17th November 2015

We did a lot today even with all the technical difficulties the other two members of my group faced, they were still smiling though. 
I've almost completed the goals i set for myself this week I just have to finish some audience theories and then write up a rough draft of what we want to do for our production.

Theoretical Research

Auteur Theory:

The auteur theory holds that a film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as they were the primary auteur (the french word for author.) In law, a film is treated as a work of art and the auteur being the creator of the film, is the original copyright holder. Under European Union law, the film director is consider the auteur/author or one of them auteurs of the film. An auteur is a film maker whose style is very distinctive which becomes the auteurs signature and it also keeps the creative control over their work.

Genre Theory:

The genre theory draws the audiences attention towards what is different between the films the auteur does rather then the similarities such as their signature. It looks at the types and kind of things in a certain genre and the characteristics and features expected in that types of genre, by the audience.

Audience Theories: 

There are three theories - 

The effects model (Hypodermic Needle Model): It's a rather outdated model of audience consumption. The audience is seen as a single mass that passively receives the messages from the text in the media. It implies that the media "injects", like a needle, messages into an unquestioning audience. However, this is seen to be an oversimplified model. Examples of this is propaganda and the internet.

Uses and Gratifications Model: It emphasises what consumes of media products do with them, the power is considered to lie with the individual consumer of the media who is seen to use certain tests to gratify certain needs and interests.Theorists Blumler and Katz postulated that there were five main reasons why audiences consumed media texts:

• To be informed or educated.
• In order to identify with characters and situations.
• To be entertained.
• To enable themselves to socially interact with others (watching, listening or reading together or through discussion of what they’d consumed.)
• To escape from their daily troubles or worries.

The Influence Model: Emphasises the subtler, less direct capacity of the media to influence perceptions. It recognises that people respond to other influences, such as opinion leaders, who may mediate the message of the media. Thus, media effect can be seen as one of reinforcement – closer to ‘influence’ than ‘brainwashing’. Research by Stuart hall found that rather than the autonomous individualised audience members of the uses and gratifications approach, that audience members shared certain frameworks of interpretation and that they work at decoding media texts within these frameworks.

Audience Profiling

Our decision: 

We have decided that our target audience is 12-16, as the production itself wouldn't contain swearing or majorly violent scenes, we could make it 12PG as there might be some mild violence within it. We also felt that because in the productions we did during GCSE we mainly looked at a target audience of 14 and we thought it would better to see what a younger target audience want to see compared to a target audience of teenagers.

A typical member of our target audience:

A typical member of our target audience would be pre-teen / teenager. 
Let's take Abigail for example, she's 12 years old, in her first year of high school and she spends most of her free time on the Internet. Abigail is the demographics of most 12-14 year old which is the audience we want to aim for in our production. Her psychographic factors include, reading mystery, adventure books and comic strips. She enjoys being around her friends and watching a good film, she doesn't enjoy just one type of genre but many types, she says her favourite films is minions  and transformers, she says she enjoys them because they both have loveable characters, she finds them both enjoyable and she enjoys the storyline. Abigail likes make-up which would been seen a stereotypical for a girl but she also enjoys video games such as Minecraft which would usually been seen as a male things. 

17th November 2015

Starting some audience research today, we have decided as I've already said that our target audience is 12+ due to it being an Action Adventure which is usually certificated at 12PG.

Technical Research #2

EDITING TECHNIQUES:

• Cutting onto action: where a shot cuts to another view of  the action, this could relate to uses and gratifications as the viewer gets a better view and feel of what is happening and what they are seeing as they get to see it from many different angles and shots.
• Cutting on Cross-frame movement (the reveal shot): the camera zooms in on something and then pans to reveal the rest of scene, this could build tension, as we could have a close up of someone running from something and then it zooms/pans out to reveal the chase/what they are running from.
• Transitioning to empty frame and letting object/character come into it: gives the shot some extra tension and mystery.
• Cutting on an empathetic part of the dialogue: I feel like this would work very well in my genre as a set-back is a typical convention of an action film which could involve some empathetic dialogue, this would make the scene emotional and full of tension.

Technical Research

FILMING TECHNIQUES:

• Shaky Cam: The shaky cam made popular by the Bourne films. This is used to create tension by bringing the audience into the action by use of erratic movements. This has transformed into one of the biggest pet peeves in action cinema today. It really depends on how it is used and to what effect it is used during the movie.

• Slow Motion: A film technique as old as the genre itself. It is used to either showcase a really cool action set piece or stunt or increase the drama of a particular scene.

• Zoom: Used mostly for dramatic effect with the director having the camera zoom in to an object or an actor’s face during a tense scene.

• Tracking Shots: Camera shots that follow/track our actor(s) throughout the action scene. They can be either edited together or done in one take. Think the hallway scene in Oldboy or the shootout scene in Heat. A brilliant example of this is the opening sequence of The Avengers - Age Of Ultron.

• Quick Cuts/Fast Paced Shots: Most often connected with the styles of Michael Bay and Tony Scott, this style is a really popular form of filming to increase that feeling of high stakes that is necessary in action films in order to become effective.

• Lens Flares: A most recent film technique used to enhance the realism of the scene by enhancing the light reflections in a scene to put you in the action. It can be really annoying when it is overused (Battleship), but it can still be a cool effect in moderation

• Crane Shots: The bird’s eye view shots that are usually seen in fantasy films. Take the wide shots of the location in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

16th November 2015

After me and my group looked at different sub-genres while doing our genre research we finally decided that we will be doing a Action Adventure film opening as we feel that it's an open genre and we can do a lot with it, now we need to get a rough idea of what we want the plot to be so we can onto some storyboards and target audience surveys.

Also, I showed our ident to some people in our target audience of 12+ and all said that it looked professional and great however, my group will be making a survey for them to take so that we can have a clear set of results but also in case people thing we could add something to it or improve it in some way.