Comp 1 - Critical Self Relfection

Brief

Create the titles and opening of a new fiction film (to last a maximum of two minutes). Titles should follow the institutional conventions of commercial cinema. The task may be undertaken individually or as a group. There should be a maximum of four members to a group. In our group of four students, we decided to make a movie about drug trade in school.

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Our movie is a comedic movie about students doing drugs, and the conventions of that particular topic are dark skinned tattooed men, lots of money, lots of drugs, and cartel culture. Our group however, decided to subvert those conventions by doing the opposite. Instead of big guys with menacing tattoos, we have high school boys doing the drug trade. Our decision to do this is supported by the genre theory by Steve Neale, which states that media texts should follow the conventions of a certain genre, but should also be unique. We conformed to the genre by having narcotics traded, drug traders dressed untidily. This is done to attract audience attention by giving them expectations but also be different. The social groups represented are high school boys and teachers. They are represented by having people from the respective groups present in the film. Social issues discussed are issues relating to drug trade, specifically in school. Our film both conforms and subverts stereotypes. For example, the students were dressed up very messily and looked tough (unbuttoned clothes, black hoodie), which conforms with the stereotype that drug dealers are broken and messed up people who do not take care of themselves. We also subvert stereotypes by not having dark skinned hispanic people doing the drug trades, which is one stereotype of hispanic people. Instead, we use high school boys of multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, such as Chinese, Balinese, etc. The preferred reading of the film is that four highschool drug traders are covertly selling drugs at school.

How does your product engage with the audience and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Our target audience are young male adults aged 16 - 23 yo of any racial, ethnic background who shares a common interest in drugs and find immature humour funny. They are targeted in multiple ways. Firstly, the main characters, the four boys, are all high school boys within the same age range of the target audience. By having people of the same gender and age as them, they might feel some type of connection as mentioned in the Uses and Gratification theory by Bulmer and Katz regarding personal identity. Secondly, all of the boys are of different racial and ethnic background. This is important because the majority of drug trades are stereotypically portrayed by hispanic, dark skinned, South/Central Americans, so by having a Chinese student work with a Balinese and Austrian could attract multiracial audiences. My group has decided that the movie will be marketed through trailers and online advertisements. This makes sense because our younger audience are more media literate and are more exposed to and will notice digital advertisements more than they are to physical advertisements. Thus marketing our movie digitally online makes the most sense. It will be released during summer, because that is when kids are having their holidays, giving them plenty of time to watch the movie. We’ve also decided that it makes most sense for us to make the movie streamable instead of having it in the cinemas, again, due to the fact that our target audience use technology more. As for which streaming platform, Netflix would be the best option due its large number of users and its flexibility, because other options such as Disney would require us to conform to their ideology, which is family-friendly content, completely incompatible with out drug movie.

How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

This project, in comparison to previous projects, placed a great emphasis on cinematography, which is something that I am very oblivious and ignorant of. I was able to learn the basics of how to use different camera angles and different technologies such as drones. In addition to cameras, I also expanded my knowledge in editing by utilising applications that I have not touched previously, like Adobe After Effects. We developed our skills in other areas of media studies. By working together with new people who are more experienced and knowledgeable in some areas, we are able to learn from them in said area. I learnt how to operate cameras and utilise different props and natural lighting to our advantage. Certainly our new learnt skills will not only benefit us in the media studies subject, but also in other aspects of life. The numerous obstacles and problems we encountered would never have been resolved if we did not have great teamwork and communication skills. Because each of us have our own schedules that overlap with each other, we always have to make changes in plans when shooting the movie, which helped us master time management skills, which is crucial in pretty much everything. The collaboration of different people in our movie enhanced our capabilities in working with new people and

How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware, and online – in this project?

Technology has a great impact on our group and has expanded our possibilities. Its effect can be felt in all five stages of production, which is research & planning, production, post production, evaluation & feedback, and presentation.  We used websites like YouTube and Wikipedia to gather information about other movies that is within our genre (drugs, high school). YouTube allowed us to analyse other movie openings to give us ideas that we can use for our own movie, while Wikipedia's extensive catalogue of different movies provided detailed information of the movies. We utilised different cameras using different accessories to ensure that our production happens quickly while still looking neat. Our main concern was the stability of the camera, because our hands can get shaky while recording, which would make our movie look amateur. However, with the help of a gimbal stabiliser, it solved the issue. Softwares like Premiere Pro, After Effects, Sound Trap, and DaVinci were the backbone of post production. Those softwares complement each other, and without them, our movie would have looked incomplete. Saving the video and presenting it was a major concern as there is always a possibility of platforms rejecting the upload of the movie due to its large size. But fortunately Google Drive allowed the movie to be uploaded there and there is where we will be storing the movie for everyone to see.