Friday 27 April 2012

Evaluation Q2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?






Gamers
The film opening will also give representations of gamers as a social group, If the film is well publicised as being based on a game, then the audience will draw conclusions on the nature of gamers from the content of the film. This could be seen as both a positive and negative portrayal of Gamers.

The film opening contains violence quite quickly and whilst not graphic it does serve to reinforce the stereotype of gamers as a violence idolising social group, as well as giving credence to the flawed but commonly held belief that videos games makes people violent.

When compared to other films such as Tomb raider, the obvious lack of female objectification within the opening could show a positive representation of gamers as it challenges the typical gamer stereotype in regards to how they treat women. However this could be viewed in a negative way due to the lack of females in the film opening. 

Evaluation Q3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?


From the research into films based on computer games, I found that these films were often very similar to action films without the basis of a computer game, hence the actual production being very similar in style to normal action films, however in terms of  the production and distribution companies for these films they tended to be smaller companies.

Film District
From learning this I deduced that smaller more indie focused companies were more likely to distribute films based on computer games as they are often seen as quite a risk. therefore I looked for a distribution company which had not only released a selection of action films but which also released films aimed at my target audience, as well as seeming to take risks in the films they released, therefore for a primary distribution company I thought Film District would be a logical choice.


Film district have produced a number of films in the vain of my own and also seem willing to take risks on new IP and less obviously mainstream titles. here are a number of examples of films they have produced:
File:Lockout film poster.jpg


EA
As my film opening was to be based on a computer game, I felt it would be logical to have a computer game company involved in the production and distribution stages. From prior knowledge of the games industry I felt that EA would be the most logical choice due their size as a distribution company, and also the nature of the games they release.

EA are one of the biggest names when it comes to distributing action franchises and titles, owning IP such as the Battlefield, Crysis and Mass effect series'. Therefore I felt it would be most likely that they would be the company behind a release of my product.



Another benefit of choosing EA as a distribution company is the brand recognition it would command, they would be able to put a lot of money behind the project and the EA brand name would help to sell the product to a larger potential audience.




Evaluation Q4:Who would be the audience for your media product?



The Audience for my media product was largely shaped by my brief, which stated the film should appear to be aimed at "15-25yr old males and females". The audience for my product would also be dependent on the other aspects in the brief, namely that it should be an action film appearing to be based on a computer game. 


Taking this into account when thinking of a target audience I realised that my target audience was most likely going to primarily consist of fans of both areas of the media, film and computer games. So from combining the research I had done into audience during the research and planning stages the average member of my target audience member will most likely to like the more mainstream titles from the two genres, which shaped how I created the product, because I chose to base it off a fictional AAA title, "On the edge". 


From the research I did into the audience for my Film opening I began to build up a picture of the kind of person I would be aiming my product at, I did this so that I was able to tailor the film to the target audience by selecting the framing, mise-en-scene and other elements that were commonly seen in films aimed at the age bracket. 


An interesting aspect I thought to look at when deciding on a target audience was nationality, as computer games are probably the most inclusive medium when it comes to interaction across cultures, due to the two key power houses, Playstation(japan) and Microsoft(America) being global companies as well as development companies existing all over the world, but being linked by online community services such as PSN, Xbox Live, Steam and many more. This lead me to realise that a film fronted by EA(one of my distribution companies) would reach a world wide audience. Taking this into account I made sure to look at a wide variety of films for research to pander to my global target audience. 












Evaluation Q5: How did you attract/address your audience?

Evaluation Q6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Evaluation Q7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Audience feedback

Audience Feedback was essential when creating my product, and it informed many of the decisions I made when creating it, the largest being whether to have the titles then the chase of the chase then titles, as I felt both ways worked but wanted to know which way had the most impact on the audience

Because I don't have Facebook myself, one of my friends posted a comment with a link to the video in order to gain audience feedback from people who were part of my target audience.





Post Production: The Edit

I used two programs for the majority of the editing work, these were Power Director and blender. 

I used power director as it is a simple but powerful program, and on eI also had available on my own pc, which made the process of editing and applying vfx a lot faster and simpler.




For the visual effects such as the laser blasts and titles I used a program called blender, it allowed me to combine 3d cgi elements with 2d footage, as well as having an in depth compositing system which I used to apply the colour grading and vignette to the entire film.

Production shoot

The production went very well, I managed to get the majority of the shots I wanted and I didn't run into any major technical problems during the shoot, as I had worked with the two actors before as well, there was vary little in the way of hold ups, as we all knew what our roles were and what was required. 

the only problem I had was when attempting to film a medium shot of the rod being pulled away from the main character, unfortunately I managed to record around the shots, instead of the shots themselves. in other words I had filmed us setting up for the shot, the gap in between the two takes, and then finishing the shot. but not the actual takes themselves. 

Fortunately I took an excess of shots, and got some angles which weren't in the shot-list in order to fill in for any problems, and I was able to fake the shots through the use of a green screen.

