Finbar Murray

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

In order to make our films successful we needed to look at the greats in the genre we are trying to achieve we wanted a darkish gangster British film with specific details so we looked at 'Resevoir Dogs' as we want our group to mimic some aspects of the film and although American is still a good inspiration, We wanted a true to the life British setting so we looked at the two great British gangster Guy Richie films for further inspiration. As well as point break we would like to take the mask aspect and use it.

I decided to use trailers when researching thriller codes and conventions because in a short space of time they manage to enthrall the viewer into watching as well as managing to display all the elements that make a striking thriller film. This allows me to be able to browse lots of different films without having to sit down and watch the whole of the film. This means in one lesson i can look at 20+ films and see what codes and conventions they all follow. This has been very useful as these similar codes that i have seen can set as guidelines for our filming.

Our thriller tends to follow general thriller codes and conventions as we have taken our influence from majoritivly traditional and well known thrillers. Throughout our film we have been inspired by particular sections of these traditional films which has helped us shape our film into its final product, the use of masks is inspired from ‘Point Break’ which the bank robbers use past president masks to conceal their identities and this was how we came to the men in the car concealing their faces with masks.

We feel our film is quite a unique opening as it doesn’t really give anything away and opens with the ending of the film instead of the beginning which will then rewind back and the film will show just how the charictors ended up being in the position that they are in just like our influences ‘Snatch’ and ‘Lock stock’

Our main influences for our thriller:

Lock stock and two smoking barrels

Four Jack-the-lads find themselves heavily - seriously heavily - in debt to an East End hard man and his enforcers after a crooked card game. Overhearing their neighbors in the next flat plotting to hold up a group of out-of-their-depth drug growers, our heroes decide to stitch up the robbers in turn. In a way the confusion really starts when a pair of antique double-barreled shotguns go missing in a completely different scam.

Snatch

Turkish and his close friend/accomplice Tommy get pulled into the world of match fixing by the notorious Brick Top. Things get complicated when the boxer they had lined up gets the shit kicked out of him by Pitt, a 'pikey' ( slang for an Irish Gypsy)- who comes into the equation after Turkish, an unlicensed boxing promoter wants to buy a caravan off the Irish Gypsies. They then try to convince Pitt not only to fight for them, but to lose for them too. Whilst all this is going on, a huge diamond heist takes place, and a fistful of motley characters enter the story, including 'Cousin Avi', 'Boris The Blade', 'Franky Four Fingers' and 'Bullet Tooth Tony'. Things go from bad to worse as it all becomes about the money, the guns, and the damned dog!

Rock n Rolla

Lenny Cole, a London mob boss, puts the bite on all local real estate transactions. For substantial fees, he's helping Uri Omovich, a Russian developer. As a sign of good faith, Omovich loans Cole a valuable painting, promptly stolen off Cole's wall. While Cole's men, led by the dependable Archie, look for the canvas, three local petty criminals, the Wild Bunch, steal money from the Russian using inside information from his accountant, the lovely Stella. Meanwhile, a local drug-addled rocker, Johnny Quid, is reported drowned, and his connection to Cole is the key to unraveling the deceits and double crosses of life in the underworld.

Reservoir dogs – Person in boot

Six criminals, who are strangers to each other, are hired by a crime boss Joe Cabot to carry out a diamond robbery. Right at the outset, they are given false names with an intention that they won't get too close and concentrate on the job instead. They are completely sure that the robbery is going to be a success. But when the police show up right at the time and the site of the robbery, panic spreads amongst the group members and one of them is killed in the subsequent shootout along with a few policemen and civilians. When the remaining people assemble at the premeditated rendezvous point (a warehouse), they begin to suspect that one of them is an undercover cop.

Point Break – Use of masks

An FBI agent goes undercover to catch a gang of bank robbers who may be surfers.

2. how does your media product present particular social groups?

Our media product focuses on the underbelly of society, criminals, lower classes and gangs. Our film is set in what looks to be a typical desolate urban area, walls with barbed wire on top and metal fencing not a nice area to be in. Although you are unable to see the characters to establish what kind of part they play in society it is fair to say that the viewer would make an assumption as they are criminals covering their faces to not be seen wearing tattered hoodies and driving through an abandoned urban area you are able to decide the social group we have focused on is the lower classes. We took the inspiration to focus on the lower classes from some of Guy Ritchie films such as ‘Snatch’

and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ in which the social underbelly is entirely represented from working class boys trying to make some extra money to Pikey’s boxing to stay alive, ‘Snatch’ also gave us some inspiration for the end of our film (the burning mask) as in ‘Snatch’ when one of the Pikey’s goes against a high up gang member they set fire to his caravan killing his mother in the process, in our film we have the person who is in the boot because he has crossed one of the gang members and they burn his mask after an implied killing. We also strongly focus on gangs in our film as recently there have been a surge of gang films to be released which focuses on the very lowest social groups in society, we gained inspiration from the films ‘Kidulthood’ and ‘Adulthood’ which shows the scary life of teenagers in the citys capital, our characters we feel would be the same age and same level of social class.

