How does your media product represent particular social groups?
All media productions represents different representations for each social groups. Representations are created from the gender, age, sexuality, regional identity, ability/disability, class &status and ethnicity of a person. Representations also lead to sterotypes of a person. Sterotypes are created from people within the society.
For example: A middle aged white man in a suit would be seen as a rich business man.
A young sexy, dumb, blonde female would be considered as a secretary.
In our film openings the social groups it represented was single mothers as our film opening portrayed a single mother dealing with depression from the loss of her daughter. This is shown through our choice of mise en scene of the cigarette and wine. We portrayed single mothers in a good way as we showed single mothers in a good way as we showed single mothers being strong and coping with life changing experiences which many single parents face the loss of their child and dealing with the pain and the pressure alone. However we also portrayed single mothers in a negative way with the use of smoking and drinking alcohol which suggested a sense of irresponsibility and lack of good mother hood.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Representation refers to an aspect of reality such as people, places, events and other abstract concepts. The term also refers to the relation to key markets of identity such as class, age, gender and gender shown (represented) in people. In TV we tend to see very typical stereotyped representations, so the men always coming across as very masculine, the ones making money for the family, the hero and so on. The women on the other hand are always being portrayed as the damsel in distress, the housewife looking after the children or something that flaunts her body. Because this is what we are used to seeing in TV it has become of norm.
I think what is meant by social group is a group of people that share some social relation whether that be age, ethnicity, gender and so on. We don’t have much variation in terms of social representation in our film, we only have a single mother and a child being represented.
Because our film is based on a mother who lost her child I think the way we represented her is a typical a portrayal of a single mother mourning over a dead child. Because we did shots of the mother looking stressed, drinking and drowning her sorrows by smoking and so on which is what you would usually see in films or TV dramas; you wouldn’t see her in a happy mood. We made sure we stereotyped the way a single mother is portrayed in the media emphasized on the fact that the mother was in a low place showing a weaker side to her which is what
would come to mind when thinking of a mother who lost her child.
·In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Real media productions convey the use of camera such as track, pan, tilt and the use of a range of different camera shots such as long shots, close ups, medium close up, extreme close up, wide shot, over the shoulder shot, cut in e.c.t. To portray real media productions in our film opening we used a range of shots. In our film opening we decided to use different camera shots to make our film opening more interesting. Here's an example of some of the camera shots we used in our film opening:
Medium close up.
Long shot.
extreme wide shot.
For a film to work there has to be a clear theme or genre in order for the film to work. Themes are also used to attract a certain age of people who would be most suitable audience to enjoy and view the film. The theme of our film opening was supernatural thriller, the audience which our film would be most suitable for is older people as the story line of our film opening would apply aspects of sadness. However i think that the age of certificate for our film would be 15+ as there wouldn't be any elements of any gory violence or death just concerning supernatural elements.
Also in real media productions they use a variety of mise en scene to convey and support the elements needed to support their wanted genre and theme, this is achieved from a range of different costume, make up, different locations, body language and props. Below is the choice of our chosen mise en scene and why:
Above is our chosen main location to film our film opening. our chosen location was St Mary's church in upper street. We chose to film here as we found that this location supported our film opening as we found the location spooky because of the shapes of the trees and the gaves.
The second location we chose to do our filming was in a house as we wanted to portray the grieving mother separately from her 'dead daughter' we did this as we didn't want to confuse the audience with portraying the same location for every shot. We also did this because we wanted to cross cut between the mother and the daughter. When filming here we used lighting equipment to create a dark and depressing atmosphere.
Costume which was needed for our film opening was a white dress and blood on it . We decided to create this costume as we wanted to show to the audience that the little girl has been murdered and was dead. We had to create this costume with the use of fake pre-made blood which was made and applied before filming.
The body language in our film opening of our mother character was shown to be stressed and upset through her body language. This is shown from her body language such as putting her head down with her hands on her head to show her stress and to show the pain she is feeling.
In real life media productions they also follow tittle of film openings. We included various different film tittles. However we didn't successful manage to achieve the correct order of title sequences as we failed to include all titles needed.
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The meaning of conventions with regards to film openings is that a convention is a specific element (a prop or technique) that film makers use over a variety of different films. Our film is a super natural thriller and some recognisable conventions we use are the child for one as you see her in another life; so in the mothers head. Another convention would be the blood stains on her clothes as it shows that the child was obviously killed in her past life and the horror aspect. In a super natural thriller you would expect to see some elements of emotional shock.
However we were also breaking typical some conventions as our main focus is the single mother mourning over her dead child which is something you don’t see; being a super-natural thriller the mother wouldn’t be shown as the protagonist. We used her expressions, emotions and body language to convey the way she was feeling showing her crying and in a depressed state.
