On a technical level the conventions of continuity worked well in our film.
Through Finalcut we were able to work a different pace of editing compared to the task in our previous year in AS media studies when we only had Imovie at our disposal. We ensured all clothing remained same during shots on different days down to small details such as jewellery. However this wasn't always a problem due to the filming for most sequences being finished in one entire lesson or day. We ensured constant matches on action throughout the first sets of shots in the opening sequence. The music video at the beginning proved difficult to film in order to sustain continuity, as multiple shots from many different angles were needed in order to create a affective opening sequence.
For our film we set out to create a documentary that was both humorous and entertaining. Featuring key elements comedy and drama that 'glamorised' the protagonist Lola Rouge, but in an often ironic fashion. The storyline focuses on a fallen 'star' who has now succumbed to a more working class lifestyle, but still trying to grasp and retain any shred of her once successful life. Our key inspiration for such a character in this genre came from Kerry Katona. Her show 'Kerry Katona what's the problem?' focuses on her self-destructive career, never letting adversity get her down and always claiming to be a 'new person'. Through research into this genre which border lined both reality and documentary television, we picked up a variety of features to put into our film to reflect the conventions of this 'celebrity culture' genre of documentary television.
'Kerry Katona what's the problem?' dramatises her life. And often the case in these genre's a relatively D-list celebrities life is glamorized (Katie - what she did next? being another example). We set out to play on these ideas and showed Lola's character and story in a more ironic fashion rather than glamorising pathetic day to day events of often deluded celebrities. We wanted to provide both humour and entertainment for the audience. Our documentary followed a classic 'armchair style' set of interviews which often cut to 'fly on the wall sequences' showing Lola often in her 'true colours'.
This form of satire is often common for such documentaries and shows, often shown on Channel4. As mentioned, the film used common attributes of documentaries used for irony and humour. A few sections of the film used a 'handheld' style of filming, often in places where Lola would not have wanted cameras around, creating a realistic effect for such scenes. A handheld style of filming was seen in 'Pete Doherty in 24 hours' which I had used in pre-production research.
http://www.mtv.co.uk/shows/pete-doherty-in-24-hours
A high amount of effort was put in place creating a system of bleeps in order to create a censor both physically on screen to black out mouth movement and a literal 'bleep' sound blocking out the swearing.
A classic convention used in such genres - even though aiming for a pre-watershed timeslot and audience we thought blocking out swearing in the film would emphasise Lola's character even more and add to the certain element of irony we set out to achieve in our film. The beginning of our film and what we liked to see as our title sequence, featured a music video of Lola before her infamous downfall. Using the Kelly Rowland track we followed classic conventions of a music video. A costume with a glittery texture was chosen to create an effect and a variety of shots, particularly a tilt shot using rhythmic editing reflected a typical pop music video and often signature title sequences.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3ov9USxVxY
Ray of Light - Madonna, an example of a classic music video featuring sophisticated use of rythmic editing. The music video was burned onto a DVD which we could play on a television screen prior to filming the base interview sequences.
As mentioned above, the 5 minute extract was created with a great deal of humour in mind. With the use of classic documentary features, such as the 'fly on the wall' sequences and the subtitles, we hoped the documentary would push all the right buttons in being both entertaining and ironic. The show related to the 'tabloid culture' allowing audiences to gain an insight into Lola's life (as mentioned, a life far from that of a typical glamorous celebrity). Richard Dyers theory of entertainment showed 3 key elements in our film.
-Transparency (the exposed character)
-Intensity (the emotional highs and lows during the film)
-Energy (the music and dancing featured which provided a 'feel good' factor within)
The film set out to make people and laugh and this is an obvious challenge, in all aspects of creating the film from the script to the actual editing of the film. Overall I feel happy that our film worked in creating humour. Using sarcasm through the actual editing and playing on classic features such as the censored swearing worked better than focusing entirely on the actual dialogue and script. Subtle features such as the subtitles created through the 'text' feature in Finalcut proved successful in creating humour within the film.
'Kerry Katona what's the problem?' and 'Katie Price the next chapter'
http://www.mtv.co.uk/artists/kerry-katona
http://www.itv.com/entertainment/reality/whatkatiedidnext/default.html
These two shows are examples of shows in comparison to ours we used for inspiration in terms of content particularly the characterisation of Lola. Many details in our project came from inspiration gathered from such television shows. We used Kerry Katona as a key figure in creating Lola's character - her brash personality and her style of clothing etc' all came from looking at such figures seen commonly in the media.
How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?
The genre was obviously kept in mind when creating our two advertising products. We opted for simple designs in terms of both the poster and the script of the radio trailer - however this didn't destroy the genre of comedy which was central to our film.
The poster proved easy to create through Photoshop. We selected a simple palette of colours from what was provided, a pink font on a plain black background. The pink relating back to Lola's strong female character.
