Evaluation

Before we started creating our opening sequence, we studied the conventions of Mockumentaries, watching full movies and opening sequences of movies such as; ‘live!’, ‘Drop Dead Gorgeous’, ‘Borat’ , ‘Surf’s Up’, and others. This research gave us a final list of conventions that featured more than once in mockumentaries becoming features that we would include in our final piece. An example of this, is the convention that is ‘interview form’, which we decided to use in our opening sequence, portraying clearly the genre of our film. We used this for many characters, interviewing the scientist, the Hulk character, and the harry potter cast. We developed our idea when we remembered the opening sequence of the film ‘The Incredibles’, which was in the style of a mockumentary, and in interview form. This Opening sequence also included titles of the characters, we liked this idea and witnessed it again in the mockumentary; ‘Drop Dead Gorgeous’ and therefore considered it a convention we would use for our final project.

Once we had put together all of our research we noticed Mockumentaries are often based on real life matters, although they in fact written and created and therefore a fictional piece of media, consisting of actors and scripts, separating the genre Mockumentary from a true documentary. Mockumentaries like ‘Live!’ and ‘Drop dead gorgeous’ are based on subjects like reality TV shows and beauty pageants, things that do exist in real life and are familiar to an audience. We however based our Mockumentary on a fictional mental disorder, giving it the name ‘Idealactually syndrome’. We thought this would bring more humour to the piece, and make its subject unique but original.

Our product represents particular social groups by portraying the mentally ill as humorous or entertaining. As seen when the Hulk character walks down the street with his shopping bags. This is quite a negative representation as it gives the impression that these people are viewed as different than the rest of society due to their abnormalities. It represents a fictional syndrome which particularly is seen in males, like the Hulk character and the Harry Potter cast, this suggests that mostly males suffer from this psychological problem.

The kinds of Media institutions that might distribute our product are; Pathe Pictures, Coffee films and Entertainment films this is because they are based in the UK/Europe and are independent film distributors. Due to our low budget it was essential for us to find an independent Media Institution that targeted a niche audience as we are targeting a young audience from Britain. We didn’t want a mass Media institution to distribute our product as we are using basic cameras and technological equipment.

Another kind of media institution that would distribute our opening sequence is New Line Cinema; this is because they distributed the mockumentary “Drop Dead Gorgeous”. New Line cinema is an American film industry and is one of the major film studios, and if they were to distribute our opening sequence we would have a larger budget and would be able to use the latest technology in the film industry. Due to our niche audience it would be more beneficial for an independent media institution such as the “Pathe and Motion Picture”

http://www.pathe.co.uk/

http://www.newline.com/

http://www.coffeefilms.com/

The audience for our opening sequence is teenagers; this is because the humour in the opening sequence would be more appealing for this age group. The age certificate we have on are opening sequence is 15, this is because in the there is mature humour, which young children may no understand. For instance when the Hulk gets angry at the camera and picks it up, this may scare younger children instead of make them laugh. In the actual film we would have some explicit language like swearing.

We attracted our audience by advertising to this particular audience in many different ways. We advertised our product on the internet, we particularly advertised on websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, this is because our research showed that over 90% of teenagers have at least on these; and that they regularly use it.

From constructing the opening sequence the technological elements we learnt were, how to do effective editing and how to incorporate continuity editing into are opening sequences, so that all the different shots show a chronological coherence. We did continuity editing by including editing techniques such as match on action and non-diegetic sounds, which allowed us to smooth out the different clips. We also learnt how to extract sound from different clips, and add music to our opening sequence. This allowed us to have narration over the scenes so that the audience know what is happening for instance when the scientist speaks over the next clip so we know who he is talking about. During our construction of the opening sequence we learnt how to use the video camera and different camera techniques and shots such as zooming in and out and how to do shot reverse shot as in the scene with the scientist interview where we zoom in to add realism and convey a seriousness about his sentence.

Looking back at the prelim task, we have learnt more camera shots and techniques, which allowed us to be more adventurous with our work. This is because we incorporated more camera shots, such as an establishing shot at the beginning so that the audience know where the film took place, where our establishing shot was of "Whipps Cross Hospital" it allowed viewers to recognize that the film was taking place in a hospital. We learnt how to extract sound and move sound into a different shot of the opening sequence, which enhanced our work as it helped with the continuity and made our film fit the time limit. More aspects that we learnt were, how to put text in to our work for example when we wrote the candidate names and numbers. We learnt different editing techniques that improved our work as we were able to use more quick cuts, and we learnt how to split scenes so that we didn’t lose any clips during our editing. Looking back at the prelim task, it helped us think of new ways of filming as we had more ideas, we also became more comfortable using the editing tools and more comfortable using the video camera.

And this is an evaluation from our peers: