The document summarizes the process of creating a film opening for a romantic comedy genre film. Key points include: - Researching conventions of film openings to understand common elements to include. - Choosing an unconventional title sequence to grab audience attention. - Using dialogue from the beginning to engage the audience and set up the plot. - Representing aspects of young people's lives to appeal to the target audience. - Learning about technologies like iMessage and social media that aided the production process.

1. Media Evaluation
By Vikki West

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
• When beginning the process of making a film opening, I thought that the most useful way
to start would be to research as many different film openings as possible to understand
common elements, and therefore work out what should be included in our own, along with
the length of the opening. I discovered that titles can make up the majority of many
openings, and sometimes speech is only used towards the end of an opening if visual and
musical elements are used instead.
• Although we appreciated that this can be effective as it allows the audience to get into the
film, we wanted to use the titles to grab the audience immediately by making them quite
different to an average title sequence for a film. For this reason we chose to use sped up
footage of Abby‟s hand writing and rubbing out the names on a whiteboard which for our
target audience would hopefully be a new and interesting way of making something
potentially quite boring, more fun and quirky, therefore fitting well with the rom-com genre.
• We chose to use dialogue within the opening to force the audience to pay attention from
the start, as I saw in the opening of „Love Actually‟, although I purposely made sure that
the script was simple and easy to follow, and used it mainly to set up the plot of the film
along with the main characters. Also, by choosing to go backwards in time within an
opening, we expected the audience to be intrigued as they should wish to find out what
happened before the first scene, taking place two weeks later than the scenes that follow,
which go back to the „beginning‟, explaining how the two main characters initially met.
• When we initially began to research the genre, we tried to research and note down
significant conventions that we noticed in rom-com openings. The most obvious was the
use of colours, which tend to be warm to reflect the romantic feel to the film, along with
bringing a happy tone which the audience will enjoy visually, as colours on the screen
appear brighter and bolder.

3. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
• Within our opening, we realised that we were representing many aspects of a young
person‟s life, including the school/education system, falling in love, and a partying lifestyle.
A lot of the time, young people are misrepresented, so we aimed to give a realistic view of
a lifestyle not dissimilar to our own, which would appeal to our target audience as they
would relate to the events within the opening.
• Furthermore, we unintentionally included stereotypes within the classroom scene, and
noticed that we had seated the trouble making students who intentionally disrupt the
lesson towards the back of the classroom, and the hard workers at the front getting on
with their work. This could be seen as representing a typical classroom set up, based on a
stereotype within the school system due to the perception of social classes.
• When devising the initial idea for our opening, we decided that we wanted to challenge the
stereotypical attractive guy falls for a geeky character who is perceived as „ugly‟. We
wanted to make our film different and a little controversial in this, as sometimes this
relationship would then be seen as comic, which was not our intention, so we chose to set
the plot as a quiet, pretty young girl who is forced to spend time with someone that she
doesn‟t believe she gets on with, but ends up falling in love with him. This is still a big
generalisation in terms of the female character, as we have classed her as “quiet” just
because she is smart, which could suggest that we have still kept elements of the
stereotypical „geek‟ character within our plot. Having an attractive female lead could also
encourage a wider audience, as many people these days tend to watch films based on the
actors, not just by looking at the genre.

4. What kind of media institution
might distribute your media product and why?
• As a group, we decided to use Ardleigh Media as the media institution that
would be most appropriate to distribute our film opening. This is because
it‟s a small company based in Essex, England which isn‟t far from where we
live and therefore would suit the location and social class around this area.
Furthermore, as the actors are English, it makes sense that the film would
be working with an English institution, as the target audience would mainly
be within the UK. Also, because it is a small company, it would be more
fitting for the small budget, and would hopefully make a bigger profit margin
than it would if it was produced under a much larger company.

5. Who would be the audience for your media product?
• Our film opening is entitled „Study Guide‟ which gives an immediate impression on the
target audience. From this title, we wanted it to be clear that the target audience were one
who were familiar with the current education system, so age wise, we aimed at early teens
to mid 20s. Hopefully, this would mean that within the film opening there would be at least
one thing that each audience member can relate to, if not all of it, which is why we
intended to show a multitude of things that our target audience of young people are often
depicted as experiencing within this age range: love and romance, a kiss, partying and
college education.
• We also knew that widely, rom-coms are watched by a female heavy audience, therefore
we chose to aim the film slightly more towards a female audience that men, a clear
example being the smart, attractive female lead, which many woman aspire to be. We
wanted the opening to portray how unpredictable love and relationships can be, which
hopefully a female audience could truly relate to.

