Payback: Final

Greetings

After some feedback, myself and Dan have made a few changes and have finally produced the final copy of Payback. So grab that popcorn and feast your eyes... on this.

Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the main task?

The grand finale. Here is question 7.

Created with Padlet

Question 6: What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Hey Guys

Here is question six of my evaluation on 'Payback' created using Prezi.

Enjoy

Question 4 and 5

Hey Guys

Here are questions 4 and 5 tied together.
(For some reason the videos are not working so here is both)
Video 1: https://youtu.be/bvHt_cRuMe0
Video 2: https://youtu.be/iNqHU_u_DgM

Question 4 from AlexHunter98

Question 3: What kind of media institutions might distribute your media product and why?

Hey Guys

Question 3, here it is in an amazing mind map.

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

The opening of Payback introduces some character that can be seen to represent certain social groups, such as age and gender.

Victim:

The first character that we are introduced to is the victim; a teenager girl played by Amy Heald.

The choice of having a female victim was because it  felt more fitting than a male victim, due to how, especially within the thriller genre, females are represented. For example, similar to Payback's opening, Scream begins with Drew Barrymore's character alone at home. She, like in Payback, is attacked by the antagonist. Her character is shown to be very sacred and vulnerable by the obvious fear and lack of attacking the antagonist. Secondly, Maggie Grace's character in Taken is shown to be a scared and vulnerable female. Therefore, having a vulnerable female victim in Payback appears more conventional, thus leading the audience to realise within a few moments of the opening, that what they are watching is a thriller. This would have been harder to suggest if, for example, the victim was a male because, stereotypically, they are conveyed to be fearless and tough.

Antagonist:

Providing brief shots of the antagonist that collectively sum up his appearance whilst still hiding his identity clearly imply that he is male. This sticks to the conventional appear of men in thrillers being violent, and sometimes evil, individuals. For example, male antagonists such as The Joker from the Dark Knight and John Doe from Seven. Female antagonists are so rare that it is mostly unexpected, such as the Mrs Voorhees being revealed to be the killer in Friday the 13th. Furthermore, the antagonist is clothed in black. This stereotypical suggest that this character is dangerous and to be feared. Therefore, representing the antagonist in this way is conventional to the thriller genre.

Protagonist:

Payback's protagonist is a detective, as suggested by his suit and the police tape in shot beforehand. This effectively represents him as the law and all that is good. In addition, we only see this character during the day time, symbolising him as 'the hero'. Also, having 'the hero' as a man is very conventional to the thriller genre. This I believe is mainly due to the fact that statistically mostly men watch these types of films, thus making the protagonist a man makes our target audience understand and fell more related to the character. Many examples of male protagonist/'heroes' are John McClane in Die Hard and Bryan Mills from Taken.

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

Hey Guys

Here it is! The first question to the evaluation of Payback done between myself and Dan.

Apologies that my audio quality is not as well as Dan's in this:

Update on the previous draft of Payback

Due to the fact that the final version has now been uploaded to YouTube, the previous draft of Payback has now been taken off, meaning it cannot now be viewed on the blog post: PayBack: video (however not final)

Apologies for the inconvenience this may have caused.

Payback: Feedback

PayBack: video (however not final)

(I don't feel like greeting anyone today)

Here is mine and Dan's almost final video of 'Payback' that is on YouTube at the moment. The reason that it is not the final piece is that after much discussion as well as feedback received, we have decided to remove the 'Twin Gun Entertainment' logo and add a 'bbfc' certificate instead. This would evoke a more 'movie-type' feel instead of a .video game-type' feel.

The final video will be up soon.

Payback: Bloopers

Hey Guys

Here's just some left over funny moments that me and Dan discovered were just sitting in the memory. So, we decided to make a quick bloopers video instead of letting these waste.

Enjoy

Textual Analysis

Hey Guys!

Here's a textual analysis of an AS Media Studies film called 'Captive' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93fH1fUQ-Lw

Enjoy

Audience Task

Hey Guys!

So, myself and Dan planned on conducting an audience task in which we would pitch our film to people within our target audience. Unfortunately I couldn't be there so Dan came to the rescue and ended up doing the pitch himself. So, here's the link to the video:

Daniel Haywood AS Foundation Portfolio: Audience Task

So as always, bye for now

Storyboards for Payback

Hey Guys

So here are the original storyboards we created for Payback. As you can see, not all the scenes are there. This has been the main reason for me not uploading these images sooner. Myself and Dan had already decided on the shots we wanted but didn't end up having time to draw them down. Some shots in the film even came to us at the time of filming as we were in the moment at the time and instantly were able to visualise what we wanted. So, these shots never got drawn down beforehand as we didn't visualise them until last minute so we apologise that a lot of shots are missing from these storyboards.

The film at the moment is complete and should be soon heading to a blog post near you. As always, bye for now!

Titles for PayBack

Hey Guys

One of the last things we need to finish off is the titles themselves; what ones we are going to have and how we are going to have them shown, such as on top of footage already playing.

I decided to watch the openings of a few films simpler to that of the crime thriller genre we are aiming to convey. Examples of that include Taken and Jack Reacher.

To my surprise, many of them differed in what titles they showed in the opening sequence. Take 2014's Non-Stop. The only title within the opening sequence is literally the title 'Non-Stop', not even the directors name or any actors names popped up.
Jack Reacher however seemed to follow the traditional lay out of titling by highlighting names of key actors, producers, writers, the director and other key associates. As expected, each film began with a shot of the film company's logo that made it, such as 20th Century Fox and Lionsgate. In our film we have done the same by placing our Twin Gun Entertainment logo as the first thing that appears on screen.