Giving George direction and standing in for him so he knew where to look for when he was doubled 

preparing for a take

the green-screen shot used to fill in the gap where I hadn't got the shot.

Planning: shotlist

This is the shot list I created for my film opening, It only included the Chase scene of the film as I knew the titles would be more abstract due to the emphasis during that sequence being on the titles. 



Planning: Location

I went on a rece around Ringwood looking for suitable locations to film my music video, I wanted areas which looked urban, this was difficult however due to the abundance of trees and foliage.
































After wandering around all afternoon trying to find a suitable location, I was still unhappy with the locations I had found. None presented the futuristic, urban look I wanted to present.

Therefore I chose to ignore the rece shots and instead decided to film in a multi storey car park. I wasn't able to go and get location pictures for this however, so I chose a car park I'd been to before, this meant a storyboard was out of the question as I wasn't 100% sure how the car park was laid out, so instead I chose to write a shot-list.


Thursday 29 March 2012

Planning: designing a product



My brief was to create an action film based on a real or fictional video game, so I chose to take elements from a number of real title to create a brand which would be representative of real products whilst maintaining a setting and style which would still be achievable considering the constraints I had in terms of setting, characters and mise-en-scene in general.

A logical first chose of inspiration was EA's mirrors edge
This is a game well known for it's free-running style game-play and also incorporation of action. so was perfectly suited to my brief, however the majority of the game takes place atop sky scrapers which is not possible for me to achieve, there fore I looked to other similar games for setting.


Character Design


I found the Mirror's edge character design interesting.



The costume is simple, but also highly affective so when designing the costume for the characters I took this into account and this costume in particular was hugely influential in the design of the final costume.

Other sources of inspiration for the protagonists costume were:
Jade - Beyond Good and Evil



Cole - Infamous 2
























Setting

I looked to the Half life series for inspiration on the setting, they had an interesting combination of sci-fi and modern day elements. which would be relatively easy to achieve for my film.






Another game with an aesthetic which could be interesting to explore was portal, the simple white backgrounds could make an interesting setting, similar to the district 13 setting seen in my earlier research.




Antagonists


For the antagonists I wanted them to be highly conventional so they were immediately recognizable as the troops/members of totalitarian regime.
To ensure this I thought about the kind of images I associated with this type of character, and also looked at conventional images. I chose to include my own perceptions as well as research as I am a member of the target audience and I wanted the enemy characters to be somewhat cliche and instantly recognizable for what they were.

I again looked at Mirrors edge as a key source of inspiration:


But also examples from games such as:



RAGE                                                 Beyond Good and evil                                                                 
The look of the Antagonists also borrowed heavily from films such as


Equilibrium














To give the film some Grounding in reality I also looked at modern day SWAT teams for inspiration for the antagonists.




The product

The Idea I had for the product was one similar to many other films and games, featuring totalitarian states. the key protagonist is a key member of the rebel group who is vital to ensuring it's victory. Whilst the enemy is enforcing the status quo with excessive force.

From the examples I had gathered and seeing as many of the themes I had already collated leant themselves well to cliche, therefore I chose to name the Fictional game my video will be based on.

"On the Edge"

I felt it was representative of the kind of names seen within the genre, whilst being simple and catchy enough to be memorable. 





Wednesday 28 March 2012

Titles

From the previous Examples I gathered the thoughts I had starting forming about the titles were to have floating text "in the world".

A previous examples where this could be seen were in the Deus Ex opening, and also slightly in the Crysis opening but those were instead on the various objects in the scene.





The technology being explained in the previous video is the reason why I picked it out as an example, because, like I previously said, incorporating the titles into the environment is where my thoughts are in terms of titles.





The same effect can be seen in this game along the edge of the tracks.

From this research and looking at titles usually seen in action films, I chose to challenge genre conventions and go for a more dynamic way of displaying titles by incorporating methods seen primarily in video games.


Tuesday 27 March 2012

Distribution company

As the brief was for the film to appear to be based on a video game, I felt it would be required that the final film be a collaboration between a film and video game distribution company.

From the research I had already done into video game openings a trend I noticed where that they were all distributed by the same company.



EA are a well known distribution company who have published a huge variety of games including many from the action genre so they were the production company I chose to use for the video game arm of my films distribution.

For the film aspect I looked back at many of the example I had already found during my research to try and find a consistent distribution company. however whilst I recognized a lot of the big name production companies,  such as Warner Bros, Paramount and Columbia. none provided a constant trend, in fact every example had a different distribution company.

So in the end I looked at some of the less well known production companies, as from the research I concluded that they are more likely to take risks on innovative and original IP, and also from looking at the types of distribution companies involved in previous computer game to film adaptations, I found that smaller production companies are more likely to take on these kind of productions.

A production company I found through my research was Film district.

they seemed to have a tendency to publish horror and action films, as well as being an indie publisher, therefore making them more likely to take risks.

Summarising, the two distribution companies I chose for this film were EA and Film District.