Real Media Products

At AS, we had to make our own film opening relating to a specific genre. Before we could make this film opening, we had to research what a genre really was in relation to film. We then looked at why it is important to the audience. This was a vital starting point since we had to ensure that our opening followed the forms and conventions that a film in the same genre would have. Firstly, we found that film openings had titles and lots of establishing shots. This was universal across all genres. When looking at our genre in particular (historical drama), we found that the film openings were very slow paced, with simple titles and lots of enigmas. We then delved deeper into some of these conventions and analysed them further. For example, we looked at 'Art of the Title' to examine how the titles of a film opening in a particular genre are presented, but also the order that they appear on the screen. We then had to ensure that the titles in our film opening matched the order and style that we had found historical dramas had. We found that the titles faded in and out on the screen with no other transitions or effects, they were black or white and were not 'funky' in any way. We decided to conform to this convention because we felt that it mirrored the seriousness of the genre we had chosen.

After this, we also looked at different theorists and the things that they believed about the narratives of films. It was important that we knew how narrative worked and what the narrative of our entire film would be in order to make a believable film opening. Theorists we looked at included Todorov's equilibrium theory, Propp's character theory, Levi-Strauss' binary oppositions theory and Bathes' enigma codes theory. As well as this, we explored the audience reception theory, hypodermic needle theory and, most importantly, semiotics. This gave us all of the tools that we needed to develop our own film opening. We looked at 'Ghost Ship' in particular as an example of these different theories. Though a horror film, it is also partly set in 1962. This is similar to what we wanted to do with our film and set some parts of the film in the future and some in the past. We looked at how 'Ghost Ship' used camera work, sound, mise en scene and editing to create a certain atmosphere and also looked at how it used semiotics. We learnt how colours could be used to create a certain effect and how well-timed and paced cuts can evoke different feelings in the audience. This allowed us to have a much more intellectual approach to creating our film opening, as we could apply theory to the choices that we made.

During our second year, we had to create our own music video. This was a much greater challenge because we found that the forms and conventions for music videos in different genres of music were much more subjective than the genres in film; there were lots of grey areas and no hard rules to follow. We started by thinking about the different genres and what kinds of songs fit into these. We then looked at music videos and identified which type of video they were: performance (e.g. 'When We Were Young' by Adele), narrative (e.g. 'Because of You' by Kelly Clarkson) or concept (e.g. 'All the Stars' by Ed Sheeran). We then made links between music video types and genre and identified which type of music video a genre would normally have. We then, like when looking at film, developed our knowledge by looking at the work of a couple of theorists. We looked at Goldwin and Vernallis in particular and found examples of each of their ideas in different music videos. This was vital in order for us to make realistic and believable music videos. We decide to make an Indie/Rock music video. We identified that this genre of music commonly had music videos that were performance and concept based. We decided to conform to this convention because the video type was a fundamental thing when making a music video. We then found that Indie videos seemed to have lots of outdoors themes and decided to conform to this too.

As well as the music video, we also had to create our own website and digipak for our artist. When researching different digipaks we had to identify the correct measurements that we needed to have. These measurements were universal across all of the genres. However, when looking at Indie digipaks specifically, we found that many of them had outdoor themes. We conformed to this since it would match our music video. We also found that digipaks were very plain and often included 'washed out' or black and white colours. We decided to challenge this in favour of creating synergy across our products and wanted to stand out slightly. We, therefore, decided to use colour on our digipak and used the colour red on all of our products to allow them to link together effectively.

When looking at websites, we found that many websites for all genres featured many of the same links in the navigation bar. We found that websites belonging to Indie artists usually had their webpages in the navigation bar in the same order. We decided to conform to this as we thought that this was something vital to creating a realistic website. We also decided to look at websites for relatively new artists to see how they are presented. We did this because we were developing a website for a new artist. We found that one of the main things on a new artist's website was a large photo of themselves on the homepage. We decided to conform to this because we thought that this was a great way of getting our artist's face known.