6. How did you attract/address your audience?
• To attract an audience for our opening, we decided to create a survey on a website called
„Survey Monkey‟ which allows you to distribute a link to a list of questions and collect all of
the results. We kept the survey simple, by asking what different people would expect to
see, or would prefer to see within a rom-com film, so that we could use the responses we
received as a basis for our plot. We wanted to survey to make the audience feel that they
were getting involved with the process of the production of a film, and made it clear that
any feedback would be taken into consideration. We were given a clear set of results
which I have written a post about on my blog, stating how and why the ideas were helpful
to us, because we were able to see what the target audience would be interested in.
• We aimed to keep the film opening realistic to a real life setting, which was convenient for
us, particularly as we were filming within our own college, which meant it was familiar to
us. This familiarity is hopefully put across within the film, to an audience who could watch
the film and relate it to a similar setting within their own lives. Many of the students at our
college who were involved in the filming of our opening were really interested in watching
the final result, and had spoken about it to others, meaning we had a real interest from
people within our target age group who wanted to watch our opening. Word of mouth is a
very popular device for publicity these days, especially with the popularity boom in social
media, so we used this to our advantage to get an audience interested in our opening.

7. What have you learnt about technologies from the
process of constructing this product?
• During the process, we found many technologies that aided us to work together as a
group and successfully create our opening. A hugely useful tool was iMessage, which we
could use as a quick and simple way to communicate within a group message, as we all
own apple products, that can access this form of communication at all times. This was
much quicker than emailing, as it was instant and we could therefore be brief and get
messages and responses between all of us within a matter of seconds. iMessage also
allows you to send files, so I could also send drafts of the script as I was writing it, to get
opinions from the group quickly.
• As mentioned previously, we found that websites such as „Survey Monkey‟ could work to
our advantage as a way to get feedback from a target audience. We were able to post the
questions and got responses within merely a few hours, which would then help us to
decide on the content of our opening.
• Another tool we used was twitter. We made an account for our group as a form of
communication between us and the public, asking for help with character names and
ideas for the plot, and gained a substantial number of followers, ranging from writers, the
National Youth Dance account and even to small media companies. We got responses
from many people and this really aided us, along with showing us how useful social media
can be in terms of publicity and marketing our product.

8. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel
you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
• Looking back on how much I‟ve learnt since we
completed the preliminary task, I can see a huge
difference within my own knowledge and ability. I recall
that we were extremely confident that we would be
able to easily film and edit this short task, but once we
actually started the editing process, we realised that
we hadn‟t completed the task properly as we really
clearly break the 180 degree rule as the first character
sat down. Also, because the two actors were not
actually sitting opposite each other we didn‟t get the
true feel of the task, and should have read the
instructions better instead of rushing off to get it done.
I do, however, know that during the process of
planning and filming our main task, we were much
more aware of how to go about successfully filming
without breaking this rule (unless a shot was from a
character‟s point of view), as well as using a better
camera to increase the quality, and editing the footage
together more smoothly to create a good quality
finished product.

9. Conclusion
• In conclusion, I can see that I have really improved within media throughout this process,
from researching and analysing openings, to discovering how to film using the 180 degree
rule and making sure that the appropriate conventions are used within the genre of our
film opening. I have realised how much work can go in to simply the opening two minutes
of a film, and therefore how extensive the whole process, from planning to editing a film
must be.
• I feel that the genre we chose was the best for us in terms of our facilities and equipment
available to us at college, and especially since we were able to film the majority of our
opening on site, meaning we could use our media lessons and free periods to put the film
together. I don‟t feel that any other genre would have worked to our advantage quite as
well, mainly due to budget and having enough actors to participate in the filming of the
task, so am pleased that we chose romantic comedy as our genre.
• As a group, we feel that we have succeeded in our aims, and feel that the opening is
appropriate to the target audience as well as being relatable and interesting to watch. If I
was to do this task again, I would probably stick with the same genre and target-audience,
but mainly alter the style of the film to be completely contrasting with a typical expectation
of this genre, to see what it would be like to go against an audience‟s expectations.