Media Evaluation of Fixed On You

For my media coursework I worked as part of a group to create an opening sequence of a film called ‘Fixed On You’. I worked with Luke Shufflebottom, Gemma Bland and Grace Rewaj; together I think that we communicated and cooperated well and were able to portray our original ideas as we first planned. My particular contributions were filming the opening sequence and drawing the story boards. We all had different thoughts and ideas of what we wanted to include so I tried to incorporate these in the story board designs and piece together which ideas would work best. Our initial idea was contrasting a male and female in some way, we finally decided that by stereotyping these characters into some form of binary opposition, such as male geek and popular female, that the audience would be able to recognise what point we are trying to get across.

The genre for our opening sequence is British romantic comedy. We have used the typical elements of using a male and female- an obvious choice for romance- so we decided to make a twist. We realised for some watchers the genre may be confusing as at first the sequence doesn’t connote ideas to do with love this is why we included the text message between the two characters to make the audience think these two are romantically linked. This is a vital point in the opening sequence and alerts the audience about what could be about to happen. We challenge their ideas once we get to the end of the sequence as the two completely walk past each other in the street, not even noticing each other’s existence. The long shot establishes location and emphasises that the two characters are completely un aware of each other.

This creates enigmas in the audiences mind of who these people are and what they are doing, therefore, making them want to carry on watching the film. This also challenges the requirements of the rom-com genre, a typical storyline is not what we wanted to portray, we wanted something unique and different, something that would make you want to carry on watching. In our questionnaire we asked ‘What genre do you think that opening sequence was and how could you tell?’ people replied ‘Teen romantic comedy by using stereotypical representations of teens in this modern society’ which shows that we portrayed genre in the best possible way.

The social groups we have represented would be the young male and female groups. In this modern day, stereotypically there are various different social groups people are associated with, such as Chavs, Goths, Fakes and many more. Usually boys are associated with mess and unhygienic habits, in our opening sequence we wanted to portray our female character as this and our male character more female like, such as taking care of his appearance and keeping himself tidy. This idea of switching roles makes our film slightly unusual a bit different from the rest, a technique we used to try and keep the audience interested. We have tried to portray two completely opposite characters that be known to the audience will eventually fall in love. The watchers first thoughts would be noticing how Gemma is extremely untidy, from shots of her bedroom floor, her messy hair and her wild dress sense. (seen below)

Luke on the other hand is a geeky neat-freak which we have shown this through his costume mostly, for example his shirt and tie and his cellotaped glasses.

I think how our characters act and the situations they are put in offers an alternative to the typical stereotypes of girls and boys, it challenges the boundaries for normal representations for these sexes, showing the audience another point of view.

We have used various different shots to show each character. When trying to focus on on ething we experimented with camera angles, levels and shots. Below are a few examples of screen shots we included to portray our characters.

This is a close-up of Luke typing a text to Gemma, this particular shot creates enigmas in the audiences mind of who he is texting before the text is recieved (seen below).

This is a lower angle shot of Gemma buttoning her jeans, with this we then used fast continuous shots between her and Luke and they both did up their pants. This looked really effective one put together and also added to the link between the characters.

Because our sequence follows the genre of a British romantic comedy I think the best media institution that could distribute our product would be Working Title films. They have produced many famous British films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually, most of these being the most popular British (romantic comedy) films up to now. Because the company are so well known for making great films people would be inclined to come and see ours after following in the footsteps of many other well-known films.
Our target gender would mainly be females, as this is typical of romantic comedy films, however we would also welcome a secondary target audience of males to watch the opening sequence to relate to the boy in it. Research is shown that in the BFI Handbook 2005 that the largest percent of regular cinemagoers are ages between 15 and 34, I believe targeting our audience at this age would be more financially right as it would bring in most money. In our questionnaire we got feedback on the audience it would attract and this was ‘teens and possibly various other ages’. I would probably give our film the certificate of 15 because aiming the film at this age group could potentially create the most interest with the public. Another factor I would expect could be that a large percentage of our viewers to be female teens due to the characters ages and also the similar social situations young people can relate to in this film such as dating and stereotypes.
We have used lots of technologies to research this product such as youtube.com, blogger.com and imdb.com along with various other websites. I think these have helped our group to remain focused on our final piece and by researching other similar films has given us the ability to expand our ideas and note down what we think would eventually turn out best. iMovie and iTunes were the software we used to create our finished piece, although sometimes difficult to use once we learnt the techniques it was fairly easy to edit and piece it together giving us an effective and realistic outcome.

In our preliminary task our shots didn’t flow well and I thought that personally it was a poor example of directing and filming a sequence. “Fixed On You” looked dramatically different than our first sequence, I think that as a team we have all learnt new techniques that have improved the quality of our work. By keeping the camera recording at all times we learnt that whilst editing you can create a much smoother flowing sequence that looks less jumpy and is more efficient. By using a range of different shots and styles our opening sequence was more convincing and looked more professional. Teamwork was also essential for being successful by using the ideas of everyone in our group we came out with the best possible final product we could produce.

In conclusion to what I have stated I believe that we have created a very realistic and appealing opening sequence. I have found from the questionnaire that 100% of the audience that watched the opening sequence really enjoyed it, 'Good average pace, fantastic music... makes you feel good' and 'would deffinately want to watch the rest of the film '. I am really happy with the outcome and believe the feedback from the audience we got showed us that a lot of people, and more importantly mixed genders would enjoy and want to watch the rest of this film.

Lauren