Q7 - Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Q6- What have learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Q6- What have learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? from Leah Harte

Q5 - How did you attract/address your audience?

Q4 - Who is the audience for your media production?

Audience survey from Charlotte Revell

Q3 - What kind of media institution might

Q2 - How does your media product present particular social groups?

Q1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media products?

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The nine best shots from our film opening.

 

 Title of The Film:

The title of our film is “Because of them”. We chose this title to emphases the point that the character Charlotte Woods got the sort of life she did because of the women fighting to get the right to vote.

Setting;

We used one main location which was Oaklands museum as it had the feeling of an early 20^th century house that could still be in use today.  We use this setting for the characters to create a connection between the different characters and so that the audience are more interested.

Our Titles

Are titles are in the font Andulas. We also kept them white and not moving. We did this to create regularity between all the titles. We also created them in a white font and not moving due to the fact it films we looked at like Jane Eyre the title were plain. We decided to do this also to keep in line with the genre and to not take anything away from our film opening.

Genre
Our genre is period drama with scenes from the 21st century. We where also looking at films with strong female leads and how they presented them to use similar power. This included looking at camera angle and where they where in the shot. A period drama is a film set in historical time period which is shown with costume and set. However we also have a modern film with Charlotte Wood being in the 21st century.

 

Challenges to common stereotypes:

We use strong female leads which especially for a 20^th century women is against the stereotype of the role of women. We also had a man as an assistant as stereotypically men are higher up than women so having a female boss with a male assistant is challenging the stereotype of a 21^st century office life.
We didn't show any men in beginning in our film to highlight the importance of women. This meant we draw our audience to the women and their story.

Camera Work and Editing;
We used a Sony Handy-cam to film all our shots. We also used tripods to stabilised the shots. We filmed different angles and height to create the best film opening.

For editing we put all the shots in order then added the effect onto Lorna’s shots to create the older scenes. We then added the titles. Finally we added non-diegetic sound to pull our film together.

Story/Narrative:

Our story is about a young successful business women called Charlotte Wood  whose forgotten about the importance to vote until 1 day she is cleaning out her attic and found a picture of her great great grandmother Alice Greenburg a suffragette.
To portey our story we used Levi- Strauss' theory of binary opposites. We used as went Alice Greenburg was being shown we had it in black and white. Where as Charlotte Wood's scenes were all in colour to show a clear contrast of characters and time. We also had each scene being performed in each different period. An example of this is when Alice and her friend where walking we then had a scene with Charlotte on the phone.

Characters:

Alice Greenburg: 23 years old, suffragette, wife, mother, has little say in the community.

Charles Greenburg: Hard head business man, husband, believes his wife should accept her role in                                        society.

Charlotte Wood: Hard head business women, great great granddaughter of Charles and Alice                                           Greenburg, Single, does not believe she has to vote.

Mark Hughes: Charlotte’s personal assistant, works hard to please her, his work is not really                                         appreciated.

Costumes;

To create the 20^th century costume they wore skirts with tights and black shoes. They also wore white shirts and coats with fancy headbands. This was to recreate the clothes of the era.

For Charlotte’s outfit she had to look serious. This means that she wore black trousers and a shirt and black heels. This was to make her look more like a modern day business women. She also wore a faux leather jacket to make the outfit look sleek and modern.

Themes:

Our theme was women empowerment and highlighting the importance to vote.We chose these films as we believe that these are issues that need to be highlighted. Especially, with voting as a lot of young people seem to forget the importance to vote and how hard some people fought to get this right. We also where looking at these themes as at the time of filming this the USA 2016 election where happening so we saw issues around voting. Also as a group we where passionate about equal rights for women so we found this as a common ground went we first where put as a group,  

Films that inspired our film
Sufferagetes- Due to common themes.

 

 Legally blonde- Due to the strong female lead.

 

 Jane Eyre-Due to it being a period drama.

 

 King's speech- Due to being a period drama and political theme.

 

Group Photographs

These are photographs of our group that have been taken throughout the planning and filming sessions we had.

Group pictures from Charlotte Revell

Because of Them Facebook Page

We have created a Facebook page to help with the marketing of our film and to make it more accessible to our target audience.

The link to our Facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/becauseofthemfilm/

On our Facebook page we have included our film poster and a link to the opening of our film on YouTube.

Because of Them Website

This is the website that we designed for marketing our film. It includes lots of information about the film and also includes connections to our film opening and social media sites.

Our Web Address -  http://hartounnoushiansl1.wixsite.com/becauseofthem

This is the homepage for our film opening website.

Because of Them Film Posters

 

We decided to make two film posters for our film and they are shown below. In both film posters we have included the two main characters and they are both in their contrasting costumes to show the different time periods. They are also both holding something that is significant to their character. We have also included the title of the film, the actors' names and some credits at the bottom.

 

 

 

Because of Them - Final Draft

This is the second draft and final draft of our film opening.

Improvements

Based on the feedback given to us by our peers, teachers and our own ideas, these are the improvements that we plan to make on our film opening -

Fix the volume of the sound and music.

Add foley to the shots where there is speech because it is currently difficult to hear what is being said.

Move the titles from the centre of the screen to around the edge. Make sure that they are all visible. 

 Change the place of the film title. Move it from the start of the opening to further along- after some of the other titles.

We will remove the dissolve transitions.

We will remove the train station shot as our teacher said that it was not necessary to the opening and did not make sense with the rest of the parallels.  

Because of Them - Age Certificate

Here we have discussed why we have given our film the Age Certificate of 12.


