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

We decided on a 'chick-flick' as our genre, being an all girl group we realised that this would be familiar and we would be able to formulate many interesting ideas. We had all watched many chick-flicks before and began thinking of inspirations instantaneously. 

  We achieved all of these opening sequence conventions. However, we didn't include a massive plot twist. Rather than giving away a lot of the film's narrative, our sequence was purely used to introduce the character. The bump between the two girls at the end would raise questions for the audience, but it is still difficult to guess the plot of the film. The Lizzie McGuire Movie has a similar feature, apart from her brother playing pranks on her in the opening, nothing is given away about the actual narrative. I believe that in a way, this creates a level of excitement for the audience.

Narrative

- Often surround a female protagonist and her problems

- Problems usually relate to family, friends, school or a love interest

- Usually has a love interest

- A sense of good vs bad, and good triumphing

Example - Legally Blonde

Miss Hawaiian Tropic, sorority president, and calendar girl, Elle Woods is a big hit on the campus of her sun-drenched Los Angeles college. She's also got the perfect boyfriend in Warner Huntington III, a wealthy East Coast blue blood. However, Warner dumps her before heading off to graduate law school at Harvard University as he feels she is too bubble-headed for him. Determined to win back her man, Elle enrolls to Harvard, quickly becoming an object of scorn and ridicule. Despite her love for malls, and makeup, Elle soon shows elite Ivy League snobs a thing or two about class, self-confidence, and courtroom victory. Warner ends up wanting to take Elle back, but with her newfound independence she realises that she can do better than him and falls in love with a new friend, Emmett.

Pretty Popular Narrative 
Films of all genres usually follow Todorov's Narrative Structure. Chick-flicks particularly conform to this, so when creating the narrative for Pretty Popular, we kept to the Equilibrium, Disruption and New Equilibrium.

Equilibrium: Both girls partake in their normal morning routine, getting up and getting ready for school.
Disruption: Scarlett arrives as a new student to the school. She notices Lauren as the popular girl who has everything, and as a result of possibly jealousy begins to ruin her. She turns her friends and parents against her and steals her boyfriend.
New Equilibrium: Lauren resolves things with her parents and friends, uncovering the mischief Scarlett has been up to. She realises she is better off without her boyfriend, and possibly realises another male friend who she didn't notice before is her true love. Both girls do not become friends, but make their peace and go separate ways.

Themes

Pretty Popular covers themes of Love, Friendship, Truth and Growing Up, like many chick-flicks do. Legally Blonde was a particular inspiration for these. The whole narrative sparks from her love of Warner, but she realises the truth about his personality and that she can do better than him. She makes new friends along the way, one of which turns into her new lover, and the whole experience of going to Harvard University allowed her to mature and grow.

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

When creating our protagonists and other characters, we needed to take the representation of particular social groups into account. We wanted to utilise stereotypical and conventional representations to emphasise the contrast in their personalities, particularly with relation to state of mind and gender.

Inspirations

The protagonist in chick-flicks is almost always the good girl, she is often flawed but always has good intentions or realises her wrong-doings. 

In Easy A, Olive begins the movie as a relatively unknown and shy junior in a high school in southern California. Although lies are stirred and get out of hand throughout the film, the end produces a new and improved, loved girl. 

Both Gabriella from High School Musical and Elle from Legally Blonde maintain their nice-girl characteristics throughout the whole movie, and provide a constant girly grounding to the films where much is changing around them.

One of our main inspirations for Lauren's character was Lizzie from The Lizzie McGuire Movie. She is attractive, blonde and friendly-looking. Her nice personality and bubbly teenage girl demeanor is very over-played in the opening sequence to the film, but the flaws slowly start to unravel. This is what we intended for Lauren.

