Evaluation Part Two - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

Narrative and/or Performance

Throughout the process of filming our british social realism opening title sequence which we named it as 'Skrew It'. We used a variety of camera shots and camera movements. We used handheld camera movement for the majority of our filming as it denotes realism to the story we are trying to tell. Another camera shot which we used in one of our scenes in our film is a close up of the two main characters taking the cocaine. We decided to use this specific camera shot so we could show the audience not only the facial expression of the characters whilst they're taking the cocaine but the cocaine (baking soda) itself to engage and inform our target audience. Using a close up to show the cocaine also represents realism to the usual BSR genre as most british social realism films uses these sort of drugs such as, kidulthood, fish tank, trains potting and many others which had inspired us to create this film and storyline. Now looking at the clothing and the performance of our characters. The drug dealer who is played by Omario is wearing the usual hoodie and jeans combination which is what you would expect from an drug dealer. However, the drug addict who is supposed to be intelligent in school becomes addicted to drugs through previously family problems which sees him to throw his school life away to become a junkie. The student who is played by Fabio usually wears smart clothes to connote intelligence and smartness which he is shown in the first part of our opening sequence but is suddenly changed.

Settings/Locations

The primary location in which we decided to use was Lilian Baylis Technology School. We chose Lilian Baylis Technology School as pour primary location because school is a unsuspicious place where you wouldn't expect drugs to be taken especially in a cubicle in the boys toilets. Also, the opening scene of the main protagonist (Fabio) studying inside the school premises shows that these school is filled with knowledge and intelligence as you see Fabio with a pile of books with him. We used a medium shot to show the main protagonist studying because we wanted to capture the image of the work he is looking at and some of the background to show that he is still inside the school. Now moving on to our secondary location which is inside the boys toilets. We decided to use the boys toilet as our secondary location because we wanted to show realism to our piece and not place the two main protagonist taking the drugs in a unusual location such as under the stairs so we thought that the most realistic place students would do drugs on school premises is inside the toilets because no teachers ever check there and we saw that as our perfect spot to shoot the drug taking scene with Fabio and Omario.

We used some camera movements such as the tilting of the camera upwards when Fabio and Omario (Bailee and Edward the two characters) were taking the drugs. We used this specific camera movement so the audience can know that they had took the drugs and through the zoom out of location and the sound effect of them reacting to the drugs it creates a sense of realism to our target audience. As this was quite a difficult scene to shoot it took us more than two retakes to ensure we were happy with our final scene because due to the limited space we had it was quite challenging to find the perfect spot to film our drug scene.

Effects and Transitions

Throughout our opening sequence we didn't use a lot of effects and transitions because we want dour opening sequence to have the same use of effects and transitions as existing BSR's and we didn't want to make ours look completely odd to a usual BSR because we wanted people to recognise that our opening sequence is a BSR and not another genre. The transition we used was our logo of the title of our film ' Skrew It' zooming in closer to the screen. 


Our film title is called Skrew It, we included a transition on this logo because we want the audience to see clearly what our film title was called and so they could know which one was the most important as we made this the biggest out of the others. The 'K' in skrew it connotes the modern informal language otherwise known as slang which the usual south london teenager uses. We swapped the C with the K in our title so we could appeal to our target audience which is 16-24 year olds. This is why we used the zoom in transition on our logo to inform the audience immediately how our title relates to our BSR genre. The only effect in which we used in our opening sequence was a fade to black effect between the first scene of our opening sequence and our own production logo. We used this effect so we could make our opening sequence look well done and not looking like we rushed it which seems to make our final sequence look better.

Lighting
The two types of lighting in which we had used for different parts of our opening sequence was ambient and artificial lighting. We used these two types of lighting because one we wanted to show realism to the scene and the story with whats happening and two to set the mood of some scenes that were considered darker than others. I feel that we used these lightings well because it made our opening sequence appeal to our 16-24 year olds target audience as they tend to enjoy films that doesn't use natural lighting throughout a film. The ambient lighting connotes realism tot he scene they are in for example when they are taking cocaine we used a for of brighter lighting than usual to show what they were experiencing from our view. We didn't really have too much problems with sorting out our lighting when we   had edited our piece because we didn't have to change the lighting for every scene which helped us to finish our editing in a short amount of time. The main reason for using natural lighting throughout most of the film because we wanted our opening sequence to have a bit of a similarity between our opening sequence and other BSR's but not exactly similar so our opening sequence can remain appealing towards our specific target audience.

What had inspired us?
These three movies: Trainspotting, sky-fall and fish tank had inspired us in some ways which had helped us with finalising our opening sequence because trainspotting involved quite a bit of drug taking which we was already using in our piece so we got a few ideas on how we could get the two man protagonists to take the cocaine so we came up with the idea for our two main protagonists to use their oyster cards to line up the cocaine to inform the audience that they are still young people that are doing the wrong thing. Our theme of drugs problems also came from watching trainspotting because despite drugs being used in a lot of movies we could make it a lot different which explains the fact why we used a school to take the drugs and not a estate in London. The Sky-Fall opening had inspired us to create the zoom in transition of our logo because they did it quite slowly and used a background sound effect which made us be engaged immediately with what was about to happen. So we decided to make our title come out slowly after the main protagonist Fabio throwing the paper away to show he had given up. Last but not the least a scene in Fish tank where the main character is walking towards the camera which had inspired us to make Omario (playing as Bailee) to do the exact same thing to show his body language and his facial expression towards the situation.


Did we use conventional pace?
Yes we did use conventional pace however it was slow. This was because we wanted to keep the same pace as other BSR's does which is usually quite slow so we had to edit to make sure our scenes wasn't flowing too quickly because our plot was about a slow and depressing story about a kif=d who was once smart who turns out to be an drug addict.