3. what kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

At the start when looking to see who would be best we saw we had a large choice of British distributor's including:

Artificial Eye

Dogwoof

E1 Entertainment UK

Entertainment Film Distributors

Eros International

Icon Film Distribution

Metrodome Distribution

Momentum Pictures

Optimum Releasing

Paramount Pictures UK

Park Circus

Pathé Distribution

Reliance Big Entertainment PLC

Revolver Entertainment

Soda Pictures

Sony Pictures Releasing

Twentieth Century Fox Film Co.

Universal Pictures UK

Verve Pictures

Warner Bros. Distributors

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, UK

We have chosen Metrodome to distribute our film this is because when at the BFI we heard Rory Aitkin talk of how his film 'Shifty 2008' used Metrodome and we see our film as similar to 'Shifty' as it is also very low budget. Metrodome would be good for our production as they gave 'Shifty' 50 screens so we feel that we would be given the same and get our film screened on a very large stage with it being screened all round the country. Metrodome distributes as it says on its website it distributes 5 different genres of film, these being, Epic Asia, Horror, Action Thriller, War and Critical acclaim. Metrodome we felt were the best for our film however the British film industry is still quite small as the wealth tends to lie in the American distributers hence why American films tend to gain much broader recognition however Metrodome are seen to be an up and coming industry and with their backing we feel our film would do best with the Distributer Metrodome

4. Who would be the audience for your media production?

Our film pitches at the age of 15-35 we thought it would be classified by the ‘British Board of Film Classification’ as a certificate ‘15’ this is because it matched the cretiria they give on 15 action films The BBFC permits the following within the bounds of the 15 certificate:

Theme: No theme is prohibited, provided the treatment is appropriate to 15 year olds.
Language: There may be frequent use of strong language; the strongest terms are only rarely acceptable. Continued aggressive use of strong language and sexual abuse is unacceptable.
Nudity: There are no constraints on nudity in a non-sexual or educational context.
Sex: Sexual activity and nudity may be portrayed but without strong detail. The depiction of casual sex should be handled responsibly. There may be occasional strong verbal references to sexual behaviour.
Violence: Violence may be strong but may not dwell on the infliction of pain, and of injuries. Scenes of sexual violence must be discreet and brief.
Imitable techniques: Dangerous combat techniques such as ear claps, head-butts and blows to the neck are unlikely to be acceptable. There may be no emphasis on the use of easily accessible lethal weapons (in particular, knives).
Horror: Sustained or detailed infliction of pain or injury is unacceptable.
Drugs: Drug taking may be shown but clear instructive detail is unacceptable. The film as a whole must not promote or encourage drug use. * taken from the BBFC website

We do not feel our film goes above and beyond this criteria and is in its boundaries making it a 15. With a majoritivly male audience or film is a generally a good action filled thriller as men tend to appreciate the gang side of things and also the violence side of it.

New ways of distribution are emerging eg Route Irish – ken loach 2011 is being distributed by artificial eye through sky box office to ten million subscribers for two weeks only also released through Curzon on demand. According to the FDA website it’s the distributor of each individual title who creates the vital awareness, interest and urgent desire to see a new release.

Our audience will tend to go to see films such as 'kidulthood', 'Adulthood', 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels', 'Snatch' and numerous other of these genre of films, the audience we are trying to attract would have recently seen are films such as 'Limitless' 'Clash of the Titans' 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' typically laddy films which appeal to male audiences.

5. How did you attract/adress your audience?

It is part of the distributers job now to build awareness of the product before it goes on general release . Independent film has a particularly acute need of effective marketing because, unlike the US studio system, it does not have a vertical distribution where films go smoothly from production to exhibition within the studio system. Independent films have recently have benefited from new initiatives from the UK film council digital innovation fund which they describe on their website in a film presented by Anglia Ruskin University. I am going to refer to just one case study to show how this works. This is what I have learnt from one individual case study.

‘The girl with a dragon tattoo’ is a small independent film based on a Swedish book which never the less attracted huge audiences in the 12 week lead up to the general release through its internet campaigning. The distributers created audience awareness of the film through a series of exciting interactive games/interfaces, where the audience could click on different characters and learn more about them each week. Audiences could download an application onto their Facebook page, which meant their friends would see the films information reaching 65,000 people. With the Dragon Tatto they asked local communities if they would like a private screening before the actual film release.

