A2 Media Evaluation [Keelan]

For our A2 Advanced Portfolio we had to create a short film, lasting roughly five minutes, a poster for the short film, as well as a review for it. Before creating the short film, which we have named 'High Stakes', we had to undertake a lot of research and planning to ensure that it was effective in using, developing, and challenging forms and conventions of real media products.

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

Short Film

(9 frame analysis of the short film)

Our short film mainly conformed to the conventions of a short, thriller film, rather than challenging them. Short films are notorious for belonging to more than one genre, as well as actually not being able to be placed into a genre, this way they are very unique. However, most all contain common conventions such - 

- Editing / post-production

- Themes and issues

- Use of genre conventions

- Mise en scene

- Sound

- Camerawork

- Characterisation

- Narrative organisation and the short film format

Narrative organisation and the short film format

- In High Stakes we have one protagonist, as per most thrillers. It is clear throughout the short film that this gentleman is the main character (shown in shots 2, & 8 of the 9 frame analysis).

- We have both conformed and challenged typical conventions of a thriller short when it comes to the antagonist as we have two characters who take on this role, rather than just one individual.

Whilst researching into how we would create our short film to either use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products we analysed several different theories by well known, knowledgeable media theorists. 

- One theorist that we researched was John Hartley, with his theory named 'The Hartley Classification'. This theory suggested that institutions produce "Invisible fictions of the audience which allow the institutions to get a sense of who they must enter into relations with", this meant that the people creating the media product, in our case a short film, must understand their audience in order to target them effectively.

- Our target audience for our short thriller film was people among our own age range, ranging from  15/16 to 20. Therefore we fully understood our target audience, allowing us to conform to a proven theorists narrative theory.

- We also challenged a common conventions of a thriller short film through the use of dialogue, or in fact lack of. This was done by using a rather minimal amount of dialogue, this is quite unheard of as with short films, as much information is usually put across to the audience as possible, due to time limitations. This complies to what a popular theorist, Steve Neale said, that pleasure is derived from 'repetition and difference'. Meaning that narrative should conform to common narrative conventions, as well as challenging to differentiate from others.

 

 

Camerawork

Poster

Short Film Review

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

3. What have you learned from your audiences feedback?

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

http://prezi.com/4qs-2ujih083/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

The link above, directs you to Prezi. Prezi is a piece of online presentation software that I have used in order to present the answer to question.