In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms of media & conventions of real media products?
Our teaser trailer breaks codes and conventions of many urban thrillers. Our main influences were movies like KidultHood, Bullet Boy and Ill Manors. One of the main convention we broke was with our character casting. We had an Asian protagonist (me), which is something you don't see often in urban thrillers, the only movie in that genre that had a Asian protagonist was Ill Manors and Shifty, in both movies was played by Riz Ahmed played one of if not the main character. Majority of the urban thrillers that you see have predominantly African Caribbean ethnicity, such as Noel Clarke and Ashley Walters.
Our mise-en-scene was very conventional to the urban thriller genre, our characters where wearing black hoodies, tracksuits, casual trainers. This is very stereotypical view on the teenagers of London today and also characters in Urban Thrillers. Our setting was in both Brixton and Tooting. We decided to set our trailer there because these areas would be very familiar to our key demographic, as the majority of them would be from in and around London.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text?
Our teaser trailer works will with our ancillary text (film poster and magazine cover), as they all convey the theme of our film. Our film poster hasn't got a lot of colour as it is very dark, we got our influence from the Kidulthood poster. it has all the main characters lined up against a wall, the colour seems like the picture was taken at dusk. The colour scheme of the KidultHood poster is very dark bluish as is very similar to our film poster. Another influence is the background, in the KidultHood poster has vague resemblance of a run down estates, our film poster is the blocks on Brixton. Our magazine cover has Ainsley in his costume, with a background of city behind him, this represents the character's dream as he wants to leave the hood and enter the city. I think it works well, especially the magazine cover as it sticks to its conventions, as it mostly focuses on one character. If you see our teaser trailer and then see our magazine cover, you will be able to understand each bit to our poster.
Audience Feedback...
Our audience was what we expected. Many people liked our teaser trailer, but we expected the audience to be confused by who the bad person and the good person is. We did this deliberately so that the audience think that both characters are the bad guys, however, when they go see the film, they'd see that only one is and the other is trying to change. Majority said that they liked how 'its set in area's in which we call all relate', we were trying to reach out to the youths of today as this is something that many young boys and girls go through. They like the soundtrack to our teaser trailer as well as it gives an emotional touch to the environment, almost a bond between the characters and their environment. In psychology, psychologist suggests that the environment plays a big part in defining our character.
Regarding our magazine cover and film poster, many people said they both worked well together once I had explained what our film was about and said they would like to look into it. They really liked the setting (the brixton estates), they said how it is very familiar with the youth of today and it 'pays a homage to the past of South London'. They especially liked the magazine cover and how the character of Ainsley position amongst the background of city.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation phases?
This year we used Final Cut Pro X instead of last years IMovie to edit our film. There were many implications, because it was a brand new software it did take us quite a while to get used to it, this unfortunately did shorten our editing time. However, what we lost in time we made up in the editing stage. Using the Final Cut Pro X did make our movie more professional, for example, by using the blade tool, we were able make it more precise, that was something that we couldn't do last year with IMovie. We were using the same HD Camera as last years but this time we had a mic so our scenes with dialogue could come out clearer, the mic on the camera isn't as good as the mic so the quality sound would not of come out as good. We used PhotoShop to put together our movie poster and magazine cover, we used this because we've used PhotoShop numerous amounts of times before and are very familiar of it, this is also a very good software as a lot of the professionals use this. We were able to make our poster and magazine cover look more professional. We uploaded our movie and audience feedback video on to Youtube, which was the 3rd most widely used search engine, which is even more surprising considering it is a video website and not a search engine.
