Evaluation Question 2

Evalution Question 1

 

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

 

All films have generic conventions that are associated with and specific to a genre, for example all Westerns use cowboy hats, six shooters, and horses and spurs to place them in their genre.

Our film has the generic conventions of an action thriller genre, as it contains violence with face pace action and intense, dramatic non-diegetic music. Our film opening also leaves the audience with an enigma code as they are unsure on what going on and are left wondering how the characters have got in to the situations we see in the film opening. As an action thriller, our film has many generic conventions similar to real media texts of the same genre and are film rarely challenges these.

 

Much like real media products of the same genre, our film uses conventions such as weapons like the knife used when Agent Thomas stabs the suited henchman after escaping. The storyline of our film also means that various weapon will be used within the rest of the film including guns, knives and fists. This is similar to other action thriller films that have these generic conventions in the media text for instance James Bond Skyfall which has knives as well as gun in both the opening sequence and throughout the film

 As well as the props, our film opening uses tense low pitch non- diegetic music which is another generic convention of an action thriller. This convention is often used in action thrillers to create a dramatic effect that keeps the audience in suspense about what is going to happen next such. Almost all media texts use both diegetic and non-diegetic sound and music to create an atmosphere for the product an example of this would by the action thriller The Bourne Supremacy which uses low pitch tense music in scenes such as the car chase. 

 

The font of our film titles is minimal yet dramatic which is shown as the title, The Escape, written in white and on a black background looks sharp and clear giving a professional and serious feeling to the film which then helps to indicate the thriller element to our film. Fonts like this are also used in other film of our genre such as Skyfall as shown below.

 

There are different camera shots and angles used within our film opening and in terms of action thrillers high and low angles are quite generic. Real media products with the same genre as our film often have generic conventions of high and low angled shots as they can be used to clearly show power or weakness which is a key feature in action films that often have a protagonist and antagonist.

Our film can be seen as challenging conventions as the main character and protagonist in our film is a woman as a pose the typical butch muscular male figure like Bruce Willis in Die Hard or Daniel Craig in James Bond. We chose to use a female as our protagonist because there aren’t many action thriller films that have the woman as the hero. One film that influenced us on our decision was SALT in which Angelina Jolie play the main character, who is a spy much like the main character in our film.

Our Final Film

My logo design for our institutional company

 

 

 

 

 

 My institutional production logo

 

Individual research on the institutional logos for mainstream and independent companies

Individual research on the institutional logos for mainstream and independent companies


Every production company has an institutional logo, the type of  institution that the company is then affect the look of their logos; this is due to things like budgets.

Independent companies such as Film4 or Warp films  tend to have less money than the big mainstream companies partially because they are usually British and so do not have as much funding as the mainstream American companies. Logos for independent companies are often quite basic, as shown in the images to the left. They are also generally just images that contain no movement or animations. One of the reason for these simplistic logos is that most independent companies don't have any where near as much money as mainstream companies so therefore they have less money to spend on creating big animated logos that are only really seen for about three seconds at the start of a film.

Mainstream companies tend to have more money meaning they and spend more on their logos, which shows as most have animations or movement in them. Mainstream logos also usually involve the whole scree rather than just an image on the screen like most independent film company logos. Mainstream logos also seem to use more colours and designs than independent logos and just look like more time has been spent on creating them as a pose to the independent institutional logos.

This research will help when designing my production company logo as it will allow my to design a logo suitable and appropriate for the type of institution we are.

The type of production company we want to be

The type of Production Company we want to be is an independent institution because there is less people for our ideas to go through so less changes will be made. We chose independent because we would like full control over the storylines of our films, how they are filmed and what actors we use. However, due to independent British film institutions not having high budgets compared to places like America, our films will be of a low budget and therefore not distributed to many countries or cinemas, therefore we would like American funding to help Penguin Productions use good technology and editing tools to create our film and make it appeal to our audience.

Research into films like our genre and how we will attract audiences

How to attract our audience.

Most generic conventions in action thrillers are some sort of fighting, chase and violence. As well as this, most have an enigma code which allows the audience to feel involved in the film as they don't know exactly what's going on and they have to work it out.  A mixture of these elements creates a tense and dramatic atmosphere which draws in audiences as they feel compelled to find out what's going on and what the films all about.


In order to consider how we will attract our audience, we did some research into existing films of the same genre to find out how they attracted their audiences. Using IMBD we found that the top seven action thrillers according to the US Box Office were:

The first two on the list are a sequel and a film related to a specific series of films. This could explain why they are top of list and attracted the highest audience figures based on ratings. If an original film does well and later has a sequel it is almost guaranteed to do well and succeed due to the involvement people feel they have within the film. As our film is not a sequel we have to consider a variety of ways in which we can attract the higher our audience.

Next on the list is Inception this is an action mystery sci-fi thriller that raised $293m at the US box office upon its release. The film stars multiple well-known actors including Leonardo di Caprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page and was direct by Christopher Nolan who also directed The Dark Knight Rises, which is first in the list above. The used of these big Hollywood names is another way films attract their audiences, because if people like the actors in the film and know their acting capabilities then they are more willing to see as they know it’s going to be good. However, our film is an independent film so therefore doesn’t have the big names but if we were to be mainstream this would be something we would consider when casting.