A Note to the Moderator

Hello! Thank you for taking the time to have a look around my AS-Media individual blog.

On the sidebar to the right, you can find links to my teachers film blog (Latymer Film Blog), my Group Blog, and the list of labels for my posts to make it easy to navigate around my blog.

On this blog you can find individual research, planning and production which contributed to the overall project, and my answers to the 7 evaluation questions. It also contains my work and evaluation on our preliminary task, completed in preparation for my opening sequence. Both my preliminary task and finished opening sequence can be viewed at the top of the blog, at all times.

Our group blog contains all our combined work towards 'Glitch' and you can see my individual contributions by clicking my name in the labels sidebar.

Thanks a lot for having a look around, and I really hope you enjoy my blog and particularly our opening sequence (which we have put a lot of hard work and effort into!) 'Glitch'.

Raef Commissar 2165

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

I will be talking about the sequence I have made as part of my AS media Project. I will be answering this question in four parts; Genre, Narrative Structure, Form and Style

Genre 

We chose our genre to be ‘Action/ technological mystery’. Our film is heavily based on hacking. We have followed some forms and conventions, from looking at previous hacking films, such as dark rooms with little light and the light would have a colour filter to create a tense atmosphere. 




For example in the film Masterminds, there is a boy hacking in his room, he has a typical messy boys room and the lighting is red, which creates a strong sense that hacking is bad and illegal. We adapted this outlook on hacking and tried to boost the intensity of it. We did this by making our  hacking sequence very snappy and included lots of hard and fast cuts. We used a blue tinted light, inspired by Die Hard 4.0, as we wanted to focus more on the technology side itself rather than focusing on whether it is good or bad. We felt blue created a very tense almost futuristic atmosphere, also it replicated the sort of light you would get coming off a screen in a darkened room. We have some similar shots to Die Hard 4.0 as we wanted hardcore hacking, not just a represetation like in Mastermind.


These are some shots from Die hard 4.0:






Our character is stereotype of a ‘hacker’ as he looks quite geeky and is also a typical teenage boy, in that there are biscuits scattered around his room, clothes everywhere and bits of lego toys stuck to his computer.

This is our main character 'n00b'




I researched some other hacking films to give us an idea of some typical features of hacking films.

The main idea that we borrowed from the film 'Hackers' is that anyone can be a hacker, they dont have to be your typical nerd. In Hackers Angelina Jolie is a hacker and she is definitely not a pubesant teenage nerdy boy. We challenged this idea with our main character 'n00b', by having him as a typical hacker (as seen above), but our other characters are not.



Narrative Structure  

As far as our sequence, we have used a compressed version of Todorov's narrative structure in that the hackers are all hacking and getting along with what they should be doing when suddenly they start to receive error reports, the main hacker then finds a solution and the equilibrium is then restored. 

We also break this rule as after equilibrium is supposedly reached again, the main hacker is attacked / taken out and all the hackers do not know what has happened, then we hear a knock on the ‘n00b’ hackers door and the sequence ends there. This leaves the audience on a cliff hanging with enigma, guessing what is going to happen next. Our sequence is all in real time except one shot where the main hacker is attacked which we decided to put in slow motion in order to increase the impact of the attack. We have sort of multi parallel shots i.e. We have all the different hackers hacking at the same time yet we can see all them together in some shots or separate in others. The real time parallel editing is very similar to that of 24 where you see a lot of action all happening simultaneously.

We have many enigma codes within our sequence to get the audience asking questions like ‘Why was he attacked? Does that mean he is bad? Is the knocking at the innocent or is it serious? Etc’ We also start off our sequence revealing as little as possible of the hacker and his surroundings. We just show off niche characteristics of the room or the character and slowly reveal more and more until the audience has built a fairly strong character profile. ‘n00b’ is our Anti-hero/ protagonist as he is part of a group doing something which is against the law, but they are doing it for a good reason.