There was emphasis on the world Fall with a slight tilt of the words to relate back to light hearted subject of the documentary. We gained the idea from posters of comedy films. Rom-com posters in particular, even though not to do with our gender the concepts behind a simple design for a romcom poster were easily applied to our poster too. Such as the emphasis on certain words and the simple design creating an overall light hearted and positive look to the poster.
The upbeat nature of the documentary was reflected in the radio trailer. The title track used in the film 'Love takes over' was used again for the trailer. Using Finalcut I was able to create a sound bridge of the piano used in the song. Through this editing a successful backing track was created to last long enough for the dialogue to finish. When the dialogue ended the music reached a crescendo and broke directly into the chorus.
The trailer featured dialogue taken from the film, which basically reflected Lola's stereotypical character. Both the poster and trailer worked well in terms of advertising the product. Each of us designed our own poster and came together with highlighted aspects to combine in our final poster.
The black and white images seen here on a poster advertising 'Anvil' worked well and we used a similar design on our final poster. With the attention entirely on the fallen stars in the movie/documentary 'Anvil', we drew our own comparisons and thought the black and white image would relate back to Lola's character and all attention being on her own story.
Overall the two advertising products rounded all up together well with the final film. The poster was simple and eye catching and the trailer with limited effects and an effective sound bridge sampling the piano from the music grabbed your attention. The entire sequence summed up Lola's stereotypical character and her rise and fall in 30 seconds.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
To gain insight into our audience we set up a questionnaire for our fellow students to fill in. We researched our target audience, and moulded how our film would look around our results. Our group got together and also used several aspects of documentaries we were fond of to try and work into our film. Our target audience was 16 - 24 year olds and falling into this category ourselves it was an easy group to try and appeal to through our project. We set up a YouTube account first off to post the finished film on.
http://http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T2t0hXf0C0
Through this, a comment was made on how the 'hidden camera' shots had been edited. Although good, the viewer had commented that the fonts should have been a bit more subtle in order to create a realistic effect.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the all stages of creating our film, we used multiple resources. The technology at our disposal compared to our previous AS year in media studies had greatly improved.
For the research stages, our main tools were any websites and programs we could find to help us in creating our film. This website http://www.blogger.com/ allowed us to keep a detailed blog of our work updating and adding to it whenever needed and was easily accessed from outside of college. We created the questionnaire and produced the results on an Excel spreadsheet to gain an insight into our target audience through other students. YouTube allowed us to research and gather ideas from other documentaries and programs relating to our concept. We explored the world of celebrity culture and gathered ideas from how television channeled it, through such shows seen here on BBC3.
During the planning stages we continued to use Blogger to share our work in one place. Storyboards were made by hand and we used digital cameras to take shots of the costumes, props and locations. At this stage we used Photoshop for the first time to create the superimposed photos of Lola. Compared to previous programs I had used in the past, Photoshop allowed us to create the perfect images to place in the frames to be physically shot in the film. The magic wand and lassoo tools
allowed us to easily select which aspects of the pictures we wanted, the original photos we found were simply images we found on the internet we thought would fit correctly.
Amy's head or body was then simply pasted on top with some rough editing around the edges to give the 'D.I.Y' feel we wanted to achieve with the pictures. Along with creating props we had to aquire music legally to use in our film. We chose 'When Love takes over' by Kelly Rowland. We contacted her record label and the website gave us details on how the track could be used. In our case the use of the music for educational purposes was allowed.
Love Takes Over ft Kelly Rowland (David Guetta)
To actually create the film we used a Sony HDV1000 camera, http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/product-HVRHD1000U/
a much more advanced camera to which we had used before. Despite given a tutorial on how to use the camera adjusting to work it just right to get perfect shots proved tricky at first, but after practicing we worked well throughout filming. The camera allowed us to create smoother shots, and building upon our skills from AS we had a big improvement throughtout filming in terms of quality.
Editing proved to be much easier this year, however complicated in some placed not due to the actual program itself, just what we set out to do. In our film we came up with the concept of the censor and beep everytime Lola would swear to add a certain degree of humour. We found a 'bleep' sound on the internet for free and used this in FinalCut. On top of this a black line was placed physically on screen using a text tool. Through a series of key - framing we were able to move the line around the screen tracking Lola's mouth in each split second of the shot.
Although time consuming the end result was very effective and worked just how we wanted. KeyFraming was tricky but it was something which wouldn't have been as easy to have created in IMovie. Along with the bleeps and black lines we also inserted subtitles and other fonts into the film in certain situations.
We used Photoshop again to create our final poster design as mentioned previously, along with FinalCut for the radio trailer which proved easy to just copy segments of sound from one window to another to build up the trailer.
After our film was completed we were able to post it up onto YouTube which was easily accsessible in order to generate audience feedback. However this did prove difficult with the lack of people actually having accsess to a YouTube account to post comments, we generated enough responses, but also interviewed class members and posted the video on Facebook in order to gain a wider feedback.