Lauren	Scarlett
Gender
Lauren is the very stereotypical and conventional girly-girl in Pretty Popular. The colour pink engulfs her room and her walls are covered in photos. She has a lot of makeup and perfume and wears traditionally feminine items of clothing eg/ Skirt and heels. She seem very chatty when with her friends on the journey to school, which again is a stereotypical female trait. In contrast to all of these conventional traits, Lauren challenges the stereotypical dumb-blonde girl by being enthusiastic and intelligent.	Scarlett is very feminine, but in a less sugar-coated and girly way compared to Lauren. Her colour scheme is very red compared to the traditional girl’s pink. She almost represents the stereotypical sexualised female, with her short skirt and bright red lipstick.
Age
Lauren is presented as a perfect and ideal school-girl. The choice of actress ensures we present the teenage age-group justly, as she does not look too old or too young. We have represented her, again, very stereotypically. She has photos and posters all over her walls, which seems like a very teenage decorative style. She is up to date with fashion; we see her packing her Cambridge satchel before heading off to school.	Like Lauren, Scarlett is presented as a school girl. We can tell by her uniform and school brochures on the table top. Her alarm is on her phone, which exemplifies the modern-day technologically absorbed teenager.  The actress portrays the age we intended well.  We know that the legal age for smoking in the UK is 16, so this also adds to a rough indication of how old the character is. Smoking has increased among young people with ‘570 children a day’ taking it up. We really wanted to emphasise this in our ‘bad girl’ character.
Race
Lauren, our protagonist, is a middle-class white-British girl. We initially wanted to make her Asian, but decided that we wanted to make our film very British. Rather than challenging the stereotypical white lead, we wanted to challenge the All-American ditsy blonde, and created Lauren in contrast to this. However, both her boyfriend and one of her friends are Asian, rather than them being tokens, we wanted to incorporate this to truly reflect the multicultural London that the film is set in.	Although Scarlett is a white British character, the actress portraying her is in fact Indian. We thought this would add something interesting to our piece because it proves that ethnicities are on equal footings.
State of Mind
Lauren, as already stated, is presented as the perfect school girl. We chose to show this in many ways. Clothing often reflects personality, so her smart clothing and satchel were essential. Her room was almost her personality hub. Everything was neat, and had its place, the table tops were clear and the drawer was organised. We ensured to slot other little iconographic extras into her room, including medals draped over her mirror and an A* graded piece of work.	Scarlett’s character is clearly the ‘bad-girl’ of our film. We presented this in various ways. For example, her short skirt, scruffy shirt and red lips. Her bedroom also reflects her personality, with clothes scattered on the floor, messy surfaces, condoms in her drawer and cigarette packets littered around the room. Even the colour red which we associate with her signifies danger and lust.
Improvements
We had originally intended to use a shot of Lauren on Facebook, to show that all personalities in this age group are technologically savvy. This would also help attract the modern audience. However, it was unusable, and if we had a chance to re-do the opening sequence I would definitely try to add it in. Her Asian friend and boyfriend were not intended to be tokens, but may come across that way. So I feel we could have given their characters more depth and screen-time. Her boyfriend is particularly important to the narrative so giving him a moment in the opening would have been ideal.	Seeing as we went down the route of sexualising Scarlett as a female, I feel we could have exaggerated this, so it was more obvious to the audience.

We chose to make our two protagonists stereotypical in more ways than they challenge conventions. This was due to the genre of our film and our audience. We felt that the young girls bracket would enjoy watching a recognisable film to a further extent than something which was new and unconventional.

However, one of our main challenges was inspired by Mean Girls:
Our protagonist is similar to Regina George in many ways, looks, hair colour, style, class etc. However, the difference being that Regina is the 'villain' and our Lauren is the 'hero'. We have challenged the stereotypical 'bad' blonde, and Regina's personality is portrayed more through our characterisation of Scarlett. 

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

Original Ideas

We decided our film should be a co-production, like the majority of British films. 
The Lottery Funding from the UK Film Council would be a likely source of funding for our film. We thought that Entertainment Film Distributors would also be a good production company as well as distributor for our film, with Hollywood successes such as Hairspray, Sex and the City and 17 Again and British films such as Stormbreaker, Run Fat Boy Run and St Trinian's. We then had to decide on a final company to add to our co-producers list. After researching a rather large selection, we narrowed it down to our top 10, from which we came down to these 4:
- Ealing Studios (Dorian Gray, St Trinians)
- PeaPie Films (Stardust, Harry Brown, Kick-ass)
- Ruby Films (Jane Eyre, Tamara Drewe, The Other Boleyn Girl)
- Working Title ( Atonement, Hot Fuzz, Nanny McPhee, Bridget Jones' Diary)


We concluded that Ruby Films specialised in very girly and British films, which would be perfect for us. They have not, however, done anything too similar to our film so it would be a new branch-out for them, yet still staying true to their style. Tamara Drewe, one of their successful films is about a young newspaper writer who returns to her hometown in the English countryside, where her childhood home is being prepped for sale. It has strong British representations.

Progressing Ideas

After doing further research, we realised that a new film similar to ours, Fast Girls, was distributed by STUDIOCANAL. Established in May 1999, STUDIOCANAL theatrical UK has established a reputation for an innovative approach to distribution, with critically acclaimed titles such as Attack the Block, The Awakening, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and I Give it a Year. We thought this would be ideal for us, they have expertise in our field, yet haven't produced too many chick-flicks, so would be open to taking on another.