Form

Some features of a typical opening sequence we have followed, others we have not. For example quite often in opening sequences you will get a very wide shot of the scene; a house, office, playground etc this will often linger for a while and let you gradually place yourself within the scene. Our opening sequence however has done the complete opposite but with a similar effect. We disorientate the audience and then putting them in medias res without giving them a distinctive ‘starting point’, this forces them to really pay close attention as to what is going on to try and find little clues or hints as to where they are and why they are there? This lets them slowly build up a picture of the character and the setting and lets them find out where they are in the film, rather than just telling them. This gives our piece a voyeristic feel and lets the audience view the footage from different perspectives.


This sequence is similar in that it makes fairly boring tasks exciting and also slowly reveals the character:







I think  function of an opening sequence is to create some sort of situation that creates enigma in order to have the audience watch the rest of the film to find the answers to their enigma questions. 

The opening of the film ‘The Holding’ started with a very unclear sequence of a man being drowned and then being buried somewhere in a forest. This had me asking a lot of questions as the next scene was a happy family scene in a house. Later on in the film, that opening sequence was used almost like a flashback and it was revealed that it was this mum of the happy family drowning her husband (this was a key part to the plot). That film opening and ours are similar due to the fact that he opening sequence is like a key you receive at the beginning to use later on to work something out or unlock some clue that is vital to the plot. Another similarity to the Holding is that both films build a lot of momentum and the very sharply kill that momentum to put the audience an unease.

Another important aspect of an opening sequence is to reveal the title. 

Our title appears letter by letter flickering in and out, whilst constantly having binary code flowing through it. The flickers tie in with the word glitch, and the binary code and green text is a running technological them throughout our piece.

Style - Our opening sequence looks and feels like a futuristic, tense action sequence. This was our aim, we wanted to make something that could seem quite dull (typing at a computer) really fast pace and high adrenaline whilst also keeping a very technological and tense feel. Our soundtrack was from a website where music is copyright free called freeplaymusic.com. We thought this track would be perfect as it starts with a very high reverb but quiet drum and bass line, which slowly changes and drops into a techno sound track. It also has a variety of different breaks in it, which meant it was not just the same music looped over and over. We had to make some cuts and changes to the timing and structure of the music which was mostly done by Anna, I did make the audio effect of him taking his headphones off.

 Our only spoken dialogue is the main hacker telling all the other hackers what to do, our idea was to make it so that it sounded very tech savvy to the audience, so we looked up different hacking terms and incorporated them into our script.

 Our overriding colour for the whole sequence was blue. We used 3 lights all with blue filters on them for ‘n00b’, for the other hackers we just had fairly dark rooms with smaller neutral lights just providing enough light to identify them. This was the look we had in mind when originally coming up wit our shots, and we slowly progressed that idea into how our actual sequence is.

We used quite a lot of graphics to create on screen animation of what the hacker was doing e.g. Typing or moving a window. 

We also used graphics to illustrate what the ‘n00b’ could see on his screen in terms of webcams and chat windows, so whenever the audience sees a hacker that isnt ‘n00b’ they are seeing them from the point of view of ‘n00b’ through his screen.

 All of our early shots of ‘n00b’ are tightly framed and then as the sequence goes on, they become wider to tell the audience more about what is going on. As can be seen by the stills of shots of our main character 'n00b'.

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

Our films focuses on a group of hackers, I would say this is a social group within society. They talk to each other and ‘work’ with each other therefore I think you could say our films represents hackers. The main group that it shows and represents (which hackers are a part of), is anyone interested in technology or computers.

Within our hacker group we have ‘n00b’ who is the standard stereotypical computer nerd. He is the newest addition to the group and therefore still is nervous about being in this elite group of hackers. He also represents the stereotype of teenage boys in as far as he leaves his clothes around, has drink and food around his room and other disorganised and untidy features that 'Teenage boys' have.

We have our main hacker who is strong clever and authoritative. With our main hacker, we wanted him to have a powerful voice, which is the main reason that we chose Robbie. We wanted him to look older and broader so we gave him the shirt and leather jacket to wear.



