For our media coursework, we had two options, design a magazine or film an opening sequence to a film. We choose to film. Our film had to be the start of a film and last no more than 2 minutes. I worked in  a group with Liam Bentley and Sara Saghir. Our idea was a fast paced, action, thriller, that involved gangsters and drugs. I thought of the main idea after many unsuccessful ideas fell down.Me and Liam basically did everything, we did a huge amount of research before we even took hold of camera (as seen on the blog), we looked at many films as well as researching the film industries that we wanted to produce the film. Sara has hardly been in lessons, and therefore done little on the blog, she also did not come to any of the filming days or help editing. I was the director of the film, this meant that I had a lot of responsibility as it was my duty to organize actors and shots, and overall produce the film and keep it looking the best it can be. We worked hard in the filming and editing stages to keep the film looking as smooth and continues and possible. Liam was a great member to have working with me, he came up with a lot of good ideas and ordered props online. He gave a lot of effort in helping find filming locations and gave up a lot of time with me to keep our final product looking as good as it does.

The genre that we had to adopt was the thriller genre, we then diverged into sub-genres, the sub genre we choose was crime/gangster. We have used typical conventions like high action fast paced editing (jump shots etc.) Music to create atmosphere, and the typical ‘bad guy’ with a balaclava. However not everything is what you would expect to find, we have experimented with different camera angles and used a flash back into the past from the start of the film. It was important to do some things differently to keep the film from being exactly the same as other films in the same genre and therefore keep the genre fresher, we also wanted to make it differently so it appealed and attracted to people who found it different and interesting. The audience seemed to lover our film and found the new camera angles different and interesting, they said that it kept it exciting and the editing kept it feeling fast and again added to the appeal and excitement.  Our film clearly belongs to the thriller crime0gangster genre but does many things to set it apart from different films of that genre.

The group we have represented is criminals/gangsters. The overall image we paint of them is fairly stereotypical at times E.g. the balaclava. We present them as what they are really, dangerous criminals motivated by money and power.We had ‘the torturer’ in all black and a hockey mask. His showed him as a strong, scary, mysterious individual. The two men who attack the car are also masked adding the mystery who these men are, they have no speech in the opening sequence. The are both very violent, for example the torturer attacks the man with a drill and the balaclava man attacks him with a baseball bat. We also have scary music when the man is about to be tortured adding to the fear factor involved with these men.At parts the criminals do fit with the dominant stereotype portrayed by the media, that there all involved with drugs, kidnapping and other criminal activities, but I feel we take this to another level by showing them physically torturing someone.

We want our film to be made by and distributed by a British film company. We have decided on Film4. We want the film to be a gritty British drama and feel Film4 would be the best to create this, as they have created gritty films like trainspotting and This is England. I believe our film would appeal to fans of coarse the Thriller genre and crime/gangster genre but also fans of action and horror. I doubt that our film would have the same effects on American audiences hence why we want Film4 to distribute it. As I said before Film4 has always been about hard hitting, emotional gritty films and that is why I believe that is why they would be perfect for our film.

Our film will most likely appeal to males aged 16-25, of a western ethnicity (probably only European). The social economic group it will appeal to isIt will appeal to fans of thrillers as well as fans of crime and gangster films. It will also appeal to fans of horror and action films.I believe thrillers have a huge amount of fans, but gangster thrillers have a smaller loyal niche market. Who will pay to go and see the latest film in that genre.From our feedback we found out that everybody loved it and they said they would go and see the film, this shows that even though our film is in a sub-genre it appeals to many people who aren’t even fans of this genre.

Audiences of  this genre expect it to be hard hitting and exciting, which we delivered right from the start through fast paced action. The Equilibrium is disrupted as this man is taken by masked men. We create many equilibriums from the start: Who is the person being tortured, who are the kidnappers, why are they doing this. Chronological are film changes, the start of the sequence is not like actual start, after the torture scene it goes back and says ‘5 hours earlier..’. We use many enigmas, like who are the people trying to capture the ‘victim’ who is the ‘victim’ and what has he done to the gang?. We build tension by sinister music and the use of cuts to black. We have used crime ideologies, like ripping off gangsters is not a good idea and they will come back for you.

We learnt about many websites that can offer excellent information in helping research and create movies. We found lots of interesting and useful videos on YouTube. We could embed videos onto our blog that we found.We also learnt about video editing software (iMovieHD), which allowed us to cut, trim and paste clips into were we wanted them, we could also put in titles and even use effects e.g. The CCTV effect we used. We would have preferred to use higher quality HD camera’s to make our products look slicker and more professional but this out of our control.

I think our final product came out very well and just how we wanted it, I believe its key strengths to be its high pace and levels of action, a weakness I feel is the un-explanation of who the characters are, but this was meant to be an enigma to draw the audience in and then to be revealed later into the film.

Sam Rushton