A2 MEDIA
ROSIE PENMAN
Centre number: 14715
Candidate number: 8187
In what ways does your Media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our Media Product
Our Media product is a 5 minute short film made within the social realism genre. We chose child grooming as our main subject because we felt like everyone seems to move away from the subject and not want to have to deal with it. Whilst researching into the subject of social realism, we came across a short film called 'After School Special'. When we first heard the name of the film, me and my group didn't understand what it was about but once we watched it, it was clear what was happening. From watching the short film we used it an inspiration to then come up with idea's of what could happen in ours. Viewing films in the Child grooming subject highlights to the audience that it is infact a serious problem that is going on in everyday life and something should be done about it.
Our Social Realism Plot
The plot of our Social Realism film firstly starts of with both main characters contacting eachother. Over several days, they become closer with one another and our main male lead starts to make Chloe feel uncomfortable. Being a young teeneger, Chloe didnt think that she should tell her parents because she didn't know how to deal with the situation at hand so she kept it to herself.
Camera Work
Close Up
Here is one of our close up shots of our main character Chloe. We chose this shot to show the certain expressions on her face of how she is feeling. At the beginning of the film, we have many close up shots of Chloe smiling but more towards the end we see many scared and worried facial expressions. As you can see in this image by the side, Chloe is looking down at her phone because Scott had just texted her saying 'I see you'.
On the other hand, the only close ups you see of our male lead 'Scott', you never see his face. We done this because we wanted the audience to understand what its like to speak to someone and never know who it is, you never know who you are talking to online. We used many other close ups of Scott but we only used them when he was typing back to chloe on the computer.
Over The Shoulder Shot
Throughout the whole short film, we use many over the shoulder shots to show what our main characters are doing over the computer. We don't only use over the shoulder shots when they are on the computer, we do it when they are on the phone aswell. Me and my group decided that we will have some POV shots but should also use some over the shoulder shots to mix it up more and have various shots.
Editing
As Social Realism films are meant to be realistic and showing everyday situations that happen in real life, we didnt need to use that much editing throughout our film. We done this because we need the film footage to flow and make it seem real to make people aware. If we had major editing in the film, I don't think that it would look right and it would ruin the film as a whole. During our film, a smooth variety of cuts and transitions are used.
Length
Our short film comes to approxitmately 5:01 including the ident and all the credits. The limit for the film was exactly 5 minutes so me and my group didnt do to bad with timing as we was only a second over. Both me and my group enjoyed making and editing the film but we found it hard trying to keep within the right time limit. At first it was too short by 5 second but then ended up only running over by a second.
Ident
Our Ident
Having our production name being 'Left Click' we felt that it was best to use an arrow key. We kept it simple because we didnt want to make it over complicated for the audience to look at before the film even started. Also, another reason why we had our production name and ident as Left Click if because it links into the fact of what our film is about, hence the mouse click.
Other Ident's
These idents that was used in other big company films are similar to the one we made in certain ways. Looking at our ident, it mainly just uses a black screen with white writing over the top. Whereas, looking at bigger companies, you can see a huge difference. The simularities are the fact that they both show the production name clearly within the ident so people don't get confused. This is a good thing because of the fact that the main focus is on the ident and nowhere else because it gets straight to the point.
How does it challenge other media products?
Social Realism films are meant to show the everyday positive and negative issues of the world. The storyline should have a clear layout to the audience of what the film should be about. For the ending of our film, we had Chloe's mum in the kitchen cooking when she recieves a message from Scott, this was then followed by a blank screen. Seeing as Child Grooming doesn't get covered in the film world that often, we decided that we should act upon that and make a short film about it.
At the beginning of the film, it takes quite a while to get into the characters lives and what they are like. Both me and my group thought this was the best thing to do as it builds up the tension of the film and what is going to happen. Overall, I think our film worked well and ended like other media products with the cliff hanger.