We have three females in the group one white, one Chinese and one mixed race (white/black).

Anna's Character would be the youngest in the group. She would also be the most shy of the group and this is represented by the fact that her camera angle is high and from the side and she is effectively trying to avoid eye contact with the camera as though it were a person.

Jeng's character is also like a quiet mastermind. She gets told what to do and does it in the quickest and most efficient way possible. She doesnt really come up with any original material in terms of hacking, but has a huge knowledge of everything that is out there.

Natasha's character is a lot more animated and has a more extroverted personality. her framing is a lot tighter which shows that she likes being in front of the camera and likes the attention. She would not be the best hacker in the group, but when it comes to life skills and real people she would be the most socially able.

We also have two other male Hackers.


Raef's character would be similar to Natasha's character. He would have more skills outside of hacking than the others, but would not be anywhere near as good at hacking as others in the group.

Francis's Character is the younger boy in the group, he would still be living with family and his mum would almost everything for him. He would not be a typical teenager like Nico's and Raef's characters but would be very organised and tidy. 

We aimed to show that anyone can be a hacker, there is no one ‘look’ of person that can do this sort of stuff.

 This is similarly shown in the film ‘Hackers’ where they all live and work together they range from good looking girls like Angelina Jolie to some very nerdy teenagers in the group.






I am going to focus on our main character in this sequence who is ‘n00b’. We decided to represent the stereotypical computer prodigy, that you tend to think of as a nerd. We gave Nico (our actor) glasses and had him mess his hair up in order to look like he does not bother with his appearance at all because he spends all his time in his room on his computer. We gave him certain gestures such as the way he re-aligns his glasses or the way when he went to drink, it was done in quite an awkward movement with his head pushed forward and shoulders up when he went to drink. We did not want him to be overtly nerdy, otherwise it might have almost become a bit comical in a way that we didn’t want. So we gave him fairly normal clothes to wear; A plain t-shirt, plain Hooded jumper and a pair of jeans.

We wanted him to represent a very large range of people so we made his look fairly generic. Each of the character would make up a character in almost every social group. There always tends to be one of each type of person as too many of the same type of people start to conflict.

Here are all the basic personailty types of which most people fall into

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

Our production company is a fictional company called Synapse Productions, they make films that have slightly more quirky and mature themes.

A similar real production company could be Screen Gems who are an American movie production company and subsidiary company of Sony Pictures Entertainment's Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group.

Our distribution company is Touchstone pictures. They are part of the Walt Disney Motion Pictures group. We chose them as they tend to distribute films typically with more mature themes and darker tones than those usually distributed by Walt Disney.

 They had a marketing scheme for the film ‘I am number 4’ which I think was brilliant and could definitely be applied to our films marketing and it is completely suitable. If you searched on google 'number 4' the first result was a sponsered ad.

 This takes you to their facebook page where in order to 'find number 4' online you had to like the page.

 This sent you on a number of online treasure hunts in which you had to sign into various social networking sites like twitter and facebook which would show what you where doing to your friends and invite them to join the hunt. Once and if you completed it, then you would be entered into a competition. Not only did it generate interest but they had many many likes from people wanting to enter the competition.

I believe our film would be released in all cinemas. It would definitely have some sort of rent or download link on the internet as this film is so heavily involved with technology and computers. I would hope for some sort of app release for Apple and Android in order to create a pre-release hype, maybe the app could be some sort of hacking game.












I would hope to get the film on the Apple store once it is released on DVD and Blu-ray. If any new technologies capable of viewing films or having some sort of interaction with the film via the internet or an app then I would hope to get them involved as well.

Question 4: Who would be the Audience for you media product?