The disappearance of Alice Creed, audiences could vote for the location of the premiere; Distributors fed pockets of interest with special private information which wouldn’t be released until late creating a sense of privilege in the audiences. The premiere was held at Southampton University which had made bigger headlines than the usual Leicester square with even the paparazzi coming down to see ‘Gemma Arterton’ . They had front page coverage on Metro which meant that everyone passing the newspaper saw it.

Infidel took a different approach, they created an internet campaign they invited audiences to submit jokes online about Religion and they took the film into mosques and synagogues that was used to diffuse antagonism towards the film to reduce feelings of hostility. They then drew attention to the comedy by having breaking dancing Hasidic Jews dancing and women in Burka’s

Our own film to attracting the audience is the campaign Spot the man in the mask in which we have a man walking around Centeral London and fans are to take a photo of him walking around and the first twenty photos to be uploaded onto the Facebook group will win tickets to the premier of our film, which will great a buzz and even if people do not win the premier tickets it will still create huge interest

Charity preview where everyone is invited to get a half price preview ticket if they wear a mask to the showing.

6. What have you learnt about technologies from constructing this product?

Through our film we have used a vast amount of technology from filming the production (Camera work working with the car) to editing it (imovie) to the music involved (logic pro) and finally intriguing our target audience and rasing awareness for the film (social media, twitter and Facebook campaigns)

Firstly we have learnt a great deal about technologies whilst filming, using an SLR camara we have had to inform ourselves about the camera to be able to capture good visual aspects of the filming, We used the features of the camera such as zoom to be able to capture close ups and create good effects when filming, Using the tripod to keep the camera steady also taught us a lot about the technology involved whether it be adjusting the height of the tripod or using the tripod to capture a panning shot with the camera being able to keep the camera steady.

The use of imovie has taught me a lot as we edited the whole film on imovie so we had to be up to speed on it to create the best product we could, using tools such as clip trimmer in order to cut each take down to the needed amount of time so the consistency of the film was kept and the camera shots would capture the car further back on the road to the previous shot so it needed to be edited down and we did this well with clip trimmer. We also needed smooth transitions so we used various fades to avoid too many jump cuts as the camera changed its angle and viewpoint. When doing the title sequence introducing the characters we used titles in imovie so that half of each name would appear from either side and meet in the middle, for example Finbar appearing from the left and Murray appearing from the right meeting in the middle to construct Finbar Murray in the centre, this was the case for each character and we managed to use technology in constructing this.

The music was also a key compartment of our use of technology as we created our soundtrack without using any physical instruments other than a keyboard we used logic pro which you press the note on the keyboard and it creates the sound of that note in whichever instrument chosen appear on the Apple computer. Which greatly aided our music video, we were helped on this by fellow student Will Jones who showed us how to use the technology.

Using social media we have been able to create awareness for our film we made a Facebook site on our film showing latest posters and campaigns and tweets showing any competitions or release dates and links to our trailer, Facebook and twitter are good for a film as it is easily accessible and hits a key market demographic as Facebook announced they had obtained 440 million users in 2010 we feel it is vital to use social media in order to publicised.

7. Looking back at your priliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from its to the full production?

I feel I have learnt a lot since my preliminary and have grown hugely in confidence and sculpted ideas which were once quite basic and unimaginative into elaborate finished ideas. We had the choice of doing either print media (a magazine cover) or Film (two minute thriller opening) for both we did a preliminary. This was helpful as it allowed us to have a taste of what we would be later asked to do in full and to see what brief suited us best.

In my magazine I called it Spray, it was a surfing magazine which I got a lovely image of a wave barreling over with the sun lighting it making it an almost translucent ultra marine, on the cover I also included a holiday to be won as well as we stories that would be covered during the magazine, I enjoyed experimenting on this cover and made a bar code which looked as though the bars of the code had been bent and someone had broken out of the bars which was fun to create.

In my film we kept ideas very simple and focused on trying to get good clear camera shots such as panning shots, close ups and over the shoulder shots mainly, out preliminary consisted of a man walking up the stairs, knocking on the door and talking about how a toy car had been broken by one of his students it was a very simple idea but set us up with practice towards making our complex film.

The one thing I learnt the most was that when making the film it is vital not to try and spend ages making it look absolutely professional as it is an amateur production and instead of a whole production team with massive film experience working for hours and hours until something is done we had just the two of us to carry out every role in the film this included acting, camera man, editing, storyboarding and making up our own co production company.