Evaluation Rough

Media Studies - Opening sequence evaluation

For our media task, my group and I produced the opening sequence to a British social realism film. The end result wasn’t as good as we had hoped it to be but overall I feel we did well.

In terms of using the conventions of British social realist films, I think we succeeded. To find the conventions of realist dramas we looked online and also looked at films such as ‘This Is England’ and ‘Trainspotting’. We found that the films usually included everyday, working class characters and involved a struggle of some sort. They were also quite gritty and the filming techniques were mostly basic – no special effects seemed to be used. This improved the film type objective to represent ‘real life’.

First of all in our film opening we tried to film footage of everyday Britain. We include a postman, cyclists and a typical British bus. The camera also moves slowly up the road we filmed on, showing rows of what are mostly council houses. This introduced the emphasis on a working class setting – plus the historical period i.e. the buses. The ‘struggle’ we tried to incorporate was portrayed using a voiceover:

“I find it hard to say anything anymore. I can’t hold a conversation with anyone about anything unless it’s got something to do with what I knew 3 years ago – my mind hasn’t soaked up anything ever since. Maybe I’m ignorant, maybe I’m stupid. Maybe I’ve just plain and simple fucked up, but once you admit that, you’ve just accepted that you’re not going to get anywhere further than the mental age of 16. I’m dissatisfied and completely bored. I’m Jack in his shitty little box. It ends. The alcohol and drugs don’t come with the party anymore, the party comes with them. They’re the priority, the main factor. It was a laugh and it was a lesson. It was when we was very young.”

We hoped this would show that our character was battling with sorts of addictions and dissatisfaction in herself. We also film her packing clothes into a bag and leaving her house. We hear her father ask where she is going and she doesn’t answer, but runs away instead. This showed difficulties within her home life, too.

That particular part of the film leads us to another convention of opening sequences: encouraging the audience to ask questions. Our intentions were that the audience would question why she was leaving her home and where her journey would take her later in the film.

We don’t release much information about the character with our filming, but the voiceover we included lets people know about her lifestyle. She drinks, she takes drugs and is unsure what she is doing in life except that. I feel this character is representative of a social group that is almost unaccounted for – people who don’t really have any aims in life but intoxicate themselves to distract their mind from that very fact. The youths you see drinking on the street who people might call ‘yobs,’ however from an inside point of view, which we intended for the story to show – the social group we represent is titleless.

The kind of media our product would be distributed under would be film, perhaps an independent institution as it does not seem mainstream enough for any large institution; it’s certainly not a Hollywood film. We could also work on a low budget for the film because, as previously said, the filming we need to represent ‘real life’ is very basic.

This film could attract a large scope of people, first of all, generally adults and teenagers: the character could be someone a teenager resembles, or someone an adult used to resemble. But the audience does not have to find themselves in this character to be interested. Its documentary style could attract anyone who is interested in class issues or simply of the working class population in the country we live in, Britain.

We attract this audience with details like costume – lots of people can relate to a teenager in jeans and a jumper. Similarly, teenagers and adults alike can relate to home life struggles e.g. the hostility of the character towards her father. We also leave a sort of cliff-hanger with the question of what happens to the girl later in the story – we hoped this would encourage the audience to want to watch more.

In constructing the product, I feel I should have gotten more acquainted with the technologies of Final Cut. Besides the filming and ideas, we split the tasks of producing the film opening between the three of us when perhaps we should have been more equally involved in all aspects. I did become more skilled at producing a soundtrack but feel that this wasn’t proved to its potential in the end result. I liked the soundtrack I made and thought it to be well fitting to our theme but due to not using our time as well as we should have, the music was cut in bits where it shouldn’t have been.

Using two computers was also a flaw. Because of this, I wasn’t able to perfect the music in time with the film opening footage because I was estimating where each change in music should come in. I also underestimated how long the footage lasted and therefore made the soundtrack too short. Due to this, we had to copy and paste a lot of the music towards the end which only made it sound too repetitive and tedious.

If I were to do it again I would have suggested we finished all the titles and editing first so that I could have used the computer with the footage on it to improve the soundtrack timing. Working on the music first only made it more difficult because I assumed that the way we had laid out our footage would stay like that, when obviously we changed out minds more than once, hence the soundtrack had to change time and time over.

The camerawork also could have been improved. Most of it, after editing, was fine, but some parts still seemed a little bit jumpy, in particular a part where we filmed a graffitied wall. We tried to show that this is what the girl was running past when she left her house so we decided to film it hand held. This could have worked if we went slower, but we found that our hands are a lot less steady than they look while filming. The footage looked like we had been running but was way too jumpy and therefore looked random because none of the other footage was that hectic. Next time we’ll go slower or use a tripod.

Overall we didn’t do as well as we could have but I don’t think we strayed too far from our objective – I feel that it’s clear what kind of film it is. The only thing we lacked is more time, so next time we’ll manage our time more efficiently.