St Mary's School Media Studies: Audience Response to KLS film

St Mary's School Media Studies: Audience Response to KLS film

Question 6 of Evaluation

3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

It is the task of distributors to identify and deliver the largest possible audience for every film. The UK has 6 major distributors and many independent distributors. According to the Film Distributor’s Association, most cinemagoers know in advance which film they want to see – and that is principally a result of competing distributor’s efforts to promote interests in the title(s) they are handling. Media institutions such as Universal would be appropriate to distribute our film because Universal is associated with chick flicks such as Wild Child. We researched other smaller institutions, which might help us create our media product because our film is low budget and not well known. We found suitable institutions such as Bedlam Productions or See Saw Films. Bedlam Productions, might be interested in helping us create our film. They collaborated to make the multiple Oscar winning, “The King’s Speech”; this film is also a comparatively low budget movie like ours. Although their main key areas have been feature films and documentaries, focusing on “real-life” stories, we feel our UK girls independent school setting also raises lots of historical and social issues in teenage lives, which would attract similar audiences.

Most importantly, See Saw Films has a first-look deal with Momentum Pictures in the UK and a film finance deal with the American Paramount Pictures. Since American institutions have much more capital at their disposal than British companies, this link with the US could be the secret to the success of distributing our film. Moreover, as distributer of “Mean Girls”, Paramount may well be interested in our film as it is aimed at a similar audience, addressing similar high school issues and stereotypes.

Momentum and Paramount would be great distributors for our product because they can distribute our film through larger companies and to the USA. These institutions would also be interested in distributing our media product because British audiences tend to warm to good quality, British films, and could work well on the back of the success of “The King’s Speech”. This might also attract funding from the UK Film Council.

The cinema is a place where film makers would love to have their products showcased. Films have the opportunity to come across as their best in cinemas as audiences enjoy an uninterrupted cinema experience. Therefore, we would like to show our feature film theatrically – in cinemas, as it is the best and most effective way to show a film and it creates a demand to see it. Showcasing our film on television channels rather than the cinema would be less effective because it would gain less audience attention.
According to the Film Distributor’s Association, the most frequent cinema goers tend to be teenagers, students and young adults, and they are the most voracious media consumers. This benefits us because our media product is aimed at a young target audience. More than half of 15-25 year olds in the UK visit the cinema at least once a month. Due to this, hopefully a good distributor such as Momentum or Paramount will distribute our product because it is aimed a large, young audience.

We invented a collaboration of production companies to produce our film. We created Starship Pictures and COSMO Productions, inspired by a space-like theme which has connotations of innovation and groundbreaking material. Our Starship Pictures logo of the globe surrounded by stars, was inspired by the logo of Univeral Pictures. COSMO also connotes a “girly essence” reminiscent of the fashion magazine named “Cosmo”.

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

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

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4) Who would be the audience for your media product?

5) How did you address/attract your audience?

The target audience for our main piece in mostly teenage girls between the ages of 10-18 and we researched modern chick flicks with a similar target group and found out how they made the film fit the need of the main audience. Like in films such as wild child and St Trinians, we decided our main character would be a young, fashionable and pretty female. This was because our research found that this was common of modern, girly chick flicks aimed at teenage girls. We chose to have this stereotypical female character as the hero of the story, since she would be someone that the audience could recognise and relate to, attracting them to our film. So in a sense, we showed our audience in our film, by choosing an actress who was female and of the age group.

During our first discussions about the plot and idea of our main piece, we were unsure of how to make the character of Cally stand out from the other girls in the school. We first thought that Cally should be of lower class, dressed less well than the other girls, so that she felt intimidated by the typical snobby girls at the posh private school. However we decided against this, having Cally dress fashionably, but be a rebellious character and so making the other girls look up to her, though they appear to be jealous of her, giving her dark looks as she passes. We found that this idea was more common in chick flicks and was more suited both our actress and our original idea.

We found that the way we dressed Cally did seem to be the right decision as when we showed a preview of our film opening to our target audience, the shoes our actress was wearing was hugely popular among the girls. They commented on how they really liked them, wanting to buy the shoes themselves. Therefore, this did reach out to our target audience and attract them to our film opening.  

