2. In What Way Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products? Our media product’s convention is mocking or spoofing serious forces, such as serious action films. Just as films such as Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead are spoofing original action movies to create a sub-genre known as “action comedy”. It challenges the conventions of stereotypical assassins, which means we are going against the idea of them being tough, lone wolf killers who must be taken seriously at all times. We’ve used aspects of other action comedy films, such as “Kick Ass” in order to make our product fit the genre and appeal to our target audience.
3. How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups? We’ve taken the idea of the “loveable rogue” from normal action films, and twisted it into a comedy. We’ve done this by subverting stereotypes of the normal “alpha male” type of assassin and made him seem more normal and down-to-earth so he is someone you can relate to. We have expressed this by putting him in a serious situation but he makes mistakes (unlike a real assassin) which make him look foolish, creating humour and in turn a more loveable character much like the film “Johnny English”.
4. What Kind of Media Institution Might Distribute our Media Product and Why? We believe Big Talk Productions would be the sort of media institution to distribute our media product because their past productions include films such as “Shaun of the Dead”, “Hot Fuzz” and other works of our role model director “Edgar Wright”. Other reasons include the fact the company is British and we want our film to have that sort of edgy, British, satirical feel to it. Our film is also suited to the type of actors this company are associated with, for example the “loveable loser” Simon Pegg and suchlike.
5. Who Would Be The Audience For Your Media Product? We originally intended to aim our film at a teenage/young adult audience. This is because recently there has been a boom of these types of films, such as “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz”, which means people have acquired a taste for these sort of films. It is probably valuable to note that these type of films may not appeal to a more mature, sophisticated audience and also, arguably may not appeal to girls as much as boys. We also decided to aim our film at teenagers because we ourselves are teenagers, therefore we know what our age group likes, and also it would make logical sense to aim it at teenagers as they are the age group which visits the cinema’s the most and watch movies.
6. How Did You Attract/Address the Audience? We used the idea of “social misfits” in order to draw in our audience. We did this mainly because this appeals to a lot of teenagers these days, especially with the arrivals of “loser comedy” shows such as “The Inbetweeners”. We felt that most teenagers are not the strong type of character you see in normal action films, so it seem more teenagers are like the character in such spoof comedy’s and “social misfit” and “loser comedy” films and TV shows. We also know that there are more “action comedy” films recently, so people will be more inclined to go and see the film because it is part of a genre we already know.
7. What Have You Learnt About Technologies From the Process of Constructing This Product? We’ve learnt a lot about the technologies and technicalities of creating a film now, after doing it. Through the problems we encountered, such as the difficulty of finding a location to film at hindered our progress and left us needing to change our whole idea, we learnt new ways of filming and new methods. We also learnt a lot more about the technology such as camera’s and computer video editing programmes such as Imovie, which are important in the editing stages of the process. These hindrances may have slowed down the process but will also help us if we do this again.
8. Looking Back at Your Preliminary Task, What Do You Feel You Have Learnt in the Progression From it to the Full Product? We have learnt that planning in advance is essential to making a successful media product. Not only does it make film more fluent, but also allows for changes to the final product. For example, during our preparation for our final product we changed our idea, and found ourselves struggling to make the video in time. Also we have learnt that research prior to the actual production is just as important as the actual making of the product, because without it you cant hope to make a successful film because it wont be aimed at anyone in specific, there’s no purpose to it and therefore getting accurate feedback would be impossible thus making is a failure.
9. Audience Feedback We began by showing the film to our friends who are of our own age group and this is quite fortunate for us because we are aiming it at these people. We Then spread to family, we got 100% positive feedback but it occurred to us that this may be because they know us and want to be nice, so to get more fair feedback, we put our piece on YouTube (now removed) to get responses from random people. We had several comments from people we don’t know, some bad, some good, however we don’t know who was watching so we cant tell if the good comments came from people we were aiming the film at or not. But it would make perfect sense if the bad comments came from an older or more mature generation because we understand that our film does not appeal to these people. We would of preferred a lot more feedback because we believe audience feedback is vital, if you don’t know whether or not your film is liked then you can’t hope to make a success. Also they could make suggestions which all adds to increase the chances of success.
