Amandeep - From these openings, it gave us a deeper understanding to the codes and conventions of films in this genre. One film in particular, mean girls, for example, followed a number of stereotypes such as themes, stock characters, and stock settings. In our film opening, we have followed the typical conventions that mean girls also follows.
Samia - The boy/girl conflict, for example, is one of the typical themes that runs throughout mean girls. We have included this theme throughout our film. We chose to do this because we decided to anchor the idea of a stereotypical Teen rom/com.
Danielle - Here, are the stereotypical characters from our film. The ‘geeks’ are shown, by reading books and doing work, the one girl also has glasses on which represent the stereotypical geek by them selves that is shown in some of our researched opening clips such as The Princess Diaries. The ‘plastics’ are shown as plastics, by them wearing layers of make-up, trendy clothes, and the actions they are doing, for example, the one girl is texting, and the other is looking herself in a mirror. The popular boy and girl are sitting together talking, as they are stereotypically dating, this is shown by the affection that they have towards each other in the action.
Samia - These images show the main girl in both mean girls, and our film, as both a geek and a ‘plastic’. This shows the similarity between our own stereotypical interpretation, and the stereotypes in the successful film Mean Girls. By showing the change, it shows how different people are when they go to school, to when they are at home, which is the initial idea for our film, contrasting personalities and peer pressure.
CLIP OF CHANGE!!
Amandeep - This is a small extract of our film, in which it shows the change between our character’s personalities.
Amandeep - The institution we chose to distribute our film was Paramount pictures. As it is a vertically integrated company, we would work along side Paramount pictures all the way through making and distributing the film. We felt that this company would be appropriate because it has created and distributed many films that are under the same genre of ours including Mean Girls and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging which are both quirky teen rom/coms.
Danielle - We have sped up the titles for Paramount; however, we think this works as we have put music over the top of it, to lead into our film.
Danielle - Our target audience is mainly teenage girls, when we analysed our questionnaire results we concluded that they would most expect to see pop music in our genre of film. Therefore, choosing the songs we have used would be suitable because that is what our target audience expect to see, and as we were following typical conventions in this genre, we had to ensure that we stuck to what our audience expected to see/hear.
Samia - From our questionnaire, our audience told us, that they would most likely expect to see a high school scene in our film. Therefore, we have based our film in a high school setting. However, due to our plot, we have shown a lot of our opening scene in the protagonist’s home, showing her getting ready for school. However she then goes to the school, and we show that the part of her getting ready is leading up to the setting of the scene in the main part of the film, being the school.
Samia - We attracted our target audience, teenage girls, by using not only the pop music that they asked for, but we also used the characters that they expected the most. We did not create a ‘villain’ character; this is because due to our questionnaire, not many people expected to see one. Therefore we were less likely to confuse the audience by putting in a character they weren’t expecting.
Danielle - We included a slap at the beginning of our film, and then went back by 15 hours, this creates an enigma for the audience because they don’t know why the girl got slapped, and it is explained that the girl is her sister. This may confuse the audience slightly and therefore make them think about why it happened and what happens in the 15 hours in order for the sister to slap the protagonist. As our demographic are teenage girls, the enigma is more intriguing for them to carry on watching because they can relate to the characters themselves and will wonder more about what happens.
Danielle - Whilst editing our film, we used both iMovie9 and Live Type. iMovie9 was where we edited the whole film; we changed the lighting in our film, at the party scene, to a hard light. By doing this, we learnt that lighting is a key element when filming because it changes the atmosphere and feel of the film. We were able to edit our clip down to 0.1 seconds and therefore it gave us more of a clean cut to our shots.
Samia - Live Type is an editing clip for creating titles for our film. We had never used this before so we were able to learn how to create interesting titles that had effects that would match with our film. We realised how important titles were by seeing the difference between titles/no titles, and how important colours and fonts were which add to the final product.
Amandeep - In our preliminary task, we crossed the 180° rule. Due to this we had to flip it around so that it had continuity and made sense, however due to the flipping it made us confused because the layout of the common room was different to how it was in real life, therefore we would have to re-do the filming to make it so that it didn’t look weird for both us, and the audience.
Samia - Due to this mistake that we made during the making of our preliminary task, we had to ensure we did not cross this line again when actually filming our film. We did actually have to re-film the common room scene in our film, however, we didn’t have to re-film it because of this reason, it was because we had rushed it and therefore it wasn’t the best it could be.
Danielle - If we had more time to our film, such as 2:30 minutes, we would probably include a more appropriate full shot of the main character and focus on her image more because this is one of the main themes that runs throughout our film because it focuses on her image and how it changes throughout the film. To focus more on her image we may have included a few more long shots of her or maybe even a few more close ups on her make-up and outfit.
Amandeep - In conclusion we are quite happy with how our film opening has turned out, however we do believe that if we had more time in our film slot, we would have been able to put more detail and focus more on the main part of the film, her different images.
