Evaluation 3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation task 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our film 'Just turned eighteen' has a few social groups but has one main one which is the stereotypical teenage girl who is the most popular girl in school and her nerdy best friend who does what ever Madison tells her to do. The bossy rebellious teenager is common in many teen angst films such as Mean Girls and High School Musical. We thought that this would be the ideal focus for our film as it shows the common conventions that are made up of a teen angst film and also appeals to our target audience who which they can relate to it. The picture i have used is from Mean Girls of Cady Heron who starts the film as a nerdy high school girl but soon becomes a bossy "mean girl" as the film suggests. In the picture you can see that Madison is wearing trendy clothes and the colours of a stereotypical teenage girl, one main colour used is pink. Most people associate pink with girls so it suggests that Madison is a feminine person but she also likes fashionable colours like the grey jacket she is wearing on top of that. In contrast to that, Cady from Mean Girls also wears a pink and grey combination of coloured clothes which connotes that she likes to take care of her appearance and wear a modern style of clothing. This also fits in as in Mean Girls Cady becomes popular and starts to wear these new trendy clothes as does Madison throughout our film. The facial expressions on Madison are also very similar to how Cady's are from Mean Girls as they are both popular and are use to getting their own way. In our film 'Just turned eighteen' we made Madison of the age around 18 as we wanted it to be near the end of her school life, this is quite common in teen angst films of people to be this age or a little younger. 

Another main character in our film, Ethan is an athletic socialite who is the boy everyone wants to be with, well except Madison that is. He is part of the stereotypical sports group and is one best in school at playing football, this is stereotypical of boys in school set teen angst films to be good at sports. Ethan is a 18 year old British male and is shown in the picture that he is older as he has a trimmed beard, alongside this the trimmed beard also connotes fashionable stereotyping as his beard isn't scruffy but is neatly trimmed. He also wears a smart checkered shirt to keep up with the stylish trends. This shows that he takes care in his appearance. In High School Musical Troy Bolton is very similar to our character as he does sports and is very popular, you can also see that he too takes care in his appearance as he has style side swiped hair and wearing typical American high school sports clothing. Ethan wears headphones which suggests he likes to listen to music but modern day music, this connotes that he is up to date with the latest trends and because he is so popular he can start trends. As a result of his popularity it means that people will listen to him and most likely do things that Ethan likes as this will them make them look popular as they will try to fit in.   

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

1. The title of the film 
This is the main title that we used in our film, just turned eighteen. The font we used in this was handwriting-dakota, we thought this font looked good and fit the theme of teen angst very well as it connotes teenage style handwriting as it looks messy and that the person who has written it doesn't really care which adds to the plot as the main character is rebellious. The white writing with the pink outline also fits in with the average female teenager, for example in Mean Girls they use white for the word 'Mean' and pink for the word 'Girls'. This shows it is a feminine film aimed towards the younger age group. We used this idea for our main title. Also the the mirror suggests that girls like to take care of their appearance, we thought this looked really good as this resembles teenage aspect for their appearance and is stereotypical for teenage girls of this age to wear some kind of makeup.    

2. Costume and props
In this screenshot it displays our characters wearing and using different props such as bags, a phone and holding a purse. It also shows the characters wearing their clothes, Madison wearing a fashionable designer jacket and handbag while Jennifer wearing a nerdy 'wonder woman t-shirt' and a purple school bag connotes that she is nerdy and not necessarily popular. But with Madison shes wears expensive trendy clothes which suggests that she is rich, spoilt and popular.

3. Setting/location
The setting and location we used in our film was mainly a school setting but we also used public places to change up the stereotypical school themed location. We thought that not using just a school location would look more authentic as most teen angst films start with them either waking up or walking to school. We choose to use a reception area of a public gym for a meeting place at the start of film as our two characters meet at vending machines within this place. This was used as a shopping centre for our film. We also used various locations around the school like toilets, classrooms and lockers. We thought that the iconography within our locker scene portrays realism as most of our target audience can relate to this. The locker and classroom scenes are very iconic and are used in films such as Easy A and High School Musical, as stated these scenes are normally used so the audience can relate to it.

4. Camerawork and editing 
In this shot i used Madison and Jennifer walking besides the school and approaching the entrance of the school, I choose this shot to portray our camerawork as this is a long shot of the two characters while the camera pans. We edited this shot down so that it didn't last on the screen for too long as it would probably put off the audience but kept it long enough to fit in the crew names. Also in our film we use a variety of shot types like close up, mid shot, point of view, panning and many more. In one of the scenes Madison is looking into a mirror, we edited this specifically to a point of view shot and a close up as it shows Madison cares about how she appears and what people think of her even if she is late for class which shows her rebellious side.

5. Title font and style
For this specific frame i decided to use a shot which shows who the director is, this shot shows how we placed our titles according to the background, the specific colours we used and the font style. We placed our crew names on brick walls to show how we used our background placement, i think that in-twining the titles in with the background fits nicely with the genre of the film. The font that was used for 'Edited by' was sans serif and for the actual name we used serif. The colours we choose were light pastel colours like green, violet, pink and blue. This connotes the stereotypical teenage girl as people of the that age and gender normally associate with these colours.

6. Story and how the opening sets it up
This frame is of our main character Madison, it is of her outside of the shopping centre we used in our film. The screenshot shows a title displaying Taylor's character name Madison which tells the audience who Madison is in the film along with a voice-over of Madison telling a short narrative to the audience describing the story in the current scene. The voice over is quite common in teen angst films, for example Mean Girls has a voice over in one of its first couple of scenes.

7. Genre and how the opening suggests it
The genre for our film is quite obvious from the start. The opening begins with Madison walking to school and meeting a friend on the way, the clothing from Madison suggests that she is in some sort of higher education and has finished secondary school. The opening also progresses to a school environment and has a voice over through most of it so it suggests that it is a teen angst. The convention of the school is typical in a lot of teen angst films like Easy A, Mean girls etc which is why we decided to use it our film.

8. Special effects
We used alot of special effects in our film and felt that they were quite important to include, the screenshot shows the very first part of our film with a spotlight style transition showing our film production company logo. In the end it covered 2 things, a spotlight and an eye. We thought that the spotlight suggests a big company and ties in with the film industry and that the eye looked good and actually went well with the theme of teen angst as the circle portrays an eye and therefore connotes gossip as a kind of all seeing eye. 

9. How characters are introduced   
In shot 9 you can see how we introduced our characters. We used titles to introduce our characters by putting the actors name first and then the characters name second, the characters name was often put in a following shot. Two of characters had a greyscale freezeframe when their names appeared but not when the when their characters name appeared. You can see this as an example in the screenshot. The names appeared alongside a voice over to narrate and give a brief description of who the character was. This method is used in The Breakfast Club as characters were introduced with their nicknames. 

Final film intro - just turned eighteen

This is our final version of our film title sequence and opening scenes - just turned eighteen.