Evaluation Question 1

The typical conventions of a teen film opening often includes:

• a teenage character
• the character to be of a particular stereotype (e.g. jock, princess, nerd, etc.)
• typical locations (e.g. high school, the home)
• a form of transport
• an introduction to the characters and/or setting 

 

 

The conventions of title sequences:

• The director normally goes last
• Production and Distribution titles and idents go first
• The title of the film stands out the most
• More than one actor in the opening
• Each title lasts on-screen for 3-5 seconds (and have gaps in between)
• There's a large gap between the actors and the crew

Evaluation Question 2

Earlier in the year, we learned about the representation of stereotypes. Every teen character from a teen film has a stereotype that is shown in a particular way so that the audience knows the type of character they are (pictured) 

In our teen film, we only have one character, therefore there's only one stereotype - the 'skater'. This slidely shows how we achieved portraying the skater stereotype.

The skater stereotype by Slidely Slideshow

The skater stereotype has both a positive and negative stereotype:

• Positive:
• our character is seeing rushing to get to school on time (which she unfortunately doesn't)
• Negative (to parents, teachers and other adults):
• purposely sleeps through alarm
• puts on dirty clothes for school

The four key areas (camerawork, editing, sound and mise-en-scene) also helps us to achieve this stereotype:

• Camerawork
• the camera is at an eye-level which tells us she is not shown as being dominant (normally shown at a low angle) or being belittled (normally shown at a high angle)
• the camera also pans across the character's room, showing the things that she is interested in
• there is a close up of the skateboard she rides to school, and a skateboard is the key to portraying the stereotype
• Editing
• most of the film is shown in fast-motion, which shows the frantic state her laziness has left her in
• the match cut shows the audience how she travels to school
• Sound
• the pop-punk rock soundtrack is what first gives away her skater stereotype
• Mise-en-scene
• the skateboard prop (see camerawork)
• the clothes also tells the audience that she is a skater

Evaluation Question 3

Here our the idents for our production company, RSY Productions Inc., and our distribution company, 21st Century Chien.

Evaluation Question 4

The wider teen movie audience are generally teenagers, some films such as High School Musical being suitable for pre-teens (10-11),17 Again and Mean Girls being more suitable for the younger teenagers (12+) and movies like American Pie and The Breakfast Club for the older ones (15+). 
This is because certain films have certain contents (e.g. sexual contents or bad language) which are allowed to be seen by teenagers of a certain age. Girls tend to watch more teen films due to the main character being a female also and the love interest of the character is often the teen heartthrob of the present day.

Although, some adults do watch teen movies either because the storylines remind them of their own childhood or it contains some older actors.

However, for our teen film, because the sub-genre is a rom-com, it would appeal to both sexes equally; the comedy more relating to the male side, the romantic more the female side. I still think more females will watch it as the main character of the film is a girl, but because the character is of a 'skater' stereotype, this could appeal more to males.

An example of a member of the specific audience would be 'Charlotte', a 19-year old from California who likes bands such as Fall Out Boy, Wheatus and Blink-182. She skates, works at Vans and is a fan of Tony Hawk. She also has Twitter, popular site amongst teenagers.

This is the type of person who I think would watch our teen film.

Evaluation Question 5

Different aspects of our teen film opening would appeal to different parts of our target audience.

Here's an interview with a member of our target audience, but unlike Charlotte, this is a 17-year old male, Mikey, from London (and here's the official Facebook page he refers to).

Evaluation Question 6

This timetoast explains some of the technologies I used during the process of constructing our film opening and how I developed as a media producer from using them.

Evaluation Question 7

Over the past six months, from prelim to final film, my media skills have progressed in three key areas - research + planning, filming and editing. I am also more confident using the different and new technologies I have been introduced to (e.g. Final Cut Pro). 

Research + Planning
There was very little research and planning going into our prelim. The only bits of planning we did was the use of a digital storyboard (pictured), and we started filming the next lesson. 

For our final film opening, we spent two months planning our two-minute opening (December 2013 - February 2014), completing 52 blog posts including research about titles, stereotypes, travelling + arriving and other aspects of films. We also made a hand-drawn storyboard, which then got turned into an animated digital one. 

I feel that research + planning is a very important part of the development for any media product and every media producer should go through this process in order to get the best out of their media product.


Filming

 
The video above shows the differences between our prelim - the first time we properly used the cameras and had no/little experience with filming.

Editing
As this was our first actual time using Final Cut Pro, there were a lot of places where our editing could've been improved. For example, one of our shots was quite long and we could've filmed different shots and edited it in to make the prelim more interesting to look at. 

But in our final opening, we filmed the same thing from different angles and that made the editing process a lot more interesting and it made our film better to look at.

 

DEADLINE (+final edits)

Yesterday was the deadline for our teen film opening, but as the amazing group we are, we were the first group to finish and finish early!

