Introduction

My name is Chris Trotman. I have spent the last year learning all aspects of media in great detail, and how much effort people make when producing a film. Before doing Media Studies, I was not fully aware how many technical skills were involved in such projects. Having just completed a very short film, I have now realised how much work, ability and teamwork is required. I would therefore like to say thank you to everyone who has helped make the production of my film possible. I am very grateful to my teacher and to my friends who said that they would help me out when I needed them.

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

Most people’s perception of a gangster film would tend towards the view that it would contain extreme violence, greed and corruption. Often the genre would involve Italian/American “families” who fight each other for control, without any conscience.
In my questionnaire I asked, “What do you think are the attributes of Crime/Gangster films and their actors?” The top answer was “violence”, and from the majority of gangster films I have seen, I would agree with this view.

Therefore, my partner and I used violence as the main theme in our film. The outcome of our film, and also the way the characters treat each other demonstrates this clearly.

There are many different British Gangster films, for example Green street Holigans, Lock Stock, Snatch, Revolver and many more. This website show lots of different British gangster films: http://www.virginmedia.com/movies/movieextras/top10s/gangstermovies.php

When analysing films I chose to analyse The Untouchables, Green Street Holigans and The Italian Job (2003 version) I thought that if i chose the new Italian Job and my partner chose the old Italian Job we could get a good comparison of how the genre of crime/gangster films has changed over the years.















Italian Job (2003) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317740/
Italian Job (1969) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064505/

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

As you can see from our film, most of the characters are men, with the exception of the barmaid. We were trying to get across to the audience the arrogance that these men show towards women by treating them as less than equals, and with little respect. It is obvious we have not portrayed teenagers in a good light in our piece. Indeed, if you were looking at this film and you hadn’t experienced how teenagers behaved in this country, then you might think that this is representative of all young men’s actions.

The characters are all meant to be from South London and, without exception, are a threat to anyone who argues with them. The two gangs in the film are sworn enemies and have had many conflicts over the years. We do not find out the background to this hatred in the film, but we can tell it is a deep hatred.

We wanted the actors to wear very simple plain cheap clothes to symbolise that these people are from a poor background. You can see very clearly from these two pictures what we wanted to create. The picture from the film Green Street Hooligans is in many ways similar to ours, the characters are standing in the same way, hands crossed, or hands in pockets. Also the clothes are similar, dark dingy plain coloured clothes.

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

From my questionnaire, the six top films that people have seen are all made by 4 different studios: Universal Pictures, Universal Studios, Paramount and Warner Bros. Because such a wide scope of institutions invest and supply these films you can see that the demand for crime/gangster films is high. This shows that a wide range of people enjoy gangster films. Indeed, the film institutions listed above only distribute world class films. I thought that my film had most in common with Green Street Hooligans. This is distributed by Baker Street and OddLot Entertainment.

It is apparent that if our film was as good quality as these films, a company like OddLot Entertainment would distribute our film, not companies like Paramount, who are more prestigious. However, our film is a low budget film, with no famous actors.

Our company which my partner and I chose to use was called Pub Crawl Ltd. We thought this was a good name as our initial idea was to do with a pub crawl.

Who would be the audience for your media product and why?

There isn’t just one type of audience for gangster films. For example, the top rated film of all time that has been watched by millions is a gangster film, The Godfather. This would indicate that the appeal for these type of films is very wide, with an audience to match.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068646/ - This is the imdb page of The Godfather Part 1.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385002/ - This is the imdb page of Green Street Holigans.

In our questionnaire we asked, “Do you enjoy Crime/Gangster films?” Out of 20 people ranging from 13 to 56 years old, only 1 person disliked them. This shows that age is not an issue. Generally men enjoy gangster films more than women, as there is usually violence, a lot of blood and swearing, and this doesn’t appeal to everyone.

I think the rating for our film should be a 15 as there is some strong languange and uses of violence and threat. This enables more opportunity for a better box office... as 18 films restrict possible audience members.

How did you attract/address your audience?

We attracted the audience that watched our film by inviting friends in our year group and anyone else who might be interested, by word of mouth. The audience were all aged between 15 - 24. In the questionnaire we conducted before shooting the film, half of the people who filled it in, were in the 15 – 24 age group. During the showing of our film we gave out another twenty questionnaires. From the questionnaires we received back, there was mostly positive feedback. We have changed the few things that people weren't happy with.

The audience said that our film was hard to understand in parts, but they thought it was good that all the characters were the same age as the audience watching it. They thought this was appropriate because they could relate to this film through their own personal experiences, some of them rather similar.

The people to whom we gave the questionnaires after the shooting of the film were not just friends, but other students in our year group. This meant that the questionnaire wasn’t biased, as our friends would write positive feedback about the film.

We would hope!

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

When we first started to produce the film, all the editing work was new to both my partner and myself. As a result, we have both learnt so much. We used Adobe Premier Pro CS3 to edit our clips. We were taught how to use the programme and, as the process is quite repetitive, we both soon picked it up and we were able to edit the clips and put them all together.

It was also very enjoyable to experiment with the special effects, and find what suited the genre of the film the best. It did however take some time to watch all the clips, then name them and decide which bits we wanted to keep. It was very helpful that we took lots of shots of the same scene.

When turning on the video recorder we waited 5 seconds before starting the action, and the space between our clips helped us with our editing in the end. Using the dolly to film the tracking shots was rather hard, as we kept rolling the tripod too far off the tracks! Soon we were able to get the hang of it, and the scene worked well. This is an example a dolly camera on the tracks, this is not the same one as we used, but this is very similar.