Final film opening

In this blog post I uploaded our final film opening.

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

 

The nine best shots from our film opening.

 Title of The Film:

The title of our film is “Because of them”. We chose this title to emphases the point that the character Charlotte Woods got the sort of life she did because of the women fighting to get the right to vote.

Setting;

We used one main location, Oaklands museum, as it had the feeling of an early 20^th century house that could still be in use today.  We use this setting to create a connection between the different characters and so that the audience are more interested.

Our Titles

Our titles are in the font Andulas. We also kept them white and not moving. We did this to create regularity between all the titles. We also created them in a white font and not moving due to the fact- in films we looked at, like Jane Eyre, the titles were plain. We decided to do this also to keep in line with the genre and to not take anything away from our film opening.

Genre
Our genre is period drama with scenes from the 21st century. We were also looking at films with strong female leads and how they represented them to use power. This included looking at camera angles and where they where in the shot. A period drama is a film set in a historical time period, which is shown with costume and set. However, we also have a modern part with Charlotte Wood being in the 21st century.

Challenges to common stereotypes:

We use strong female leads which especially for a 20^th century women is against the stereotype of the role of women. We also had a man as an assistant as stereotypically men are higher up than women so having a female boss with a male assistant is challenging the stereotype of a 21^st century office life.
We didn't show any men in beginning in our film to highlight the importance of women. This meant we draw our audience to the women and their story.

Camera Work and Editing;
We used a Sony Handy-cam to film all our shots. We also used tripods to stabilised the shots. We filmed at different angles and heights to create the best film opening.

For editing we put all the shots in order then added the effect onto Lorna’s shots to create the older scenes. We then added the titles. Finally we added non-diegetic sound to pull our film together.

Story/Narrative:

Our story is about a young successful business women called Charlotte Wood  whose forgotten about the importance to vote until 1 day she is cleaning out her attic and found a picture of her great great grandmother Alice Greenburg a suffragette.
To portray our story we used Levi- Strauss' theory of binary opposites. We used as went Alice Greenburg was being shown we had it in black and white. Where as Charlotte Wood's scenes were all in colour to show a clear contrast of characters and time. We also had each scene being performed in each different period. An example of this is when Alice and her friend where walking we then had a scene with Charlotte on the phone.

Characters:

Alice Greenburg: 23 years old, suffragette, wife, mother, has little say in the community.

Charles Greenburg: Hard head business man, husband, believes his wife should accept her role in                                        society.

Charlotte Wood: Hard head business women, great great granddaughter of Charles and Alice                                           Greenburg, Single, does not believe she has to vote.

Mark Hughes: Charlotte’s personal assistant, works hard to please her, his work is not really                                         appreciated.

Costumes;

To create the 20^th century costume they wore skirts with tights and black shoes. They also wore white shirts and coats with fancy headbands. This was to recreate the clothes of the era.

For Charlotte’s outfit she had to look serious. This means that she wore black trousers and a shirt and black heels. This was to make her look more like a modern day business women. She also wore a faux leather jacket to make the outfit look sleek and modern.

Themes:

Our theme was women empowerment and highlighting the importance to vote. We chose these films as we believe that these are issues that need to be highlighted. Especially, with voting as a lot of young people seem to forget the importance to vote and how hard some people fought to get this right. We also where looking at these themes as at the time of filming this the USA 2016 election where happening so we saw issues around voting. Also as a group we where passionate about equal rights for women so we found this as a common ground went we first where put as a group,  

Films that inspired our film
Suffragettes- Due to common themes.
Legally blonde- Due to the strong female lead.
Jane Eyre-Due to it being a period drama.
King's speech- Due to being a period drama and political theme.

Question 2 How does your media product represent particular social groups.

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

Question 4 Who is the audience for our media Production?

Audience survey from Charlotte Revell

Question 5: How did you attract/ address your audience.

Question 6- What have learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?