looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Looking back at my preliminary task, it shows that there was hardly any editing put into it except cutting scenes and adding a title. The main thing i have had to work with while creating my final product, is working with titling and editing. In my final product there is also alot more advanced camera work, in the preliminary prject we mainly only used close up shots as in our opening title sequence we used a variation such as long shots, mid shots, and close ups. in the final product i personaly worked more with the editing, i cut almost all of the scenes and added most of the titles and placed different effects and transitions, and also chose and added the music. In the preliminary task there is no music which i think makes it obvious that something is missing. It also includes dialogue which we dont have in our full product. We have a very short voice over which was imporvised just to tie together what happened at the end. I think that my use of technology has greatly improved from the preliminary task 'Do I Look Bothered' to our final product 'Narcissist'.

Animatic Storyboard

For our Animatic Storyboard we took stills of the drawings that were created before we started filming. We then uploaded the stills onto iMovie and set them to a certain speed and added the other peice of music that we had as an option for using as our final product.

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

While making this product the main focus was to work with iMovie. Using Imovie alot before, i already knew hot to cut clips and add transitions and the main basics. When it came to adding titles, it got quite complicating due to the small selection of fonts and positions. There were a few problems because we had a certain idea of where we wanted our titles places but couldnt due to the fact that they werent so flecible. We overcame this problem the best we could which was by being flexible and using the closest positions, to what we origionally wanted, that fit each cut from the choice that we had.

In our opening sequence there was a part where we wanted a slideshow of still photographs, like the how i met your mother opening theme.


iMovie didnt have a way in which we could do that so we dicided to try using iDVD.
On iDVD there is opening title themes where you add in images to make it like a mini opening title, but it could also be used to create a slideshow for our matter. Each one could only have 7 images and we wanted more so we created 2. We learned how to do this. The problem was when it was complete transferring it to iMovie where we needed it to be, Due to the fact that iMovie and iDVD are two different formats, importing it was difficult. We had to burn it to a disk and import it from there in a different format. Once it was in iMovie it couldnt be edited so we had to make it perfect first and have the title how we wanted it.
We used a friend to create music to fit to our product because none of us could do it ourselves. When we had our opening title sequence almost complete we burnt it to a disk and gave it to him with the idea of music that we wanted, and explained to him what we thought would fit best.
We over-estimated iMovie at first and thoguht that we would be able to change the text from tube cuts into titles, but we never managed to learn how to do so. ANother thing we had to learn about technologies before we got to editing was how to use the camera and tripod. I wasnt filming so i didnt need to learn too much about the camera but i helped with the tripod at times. I had to learn how to adjust the tripod to get the camera in certain positions, etc. I knew alot about what we were working with while constructing this product, but i still learnt a few useful things throughout the process.

how did you attract/address your audience?

One way How i met your mother attracts an audience is through a facebook group which contains, videos, images, and news on the tv show itself. I think this is a good way to attract an audience especially for a 'young adult rom-com.' Most young adults use social networking and a main one is facebook. This could really attract a good audience for our product.
From looking at different ways that films and tv shows had used to attract/address their audience as a group we decided to creat a facebook group that we would add videos to and update posts on our film. I think this is an effective way to attract the right audience you are looking for to veiw your film. I think that social networking was the best way for us because our target audience is both genders aged 17-25 and those are usually the people using social networking.
I think our chosen music also helps attract and audience due to the type of music we had selected.

What would be the audience for your media product?

I think that our media product would appeal mainly to girls and boys from the age of 15-25. The media product should be rated 15 because it contains strong language and mild sex refrences and the use of alcohol.



It would probably be better for british people. My product is about some mates going for a night out. The opening sequence flashes between the clubs and bars they go to and them getting ready. The audience would have to be interested in the whole 'club scene' for them to enjoy it.





The reason i think it could be directed towards both genders is because the group of friends is both girls and guys. There is a tube sequence in the opening which takes a relatively big role so viewers would have to understand what the underground is and the way it works.



Our film might also attract an audience similar to the audience that the tv drama 'Skins' attracts. It is the same sort of thing. Although we didnt look at skins while creating our product now comparing them they have a number of similarities, such as the actors/actresses and the whole 'young adult scene'.

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

I think the best way to distribute our product would be mainly through social networking, and audience involvement. Our product could be promoted through parties for cast and crew at different featured clubs and bars in our title sequence. Different clips from our product could be shown on these nights, and they could be advertised through social networking such as facebook, myspace, twitter, etc. The reason for club promotions would be because our product is revolved around a night out in London, and about the nightlife of a certain age group. We could distribute our music online, and in bars and clubs which might attract a certain audience. Our product could also be distributed to our target audience through mini trailors on places such as facebook which would be where most of our target audience would be linked to.





we created a facebook group to help distribute our product.


