audience because when we see a film with a macho male actor, we automatically assume that there is going to be violence and bloodshed.

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
This product probably would not be produced by a major Hollywood Studio because our product doesn’t seem to be the type of film that would appeal to a Hollywood studio. I say this because the boxing genre seems a bit out of date at this day also our film is a very local production.
This film would be an art house film because it has a lot of the properties that other art house films, like “Me and Orson Welles” has, whereas it has a element of social drama which a lot of art house films have and also has a main storyline topic, which is boxing
It may not offer opportunities for franchise and merchandising because the topics the film lends itself to that type of advertising, however it can lend itself to product placement because there are opportunities for things like sports labels and drinks companies to place their products in the film and this would not disrupt the mise-en-scene of the film.



4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
The audience for our film would be anyone who is 15 or above mainly due to the bloodiness of the boxing matches. However, the film itself represents more of a social drama set around the boxing ring and would appeal more to people who like social dramas and independent films.
I would say the films our film is similar to are Rocky, Ali and 8 Mile. The first two films are similar because they follow the life of one boxer however 8 mile is the odd one because it isn’t about a boxer but a rapper. Despite the major difference the story is almost the same because it’s about someone trying to get accepted in to a social group.
The classification criteria that would be most suited for our film would be certificate 15 because of strong language and violence. Also there are some themes within this film like crime that would not be suited for anyone under the age of 15.
http://www.bbfc.co.uk

5. How did you attract/address your audience?
The audience for our product is anyone over the age of 15 and most parts of the film suggests this. However, the violent parts of the film, such as the boxing matches, would appeal more to the male audience and may be more suited to the younger end of the audience. Although the social aspect of the film would appeal to older viewers of the film and would appeal to both genders equally. The criminal aspect of this film would not be suitable for anyone under the age of 15 because they may take away the wrong message from this aspect and could even imitate this aspect and this could cause outrage in a community.

6. What have you learnt about technology from the process of construction your product?
During the making of our product we used a same handheld camera and a standard tripod
and the advantages are that the fact they are small and light, this made them easier to transport. Also because they were small they were easier to used and also easier to film with. Unfortunately we discover that if the light conditions weren’t perfect the camera was prone to go in and out of focus and also the picture quality wasn’t the best you can get. We also had to re-shoot some parts of our product because of mistakes we made and we used a HD camera because the type we used before were not available. The advantages of this camera were the picture quality was very good and a lot better than the smaller camera and it didn’t go in and out of focus automatically. The downside of the larger camera was the size and weight of it which made it very hard to transport and it needed a special tripod as well which also made it hard to transport unless you had a car. Also the layout of the buttons was more complicated than the smaller camera and this made it take longer to figure out how to set the camera up for recording.
We tried to shoot the product’s scenes in order of appearances in the film. There were not too many problems during the first day of filming as we set up the camera filmed the shot and continued in that manner. However all of the day’s problems came at the end as we discovered that the camera had a faulty part and we had failed to notice it and as a result the camera didn’t capture any of the footage we had made. To resolve that problem we replaced the camera and any other parts that were faulty and checked the replacement equipment, we also arranged to re-shoot the scene we had shot that day and we also decided that we would check our equipment before filming and checked if the camera had captured the footage after the filming.
The editing software we used was called “final cut express”, which is a form of editing software which is designed for the Apple Mac. We found it quite simple to use however we did need some help when applying the titles to our film and we found that editing the sound i.e. the dialogue we found that we had made the whole film seem to run smoother.

7. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full project?
For the planning stage of our film production we had to decide what type film we were going to do. And by a voting of 3 to 1 in our group of 4, we decided to do a boxing film. I was the one who voted against the idea for a boxing film in favor of a horror film because I felt that it would be simpler to portray in the two minute allowance that we had for this project. We did some research in to the film genre as in we look at some other boxing films and then we made treatment of our film. We then spilt the work load up between the group so some of us were scripting and others were organizing the locations for shooting. This detailed planning gave us an outline for the shooting of the film because there were predictable going to be some involuntary changes for example there were some subtle changes to the script and we didn’t do some of the shot we had planned because there were too hard to film.
Our use of shots has improved as we tried during filming to make it as easy as possible keep the match on action and continuity going during editing. We did this by noting down movements the actors did in the shots and we gave instructions to the actors to do their best to repeat their movements which wasn’t easy because some of the movements were involuntary, however these issues were eventually solved in the editing room.
I feel very confident with the equipment and as a result I did the majority of the camera work and I was able to do the shots that we wanted. However we could have used external microphones to make the sound quality that little bit better than it is on the film.
I feel that the end product was somewhat successful with the usage of the camera work and editing. However it didn’t fulfill the task as well as I had hoped because I feel that it didn’t make enough of a reference to the genre of which is a boxing film. Saying that I do feel that we have done very well with the time and resources we had.