Evaluation Question 7

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Evaluation question 6

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Evaluation question 5

Note: Due to technical problem the lip-sync is slightly out of time.

We asked some people from our target audience to watch our title sequence then we asked them a few questions about it. In summary we asked them:
1. What they thought the genre was?
2. Who they thought the main character was?
3. How real the film looked?
4. Is it similar to other chick flicks that you have previously seen?
5. What they thought the name of the film was ?

Their answers were mostly right, but there was some slight confusion in some places.  They knew the genre was chick flick, they identified this though the characters. When we asked who they thought the main character was there was some confusion there, Emily thought it was the 'Queen Bee' Julliette, but Paige knew it was 'the outcast'at the end. We then asked if the film looked real because we wanted people to be able to relate to our characters. They said it was similar to chick flick films they had seen, they were regarding to the type of character which they see in films like mean girls. Lastly we asked what they thought the name of the film was and they thought it was 'Who's that girl' which again was correct.

There was a preferred reading as our target audience understood what we were trying to portray. Most understood the genre of film based on our characters. They also understood the outcast character as she was shown as different from her friends. This was our aim, for our audience to understand our storyline from our title sequence as this is what will get them to continue to watch the film.

Also, here is the comments from our facebook group that we created:

Evaluation question 4

The audience for our media product would be teenagers around the age of 12-17 and would come from a middle class background. They would be at a high school level and will often get together in groups to watch chick flick films.




The people will be normal teens that can relate to characters from movies such as mean girls, because mean girls has 'clicks' which are quite common in high schools. Words to describe them would be friendly and 'girly'.

They will enjoy getting together with friends and having sleepovers, shopping with their friends, and going out socialising.

They will enjoy watching television programmes such as Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, 90210,and other female cast programmes that have something that they can relate to, whether it be mise-en-scene of type of character.

Their favourite films will consist of A Cinderella Story, High School Musical, Princess Diaries and they will love Mean Girls and will often quote the film to their friends.

Their favourite music will be sung by artists such as girl bands like The Saturdays, Justin Bieber, and they will listen to music that is quite new and current. Their taste in music will probably change as the charts change.

Websites they will visit are Youtube and they will spend a lot of time on social networking sites like Facebook where they will have lots of friends.

Their dress sense will be quite stylish but also simple at the same time, such as jeans, leggings and cardigans but they will enjoy dressing up from time to time.

They dream of living in big cities and places such as America, and may want to be quite popular and successful in their life.

If they went to the cinema this week they would see the film a little bit of heaven as it is a classic chick flick, and has a good reputation, they will probably see this with their group of friends most preferably on an 'orange Wednesday' when the cinema is 2 for 1.

Evaluation question 3

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

What a distributor does?

1. They decide on the release date

2. They do audience research

3. They decide how many prints to make of the film (they need these for the cinema)

4. They decide what kind of cinema to show the film at

5. They also sort out the advertising and marketing

A Cinderella story is one of the films that we looked at, the film is a chick flick genre the same as ours, their distribution company was Warner Bros. pictures. Mean girls was distributed by Paramount pictures. Overall Paramount pictures are owned by Viacom.  So I would pick Paramount pictures also to distribute our film, this would also give us access to MTV and Nickelodeon. This would allow us to do horizontal integration.  Paramount are a mainstream company and are very well known around the world.

We are aiming to get our film into multi-plex cinemas all around England and maybe even in America as the chick flick genre is very popular there. A lot of chick flicks are actually made in America and are successful like Mean Girls and Raising Helen.

Mean Girls is an example of a successful chick flick film. It was distributed by Paramount Pictures, it had a budget of $17,000,000 which is average for this genre. It was released in the USA in 2839 screens, it was released in 364 screens in the UK and it was also released in more screens around Europe. This is similar to what we would want for our film. This film was just as successful on DVD if not more.

The benefits of using this strategy is that using Paramount will expose us to other companies that can help promote the film, being a Paramount distributed film will also give us credibility as it is a well known company. The number of prints would be over 2000 and this would mean we get a higher coverage. Paramount movies such as 10 Things i hate about you had a marketing budget of 16 million. We would get a figure similar or higher than this to spend on the marketing of our film. This money would be spent in marketing in different ways. We will also do some online marketing which will be very low cost.