One of my mates is a DJ so i contacted him and asked him to create a mix that would fit well to our opening sequence. He came up with a couple ideas to choose from. As a group we chose the 30min mix and i cut it to the parts that we liked and mixed different parts of the mix together to get the perfect piece for our film opening. The music would help distribute our product because it is the type of music that our target age group would listen to. As our music is a big part of our product another medium of distribution could be itunes.
Here is the link to his website where his music is uploaded to: http://soundcloud.com/joshlake

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our media product represents the 17-25 age group. You see 18/19 year olds getting ready at the beginning of our product while getting different shots of the club scene mixed in. In the first shot you see a girl putting on her make up in the mirror then it jumps to a shot of the name of a club, then it cuts to a girl putting her shoe on then goes to a guy sending a text to a mate about going out, and so on. This goes on for the first part of our opening sequence then it goes to the tube part of our opening titles. At the end there is a little dialogue part of 2 guys saying bye to 2 girls the next morning and basically kicking them out before they even had a chance to get dressed. The end part just shows the personalities of those guys through the ways they were acting and the things that they were saying. Our music also helps us represent the particular social group that we aimed to attract. With the whole mise en scene, filming clubs etc, the music helps tie everything together to create a general feel of the particular 17-25 age social group that enjoys partying and having fun.
Our product has similarities to the tv drama 'Skins'. 'Skins' is a British teen drama that is about a group of teenagers in Bristol throughout their two sixth form years. The plotline explores issues including dysfunctional families, personality and eating disorders, substance abuse, sexuality, teenage pregnancy, mental illness and death. Our product may not include all the same issues but it does include a few.

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

One way in which our media product uses forms and conventions of real media product is through the 'How I Met Your Mother' opening title sequence. We found one of the openings for the tv show on youtube and really liked the idea. We thought that showing the night out of the characters in our opening sequence through a slideshow of stills would be a good way to get the message through to our audience. We took the idea and developed it further in our own way using iDVD. if it was to be compared to the origional from how i met your mother it wouldnt look as if it had been used for our idea. Thats how different the two were. At first we thought that it wouldnt be possible to complete but then we managed to follow through with our idea with lots of challenges. Our media product developed the origional idea from how i met your mother and turned it into an idea of our own in a way. The stills slideshow made our title sequence look more unique and varied. We challenged the origional 'how i met your mother' title sequence by showing it to our audience in a different way. Also we didnt use it as the whole thing as it can be repetitive and boring but we used it as part of our sequence.

Working with titling

We left the titles till we had most of our footage in order to fully draft and create appropriate material. We faced a couple of issues because our cuts were too fast to have titles on them. Originally we put titles where we wanted but then realized that there was not enough room to add all of them. The tube sequence was too short to feature titles so we had to alter the arrangement. I attempted to creat a slideshow on powerpoint where the titles would all come at once. However when we imported it to iMovie it did not import with the transitions that we wanted it to have. It did not turn out how we desired and made our opening sequence look low budget. We decided to adjust the titles and put them how they were initially but simply work around the fast cuts. I had to remove the titles by deleting the whole cut and reimporting it. I then had to find ones that we had used before and cut them to the place they were at first so it would still flow and look professional. I also had to incorporate the original transitions into the footage so that our piece would run smoothly without breaks . Now we will work on adding titles where necessary and make it as easier to understand and watch.

On the last two days before the holidays...

My group tried to do the animated title sequence, where we take stills of our storyboard and put them together on imovie with our music. In the lesson i took the stills and imported them to iMovie, however the transitions, and speed of the slides was quite difficult especially when we had the music to add. Ofcourse the stills were faster than our actual opening title therefore it was way too short and quick, and adding the music was difficult. I didnt manage to complete this as i was away for the last lesson. The rest of my group might have done so.

Day 15

Max wasn’t in the lesson today but Awwal and I added titles. We got most of the titles that needed to be added in the best places possible. We worked with the different fonts for the titles and the different ways that they would appear.

Day 14

We worked as a group in editing and adding transitions in todays lesson. We cut a few things today and made certain shots shorter because we thought that they were too long. We added transitions where we thought they were acceptable and watched our sequence over and over to see that everything was right.

Day 13

There was a problem with picking up the disk that we had burnt in the friday lesson so max didnt get it to the person that was making our music. The only other time we can get it done is over the half term. Today we just got our opening sequence as finished as we could. we did this by adding transitions and titles and making sure everything fit together. We still need to work a little bit more on the tube scenes because they arent quite finished yet.

12th Day

Today we got everything in order and ready to burn to a disk. The title sequence wasn’t complete but max had to take it to London to give to a friend who was going to make our music for us. He had to have a copy of the disk so that he could see what would fit and how long everything had to be.

Day 11

We continued editing the footage of Cambridge club exteriors. We compared the similar shots and deleted the ones that we didnt want to use. We put them in the correct places. Today we also filmed one quick shot using my phone. I filmed max sending a text saying 'Are you coming out?' This took alot of time because we couldnt get a camera that would have the text in focus. We finally managed to do it and it looked quite good. We imported this and cut it shorter and placed it in the appropriate place.

