1) The media product is an independent film noir that uses the conventions of the genre, including black and white film and costumes from the era. 2) It represents some stereotypes like the "tough guy" gangster but subverts others like the tomboyish female lead. 3) As an independent film, it would be distributed by an art house institution to appeal to a niche audience and gain credibility from critics.

1. Media Evaluation By Kirsty Hunter and Rebecca Forrest

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? In our rough cut we decided to have an all female cast, however this wasn’t possible as we had trouble with casting. So we used the main conventions of film noir due to it being Black and White and having contemporary costume to fit the general out look of film noir.

3. How does your media product represent particular social groups? Doesn’t really show any particular social group but more on the lines of stereotyping the particular gangster badie and the shirt is a sign of masculinity. The female character in our film subverts the stereotype of a female character in some ways, due to her costume being quite tomboy like with the trousers and trainers. This suggests that she’s a plain character and not 3 dimensional, as most characters are written to conflict with others.

4. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? Instead of having a mass audience we have decided that our media product should be an independent film in which it would appeal to a Nish audience; so the institution that will distribute our media product will be Art house institution. Having our film as an independent film would be at an advantage as it could get good creditability from the critics giving the film good status, an example of this would be Slumdog millionaire and Fish tank. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIzbwV7on6Q However our film is not promotionally driven and pushes the boundaries of a film noir, making the film create a more artistic quality therefore appealing to a Nish audience. Also casting unknown actors actresses as well as an unknown director may not appeal to a mass audience. To recuperate any loses or to even gain any profit then windows will be open as an opportunity for fans to buy products and DVD's of the film.

5. Who would be the audience for your media product? Our intended target audience was set to be a 15, however we decided after filming that our target audience needed to be aimed at a more mature audience. This opening sequence seems to be stereotypically appealing to male audience due to the slight degree of violence and a male being the dominate character. Although it may appeal to women because of the storyline, it would most likely attract a well educated audience.

6. How did you attract/address your audience? The audience would be aged between 16-35 years old because were aiming to hit a mature audience for our artistic film. This film would appeal to all genders as there are certain bits in our opening sequence that could appeal to male and female audiences. For example in our sequence there is a part where the male is very dominate and chases the female character. Another the whole sequence of events would actually appeal to a female audience due to having a male female murderer. The audience in particular when they were watching the sequence, I feel were put in the shoes of the female character as we saw the sequence of events leading up to her death! The impact the sequence has on the audience is shock as they weren't quite expecting female character to get murdered. . In our film noir sequence non-diagetic sound created suspense leading up to the events of her murder.

7. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product? Strengths and weaknesses of technology: S: Fairly easy to use once shown. S: The tripod gave us some good steady camera shots. W: The battery life could have been improved as we didn’t plug the camera in enough. W: The Mac is a good piece of technology, however we needed to use the same Mac each time as it would save to that hard drive. The software that we used was imovie and garageband was very useful and easy to use, however to start with we didn't’ know how to capture the video footage onto imovie. It was hard to pick which instruments to use for our soundtrack. If you wanted to put in sound effects they would be an error occurred saying that you couldn't use this sound effect.

8. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? The planning stage consisted of narrative, shooting schedule, animatic, mise-en-scene. In our shooting schedule we stated which shots that we would use and what order to edit it in this helped us make the process alot easier. We uploaded all of our planning onto our blogs which meant that we could keep updating and changing our blogs if necessary. It gave us certain goals to achieve to produce our standard of work to the best of our ability. Our camera shots were more thought through then in our first ever task. I feel more confident with the equipment than before due to having more experience with it. I think that our end product has fulfilled the brief to a good standard but in our opinion it could be improved a bit more by adding diagetic sound and other angles in the opening sequence.

9. Audience feedback and end product “ The opening sequence is really good as the music is effective through out this sequence giving it suspense and tension.” “In this short sequence the narrative doesn’t make it clear at first, and brings up a lot of questions to answer.” “Editing throughout the sequence is okay but could have had steadier shots at first.” http://kirstymariehunter.blogspot.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOF4o16r2rw