Media Evaluation - Stephanie Brand

When we were planning our media product we made a decision and that decision was that we wanted our media product to challenge the typicall political movie. But with the difference that our Politcal media product was going to be different and we were going to challange this genre by using a Female actress to play the main role, the reason for this is because normally in political films men always play this role. Also this way we are showing the audience that Women can also do things that Men do.

We did take in consideration that these types of movies fully establish the location of where everything is taking place ie what country/city it is set in. So we thought about this carefully in our group and we decided that int he begining of our clip we were going to do this by showing off the location and buildings by using long distant shots of:

City Hall


Tower Bridge


By fully establishing where everything is taking place, our clip shows and fits in with what social group our media prodcuct represents. Our media product represents the Higher working class social group. We done this by making myself (the actress) look very sophisticated, quite wealthy and high statused. We dont this by the clothing that im wearing. I wore a Black smart knee length skirt, a Black smart blazer with a white shirt, Black heels and a rather expensive looking handbag.

My body language throughout the clip is quite secretive but at the same time i am dedicated to what i am doing and following orders. I personally think that where we filmed our media product, the way i am dressed, my body language all fit in really well with the fact that it represents a Higher class. We filmed in the heart of the City of London where ther are lots fo glass buildings, people walking around in suits and briefcases, this all links because the women in our clip has the power to enter these sorts of buildings because of who she is, he body language and the way she is dressed.

As we live in London and we wanted to show off the actress and the buildings properly, we wanted to make sure that the weather was nice and bright because we didn't want our clip to seem dark and dull. London's weather is unpredictable so this was going to be hard to do and it was! On our first day of filming it was bright and lovely, although it was a bit chilly there wasn't a cloud in the sky, so we took this opportunity to tape as much as we could. After that first filming session the weather completely changed, it even snowed which meant that we had to wait until all the snow had cleared up and completely dissapeared. Thankfully the weather did clear up and we succeeded on keeping our media product nice and bright, unliike most British movies which tend to seem grey and dull.

It wasnt hard to figure out who most of our audience would be. Most men like to watch politcal type movies because of the fact that it has thrill, mystery and some action in it. Our media product definatly has that bit of excitement, thrill but will attract more men becasue the main character isn't a man, this time round it is a female actress and men like to see women that are dressed up in smart sexy clothes but that all can be sneaky and mysterious. The age of our target audinece would probably be from early 20's to late 30's because people from these age groups are the ones that mostly attend the cinemas. They like to see what good movies are showing also they are aware of what is going on around the world and they like to analyse how well the movie has covered its expected storyline.

Using the different types of technologies was the easy part for me. I personally think that it was the easiest because before we stared to film our media product we had had practices using the cameras, the tripod and aslo Final cut pro on the iMac's.
I think the only hard part was using final cut pro right at the end of our editing. The reason for this is beacuse we had the whole clip ready, the clips were all in the right place, we had added the different transitions we wanted in it, we had also added the credits, our title clip but we left adding the sound and the voice over till last. This was a bit of a problem because we had to choose what sounds and what background music we wanted to add in our clip using Soundtrack but not only that, we had to add the voice over in the right place. We had added the sounds and the background music, we then recorded the voice over and inserted it in its right gap. But then once we played the whole toghether with the sound and the voice over, the voice over was playing to quick and didn't play according to what was going on in the clip. This is when we started to get a bit stressed out, but with the help of one of our teachers we slowed down the part of the clip where the voice over is meant to sound and made it fit in perfectly with each other.

Looking back on our task i learnt quite alot.
Firstly, planning and oraganisation are CRITICAL. If we hadn't of planned our media product carefully from the begining i dont think we would have gotten anywhere. There were parts when our group found ourselves a bit stuck because of the reason that we didn't follow our storyboard. This then leads on to organisation, we all had to be well organised and we all had to know what was going on, where and at what time. I made an error when it came to organisation, this was because when we first started our filming i had my hair straightend and clip at the back, but then when it came to our second filming session, my hair was naturally curly and tied at the back but the difference cud be seen just a bit. This was a bit dissapointing because i should have kept it all the same. So for our third filming session i had it stuck in my head that i had to be WEARING and LOOKING like i had looked for the previous filming session as we didnt want our film to look dodgey.
Research is also important because of research isnt made then there are no ideas of what kind of shots or sounds or what type of people to have to play the main roles.

Overall it was hard work, there were times when as a group we all got stressed because we felt we weren't getting anywhere but thankfully everything got done and we finshed sucessfully. We completed our media clip just how we wanted it and when we watched our clip in the Vue cinema in angel with the rest of our media students they really enjoyed our media clip, they cheered and clapped when it had finsihed.