10th Day

Max and Awwal had gone out in Cambridge and gotten a lot of footage of different bars and clubs in Cambridge. When we had our next media lesson we imported this work, and started editing it. By the end of this day we had all our footage in order and cut to the length we wanted each shot. Once we had done this we started adding different transitions to certain areas of our opening sequence.

Day 9

Today when we were looking over what we had from start to finish we realized something wrong with the stills that we had and had to fix the problem, burn it to a disk again and burn it to iMovie when we had a chance. We also had another stills slideshow to make because there was meant to be 2 because only 7 photos fit in each one and we needed more than that. We created the 2nd slide show and also burnt it to a disk ready to get imported to iMovie.

8th Day

Today we to media and Charlie had talked to another student in the U6 film lesson. This student knew how to get our stills slideshow onto iMovie. He came to the lesson and did it for us. While we waited for it to imort to iMovie we continued editing the footage that we had. We realized we needed to get the exteriors of London such as outside the clubs, so we discussed how we were going to do this. The problem was that none of us could get to London on time to get the footage. We decided that we could just use Cambridge for out exteriors.

Day 7

I finished the stills piece today in the lesson but then faced a problem. The problem was that iDVD and iMovie aren’t linked so we couldn’t get the slideshow of stills onto iMovie. We spent most of the lesson trying to figure out how to do it but we couldn’t. We ended up burning it to a disk and were going to see what we can do tomorrow.

Day 6

We went through the stills as a group and picked around 20 photos that we thought would be good for the slideshow of stills. I came up with an idea that we could use iDVD to make the slideshow because it would be more interesting as iDVD have a lot of different themes. When we went on iDVD and started experimenting with different things we finally chose a theme that we liked and decided to stick with it for our stills piece.

Day 5

Today we edited all of the shots that we had so far. We worked with speeding up and slowing down certain shots. We speeded up certain shots because max did the tube sequence hand held and so a lot of the shots were very shaky.

4th Day

Max traveled to London and filmed the abstract tube sequence. He redid the cuts of the key in the door. Today as a group we did a lot of filming and editing. We imported our footage from the past 3 days onto iMovie and started editing it a bit and cutting things we didn’t want and putting everything in order. We also went to barnabus and took the shot of the other girl doing her hair. In this we used jade and I was brushing her hair for her while max filmed it. That night we went to The Regal to shoot the stills for this we got some friends to participate.

Third day of filming

On the third day of filming we did the key shot. This shot is max putting a key in a door. Awwal filmed this by holding the camera. This was a really short shot and we couldnt seem to get it right. We didnt have time to redo the shot where Awwal picks up his belongings, so we planned to do that the next time we were filming. When we looked over the shot we thought that the door we were using looked low budget, and didnt look like an actual front door of a house. Max is going to do that shot again using his front door of his house in London.

second day of filming

On the second day of filming we filmed the first shot again but this time it was a close up, and still only 2 seconds long. We improved it because it was just my face which is effective because it shows that the reason for the shot is me putting on lipstick and not just looking in the mirror in general. After we completed that, We filmed the scene where Awwal picks up his keys, phone, and all his other belongings. This shot was around 4 seconds long and was taken as a midshot. Then they filmed me putting on a high heel. This was a close up and was only 3 seconds long. We did both of these a couple times so we could make sure that we had a good one. When we looked over what we had filmed, we were happy with the close up and the shot of the high heel, but the shot with awwal picking up his things from the table didnt work out too well due to the room that we chose to do it in and the lighting.

1st day of filming

On the first day of filming Awwal, Max and I filmed the first shot in Max's room at Barnabus. We set up the camera and then they filmed me putting on lipstick in the mirror. It was a midshot and we did it a couple times so we could get it right. The shot was only 2 seconds long. When we looked over it we decided that it would be better as a close up shot and planned how we were going to film it the next lesson.

My film idea is a Romantic Thriller. Part of the film takes place in a club and the opening is based mainly on flashbacks. The basic story line is about a girl and her boyfriend who were deeply in love and got in a blow out fight. It ended with him taking it too far with his anger management and stabbing her where she ends up in a coma.
Shes happy and ignoring what had happened with the argument and thought that it was over. She has no idea that he has been occasionally following her and knowing where she was. He had been threatening her but she didnt think anything of it. She goes for a good night out with her friends not expecting anything bad to take place, nevermind her expecting a visit from her ex boyfriend. When she gets to the club she all of a sudden sees him in a corner and she immediatley knew she was in trouble. She ends up being stabbed by him and being put into a coma.
The movie opening is her waking up from her coma and having a flashback (like in Misfits) of what had happened inside the club. There are flashbacks of relatively important parts of the film but not too many to give away what is actually going to happen. Throughout the flashbacks there will be a voice over (at some parts) of the girl talking about what happened. The point in the opening is to make people want to watch it and curious about what is going to happen next.

Genre: romantic comedy
Target audience: teen, more female than male
Style: club setting, dark at some points but at the same time bright. Throughout the flashbacks she is moving really fast looking nervous and scared while her everyone and everything surrounding her is at a normal speed. The shot will be take from front on.