Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

To establish the target audience we conducted a few searches into what we could create and what we wanted to get out of the films as well as what we wanted to convey to the audience, we decide that our target audience was going to be more teenagers and up and thats why we went with the overall idea of having teenagers are the main characters for the film. To find out things about our target audience we decided that we would conduct a few data collection missions, finding out habits, lifestyle and the actual age demographic that we were trying to appeal to in the first place.

We conducted a questionnaire with people in our college and adult we found on the street, and from what we got back from them we got the ida that people mostly wanted to watch more mature films and they liked to watch them more when they were off of work, college or school. seen as our demographic was people age 15 and over, most of them would be at college all though the week so we even found out that theoretically if we were going to distribute our product to the general populace we would have to release it close to a holiday or at the weekend. We found out that they were mostly 16 and up so we decided to market the film as a 15, we also found out that we had an even amount of boys and girls that wanted to watch our films. from this we drew up an audience profile and based our film around it.

In response of this we shaped our film to fit our audience, we created characters that they could identify with because they were all teenagers making the audience feel closer to the film. We created scenes that teenagers would usually see within that age bracket for that films, such as mild gore and fight scenes. we also shaped it to fit them by adding topics and things they are familiar with such as the male character smokes and the female character watches a lot of TV, which are sort of stereotyping the generation but its also things that they are accustomed to and like to see within their films.

In conclusion we have created a media product that fits our audience very well, it has topics and stereotypes that they are used to and enjoy and expect within their films. We listened to what are audience wanted and created a product that they could identify with, overall the product was really well marketed and produced for its target audience.

Q7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the the progression from it to the full product?

Q7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the the progression from it to the full product? 

I feel that I have learned quite a few things during this project, a lot of them revolve around software and good production practices, although some are also about the hardware i have interacted with during the production of our product.
firstly I have learned about about the good production practices required to make a good film, something which I feel that I could improve upon next time. For example during the film, we had quite a large amount of shots but I feel that we could have had more that would have better suited our film, as a lot of clips were not used or thrown away because they didn't really fit in with the rest of what was going on in the clip. This made the overall film look a bit unprofessional, even to the untrained eye. Things looked like they skipped and the overall product looked a bit jittery every now an then.
As well when we were filming the product our overall work ethic could have been better as we didn't really look about the positioning of the characters within the scene, for example, when we see my character the zombie fighting with Matthew's character, Steve, you can actually see Martha's character sat on the stairs which doesn't make sense as in the previous shot she stayed in the room when Matthew left to go for a cigarette.

I also learned to look more carefully at where we shoot our shots from and how we shoot them, because for some of them we had to improvise when the tripod wasn't large enough to get the shots from the stairs we wanted for the fight, so instead we sort of made it stable on our own and filmed it that way. we also had a great idea which was to do a sort of handheld camera sort of view of what the zombie is seeing and then used after production affects to make the screen red as if the zombie was experiencing some sort of rage.

I feel that I learned a lot about software and its applications and uses in our product from when I first began at the beginning of the year, for example I started on final cut pro with only knowing the basics such as simple shot to shot editing and a slight knowledge of matching sound up to a clip. Since then I have learned to do many things, like stretch out the music to fir the ambience of the clip and shortening clips to make the film seem more professional. This overall contributed to our film looking as good as it does, I also learned things such as making the screen go red for the rage virus affect on the zombie and creating a professional looking news setup by adding a bottom bar image that would looks something like the ones seen on TV, and by adding a running background of the college to make things look just that bit more professional and realistic.

I also learned things about the hardware we use when we are making the film and editing it as well, for example I learned things like command shortcuts on the iMacs to speed up my work when Im doing editing or when searching for information or content online. I learned more about the cameras we use such as changing the white balance and messing about with other key feature to make the film have a bit of an unnatural feel, which really adds to the atmosphere when people watch the film. The tripods we were given were also different to the ones we had started off with which mean that filming on them presented new challenges that we had to overcome because we didn't necessarily know how these ones worked. However because we had worked with ones before, we could then figure out how to attach the camera and adjust it to get the angles and shots we wanted.  

In conclusion I think that I have learned a great many things about about hardware, software and production practices during the making of our product, things and techniques that I could use to benefit or better other tasks. The skills I have learned also have some real world application and I look forward to using what I have learned here on future projects.

Question 2: How does your product represent particular social groups?

Question 2: How does your product represent particular social groups?

Our products represents social groups stereotypically but in a good way, by this I mean that we show things that an audience is used to like a teenager wearing skinny jeans and a hoodie because that is what is well known and appealing to the teenage audience which is who our product is actually aimed at. This has a positive effect because people feel comfortable watching what they know and because of this they are more likely to identify with the characters that are actually on screen and then because of this they could possibly like the film more because its isn't that far from their own reality. We showed in our product that just because teenagers wear the typical attire, it doesn't mean its necessarily a bad thing.

Seen as teenagers are the only social group represented in our media product its the only social group we can analyse. Teenagers are represented as being quite moody and argumentative in our product as you can see form the couple that are in the later half of the clip played by Martha and Matthew, Matthew is seen as wearing the typical attire of a teenage male which is skinny jeans and a hoodie with a bag that he takes of at the door when he comes in. Martha is also portrayed in the same way wearing a loose fitting top and a skirt, this is typical of most girls of the same age around the same area. They are also portrayed as being quite vulnerable, which is a common misconception of youths these days.