Production Company

Our Production Company is called Seagull Productions. The title was inspired by passing seagulls on our school field. We thought it was quirky and fun, therefore similar to the atmosphere of our opening sequence. This idea also allowed us to easily create an ident, by actually going out and capturing footage of the seagulls around us.
Seagulls Productions produce films mainly targetted at both genders of the 16-24 age bracket, but also an audience slightly older and younger. They are a British, independent company with aims to produce films that are fun and have relatively universal themes, with predominant genres of chick-flicks, comedies and rom-coms.

Distribution Strategy & Exhibition

As our film is about a new term of school, we would aim to distribute Pretty Popular in the October half term, as student will have just experienced the happenings of our film. The half term also gives people more of a chance to actually go out to the cinema, without it clashing with school-work or other activities. I believe our film has a wide enough appeal to be exhibited in the bigger 'block buster' mainstream cinemas, such as Odeon, Cineworld or Vue. It would be exhibited in 2D. After researching exhibition platforms, the BFI Statisical Yearbook for 2012 showed that cinema viewing is only a very small percentage. We took this into consideration and decided that after cinema showing have ceased, Pretty Popular would be released on DVD and Blu-Ray to account for the audience's needs. A TV Release would be likely on BBC channels due to the pure Britishness of our film.

4) Who would be the audience for your media product?

Being a group of all girls, we thought creating a film for an audience we know a lot about would be an effective idea. Also after doing research, we discovered that one of the most popular cinema-going age brackets is 16-24, and therefore should increase the revenue of our potential film.

Our target audience are British teenage girls, possibly the 16-24 bracket, but also slightly younger. Our film is very British, but we also hope to reach other nationalities.

Our audience is fairly niche in terms of gender, although there are male characters, the film idea is very much directed at females. However, I do believe it could be quite broad in terms of age range. The core audience is teens, but we are also able to reach out to older women as a wider audience group. They will be able to look back to their school years with a sense of nostalgia. The girls may remind them of themselves, friends, or possibly even their daughters. This could potentially be a fun film for mothers and daughters to see together.

Target Audience Profiles

Name: Claire Liu

Age: 17

Occupation: Student

Film Likes: Action, Rom-coms, Animations

Film Dislikes: Historical films

Film Consumption Habits: Watches DVDs every weekend, Goes to the cinema once/twice a month

Name: Alice Brown

Age: 17

Occupation: Student 

Film Likes: Rom-coms, Chick Flisks, Comedies

Film Dislikes: Horror

Film Consumption Habits: Watched DVDs once or twice a week, Goes to the cinema every one/two months.

Audience Questionnaires
I asked some girls in and around our target age group some questions after they had watched our opening sequence. Abigail, a 17 year old, recognised and understood everything about the opening. The split-screens really stood out and became a favourite part for her. She really liked the use of iconography. However, she did pick up on the smaller details that seemed incorrect. For example, blow-drying dry hair, and washing face before going in the shower.

I then asked Nicola, a 27 year old, who had very similar answers. However, her favourite parts were the titles and their interesting animations. She also agreed with Abigail's points about the unusual details, and also thought we could have incorporated more split-screens!

Doing this exercise helped to prove that our audience is able to reach further than merely teenage girls! However, in hindsight, I do feel our film has alienated men. We haven't provided much for them in our film, and certainly nothing in our opening sequence apart from potentially the attractive actresses. They could have increased audience and therefore profit if we had targeted them further.

Although most chick-flicks have the same problem we did in finding a way to attract the male cinema-going audience, Fast Girls, a film quite similar to ours in concept, did just that. It's a girly film that is definitely targeted at teenagers and females. However, they have successfully input features that would attract men too. For example, the theme of sport, comedic aspects and famous British actors.

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

We needed to really think about our target audience when considering how to attract them. Our core teenage-female were particularly taken into account, and most of the appeal in genre, characters, settings, narrative and enigma were focused towards them.

Genre

The genre we chose, chick-flick, targets a very specific girly, female audience. We are clearly putting their needs first and conform to many of the expectations. The opening sequence is very bubbly and upbeat, predominantly carried by the music, Full of Mesh. The titling is pink, and we have heavily imposed this colour in the mise-en-scene of Lauren's shots. The editing is fast-paced to keep the audience enticed, it mirrors the action on screen and the pace at which we would want the film to continue. The montage is not in real time, requiring our audience to suspend their disbelief briefly, but the reflection of what would be a normal routine allows the every day person to fill in the gaps.