With the girls who played extras in our film, we allowed them to form their own groups, making the film more realistic as they were in similar age and friendship groups. This created verisimilitude, along with the chosen setting, which was our school, which we found was the perfect setting. We also had girls in the windows of the school building, which showed that everyone was focusing on Cally as she arrived for her first day. We handheld the camera in part of our film, showing Callys point of view as she looked over at the small group of sixth form girls and the head girl. This also would help the audience to relate to Cally, getting the sense of being watched by the girls who think they are superior to her.

Another important thing that we also found attracted the girls that we showed a preview of our opening to, was the music. Our song Dirty Little Secret by The All American Rejects was the perfect song for our piece as it was a well known, upbeat, current song that was widely and often used in the chick flick films we had researched. We also felt that the lyrics of the song applied to the plot for our film and so decided that Dirty Little Secret would also be the title to our film. From the questionnaire given to the girls at the screening and the interviews we had with a few of them afterwards, the music was scored extremely highly and the girls were very enthusiastic about it.

7) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

From doing our preliminary tasks back in October to now having completed our main coursework piece, we feel we have learnt a great deal that helped us to make our product the best it could be.

Probably the most important thing we learnt from our preliminary task was that when filming we should always use a tripod. In our preliminary task, we handheld the camera when filming the shot-reverse-shot sequence and although it seemed steady at the time, it was clear when we uploaded it to final cut express that this was not the case. Therefore, when shooting our film opening ‘Dirty Little Secret’, we made sure that we used a tripod the whole time, except for when shooting the main character point of view shot. This made our shots steadier and easier to watch than our shaky preliminary tasks. We decided that handheld would be appropriate for Cally’s point of view shot as we found it was conventional of chick flicks like our piece.

After having a professional cameraman in to view our preliminary tasks, he pointed out the importance of headroom. It was clear in our preliminary tasks that there was much too much space above the actor’s heads, and so they did not properly fill the frame and there was too much background. Therefore, in our main piece, we were careful to make sure that our actresses filled most of the shot, ensuring that there was little or no space above her head. We feel that this improved our film greatly in comparison to our preliminary task and we have learnt how important it is that the actors fill the shot.

We also learnt how important it is to be organised, and made sure that for our filming of ‘Dirty Little Secret’, we had everything ready. In our preliminary task, we made the mistake of not charging the camera before filming and so had the problem of having to charge it and film at the same time. Luckily, since we were filming inside, this was not so much of a problem, but if it had happened in our main piece filming, we would not have been able to film. Therefore, we made sure the cameras were fully charged and our equipment was set up before our actress and extras arrived for filming. We found it difficult to arrange everyone in place and had to do lots of retakes in a short space of time, but from this we have learnt efficiency and we managed to get most of the filming done on the first day. Like in the preliminary task, we had to film over two days and so we made sure that our actress was wearing exactly the same thing she was wearing before and waited for a day in which the weather would be the same. Again, even though we had a short space of time, we managed to get our filming done completely by the second day and so we learnt a lot from this about time management, organisation and the importance of communication.

When editing our final piece, we thought back to our preliminary task and remembered the importance of continuity. In our preliminary task, we found that it took a considerable amount of time to edit the actor walking through the door so that it looked realistic. Therefore, we made sure that we took time editing our film opening, so that it flowed well, keeping the verisimilitude of the piece.

So, from our preliminary task to our main coursework piece, we learnt a lot about constructing a film and the experience at filming and editing certainly helped us when it came to doing our film opening of ‘Dirty Little Secret.’

The Evaluation!

Now that our final coursework peice is complete and we are happy with our film opening, we are working on the evaluation of our project. We divided the questions amonst our group and worked together on some so I will now be blogging our responces :)

We've almost finished editing!

All we have left to do is put the credits into our film and hopefully that shouldnt take too long. We have created our 'Starship Pictures' clip with a starry/world background and we are in the process of completing 'A film by' and 'Cosmo productions'.


We are going to have a showing of our film opening on Thursday 31st to a small group of our target audience and then intereve them, recording their opinions for part of our evalutations.