Our film will include discrimination against women however it will be clear that this is wrong and the main character will be fighting against this discrimination. We will also include some mild violence but most of it will be implied only. There will be no gory details in regards to violence. There will  be some moderately disturbing scenes but the film as a whole will not have this tone. There will be no use of drugs or strong language; there will be moderate language only. There will be no sex scenes and sexual acts will be implied only.

Our film would not be able to have the certificate: Parental Guidance (PG) because it includes discriminatory behaviour towards women and there will be some intense threatening scenes for the characters which could be difficult for children to watch. There will also be moderate language which will not be suitable for children.

Our film would not be a 15 certificate because it does not include the use of drugs, strong sex scenes or strong language. Dangerous scenes will not be in  a great amount of detail and very frightening and intense scenes will not be long or frequent. The violence in our film will also be moderate only and not strong.

Storyboard Evaluation

Our storyboard works well because we include details of what we want to happen in each shot and the angles. However, the timings on the storyboard mean that the video will overrun past our time limit.

The first page of our storyboard works well because we include details of what we want to include and we have also included the transitions that we want to use. However, we have not included all of the information that we could have as we have not included all of the camera angles we used. We decided to remove the part where the letter was posted through the letter box and then Charlotte put the letter in the bin. We felt that this was not a crucial part to the story and since we needed to remove some shots we decided to remove this one.

 

This page of our storyboard is better because it includes much more detail and some of the various shots that we are hoping to include. We have also included the transitions that we hoped to use so that it would make the editing process easier. But, we did not have on box for each individual shot/camera angle and so some of them are grouped together. This makes the storyboard a little bit confusing. We also removed the shot where we see the suffragette painting the poster as we felt that it was not vital to the story. We therefore also did not include the transition where the camera tracks into the poster and then tracks out in the next shot. We tried to incorporate this in a separate part of the opening but found that this was too difficult to do without a tripod with wheels. We also decided to have the suffragette sit on a chair with the baby instead of walk through the house. We did this because we thought of a creative way to film this and felt that it would make the opening more interesting. 



 

The final page of our storyboard is good because it includes detailed descriptions of what we will have in each shot as well as various camera angles we will include. However, like before, we did not put each camera angle/shot in a box on its own which made the storyboard more difficult to read. We also did not include the shot where the suffragette was doing the washing up. We thought it would be better to include a more historical looking object and so had her cleaning a clock instead. We also showed the woman from 2016 looking in boxes in the loft rather than climbing the ladder.



Because of Them - First Draft Feedback

We watched our film opening back and identified the things that we felt needed to be improved. We also showed our opening to the other people in our class and got their feedback on our work so far.

There were many things that the people in our class though went well. Mostly, our peers said that we included a wide range of shots, including a low angle shot which worked well, and the shots that we included looked very professional and creative- particularly the shot from through the banisters of the stairs and in the reflection of the mirror. They also said that the pace of our opening matched the genre of the film, as did the music. Our peers also said that our locations and use of costumes were also effective and helped to make the genre of our film more obvious.

However, our peers also gave us many things that we can improve on. Almost everyone said that our title were too difficult to read and that we needed to change the colour from white to black (we also decided as a group to move the titles from the middle of the screen to one of the bottom corners). We were also told that it would be better if we removed the dissolve transitions and just used straight cutting instead. They also added that we should try to improver the sound in our opening as it is currently difficult to hear the music at some points.

There were some aspects of the opening that people found distracting, the main one being that you can hear the camera movement over the music throughout most of our work. They also said some of the transitions were distracting. It was also mentioned that it was a little bit confusing and it was not always clear what was going on.

Because of Them First Draft

This is our first draft of our film opening, Because of Them.

Film Poster Research

This is the research that we did before designing our film poster.

 

Film Poster Research from Leah Harte

Timeline of Film Opening

This is the timeline of our opening. It includes the times in which everything happens, what is happening in the shot and which titles are shown on the screen at the time.

Timing In Opening	What’s Happening in the Shot	Titles
0-8 seconds	Film 4 Logo	-
8-13 seconds	Solar Productions Logo	-
13-20 seconds	Worm’s eye view shot of ceiling and window	-
20-29 seconds	Charlotte walking down stairs	Charlotte Revell
29-42 seconds	Lorna walking down the stairs	Lorna George
42-46 seconds	Freeze on stairs	Because of Them
46-54 seconds	Charlotte putting on coat	Leah Harte, Jude Pettyfer
54 seconds-1.00 minutes	Leah and Lorna walking along front of house	Casting by John Ranch
1.00-1.07 minutes	Charlotte walking along on the phone	Producer Ben Home
1.07-1.16 minutes	Charlotte using computer and writing ‘To Do’ List	Music by Gavin Luke Edited by Rodger Brown
1.16- 1.24 minutes	Lorna holding baby	-
1.24-1.30 minutes	Lorna cleaning in the house	Produced by Emily Hall
1.30-1.38 minutes	Charlotte getting box out of the loft	Director of Photography John Deadwood
1.38-1.52 minutes	Charlotte looking through box and at photograph	Written by William Field
1.52-1.59 minutes	Shot over Charlotte’s shoulder looking at photograph	Directed by Todd Haynes
1.59-2.04 minutes	Black screen – Sounds of suffragettes shouting	-

Order of Titles

Film4 Logo 


Solar Productions Logo

Charlotte Revell

Lorna George 

Because of Them

Leah Harte

Jude Pattyfer

Casting by

John ranch

 

Produced by

Ben Home

Music by

Gavin Luke

Edited by

Roger Brown

Produced by

Emily Hall

Director of Photography

John Deadwood

Written by

William Field

Produced by

Emily Hall

Directed by

Todd Haynes