Characters and their appeal

Lauren is definitely an aspirational character, and therefore this would be attractive for our audience. Although Scarlett is the 'bad-girl', she is a challenge to the recognisable 'bitchy blonde' and would therefore intrigue an audience.  

Settings & Narrative

The whole idea behind the opening sequence is very relateable for both our core audience of teenage girls, and wider audience of adult women. The morning routine is a simplistic yet effective idea, it is recognisable and memorable. The settings we chose looked warm and lived-in, we thought this was important, as it created a very homely environment for the characters to really develop. We chose to include Lauren and her friends getting on an iconic red London bus, to increase the British feel and further attract our audience.

Enigma

We ensured that our opening sequence raised questions for the audience, as this would be a main factor in them wanting to watch the rest of the film. Who are these girls? How are they related? What will become of this 'bad' girl? Why do they bump each other at the end?

We used Katz and Bulmer's Uses and Gratifications Theory to highly satisfy our chosen audience:

Information: Learn about how character traits affect what would be a normal recognisable routine

Entertainment: Upbeat girly genre, entering the private morning routine of someone else

Identification: Relatable characters, settings and events

Audience Feedback
I held a screening for our opening sequence, and invited some people along to answer a few questions afterwards. It proved to be very insightful, as I was able to see what an actual audience thought about our film from the final product we had created.

Video Summary
- Identified title, genre, themes and style easily
- Liked the way Scarlett wasn't sexualised too overtly, it was nicely subtle
- Liked the split screens and professional title animations
- Thought the target audience was younger than we had intended
- Only identified the audience as teenage girls

Things that came up that weren't intended
- They thought Zenia missed the bus, we didn't intend for this to be the case but this could be another addition to her 'bad girl' character
- They thought smoking would be a big theme in the film. After them identifying this, it seems we may have overplayed this in the opening sequence as it was only meant to be a small addition to her character.

How could we have furthered audience attraction:
- There isn't much of a plot twist to create further enigma

- We could have shown Scarlett to have more of a relateable side
- Lauren could have been a bit more flawed so she was not completely fake and unrealistic

Marketing

When deciding on our marketing plan, we decided to study Fast Girls, a Studio Canal film with a similar audience to ours. Fast girls covered both the main forms or over the line and under the line marketing.

The poster covers a lot of ground. We can see the rivalry between the two protagonists and the big, bold title and setting allows us to guess at the film's narrative. We are also introduced to some of the other characters. The reviews are prominent on the poster to further attract the audience.



The Fast girls website is quite limited. You are greeted with a trailer at the top of the page. There are two options to click, 'trailer' and 'cast'. Their website is more informative than interactive, we would want our website to be the best of both.


The Facebook page provides the interaction the the website does not. There are more trailers linked to the page, as well as pictures of the cast, posters and stills from the film. There are many wall posts from the fans talking about their enjoyment of the film, and the page also covers all the information needed about the film's release.

All the elements have a sense of synergy between them.
The same image is used throughout and therefore similar colour schemes are maintained. This makes the Fast Girls brand more recognisable and appealing to the audience  If anything, this is one feature we would want to replicate in our marketing.


We would advertise Pretty Popular with posters both in female magazines and on buses and bus stops. These posters would have a link to our website which will contain interviews and teaser clips to further audience attraction. We would also aim to base a viral campaign around the website. We would have a TV-spot trailer shown during breaks of TV programmes targeted at a similar audience. Social Media would play a heavy part in our marketing campaign due to our 16-24 audience, for example Facebook and Twitter. We would centre competitions around these pages and will hopefully build up the word of mouth.

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

The use of both hardware and software was essential in creating our opening sequence. We needed to act professionally with the equipment and use it to the best of its ability to ensure our shooting and editing went to plan.

 

Animatic

In preparation for our shoot, we created an animatic with still shots. This allowed us to check that all of our shot types worked well before going out and using the real equipment.

Production

For all of our shooting we used a Legria HV30 Camera, with a tripod and microphone. We had previously worked with this equipment for our Prelim task and for GCSE Media, so it was all quite familiar.

After realising on our first shoot that the majority of the shots were grainy and dark, we decided to use Arri 650W lights on our next. Although they created beautifully lit shots, there were difficulties that came with the lights which we had to overcome. Firstly, they were extremely heavy, so carrying them on public transport required a lot of teamwork. Secondly, they became hot very quickly, and so we had to ensure we wore gloves when handling them. Along with these lights, we were able to use a large reflective disc to direct our light with further precision.