15/03/2011 Filming

We filmed the last shots of our coursework peice Tuesday and luckily the weather was good!
We booked an appoint with Mrs Winter who played our Headmistress for 1:45 and had 15 minutes to film. Also, we did a few more close ups so hopefully, along with the credits and titles, our film will be longer :)

Title Sequence of 'A Cinderella Story'

Risk Assessment

Risk Assessment
FILM PRODUCTION RISK ASSESSMENT

Production Title Starship Productions	Production Date(s) February 2011 – April 2011
Producers Names Lizzie Smith, Shereen Sagoo and Kayleigh Turner	Directors Names Lizzie Smith, Shereen Sagoo and Kayleigh Turner
Date of Risk Assessment 9h February 2011	Risk Assessment conducted by Lizzie Smith, Shereen Sagoo and Kayleigh Turner

Hazard	Persons who may be harmed	Property which may be damaged	Risk controls already in place	Risk Assessment LOW, MODERATE, HIGH, EXTREME (see table)	Further action required to control risk
Driveway/cars	All actresses and directors	Camera equipment	Pavement at the side of driveway and roundabout	Unlikely High	Warn all persons to take extra care.
Trolley for filming	Directors	N/A	Handle to control the wheels of the trolley	Unlikely Low	Warn all persons to take extra care.
Temperature/weather	All actresses and directors	Camera equipment could get wet	None	Unlikely/Moderate Low	Check weather forecast, ensure actresses are dressed appropriately
Road outside	One actress and directors	Camera equipment	Pavement	Rare high	Warn all persons to take extra care.

Costumes

For our production it was vital the characters were all dressed appropriately to ensure the beginning of our movie looked 'real' and not faked. To do this, Callie (the main character) wore a vest top with barbie on, heels, jeans and a coat as it was very cold! Obviously, this is not what a normal independent girls school pupil would wear, even in the sixth form, but we did this deliberately to make her stand out. The normal pupils from the school wore typical independent school uniforms - blazer, shirt, jumper and a skirt. We also featured some sixth formers and they were wearing suitable, smart clothing.

Weather for Filming!

We will be filming the last few shots of our coursework piece on either Monday or Tuesday, depending on the weather! Heres the forecast for this week :)

Sub genres of the Chick Flick

Tearjerkers

·         Tearjerkers are gal-pal films, movies about family and emotional crises. They are traditionally ‘weepies’ and fantasy-action adventures, sometimes with powerful females and bonding situations involving families and woman’s issues. An example of a tearjerker is ‘The Notebook.’ 

Rom-com

·         Rom coms are films with light-hearted, humorous plot lines, centred on romantic ideas such as true love. Examples of a Romantic comedy are Bridget Jones’ Diary and What Happens in Vegas.

Guy com

·         A guy chick flick is a movie where feelings and emotions are discussed and/or dealt with, but from the guy's point-of-view, and with minimum sap.  They may contain things most guys enjoy, like sport, and strong language, but they are always about guys dealing with life, their futures, or relationships with women, family, and/or friends. Examples of guy coms are American Pie and The Hangover.  

Filming 16/02/11

We had planned to film the beginning of our chick flick during the lunch hour on Wednesday 16th March. After checking the weather forecast beforehand, we were pleased to see it would be a bright day, as we thought it would be more appropriate for chick flick not to begin looking dull and dreary. 
Luckily, the forecast was correct and we had no problem there. We had already done spme practice shots with our main actress Harriet Baylore who plays Cally and so began straight away, with the help of Axel. Also, we rounded up some girl of different years to be extras in the fim and a group of Sixth Formers who would take a dislike to Cally.


Although the filming went well, we didnt quite have time to finish and so will plan to our shots with Mrs Winter (Who will play the headmisstress) when we get back from half term. We also need to shoot a few more close-ups of Cally, as close-ups are very common in chick flicks. Apart from this we have most of our shots and so can soon move on to editing!

Video Storyboard

Collage of Chick Flicks

First 9 Shots of Mean Girls

1) Cady Heron's mum and dad close up shot of them
     talking to Cady before her first day of school.
   
2)Close up of Cady. Over the shoulder shots

3) Cady's dad taking a photo of Cady and her mum

4)The photo that Cady's dad took off his camera

 5) Cuts to a spelling bee to show stereotypical views
      of "Home schooled freaks".

6)Another cut to more "homeschooled freaks"

7) Close up of Cady. She is homeschooled but her
 family is normal and she is not a freak, but she used to
live in Africa.

8)A snapshot, far shot of Cady's African life

9) Cut back to reality of Cady standing outside of her
     new school in America, saying goodbye to parents.
These first 9 shots shows the storyboard of Mean Girls
 for the introduction. Many close ups were used which
reflects typical conventions of a chick flick, so in our
2 minute film, we will also use close ups.