We went over our final edit with Marisa and she spotted some things to that we could change to make our openings as perfect as it could be:

• film title - our opening titles for the actual film title needed to be bigger and bolder for it to stand out
• actors - we originally only had one actor in our opening credits because I was the only one in the opening, but Marisa reminded us that because there is only one actor in the opening, doesn't mean there'll only be one throughout the movie. So we had to make up some names for other actors
• ident - to widen our creative skills, we had to create another ident (replacing the 21st Century Fox one) for a distribution company one. To add to that, we had to include them in our film titles.
• music - our music started at a random time in the opening, so we lengthened the alarm clock sound fx to give the music a reason to start

We corrected all our mistakes, and produced a really good opening!

...More Editing

Last Thursday me and my group thought
we got the last of our editing...

however after having one of our teachers watch
what we thought was our final edit there was a lot
of faults that were shown which meant there was
more editing to be done.

Some of the faults that were pointed

out was the ident (a very well know

ident instead of our own original 

one), not having enough actors' names

down and also shortening and stret-

ching some of the clips. 

Once all these have been incorporated

into the our teen film opening we should 

have a completed opening which will

mean no more editing!

Editing: Day 3

Our film is practically finished! 

We showed it to Rebecca today and this was some of the feedback that was given:

• to highlight certain sounds (e.g. the alarm clock), use sound effects
• to create our own ident
• to not use our names more than once in our titles

We used the pre-made sound effects on the Macs for our film opening and we used the alarm clock sounds, school bell sounds, and music for our idents.

To create our ident, we had to use a program called Motion where we were able to start from scratch and choose the font, background and any animation to go along with it.

For the titles, we had to use different names (sometimes even make them up!) to avoid using our names 1400 times (not that many.)

So Monday is the day where we will run it over with Marisa, hopefully she'll give it the thumbs up and it'll be ready to upload!

Film Titles

This is the order that our film titles will be in for our teen film opening.

Sound

Right now we are selecting different music and sound that is needed for our teen film opening. 

For our film opening we need different sound effects for certain scenes for it to come across effective for example the alarm clock.  

 We created the sound which has been used for the background music or sound for the ident, the alarm clock sound has been enhanced and also the school bell at the end.

Creating the Ident & More Editing

 Today we are doing more editing and making our own original ident
as we are not allowed to use one that is already well known. We used
the programme called Motion to create our ident which a took a while
as there are so many options to choose from.

So far this is what we have come up with 

for the ident (this is just one of our ideas so

it is most likely to change). 

We decided to call out production company

"RSY Productions INC." which stands for 

the first letter of each of our names.  

At the moment we are working on what sound

we are going to use for the ident and whether 

if we are going to go through using this option

that we have made. 

Editing: Day 2

We finished our rough cut *cue Chandler dance*

And surprisingly, we're the first group in our class to have done it *cue another Chandler dance*

However there were some issues:

• we need to create our own ident - for more 'creativity points'
• there were continuity issues - alarm clock at different times
• not very fluid - some of the shots didn't flow well

We can use the 3 hours in Rebecca's lesson to fix some of those problems.

Rough Cut!

We have finished our first rough cut of our film opening. The editing went well; better than we expected. 

Filming: Day 4

So due to some of our footage being too dark, we had to reshoot it yesterday.

And it took less than an hour (which was good so I was able to watch the Captial One Cup final!) because we knew what he had to do and what angles to do them from! Hopefully the footage will be good enough to use :)

Editing: Day 1

Now filming's over, it's time to edit!

We're using Final Cut Pro to put together all of our pieces to create our teen film. We took the filming bits from the memory cards, copied it onto our video drive and from there, we imported our filming bits onto Final Cut Pro.

We were advised to watch over our footage before we started editing. And it's a good thing we did because there was a problem with filming some of our bits.

Problem is some of our footage ended up being too dark, sometimes you can't even see a thing.

 So to resolve this problem, we've decided to re-film the stuff that needs refilming on Sunday (before the football!)

Filming Overview: Day 3

So that's it! Last day of filming :D and the beautiful weather held up nicely! (Carlton = me)

We just had to film the final bit of my character finally arriving into school and realising she has detention. We were lucky that on all three days the weather was roughly the same so we could have good continuity shots for our film opening.


So glad I can finally wear whatever clothes I want and stop being ask 'Oh, so can you skate?' all. the. time.

Film Review: The Notebook

So, I was in the mood to watch The Notebook the other day and it was exactly as I'd thought it'd be. Very cute and romantic. Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling play their characters very well.

At first, I couldn't see why people classed a typical rom-com as a 'teen film' but after thinking about it for a while, I can see why:

1. It's all about first loves, and a lot of people experience their first loves in their teenage years
2. In the beginning, McAdams and Gosling play two 17 year olds. Which are clearly part of the teenage years.

Overall, it's a decent film. If you're not into Rachel McAdams (Regina George), Ryan Gosling or romantics, it's not for you.

Framing Tutorial: Review

Micky gave us a framework tutorial the other week to prepare us for our filming. The top three tips were:

3: The Thirds Rule

The Thirds Rule is where you have to imagine the grid (pictured) is on the camera screen, and try to align the main focus of your shot (normally a character) where these four crosses are marked, like this girl.

2. Close-ups
We were advised to give close-ups of people or characters as it gives more variety of shots to use.








1. No head space - ever.
It's important to not leave any head space in the frame as you want to focus on the characters as much as possible, not what's behind or on top of them.