Evaluation-Will

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

In two cars one night there are allot of shots that determine the characterisation of the characters. In two cars one night the main male character is trying to be the dominant figure, he is trying to convey traditional representations of masculinity by trying to act tough in front of the girl to try and impress her.

The shot above shows a sequence of shots where the conversation between the two youngsters is interrupted by and old man. The two react differently as you can see in the shot above it is an over-the-shoulder shot of the girl winding up her window, this could be a sign that she is scarred by him and would show a traditional representation of women that they are weak, even though in this film the girl is represented as very modern and sticks up for herself against the boy who is goading her. The boy nods at him as if to portray that he is not scarred and it is again an over the shoulder shot, as you see below.

If you compare the two shots the girl does not make eye contact with the man whereas the boy is looking straight into his eyes, to portray the notion that I explained above.So there is a mix here of the old and the new representations of gender and films and short films are supposed to portray some of these representations in their products, we did this as well. We showed the new representation of our main character, who is a teenager and in today’s society teens are represented in the media as rebellious and no respect for society and its rules and regulations (highlighted by the riots and student riots last summer), as you see below with two teens jumping the barrier at the train station.

We again showed this side of our character when he was stealing the bottle of alcohol, as you can see below.

A bit later on in two cars one night another man appears , but this guy looks a bit more menacing than the previous guy as you can see below.

The boy’s reaction again is two nod back at him, but it kind of puts him back into reality that in fact he is just a small boy and he does not have that much authority and all this bravado that he has shown just looks stupid. This is backed up by the fact that the girl asks him his age afterwards and it turns out that she is older than him, this brings his character is brought back down to earth and there is kind of a power shift from then on from the boy to the girl. This kind of happens in our film as well because Jack thinks he is above the law, but when he opens the door to the policeman the power shift happens and he is respecting his the rules and regulations now and it shows the old representation of young males, also when the music is playing in the flashback it kind of creates the mood that Jack thinks he is going to get caught for one of his crimes, but he gets away with it. So our character is shown to represent the new representation of teenagers and also the old ones as well. Also I feel that our representation of Jack as a teenager is a very real one because quite allot of teens think it’s acceptable to commit petty crimes, as seen in the student riots last summer, and allot of the times they get away with it for one reason or another, mainly because the police don’t have time to deal with these small cases or they simply don’t know about them and this is what our film shows. So the way we ended it was good in a way because if we had shown the policeman catching him for his crimes, then it would have been boring because there would have been no twist and two it’s not very accurate of what really goes on, I know allot of people who go out and get drunk and they commit petty crimes and most of the time they get away with it, but not all the time.

Genre

In short films there is often a mix of genres because they are often too short to really establish one genre so they are often a highbred of genres, which is what we have done. One genre that is used in our film is thriller. The elements of our film that use genre conventions are the use of a flash back, which is often used in thrillers because it works as that style of narrative in order to build tension. We also built tension up for the audience by putting in the music in the flash back.  A key thing is the clever storyline that has the audience fooled into thinking that Jack is going to get arrested for his crimes, but the twist at the end was not only a relief for jack, but also for the audience.  So we challenged forms of real media products where most of the time the bad guy gets caught for his crimes, whereas in our film he gets away with his crimes and although this does not send out a very good message I feel that it is a more accurate representation of what life really is because the police can’t catch everyone all the time.  

Editing post/production

We used some clever techniques in editing to portray the begging and the end of the flashback sequence. We used a sound bridge, this is where at the end of one scene, the sound from the next scene is heard, leading into that scene and we used this at the end of the flashback sequence. Below is our video and at 4:27 is the sound bridge 

Sound
When Bradley was waking up we used diegetic sound for the music in the background. We did this because it gives it sense of realism which we thought was important in the scenes not in the flashback and then in the flashback we used non-diegetic soundtrack in order to try and show the difference between reality and the flash back.

Above is a video clip of the film adulthood and in the clip at 3:24 mins it shows the main character taking his iPod out of the docking station which cuts out the music, which I think works really well because it gives the viewer a chance to see where the music is coming from and adds to the sense of realism. This gave us the inspiration to do it ourselves and below is a shot of Bradley doing the exact same thing.

        

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?

I have had real trouble uploading my video, ive been trying to upload it for hours.

3,)What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

I put the film up on Facebook a couple of hours ago and got some good responses. I chose Facebook because the majority of people who use it are our target audience which is 15-25 so it was perfect for getting feedback from the target audience. Although all the comments are positives about the film which is nice, but its not very balanced. The reason they were all positives was becuase this that the people who commented where my friends so it might be a bit biased.

Also throught the editing we got feedback from you, Andy Hampson, Andrew Mann, Ollie ans Andy Paul which was very helpful. Especially with the sound because we had to tinker it quite allot especially in the flashback, but it has seemed to payed off with comentts such as” lovley use on non diegetic sound” from Matt aged 18 and “I liked your use of music throughout the film” from Rachel aged 20 and “the music was just an added bonus to an already good film” from Jack aged 17. So I have learnt that you have to listen to feedback especially well grounded negative feedback in order to improve your film.

4.) How did you use new media technologies in the construction, and research, planning and evaluation stages?

http://prezi.com/rnjcj4qnspoz/how-did-you-use-new-media-technologies-in-the-construction-and-research-planning-and-evaluation-stages/