In order to represent our Target Audience, I decided to make a character profile of someone that lies within our Target Audience:

Character Profile of person within Target Audience:

Name: Tom

Age: 22

Nationality: British

Lifestyle/ Attitude to life: Laid back, relaxed, but always wanting find new cool gadgets to impress his friends with and make his life more efficient. He is a chance taker, if someone offers him a chance to do try something new or be part of an experience (provided that it is legal and safe) he will give it a go, because as he says “you never know until you try”

Tastes in Media: Hates chick flicks, Loves Inception!!! Enjoys most TV except Big Brother or similar reality TV programs. Keeps up to date with the news via his phone. Is often on his twitter and facebook finding out all the latest news. Enjoys computers and photography.

Film Consumption Habits: rarely goes to the cinema, maybe once every few months, but only as a social occasion. If he really wants to watch a film, he will either illegally download it or wait for it to be released on the internet. If there is a particular film that he has known he absolutely has to go and see, he will go to the cinema to get the full experience.

Over all the Target audience is niche, but still quite broad.

 Our secondry audience would be females age 14-25 who are not typical 'Girly girls' but are not necessarily Tom boys.

The useful thing about this film is that it will especially appeal to people that will understand the hacking process, but it can be just as exciting for people that do not, as they can wonder in awe and look up to the people hacking. I think our film would suit and international release as it has no cultural references or backgrounds that would not be applicable internationally.

Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

Our opening sequence plays with the audience and teases them in terms of their needs and gratifications. Blumler and Katz said that audiences have needs within films in order to keep them interested. In our sequence we use the enigma codes and action style editing in order to keep the audience on their toes and wondering what is going to happen next. Blumler and Katz also said that the audience gets gratification for certain things within films, such as when they see something that the character in the film may not have spotted, which come into play later, the audience feels good about themselves as they have observed an important part of the film, which someone else (the film character) missed.

The last shot of our piece plays around with fear as the audience do not know whether the knocking is another ‘agent’ type person come to attack ‘n00b’ or whether it is just a friend that wants to visit. It should also give the audience a little bit of a shock as it does to ‘n00b’ because they have been so plugged in and involved with what has been going on that you forget where you are in space and time, so when that reality is suddenly brought back, it can create a shock.

Our techniques in order to attract our audience just to the screening obviously worked as in one room we had about 45 people. We gave out questionaires which the audience could then fill in. We asked questions about our film to see if people could identify characters for example. We also asked more general questions like what they thinked worked well and what could have been done better.

 On the left you can see someone that absolutely loved our sequence and had no negative feedback.

On the right you can see someone who liked our film but had a few very fair critisisms.

We have, within our sequence, continuity as our sequence is happening in real time, we also gave the editing of the hacking part a montage feel in order to make it seem like more of an action than just typing. We used a technique to suspend disbelief in which we give the audience enough time to see everything within our sequence without having to watch it again, but we do not give them time to think about it until after the sequence is over, so that if the whole film where to be made they will be asking all these questions in their head and the parts of the film that come next will slowly answer those questions. Also by not giving the audience time to contemplate too much we again keep them guessing and that make them feel more like they are there within the hacking and hopefully forget they are sitting in a cinema.

Our main attraction for the audiece is a voyeuristic attraction. It is the pleasure of watching these unheard of and unseen technologically glamorous socialites. In the same way that one film may show the lifestyle of being the richest and most innovative person in the militant weapon industry ie Tony Stark in Ironman. Our film shows the lifestyle of a Hacker.

We also had a preview at school which we marketed with posters and on facebook:

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

My main learning curve in terms of technology was transferring my photography lighting knowledge over and adapting it to use for motion picture lighting. I was using my own light which are all made by a company called Blazzeo.



 They are photography flash strobes, 1 light being 600w/s and the other two being 180w/s.

They are intended to be used so that when you take a picture they flash and you get a good exposure, he problem was we needed a constant light as we were filming. The lights also had a modelling light on them, which stays on constantly to show you where the light will flash, these are not very bright which was perfect seeing as we wanted a dark room with a very shallow tint of blue light using gels.

