Film Opening

Preliminary exercise

Evaluation Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation in annotations
 

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:



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?