 

Stratergies that we will use to spread word of mouth will come from things such as early screenings, with tickets given to competition winners. This will help spread word of mouth. The internet will probrably be the best place to start if we want people to start talking about our film. We could set up a group on social networking sights such as Facebook or Myspace. Which is used by people all around the world this would give us coverage. We could also set up an account on a network like twitter and this will keep people informed of release dates and whats going on. These sorts of things would be succesful as they can be seen by a lot of people, and can spread within minutes. We could also do marketing by sending out our stars and get them interviewed or invited to red carpet events, at these places they could advertise themselves and the movie. If there is enough money we could also do some tv trailers or a few billboard campaigns to get our film seen.                                                                

We could use new technologies to advertise and market our film. This is a good stratergy as millions of people now have the internet so it is accesible by a lot of people who are just browsing. We could start  by uploading a trailer or some sneak peeks onto youtube. These can be watched by anyone and the more popular the videos become the more people watch. Pop up advertisements may also work as people will se them, if we have access to MTV, whenever someone goes on the MTV website we could have a pop-up or a link to the trailer of our film. Social Networks will also be very useful for campaigning.

 Cinema websites such as odeon and Vue are looked at everyday and these are what people mainly look at before they go to the cinema, so our film should be advertised on the websites before the release date and whilst it is showing so that people have the option to see the film.

                                                  

Evaluation Question 2

Question 2

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Evaluation question 1

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

I think you can recognise that our video is an opening title sequence firstly because of the titles. Our titles are shown in a more artistic way than mainstream chick flick title sequences, we used things around us to create them. This is similar to the titles in Napoleon Dynamite.

Also i would recognise our video as a title sequence because we are introduced to each character and we find out a little bit about them and about what kind of person they are. Similar to the opening title sequence of Raising Helen when we are introduced to the main character and we are shown what her life is like.

Our film genre was chick flick, we looked at other chick flick title sequences to find out how the genre was established. We showed our genre by revealing the main characters to the audience,as they were all girls it was very obvious that this film was centred around females and this would show that the film was a chick flick. In the title sequence we showed all the four friends getting ready to go out, slightly showing their life. This is regularly done in chick flick title sequences.

We challenged the conventions by the way we displayed the titles, most chick flicks have simple, formal, 'girly' text but we made our titles from things around us. We did things such as writing on mirrors with lipstick and putting labels on clothes. We thought this would make our title sequence more interesting. So the mise-en-scene in the title sequence was very important. Also we showed all 4 main characters usually you would just see one main character but we wanted to show the contrast in character we felt this made the title sequence more engaging.

Our title sequence does support Levi Straus' theory of binary oppositions. In our titles it is the girls who are popular and pretty vs the girl who doesn't really care and is the outcast of the group and we tried to show this through attitude and mise-en-scene.  We felt it was important that the audience understood the binary opposition in the first scene as this was the main synopsis of the film. We felt this was also what made people want to watch the movie, so if we could establish the difference people would continue to watch to see how it would progress and what would be the outcome.

Final Production

Final title sequence

Response to first draft

The response to the first draft is shown below:

Filming : Molly

This is Molly, she is another one of Julez's followers.  She will receive a text and be getting ready to go to meet her friends.


Prop list:
Make-up
Clothes
Phone
post it note
shoes
grips


Risk assessment:
Clutter in the bedroom whilst filming may be an issue, particularly whilst using the tripod, so the area must be cleared to insure no damage to the camera or tripod will be made.
There is a scene outside where I film  molly coming out of her house, so the obvious risk would be passing cars on the road. To avoid this risk I should keep to the pavement and watch out for passing traffic.


We took out the shot list when we went filming, but we did not follow it exactly as some ideas were more manageable than others.

First draft edit

This is our first draft of our title sequence

Research and Planning: Photos of cast

Juliette Webb is going to be our 'Queen Bee'.

Molly Hall is going to be one of the other girly girls

Laura Turner is going to be the other girly girl.

Jodie Shane is going to be the 'outcast'.

Audience research: Facebook group

The facebook group we set up really helped us in terms of putting ourselves in our target audience´s place.

Most girls were in agreement that the queen bee is goodlooking, popular and rich, and wears nice designer clothes. Alll the girls asked in our facebook group would respond better to the down to earth character than to the queen bee. Some of the reasons for that are that girls watching the film can usually relate to her better, since they are not in the position of the queen bee and the main character is usually nicer.
Many different ideas were mentioned when asked what they expect to happen in a chick flick. Some girls said they would expect a popular girl to fall in love with a geeky boy or an unpopular girl becoming popular. Some girls expect a love story with lots of             drama, but also a bit of comedy.





We asked the invited girls whether they think our mood board represents the chick flick genre well and all of them said they do because there are many typical things in it girls like or expect to be in a chick flick. It also displays a girly girl´s world or ideal world.

We showed a picture of a girl we considered as an actress for the queen bee and asked whether she is typical looking for a queen bee. Everybody said she does, since she is goodlooking and rather attractive.

We also showed opening sequences of two chick flicks and asked for example why they can connect with the main charcater, which character they like the most and what they would expect to happen next.
The audience usually likes the main character the most, because they can identify with her, since she is normal and down to earth.
The answers to those questions help us to set up our own main character.