 We originally only used the more powerful light, but a lot of our footage came out grainy so in our real shoot we used all three lights. I was in charge and did all the lighting for the shoot as I was most confident and knowledgeable about how the lighting worked. I showed and gave my peers chances to learn and have a go on the lights aswell in order for them to hopefully get some experience with lights. We had a problem with a bulb blowing part the way through our shoot, in terms of health and safety everyone was fine as I made sure everyone stays behind the lights unless acting and also I always had either of filter or some other light modifier on the front of the light which would protect anyone should something go wrong. We used light modifiers such as softboxes, shoot through umbrellas, reflective umbrellas. I had spare bulbs with me, so this did not affect our shoot.

 Explanations on how softboxes and shoot through umbrellas work (found on zarias.com)

We did non-linear editing on a program called Adobe Premier Pro CS5. I had used this before, but I had never needed to do such complicated tasks like getting 6 webcams onto one screen.

 I also used a graphics program called After Effects, we used this to make the on screen graphics and the part that I had not done before and learnt how to do during the process was actually superimposing the graphic that you have made on to a piece of moving footage and making it look like part of the screen by adding various lighting effects.

We used Matrix style graphics on our screens.

In hindsight I would have left more time for grading and would tell anyone starting a project to leave time for grading as it can make a really big difference.

A program I learnt how to use was LiveType. This is a title making program on the Apple Mac, on which I made all of our titles.

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

Our brief for our prelim task was to film a continuity sequence using a range of techniques such as match-on-action, 180 degree and 30 degree rule. It had to involve one person entering a room, meeting another person, exchanging something with that person and then leaving again.

Through doing our prelim task we learnt that filming always take longer and more shots than you think it is going to take. We also got to relearn the basics of Adobe Premier Pro which we had used, but not for quite a while. I also learnt that you need to check all of the set that will be in shot, before doing each shot as in our prelim for example one of our bags and folders where in the background of a shot.

The brief for our final product was to create and opening sequence to a film lasting 2 minutes with titles running throughout.

In the progression from prelim to full product I personally learnt a lot about organisation and how important it is. If you do not get every little last detail organised then what ever you have missed, as a general rule, tends to go wrong on your shoot. Also I learnt how useful it became when editing to have all the shots written down with which one was the best shot, time codes or if it needed re-shooting.

In terms of planning, what I didn’t realise had to be done, which I was doing toward the end of the process, was that if we decided to change something within the sequence, we would have to retain a copy of the old plans, but also make news plans with the adjustment amended or added to them.

We knew from our prelim how important getting master shots was, and this showed itself when we were editing our final product as sometimes we needed a little bit more footage from a different point of view just to achieve continuity and with a master shot, you can just add back in as much of the shot as you need in order to achieve what you are trying to do.

One thing we learnt that worked in our prelim was having some figure or important information in the plot that is unknown or unclear. In other words it is good (especially for short sequences) that there is some enigma that the audience is trying to work out as it keeps them fully focused on your film as they do not want to miss the part that they want to know. In our audience feedback from our screening of our films, we found that almost all of our audience was able to identify Nico's character as 'n00b' and also could clearly identify that Robbie's character was the leader of the group. The main critisism we got was that even thought the audience are not meant to know what happened to the leader hacker or who was knocking on 'n00b's door, they wanted to have an idea of who and what might have happened. While this was a critisism from some, this was a praise from others, so I guess if we were to redo the project we would balance the enigma a bit better with some hints as to what might happen.

I believe that we worked extremely well as a team. In the prelim we were in different groups, but in my opinion, in my group, we were not all working to our strengths, I think if we had organised our prelim more thoroughly, then we would have each been working on our strengths, but we didn’t. When it came to our final product, our group all had different strengths which worked really well in order to achieve all the different aspects we needed. Even when there was something none of us were strong on or could do at all, one of us would learn and practise then teach the others, for example, so we could all work on something, or there were other times where for example a member of our group learnt how to make the graphics, so she did the majority of that whilst myself and the other member of our group carried on with everything else that needed doing.