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, challenge or develop forms and conventions of real media products.

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, challenge or develop forms and conventions of real media products.

Our media product challenged the common ideology of male and female gender conventions by placing our male character as the damsel in distress, although a capable fighter in our film the character of Steve played by Matthew is still the one put in harms way. This would usually be the time for Martha's character to come into play because this would usually be a female role but instead we chose to use a male character to challenge the social norms.

Our product also challenged the norms of male dominated media, usually in films you will see a cast full of male characters doing high payed jobs with lots of dialogue but its very rare you see females take on the same social status. Which is why we changed it round a bit, we decided to make it fair we would have an equal ratio of male to female characters with equal amounts of dialogue. This worked out perfectly as our group of four had two males and two females, making it easy to cast for our film and the dialogue was easy to assign for all characters. 

Our product also played to its strengths by using conventions that would be found elsewhere in zombie thrillers, we thought this would be good because if so many zombie films have made it this far then they must be doing something right. We chose to follow horror iconography by adding things like typical zombie walk and aesthetics, whilst we followed things like genre conventions by adding a male and female couple that have to survive the odds in a zombie apocalypse and the stereotypical news broadcast of a deadly disease that is sweeping the nation and seeks to kill everyone by turning them into flesh eating rage machines.

Our product developed the usual conventions by adding an atmosphere to the usual zombie thriller, this means we had all the usual good stuff from the usual zombie films but still retained our own individual spin on the product. This is what makes our film good, not only was it made with a very small budget but it is also a good film because of things like this we took into consideration so that we could achieve a better rating by a larger and more varied audience.  

How did you attract/address your audience?

In order to attract our audience we designed relatable characters, Melissa and Steve. Both characters were of similar age groups to our target audience of 15-25 therefore meaning the audience could connect with our characters on a personal level. In addition to this our characters featured costumes of similar clothing such as hoodies and crop tops. Oure audience feedback informed us that our characters were relatable. One person said 'I personally felt sympathy for the characters when they were attacked as I found them to be just like me'.

Our audience are also classified as being fans of the horror genre, specifically 'zombie' horrors. Therefore to attract our audience we featured a realistic zombie ccharacter. We conveyed the characters infected 'zombie' state through the use of makeup. One responder to our audience feedback told us 'The zombie looked very real, I loved the gore!'.

The audience feedback also told us that the film flowed well and included good continuity. This is thanks to the extensive planning of a shotlist within our production period.

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

Our film was set within the zombie genre, so to convey this we used horror iconography, For example the zombie and his makeup as well as other horror coneventions we found out through research. Inparticular the film Zombieland used plenty of makeup and especially gore based effects. Our costumes for the two actors were stereotypical of their age and gender

Other parts of iconography from within the horror genre was a fight scene, Our fight scene was between the Zombie and lead actor Steve, fight scenes are extremely common inside the horror genre as they add tension and offer more reasons to add extra gore. Not only does it fortify the other conventions it engages the audience as they fear for the protaganists survival.

We established our plot through strong foreshadowing as displayed in our news scene which utilised a green screen as well as some of Final cut's editing functionanlity.

Within our title sequence we used forms of typography to create a theme of destruction within the film. The font used was white, block capitals and appears to be damaged and worn. This holds connotations of destruction therefore conveying to the audience that the film features ruin and havoc- fitting with the post-apocalyptic horror genre.

Question 5: How did you attract/ address your audience?

Question 5: How did you attract/ address your audience?
The best place to start attracting was by looking at what genre of film we were going to put out and the age range that was most likely to watch these films, so because we had a zombie films with mild violence and a bit of gore we decided it would be a suitable to class the films as a 15 films. This gave us a suitable age range to work with, we could have appealed to both teenagers and adults if we played it right but decided it was better to focus on the teenager age range because they were not only more likely to be more of the audience that would watch our film but there was a very high supply of them at college making it easy for us to screen the film to them because a lot of the people that go to our college are happy to help and are old enough to watch a film with this certificate.

We soon realised that when making our film if we wanted the film to appeal to our target audience we would have to add in a generous amount of horror conventions and cliches, so we decided it would be a good idea to add things that would be popular with the genre typically such as a realistic looking zombie, the rage scene where the zombie sees red and attacks the male character and having subtle touches like making things realistically bloody and gory to appeal to the hardcore fans of the genre.

We also added both non diegetic and diegetic sound into our clip such as creating a worrying atmosphere with the siren at the end when the screen faded to black and using music over the already worrying atmosphere created by the female reporter, this just made it feel that much more real for the audience and really helped them to get involved with what was going on in the opening sequence

We also added a really quick paced fight scene to the movie so that we could give fans a shock to keep them on the edge of their seat, we did this by making the zombie character and the male engage in a brawl sequence. we really put some thought into this one because we played the fight sequence out just before we faded to black, so we gave the audience a really good thrill before hitting them with some mystery so they would be left wanting to see more of the movie and it worked one person we screened the film to said "My favourite part was when the zombie and the guy were fighting and then it just cut to black with the zombe on the floor because you don't really know weather he is dead or not".

Finally we addressed our audience by way of direct questioning and questionnaires so that we could collect a wider range of data from them, we used the direct questioning to get answers about our film after a private screening and used questionnaires to get answers from an audience about what they would like from our film.