Media Evaluation Disruption

Evaluation - Disruption Glen Waine
http://cherwellmediaglenw.blogspot.com/ Word count: 1027

Me and my group created the opening 2 minutes of a film we named Disruption. In the making of this film we managed to capture quite a modern view of youth today. We used stereotypes which appealed to both sex’s, as the boys can to some extent relate to the characters and the girls find the comedic aspect that is created through the over exaggeration of the characters appealing, for example at the beginning the 4 main characters great each other in a manner that is widely used through youth groups today. I believe that Disruption to some extent challenges conventions of real media products as the films that use this topic are generally not as accurate as might be thought, where as I feel that we have managed to capture a more gritty realistic concept of youth. The Social group that is depicted within our film represents lower class people having to make money the only way they see that they can. We choose to show our social group mainly through the type of clothing worn and body language of the characters, we also use juxtaposition to establish the link between the characters and drugs which created a great sense of realism. We managed to add this realism by choosing a specific area to film very carefully. The props used were all very stereotypical of the group we were trying to represent, I think the serious music contrasts with the ‘over the top’ props to create comedy in a serious context. Although the house we used to film (especially for the last scene) had items on the wall which did not go hugely well with the background we were trying to set, unfortunately we did not gain permission to remove the items.

We were influenced a lot by the film “Layer cake” which gave us the idea of creating the film about gang activities, but wanted to focus more on the social group being shown as anything but the business elite. This can also be linked to how youth can be manipulated by unofficial authority figures. The audience we were aiming this film at was young people but also at the slightly older generation to give a slight insight into the certain things that happen on the streets today. We managed to attract our audience by showing material that some people can relate to as well as including comedy through the over exaggeration of characters and representation of certain stereotypes. The comedic reference in our film is not there to stand out, as nothing changes to bring the fact that something is funny to the audience’s attention, we thought it would go better if we kept the seriousness of the film and only added subtle comedic references.

I feel I have learned a great deal from the technical side of creating the film. Its not only editing skills I have developed but organisation skills as well. The aspect of the editing process which most interests me now and that I feel more comfortable with is think about shot transitions. One shot transition I particularly like in when the buyers are seen knocking on the door of the house, the shot transition then is of the inside of the house and the door-mans reaction to the knock. Its not the most unusual of shots, I just think it goes quite well with the context of the film and helps build up suspense. We have had a lot of comments about our film, but the most frequent ones have been about our music. It took us quite a long time to find the right piece to put in. We finally decided to use “Cold City” by David O Brian and to our surprise not only was it very good at building suspense it also was timed almost perfectly with the vast majority of our shot transitions, which added much more of a professional touch to our film. If our film was being distributed professionally I would think the best way for it to advertised would be in magazines that have the same target audience as our film, for example hip hop or music magazines in general which would generally be read by 15-25 year olds. The topic shown in our film is popular but not usually as real, as it would be on a much larger more important scale.

In looking back to our preliminary task I can see a great deal has changed both with my media knowledge and with they way that we constructed each project. Now re-watching out preliminary I can see that it is very rough with most of the shots and you can tell that there was limited thought into what we were trying to create. Where as in our final task I feel a great deal more confident in everyway of what it achieves. As well as the editing process I also feel I’ve enhanced skills in the setting up process e.g. storyboard, synopses etc. The things we did for the preliminary task for example the storyboard was to no way near the level of work we produced for the beginning of our final task simply because we did not have the knowledge we do now. There is also the fact that our preliminary task was a lot shorter than our main task, so it gave much more of a chance to include semeiotics and part of a story. While we were doing our preliminary task we were not considering a lot of the factors we had to think about for our main film such as, target audience or institutions, which really shows how much more detail is needed to make something work with a story. I was quite surprised at the increased amount of work, planning and attention to detail that was needed for the main task. One factor which is wrong with our film is the amount of money that is passed in exchange for the drugs, the seller asks for “40 grand” and receives a fist full of cash. Unfortunately by the time we noticed this we couldn’t really change anything.