Evaluation - Ramish

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

In my perspective, our media product uses a typical view of a crime thriller situation where you have a bad guy wanting a certain thing from someone else but he cannot perform the task to how the villain wants him to and followed by revenge, he ends up in a situation where his life is in a high level of danger and the antagonist seems to torture him in order to claim what he wants.

Our media project did not quite challenge the traditional view of this type of scenario because what you see in our one is what you would normally see. Since we had Asian actors to portray the characters in our storyboard, this added to the development because you would normally see white actors or black actors because they are usually the centre of attention in these genres. Also in the later part of the opening sequence we had the bad guy running away due to the fact that he shot the victim when he actually did not mean to, the scene where he is fleeing the scene is shown as a point of view shot combined with diegetic sound of heavy breathing so this developed the intensity and suspense of the scene.

How does your media product represent particular social group?

We included Asian actors in our film because as I mentioned before you would not normally see Asian backgrounds being the centre of attention, Asian groups for instance Pakistanis and Arabs are normally seen as terrorists and violent individuals so we included them because it would convey a message of how they are normally portrayed in the minds of our average audience as anti-social groups. Also as you may have viewed that our actors are quite young, being between 18 and 25, this also represented age groups because young boys are stereotypically seen as hot headed and always violent, usually starting a riot or fight. Also the young teens always seem to be carrying a knife or a weapon of some sort in the stereotypical media index and the young teens being of an ethnic background, it just develops the opening sequence because a typical view of the average young Asian is represented as how people view them as.

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

The institutions that we mentioned before such as ‘Revolver Entertainment’ and ‘Regency Enterprises’ would be the forecasted companies we would aim for our film to be a part of since they both have made quite a lot of crime thrillers. We don’t expect a big time company like 20^th Century or Universal to be part of our film because our sequence does not have an American feel to it, it is quite low budget and has more of a urban theme to it instead. 

Who would be the audience for your media product?

In my opinion the audience for our film would most likely be late teens and early 20s individuals because our actors themselves are young, and by past experience, the young target market normally is the one to go see a film on young adults.

We obviously would like to see majority of the audience, those who are not even our initial target market, to still view our project. The reason that young teens would view our movie is because it represents the stereotypical view of ethnic backgrounds and also the stereotype view of late teens and early 20 individuals.

How did you attract/address your audience?

I did not quite set out to have a mass audience with our movie, instead I hoped to achieve a critical response such as uploading the movie onto youtube etc and just gathering a niche market which would give us a response on what they thought about the product we manufactured into an opening sequence.

What have your learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Technology was the prime object of support that we had because without the likes of an editing software on the Apple Mac we would not be able to put any of our film together and make it look as professional as we can, or without the use of a camera we would not be able to do any of the shooting and get every bit of camera shots and different scenes as we possibly can.

Our individual USB’s also helped us a lot because utilising them lead to the group being able to do work outside of the class as well as inside. But because USB’s are quite small and quite vulnerable they proved to have disadvantages as well, Shazma’s usb which had most of the edited movie on it got corrupted in the process so this proved to be quite a bit of a problem so we had to re-do the movie which did not take long because we already knew what to do and how to do it as well. Also about a number of times I myself did not remember to bring my usb in and any work I had saved on that for media could not be done but still I had a back up file of it on the school computer. The lesson learned from this was that we should not always rely on a usb because it can prove to be a high drawback on part f the project we are doing and we should always have a backup somewhere just in case something goes wrong, this can be said about me as well as others who I have worked with.

My phone also should be taken into consideration because I was able to contact other group members through that and also save any tasks that were pending on my behalf onto the phone. They were useful but at the same time had drawbacks to them because when Shazma’s was recording the BBC report on her phone to upload onto the PC, it didn’t work due to some technical errors so she send it via Bluetooth to Abdur and he uploaded it onto the editing software ready to use.

Looking back at your preliminary task (FEED THE FISH) what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to be the full product?

The one thing I learned was that when in a group you obviously need the support of your colleagues but at the same time if you want to get a high grade then there has to be individual effort and time put in order to get the mark you seek.

Also that technology helps you a lot in the process such as this one but we have to remember that it cannot always be as reliable as you would think because it can be get corrupt quite easily.

In the “Feed The Fish” there were a lot of issues that were causing our movie to look quite different as to how we initially wanted it to look. We did not have a strong research field or any major planning for instance the storyboard etc. This lead to us basically showing up to shooting without actually having a strong idea of how exactly we are going to pull off a decent enough scene.

When editing is included the shots in our preliminary task seemed to be quite confusing and at the same time some were short when they did not need to be and vice versa. The 180 degree rule also was disrupted and we did not notice that we ‘crossed the line’ while shooting.

The location that we selected was always varying in terms of it being used a lot of the time leading to our shooting to be on a halt most of the time. We used the music building in the school for the preliminary task because it seemed to be the most convenient place for us because quite frankly no-one seemed to be bothered to visit a far place which at the end of the day would prove to be un-convenient.

All the aspects of the flaws in Feed The Fish compared to the final movie were astonishing, when I viewed the movie before editing it still seemed quite good and also promising that it would turn out better then what I expected.

The shots in the opening sequence as compared to the preliminary task were much more decent, the framing was more on point and there were not as many unusual shots or weird angles, it looked like a traditional crime thriller, obviously not as much as I thought it would but it did meet certain expectations such as that considering that the camera and lightning equipment that the school gave us could not be picked up and the school was closed during half term which is when we were supposed to film the opening sequence, so this proved to be quite a thorn in  the progression. The shooting team had to rely on a digital video camera, which still had decent results in terms of quality and understanding.

To conclude I would like to say that when you view our preliminary task and compare it to our final finished product you can tell that we have made progress in terms of individual skill and teamwork too.