We didn’t use much mise en scene; for props we used a white dress for the child and we spilt fake blood on it to make it more effective. We used cigarettes, ‘alcohol’ and old pictures to reinforce that she is under stress and not herself so by using these props it shows she’s using this as her only comfort. For sound which would be agreed to be one of our most compelling and effective aspects in our opening, we started off with using foley sounds such as the church bell and then moved on to making our on “soundtrack” by merging some sounds together provided by soundtrack pro. For setting we decided on using St Marys church. We chose this because it suited our storyline and it was very convenient as it was close to college.
Brief Intro: Our media project called Affliction Of Memory is an opening scene that consists of two main characters that our audience is focusing at, a mother and a child. Our main message that we were trying to address is on a fragile single mum grieving over the loss over her young dead child. A film solely based on a single parent is hardly something you see a lot though it is something that happens on a day to day basis as there are many single parent households. For our film we also focused on the number of emotions the mother had because of her child. You get to see a few emotions of her stressed, emotional, distraught, frustrated and imaginable. Imaginable because at the end of the opening she turns round and appears to believe her daughter is behind her however it is purely just in her imagination. The theme for our thriller opening is a psychological thriller as the storyline generally focuses on the attitudes towards our characters.
Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? The familiar and predictable forms and techniques used by the media to communicate certain ideas or to convey a desired impression is what is defined as conventions. Technical codes include camera angles and sound. Our opening has those technical codes and we also have a few common conventions that is recognisable.Our opening consists of four different elements of conventions that is always present in film openings. These four examples are the use of camera work, Mise en scene, sound and editing.
To portray real media productions in our film opening we used a range of different camera shots such as medium shots, close up shots, over the shoulder shots and long shots. We done this because we wanted to make our film to have a variety of things. We knew camera shots was important because it it is the main thing we are being assessed on. Also we wanted to show an improvement from our last filming task to show that we have gradually improved our camera skills.
Here are examples of the different camera shots in our film opening:
-Medium Close up. This focuses on an individual and you can see the body language of the person and its facial expression.
- Over the shoulder shot
Other real media productions used in our film opening is Mise en scene. We didn't use much Mise en scene as our storyline was simple yet interesting also however we did use mostly props.
An example of the use of mise en scene for our opening are here; it shows our setting location and there are a few images of what was in the park like the graveyard and the fountain:
This image here is St. Mary's Church, our main filming location where we spend most of our time shooting.
We had props like the costume of the white dress on the girl, old photos of the girl. cigarettes, an astray and a bottle of wine with the wine glass for the mother. Fake blood was also used on the dead girl's dress.
An example of the use of props are here:
Our opening also has other conventions such as the use of title sequences.
Our sound was taken from sound track pro and we kept it minimum as sound can be distracting. The church bell sound was taken from foley sounds and we created our own soundtrack by merging and mixing it together again provided by soundtrack pro. For evaluating our sound, i believe it is very intense and builds up tension. Lastly the edits we used was a fade in out effect and title credits.
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Conventions of a film opening are methods that often use certain common conventions for conveying meaning through particular camera and editing to make it an effective film opening.
Our media product is an opening scene to Affliction of Memory which we made using different elements of mise en scene, camera work, editing and the use of characters.
For our film we decided that we would challenge the typical film convention as we had made the mother the main character in our film opening scene. The main focus was the mother and her emotions towards the deceased child. We focused on her reaction for example the crying and depressing states she would be in and her body language. We based it around a Psychological thriller. We didn't use much mise en scene as our ideas for the film opening didn't need many props as it was a simple idea where we only needed a white dress, wine, cigarettes, ashtray, lighter, fake blood and a wine glass. We also used minimal sound throughout the whole video which was taken from sound track pro. The sound is very intense and builds up to make tension which gives it that psychological thrill. The camera work we used was mainly mid close ups and close ups. The editing was just fadeins and credits. We also had a location which as was at a church grave yard in upper street islington.
We adapted our idea for our film opening scene from the film orphan. We mainly took the concept of the creepy little girl as we thought this was scary and would make our thriller opening a compelling and scary one attracting audiences from 15 and over.
You can see that we adapted this concept for our own image of a little girl pretending to be creepy.
The emotions on a persons face makes a situation scarier and where they are placed in a scene, for example the image above this one we can see the little girl standing in a dingy background, with an evil expression and beady black eyes. On the other hand looking at our own image we tried to get the same mise en scene, this can be seen from the icy cold background and the blank expression on the girls face looking into the camera lens.
We had various camera shots for example,
This is a long shot
This is a medium close up
This is a close up
This is a over the shoulder shot
The props and location that we used are:
We filmed in St Marys church upper street islington.
These are our props and the picture of the corner of a room is where we filmed our other half the film in a house in bethnal green
