Year 12s: what will be the first way you research your future options? >>

Could anyone mark this OCR Media Studies A2 1A Answer for me?

June 2010
1a) Describe the ways in which your production work was informed by research into real media texts and how tour ability to use research for production developed over time.

In AS media I made an opening of a thriller about a girl found dead in a park by a group of misfit teenagers and they try to uncover the mystery. In A2 we made a promotional package for a Dark Teen Comedy about a loner called Zac in Sixth Form who gets obsessed with trying to become friends with a new boy called James.

My research for both projects included researching genre conventions. We looked at a few scenes and openings of thrillers such as, a scene from ‘Mission: Impossible – A mole hunt’ which we got the idea from to use violins in our opening music to create tension. We also looked at the beginning of ‘The Butterfly Effect’ and ‘No Way Out’, but we did not really get much from those two. We did not really take notice of our product research in AS and so our final product was too dialogued and got into the plot too quickly.

However, in A2 our genre was much more specific so the conventions we found in our product research, were much more influential. We found that most Teen Dark comedies where based in a ‘high school’, so we decided to make it more British by basing it in a Sixth Form. We looked at ‘Heathers’, ‘Jaw Breaker’ and ‘Mean Girls’ and found that the character types were a new girl, we decided to subvert that by making the new girl a boy (James); a loner, which in our piece was Zac; and a group of girls which we decided should just be the rest of the students in his sixth form to suggest how much of a loner he actually is, and to suggest that he has alienated himself.

I also extended my research onto film posters and magazine covers as we had to create a whole promotional package. Our film was independent so we looked at independent magazines, such as ‘Little White Lies’, ‘Sight & Sound’ and ‘Film Maker’ we found that most of their front covers were very simple, most just had a picture of the actor from the film they were promoting and a simple background. So we decided to just have a picture of the two main characters standing one behind the other, which was influenced by another convention we found which was that characters with a complex relationship were often pensioned one behind the other on the front covers of magazines. We also found that film posters and magazine covers of independent films where considerably different, such as the film poster of ‘Attack the Block’ which had a picture of the full cast and the tower block in the back ground with aliens falling down from the sky however, its feature on the front cover of ‘Little White Lies’ was art work depicting the main character and the plot. This implied that independent films did not have that much control over how their film is featured on magazine covers, so our poster was considerably different; we had various pictures of Zac and James all over a cork board and anyone who was not James or Zac had their eyes crossed out.

My audience research also improved. In AS we made Vox Pop asking our target audience what they liked in a thriller and what their favourite type of thriller was (psychological, action, crime etc.), we also made a questionnaire asking what music they would like in the beginning of a thriller. We did not use our research at all because they were not very useful questions, as most people said that they liked crime or psychological thrillers and gave examples like ‘Inception’ and said that they liked tension in an opening of a thriller, this could not really impact our idea, except for our genre being a crime thriller, as those answers were pretty obvious. We did not ask any questions about our ideas, as we thought we would rely on the audience research to help us come up with one. We therefore had a very uninteresting plot that did not have much depth to it.

However in A2 we had an idea for our film; an outcast school girl befriends a girl new to the school, the obsession grows, the new girl joins a popular clique making outcast jealous, and so the outcast does all she can to get her back. We asked in our vox pop if the audience liked the idea, they liked it, but said that they would not see the comedy in it, as something similar has been made in the thriller genre – ‘The Roommate’ – so we decided to change the plot a little by making the two characters into boys which adds comedy as it subverts the stereotype and shocks the audience. We also gave the film a back story – the main character Zac is making a book on how to make friends called ‘How to Make Friends’ and he has tried out his ideas on how to make friends on other people but, it did not work so he tries it on James to see if he is different, but goes a bit too far. We asked our audience, then if they liked it and they said they could defiantly see the comedy in it.

To conclude, I improved on my research as we did it with the impact of our final product in mind and expanded onto more media platforms.