How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Originally, our story board was meant to show the divide between three social groups, the mayor, who is powerful, the two teenagers, who want to stop the mayor from destroying the town and the man who has the contacts and ability to bomb the town.

The mayor is represented as a member of an authoritarian social group, he is higher than the other characters in the story board, and again is higher than the bomb man in the prelim. His power is shown in the worm's eye view that is given of him, showing him in an angle that gives him the appearance of being tall and towering over the camera. This social group could be summarised as a group that is stronger and gives orders to others who are expected to do as is said by him.

The bomb man is shown almost exactly the opposite, he is shown from a bird's eye view, which implies that he is weak and vulnerable. Although he has more lines than the mayor, there is a clear divide in social groups as he has to obey what the mayor says despite his efforts to persuade him otherwise. This social group could be summarised as a group that is weaker and lead by other more dominant people, like teacher in a school who is answerable to the headteacher.

The final social group is the two teenagers who are trying to save the town from being destroyed by the zombies and the bomb. They argue against the mayor's decision to bomb the town and they fight the zombies. In this sense they are represented as being rebellious, a stereotypical social group for teenagers.

 

However, we were unable to complete the full original storyboard and the prelim was shortened quite drastically. In our short film, we show the mayor having a conversation with the bomb man.

We attempt to make the bomb man look less powerful by using the bird's eye view of him. Also the bomb man is in the shot during the conversation between himself and the mayor, in an over shoulder shot. This makes the mayor appear anonymous and sinister. The camera only falls on the mayor to show his glaring gaze in a medium close up shot which was taken on a slight worm's eye view angle. The angle was used to show him as more powerful.

We didn't get time to include the teenagers social group.

 

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

The storyboard and the shortened film clip could be from the media producers of the TV series, The Walking Dead, or the more recent World War Z by Skydance Productions and produced by Paramount Pictures. It would be produced by one of these institutions and follow a similar style to the two examples just given.

 

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Teenagers who are interested in sci-fi and apocalyptic genres such as 2012

 

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

I was given a short introduction to using a camera and filming. Also I learnt how to edit the films by cropping them, re-arranging them, adding music to them and changing the audio in them.

Claudia and Lily's First Short Video.

It took us quite a few attempts to get this final product and we had to cut the original storyboard a lot, but eventually we managed to create this which includes a few match on actions and an over the shoulder shot. There are lots of things we could have done to improve. For example, when it was Toby's lines, we could have filmed from Ollie's side, doing another over the shoulder shot. Also, we could make the audio between the two characters louder to prevent it from being drowned out by the music. One final improvement, we could have made the film longer, adding in some of the scenes that we had cut out. What went well was the timing of the music to the clip, it created an eerie tension that was appropriate to the clip. From this small project, I have learnt not to use the camera vertically! And that match on action shots make a film more professional.

Magazine Front Cover and Contents Page

I took ideas from other magazine front covers and contents pages such as OK! and Kerrang to give me an idea for the layout and the style of a front cover and contents page. I used publisher mainly but also paint to make some edits to the background image. I struggled with uploading it on to the blog ! But also found it difficult to put it all together so that there was not too much nor too little white space. I would use better quality images if I were to improve it.