Personally, I have come to respect Non-Stop's use of simplistic titling as it can be used to symbolise a theme of mystery and the unknown in some aspects. I believe that this simplicity and its symbolisation can help evoke the crime/mystery genre that me and Dan are trying to achieve with PayBack. Ultimately, we'll have to see how this goes and see if we end up doing this or something different.

Brace yourself for more posts coming your way soon and, as always, bye for now.

Update

Hey Guys

Just to let you guys know, we've just about finished everything except for a few titles and music. We should be finished by Friday (hopefully because that's when the deadline is haha).

See you guys later

Binary of Opposites

Binary Opposites from AlexHunter98

Filming

Hey Guys

Sorry this post is a little late but hey better late than never.

 So basically this post is just about our filming stage and as you can tell by this picture of Dan redecorating, we were very productive.

The equipment we booked out between 26th-28th March consisted of a NSLR, a tripod, a focus pull lens, a gorilla mount and a clapper board. The varies props and costume were mostly provided by Dan however both myself and Amy did bring the odd thing such as... ourselves.

We began on Friday night at about 7pm in order to film all our night-time scenes in one chunk. This went successfully with the occasional blooper that we will probably share once all this is done. After a few hours we'd done and the camera battery was on it's last legs.


On the Sunday we rushed to Dan's house for about 10am to film the morning shots after the murder. Fortunately it was moderately bright enough that we could easily distinguish the film from the night-time to the ones from the day-time.
Equipped with police tape we found from the English department (don't ask) and a box of latex gloves we began filming. The filming again went swimmingly and we had completely finished all of the opening. Although people driving past did seem a little concerned at the line of police tape we accidentally left outside the house once filming inside.

Now we are done with the filming we have began our post-production process and are extremely excited for how the end result will turn out.

So, as always, bye for now.






 (Dan stroking tape... as you do.)









(The hell am I doing in this? It's like some bad attempt at making The Predator's gun.)

Update: Filming

Hey Guys!

Great news, we have finished filming all the footage and are ready to start editing tomorrow. Special thanks as well To Amy Heald for helping us out with the acting as she isn't in mine and Dan's group so she shouldn't have had to do it at all if she didn't want to. Here's a link to her blog: http://amyhealdasfoundation.blogspot.co.uk/

As always, bye for now

Update (again)

"Another update post! You must be joking."

I'm guessing that's what all you guys are thinking. But it's a video this time! Exciting!

Update

Hey Guys

Just a little update, we are gonna start filming tonight! Whilst getting the footage we're also hoping to take some pictures to post on here in the mean time.

So as always, bye for now

Narrative Codes

Hey Guys

 

Sorry for the lack of blog posts but I'm back on track (for the second time haha). Basically this video that I found on YouTube talks about a French critic called Roland Barthes and the five narrative codes he devised when analysing media.

 

See you guys later

 

Credit for this video goes to GeorgiaJonesASMedia

Update

Greetings!

Just a quick up date, at the moment we are still working on our storyboards and hope to start filming soon. Can't wait.

Bye for now

Facebook Page

Hey guys!!

So me and Dan have decided to create a Facebook page for our media project where we will post content and updates to do with our filming and any posters we make as well as right here on blogger. So please like the page.

Bye for now


https://www.facebook.com/Payback-Media-Studies-1518504151786889/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

Film Poster

Hey Guys!

So I've just had a bit of spare time on my hands so I just thought 'hey, I might as well practise making a poster for our film'. After throwing some stuff together on Microsoft Publisher I ended up with this. I think it turned out pretty well for a first attempt so I've decided to share it. Enjoy.

Risk Assessment

Hey Guys!

Before we start our filming, myself and Dan have to fill out a risk assessment for where we want to film. This is to just basically outline any hazards, like cold weather or shark attack, and to say what we are going to do in order to prevent these. As you can see there is nothing extreme but our filming does involve us cross a road a lot at night so we got to be aware of that.

I just decided that it would be worth posting this on the blog.

Quick update!

At the moment we are whipping up our storyboard so expect that on this blog soon.

Location and Practise Shots

Location and Practise shots from AlexHunter98

One Page Pitch Video

Hey guys!!

Here is mine and Dan's official pitch video of our thriller opening.

Audience Theories

Hey Guys!!

Here's some stuff about audience theories (I don't know what's up with the paragraphing on this presentation software I'm trying).
The Audience - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Criteria

Hey Guys!!

Alright, sorry I haven't done any blogs in a while but now I'm back on track.

Basically the other day we watched a few thriller openings filmed by other AS media students like ourselves. We judged them against an exam criteria, much similarly to the ones that real examiners would use. The first one we watched I thought was amazing. Good use of sound, creative variation of shots, nice editing. I assumed that this one would be well in the top marks ban of 48-60. Turns out it was, unsurprisingly, achieving a number in the 50s (I don't really remember what number to be exact).

The next one we watched, and I don't want to be too harsh since I've never made a film and this is their first attempt, I felt was a little bad. Sound volume drastically increased or decreased in random areas, the mise-en-scene to me didn't exactly say 'thriller', neither did the use of high-key lighting throughout. The white font on the titles didn't match well against a white wall too. However, I was then surprised to learn that this film too achieved very high marks.

Next, we watched a couple more. Each had what I thought were massive faults that would lead to low levels such as poor camera work, generic shot-types and overall material that didn't suit the target audience originally aimed at. However, one after the other I was shocked to find how harshly I had judged these as they all achieve decent grades.

Overall, watching these has made me more confident about making our films and has given me a insight into what I believe works and doesn't work. I should hopefully be back on track with posting regular content so stay tuned for more.

Character Theories: Vladimir Propp

Hey

Here's at look into Vladimir Propp's theory of characters in media.

Character theories from AlexHunter98