We were able to rotate all the roles so we all got to work with the camera. It was extremely easy to use, and the tripod gave us smooth pans which were ideal. However, our equipment was limited, and we ended up having to get creative and use a skateboard for the tracking shot of Scarlett's feet. We also shot a pan of Lauren's feet walking, although it was not used in the final product, and for this we opted with a swivel plate on the floor to ensure the pan was smooth.

Post-production

We used Adobe Premiere Pro for editing. We were able to cut and shape our clips, followed by grading them using the ProCamp tool, which allowed us to ensure the shots had lighting and colour matches. After using the ProCamp tool, we used a Three-Way Colour Corrector to enhance the pink tones in all of our shots.

I created some voice-over videos of how we used the programme:

As shown in the video above, we used split-screens to contrast the two characters and create a sense of interaction between them both. Although none of us had use this split-screen technique before, we found it simple to understand, even though it was quite time consuming to match.

Before we scrapped the idea, we intended to use Adobe Audition to voice-over our opening sequence. Instead we decided to stick solely to the music. Full of Mesh, which we found on www.freeplaymusic.com
This was a perfect website as it gave us many styles of music without copyright. We decided on Full of Mesh because it was upbeat and fun, which suits the mood of our sequence.

We used LiveType to create our titles. We debated between a girly hand-written font or one that was bold and capitalised. We tested both and found that the hand-written versions were rather illegible, so we used the other in a light pink shade to enhance our genre. By adding animations to our titles and making them part of the shot, it was a nice addition to the fun, uplifting feel to our opening sequence. For example, the hairdryer blowing away the title or the title swirling down the sink.

In hindsight...
- One shot which was difficult to edit was the 'skirts' split screen. Originally, we wanted the framing to be identical. However, we had filmed Lauren's skirt a lot more zoomed in than Scarlett's and it was impossible to zoom out once it had been filmed.
- I feel there were a lot more creative possibilities we could've grasped if we had had more planning and shooting time. For example, better incorporating more of the titles into shots.
- I would advise people that lights always help in interior settings, no matter how bright you might think the room is.

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

Brief for the Preliminary Task:

Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.

 Planning Process

• Brainstormed Initial Ideas
• Decided on a genre to showcase our skills effectively - Thriller
• Did Location Reccies and made a final decision - Media Block
• Created a Storyboard followed by a Shot List - Included the necessary continuity techniques 
• Rehearsal 
• Shot the Prelim
• Edited the footage to a final short clip
• Decided on a title for the continuity clip - Withheld

What We Did Successfully

- Conveyed a good sense of genre in a short amount of time

- Completed all the continuity requirements well

- Rehearsed before hand, so everything was carried out correctly

What We Learnt

The preliminary task enabled us to get a feel for the techonolgies we had to then use for our opening sequence. We shot using Canon DV30s and tripods, and had to use pag-lights as our shots were initially too dark. We then cut and sequenced our clips using Adobe Premiere Pro.

We learnt about what needed to be taken into account before and during the shoot. During the preliminary task, we had to share a location with another group causing complications we had to work around. This put further pressure on the time constraint we also had, having only one hour to shoot. We only had a few weekends to shoot our sequence, and could only film in daylight, so this had to be taken into account too.


The task allowed us to experience the planning stage, which we then replicated for our film opening.

• Storyboard and Shot List
• Props and Costume List
• Floor Plans of Lauren's Bedroom and Scarlett's bedroom
• Location Plan

By the end of the task, we understood how to overcome problems when shooting, for example using the pag-light when realising the shots were dark. We also noticed the importance of continuity for realism in a film clip, so we were then able to ensure this was perfect for our real sequence.

What Could've Gone Better!

Problem in Prelim	Corrected for Opening Sequence?
More varied shots needed	Yes
More creative shots to convey genre	After audience feedback, I think we could’ve gone further with split-screening and title effects
Unusable shots with tripod left in	We often had shots with shoulders slightly in the sides, but this was easily cropped when editing
Shots too dark – pag light needed	We didn’t take lighting into account and shots were also too dark, lights were needed on a reshoot. The ‘drawer’ shot was particularly impacted by this.
Appeal not taken into account	Could have furthered out audience appeal towards males,there isn't anything particularly directed towards them.
Didn’t grade or learn the techniques	Found it difficult to grade many locations and lighting settings.
Lack of time – Unable to reshoot	Lack of time for multiple reshoots, but managed to get everything done successfully.

Overall, the prelim was the perfect preparation for the real film opening task as we gained a better understanding of what we were going to aim to achieve. Even though there were still problems and complications, we avoided the majority as they had been foreseen using our knowledge from the prelim.