A Film Evaluation.

Our Film is now complete and so I have completed an Evaluation.

I have tried to answer the following questions:
> In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
> How does your media product represent particular social groups?
> What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
> Who would be the audience for your media product?
> How did you attract/address your audience?
> What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
> Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Evaluation on Prezi

A post long over due

Right at the start of our project our group had to present our ideas to the class. This presentation was recorded as well as being presented to the rest of the class. This is how it went.

PRESENTATION 5 from fLIX.TV on Vimeo.

an update on our OTS

after research with a focus group my group mates and I have have made some updates to our film. Although we do not have any voices on our OTS yet we do now have a soundtrack with was composed by Sam High. We have chosen to have the majority of our soundtrack written and performed by our group (mostly Sam as this is his forté)  as this will help with avoiding copyright infringement. The exception in our music is that we have used another artists music in our film noir, however, up to 20 seconds an be played before copyright is infringed so we have kept the time down.

We have also completed the editing now also, including adding in the animation. The animation will be uploaded to my blog soon.
UPDATE:

filmnoiranimation from Matt Armes on Vimeo.

Credit where it's due.

My group has been working well and have been looking into different areas of the film industry.

Matt has done some work relating to age groups and film ratings which can be found here:
http://asmediastudiesmattarmes.blogspot.com/2011/02/film-age-classification.html
and has also done some work with uploading one edit of what will hopefully be our final piece, which can be found here:
http://asmediastudiesmattarmes.blogspot.com/2011/02/update.html

Sam has done his work on Target audience, and who our Film noir will be aimed at, which is here:
http://mediastudiessamhigh.blogspot.com/2011/02/our-target-audience.html
He has also been working on the sound for our film noir, and an update can be found here:
http://mediastudiessamhigh.blogspot.com/2011/02/sound-problems.html

Deconstucting a Neo-Noir

The Red Riding
A film that starts off by building tension a slow tilt showing a small dead child with angel wings, like a fallen angel, this shows a murder already and this is a major part of film noir, as they usually involve some sort of crime. The next scene (using a fade edit and continuing the tilt) is of the anti-hero/protagonist, he is beaten up, which shows he is flawed, making him an anti-hero not a proper hero. The next scene is of him driving in his car down a rural road in the rain. A voice over states that he has just failed in london where he was attending his fathers funeral, once again showing his flaws. the colours of this OTS Neo-Noir are almost monochrome, the colours are all quite whitewashed brown colours, with very high shadow contrast. The music is very unconventional because it is acoustic guitar, where-as it is normal for a film noir to have an orchestra. However, it did use a voice-over which is conventional.

Blade Runner
The colour scheme is very conventional to Film Noir except it is in colour, not monochrome. The contrast is very high, which means the scenes are either very dark or very light. This is highly conventional of a film noir which tended to be very dark films. Another convention used in blade runner is the fact that it uses an urban backdrop however it is extremely unconventional because the city is completely Sci-Fi with explosions, flying cars and hologramatic advertising.





Maholand Drive
Urban and dark Maholand drive starts off very conventional however it soon goes completely unconventional. It goes to a clip of very abstract dancing with bright purple backgrounds. It is also unconventional in the fact that the hero is a woman, as well as the femme fatal. The following scenes are all set at night in the dark, following a car. This gives a very bright light contrast from the headlights. When a crash is shown in the clip we watched, the explosion is a brilliant white (magnesium powder most likely used) which is another good colour contrast.

Semiotics in film noir.

semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of cultural sign processes, analogy, metaphor, signification and communication, signs and symbols. In film noir this means that different objects will have different meanings. For example; a pack of cards would represent a casino, or a loaded gun would represent danger and power. Or finally the light could also show this sort of thing. If the lighting is dark then it will show danger, or evilness, whereas light will show goodness, etc.

In our film noir we have used a gun to show power and danger, we have also used the eyes of each character to show danger and what side they are on. The mobsters wear their fedoras low down so that it creates a shadow down over their eyes, whereas the hero's fedora is facing upwards, showing his face. When the Don goes to shoot he pulls up his fedora showing his face, this is to show he means business and the audience can understand this.

Continuity task for AS media from Lee Cooper on Vimeo.

This is my and Bethany's continuity task for media. We have included all of the necessary shots and camera techniques, however the actual footage is not very good and is quite boring. However from a technical point of view i have included Long shots, Mid shots, two shots, Matches on action, reaction shots, and panning. We have tried not to create any continuity errors.