In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We started preparing our film by researching other films similar aspects. From this we could see if our target audience had seen and enjoyed these films too. We watched the trailers from films such as “Sin City”, “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and “Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles.”
'Sin City' - we used this film as inspiration because of the colour scheme ( all black and white with certain colours stuck out). Although this was our initial inspiration, we were unable to pick out certain colours with the rest of the scene in black and white. However, we did us this inspiration for our final poster and DVD options, where the rose is in red and the rest of the picture is in black and white.
'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' - we use this film for inspiration because of the schizophrenia or split personality. In "A Widow's Death", The widow (Elizabeth) has schizophrenia which is later revealed in more detail later on in the film, but is hinted in the diary entry when she is writing about her mother.
'Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles' - the inspiration here was the set location where it is set in Dartmoor where the moors are very spooky. we thought of different places to set our film, and a church stuck out as a very spooky location. Another piece of inspiration which originated from 'Sherlock Holmes', was the detective idea. However, this is later revealed in the rest of the film.
How does your media Product represent Particular social groups?
In "A Widow's Death", there are only two characters which makes it simplistic and avoids confusion, as the two characters are very different.
The First character is Elizabeth, played by me, Alice McKenna, who is a young woman, late teens/ early twenties, who is very mature due to the fact that in 1843, people went to work at a very young age and therefore grew up quicker. However, despite this Elizabeth suffers from schizophrenia, (our inspiration from 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'). We have dressed her in all black to show she is in mourning and to something is not quite right with her.
The other character is the un-named murderer, played by Ed Green's brother, George Green. Although you never see the murderers face, you can see his bright white hair which contrasts to the black cloak he is wearing. This also gives the idea that something is not right. The 'albino-ness' of his character also makes the audience feel uneasy about him, as well as the fact that he keeps popping up everywhere behind things - this gives an eerie feeling.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
The type of media institution we would use to distribute our media product would be Working Title a British film production company based in London. We would used them because we aim to produce a British murder mystery film which Working Title films have done before, such as : "The Man who wasn't there" and "Libestraum". Therefore, I think they would be perfect to distribute our film as they have a record of being very successful.
Who would be your audience for your media product?
Our target audience for our film would be for the ages of 15+ , as the films that we have studied such as 'Sin City’ and ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ have been rated at around a 15, so we felt that although our film doesn't include any scenes of blood, it does include violence and is quite complex. It is hard to guess what ages it would be suitable for and therefore we made it a 15.
How did you attract/address your audience?
After we had chosen the genre - murder mystery/ period drama / horror , we wanted to make a film which would make the the audience want to watch on. we thought a good way of making sure they would want to watch on would be to see if we would want to watch on.
We liked the idea of showing the ending first because this makes the audience want to know and find out what had lead up to the murder.
Another way we could tell that the audience would like our film was because of our questionnaire.
we interviewed 30 girls and boys, aged between 15-17.
This is what we asked them:
1. 1.Do you like murder mystery films?
2. 2.Do you prefer an intense scary film or a more light hearted film?
3. 3. Have you ever watched Sin City ?
Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles?
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?
4. 4. If so, did you enjoy them?
5. 5. Which would you find scarier? A knife or a gun or an axe?
6. 6. What location would you find more eerie and intense? A wood or a church graveyard?
After gathering up the information from our questionnaire, we then made a second questionnaire which relates to what the target audience replied.
1. 1.We are planning on making a murder mystery film, in black and white, set in the 19th century in a church graveyard. Do you think this would be interesting for people you age, (age 15-17), to watch?
2. 2. Would you watch our film?
3. 3. How could we improve on our idea?
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What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
To make "A Widow's Death", we use a lot of programmes on the apple macs. They were:
1. Final Cut Express - had never used Final cut express properly before. Overall I found it fairly easy to use. However, it was a bit confusing when you had to drag the correct clip onto the film, as these clips had number names which were not relative to what was on the clip. Another aspect I found difficult was cutting the clip in exactly the right place, especially with the sound because I found it quite easy to cut some of the voice of which you didn't want cut off.
2. Garage band - Although I had used Garage band before, I found this extremely difficult to use. Not because of the lay out of garage band , but because when we recorded a piece, something always went wrong and we found it too complex to resolve so started again and again until we decided to use Cubase instead.
3. Cubase - this was much easier than Garage band and we decided to have a little girl singing accapella. This stopped any confusion of keys for accompaniments.
4. Photoshop - finally, we used Photoshop. I in particular, found Photoshop hard to used and I didn't really understand how to used it. Luckily, Dan knew how to used it well and directed what we should do to get our poster and DVD options perfect.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the final product?
I believe that the preliminary task was great preparation for our end product. We were able to experiment using the cameras and also to practise and see which camera angles worked and which didn't look as good.
By doing the preliminary film, we learnt a few things which we would not want to have in our real film. First of all, at the beginning of our preliminary film especially, there is a lot of echo. in our final film, we didn't have diagetic voice but we did have diagetic footsteps in the church. Although this was a problem in our Preliminary film, it wasn't so much of a problem in the church as it added an eerie feeling to the scene. we did however, turn the sound down so that the footsteps wouldn't draw attention away to what was happening and the non- diagetic singing in the background.
Another thing we learnt from filming the Preliminary film was that we can act out props which are not there. For example, in our preliminary film, Ed looked at his watch. However, he did not have a watch on at the time. luckily he realised this and covered it up.
A third mistake we made in out preliminary film, was that Josh entered and exited through different doors. he should have left through the same door. we then knew that in our final film, we had to enter and exit through the same door.
the final thing we learnt was that the background noise was a big problem in our preliminary film. therefore we had to mute the background noise in our final piece.
comparing our preliminary film to our final film, you can see it is much more flowing and more advanced with different fades used and different and more inventive angles.
overall, I enjoyed making "A Widow's Death" and I particularly enjoyed being inventive, creative and acting out the Widow.
