The document discusses learning from real film openings and techniques used to create an original 2-minute film opening. Key points: - The group studied techniques like camera angles and credit placement from real films to inform their opening. - Their unconventional opening showed parts of the climax before the beginning to create curiosity. - They learned filming, editing, and advertising skills throughout the process and applied lessons from their preliminary task.

1. Looking at real media productions helped in many ways. We learnt which angles would
suit the scenes we were filming. For example, the 180 degree rule helped us not confuse
our audience with characters switching position (although our film opening only used
one character throughout). Also watching different film openings gave us ideas on where,
how and when to include the credits in our opening. I looked closely at the opening to
World War Z as I felt it’s opening was very well created and set the scene/tone of the
movie perfectly. I used it as inspiration to want to achieve that quality within our film
opening. Unfortunately as a group we did not have the editing capability to create an
opening to that standard. However, we did include the sound effects used in that film,
such as the use of volume to create moments of impact. In our film opening we decided
to do a slightly unconventional way of showing parts from the finally scene of what the
movie would be. Some films do open with this technique as it gives the audience a
curiosity to find out what led up to that point, however film most commonly start with
the begging on the event sequence. We decided to have are opening in that way because
we found that it might be more effective in a tragedy to show a climax moment in the
film so that it appears more appealing to watch.
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
Question answered by Tamsin Markina Wastell

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The absence of men in our film opening is typical of a war film, as the majority of the
time they begin with either the wife of soldiers or flashbacks from before the war. As
we wanted it to be a realistic and historically accurate film, we did not want to focus
on creating stereotypical characters. In many films stereotypes works as an advantage
as characteristics can be inferred by their mannerisms, clothes, voice etc. without
these characteristics having to be stated. It helps state to the audience what a
character is like within the first 2 minutes without having to even see how they
genuinely are portrayed in the film. However in our film we did not feel this was
relevant as we wanted the emotion from the scenes shown to be more important than
the characters themselves. The only stereotype which could be linked to our film
opening is the idea that teenage girl are overly hormonal and emotional. As our young
girl appears to be very distraught this could fit in with that stereotype. If we had used
a male character for these scenes them it wouldn‘t be conforming to the stereotype
that men are strong and never show emotion. We wanted the emotion portrayed in
the opening to appear very real, that way she would seem like a more believable
character.
Question answered by Tamsin Markina Wastell

3. What kind of media institutions might distribute your media product and why?
The film company that will make our film is 20th Century Fox Films, we chose this
production company because they helped produce the famous tragedy 'Titanic' so
they will know how to create the right mood for the film opening. All the films that
20th Century Fox helps produce turn out really good, we hope that this will happen to
our film. To make ourselves look more professional, we decided to create our own
production company logo, which we named 'Green Hair Productions' which features a
picture of Libby with her back to the camera, holding her hair. We decided this would
be a good logo for our production company because it is unique. We used a photo
editing software to edit the photo to make it look more processional and also to then
add the name of the company we had created over the top of the image. We then
displayed the logo at the start of the film opening to shown it was our production
company which produced it. The 20th Century Fox production company, like most
production companies, has a short 5 second clip at the start of any of their films. This
clip shows their company name and their logo however displays it in a creative way
using online editing software.
Question answered by Danielle Kimberley

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
As a group we agreed that children will definitely not watch this, as it's quite sad, it
involves graves, death and an overall more mature mood, that it might not be suitable
for such a young audience. The audience for this film opening would be around 16+
because as it's a drama romantic, has tension in and historic features, it will be most
interesting at that age. It will also appeal to people who like sad films with a lot of
suspense. We thought this was most likely to be the popular audience because the
audience needs to keep up with the film, another reason we think this would be the
audience is because the older generation will be able to relate to the sorrow of losing
someone in the war. As we wanted to make are movie as historically accurate as
possible, older generations may find it interesting to watch as they may recall thing
they know from having grandparents who would have been in similar situations. We
wanted the movie to be as releasable as possible even if it isn‘t through the exact
feeling of loosing a loved one, we still wanted the idea of unbearable emotions
overpowering you to come across to the audience. Anyone who appreciates an honest
portrayal of deep human emotion should be able to enjoy our film.
Question answered by Danielle Kimberley

5. How did you attract/address your audience?
To make sure we got an audience for our 2
minute film opening we used what we knew our
film would get a lot of attention, social media.
We posted about our media work we had to do,
and kept updating our friends about how we
were getting on with the process. This got
people excited to see our finished work, so when
the time came, we posted the video onto our
Facebook and Twitter accounts and within
minutes we got replies and people shared their
thoughts on it. A lot of the people, who watched
it, got given a survey to write their comments on
there. Overall we think our advertisement
worked and got a lot of people who may have
not seen the video without our advertisement to
watch it.
Question answered by Libby Mulvaney

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this
product?
As a group we all contributed to each aspect of the process of creating this 2 minute
film opening and as we went along, we learnt a lot. For starters, we used each other’s
strengths to our advantage. Tamsin is good with a camera, as she likes art and
photography. So she did most the filming but as well as doing that, taught Libby and
Danielle the techniques to get the right footage. Libby is good at editing and it’s her
main passion, so while the editing process was going on, Danielle and Tamsin
overlooked the process and as Libby was editing with the help of the girls, she also was
talking through what she was doing. This gave Danielle and Tamsin editing knowledge.
When we were advertising our film opening to the public, we all turned to Danielle to
make it go far. She is constantly up to date with the world and the gossip from people
such as celebs and friends. So she knew how to make everyone see our film. She also
taught Tamsin and Libby the best social media sites to go on to get our film seen by as
many people as possible. As a whole we all learnt a lot from the process of constructing
this film, and we can all use our experience and expanded knowledge we now have to
the best of our ability.
Question answered by Libby Mulvaney

7. Looking back at you preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the
progression from it to full product?
When we started filming for our preliminary task we struggled a lot to work out which
angles were better to use and we also found it hard to learn how the camera worked.
The task taught us which angles to use for certain scenes and also made us realise that
we had to dedicate more time to the filming process. We had two attempts on the
preliminary task as on the first one we didn‘t feel like we had fully learnt how to create
a good enough small clip. By the second attempt we learnt how to film two separate
sense but still manage to make it flow as though it was one continues sequence just
from different angles. For example the part where I reach for the door in a mid shot
and then it switches to a close up of my hand turning the door handle. We
incorporated what we learnt from that when we filmed are opening and had a shot of
Sophie walking and then a close up from her perspective lf her feet as she walked.
Without having practiced this technique and others in our preliminary task, we
wouldn‘t have been able to achieve a good quality film opening.
Question answered by Tamsin Markina Wastell