School's Out! Final Cut

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This is the Final Cut for 'School's Out!'. Since the last rough cut we have improved the sound at points based upon feedback from peers and our teacher.

Question 1 - Use Of Conventions

My answer for Question 1 on the use of conventions




A (not so) brief overview of the points made about our use of conventions can be found after the break.

Question 2: Representations

For out final media text we used a variety of stereotypes and also countertypes shown in our characters.

Main Character from PiP.

Our main character was an outsider. To demonstrate this we purposely chose someone with ginger hair, as this is normally a hair colour associated with a social outsider. An example of how this has been used in existing media texts is Pretty in Pink (Deutch, 1986). The main character, Andie Walsh, has ginger hair and her friendship group only consists of two other people. She is also seen to be teased by a blonde bully, also similar to our character.

Lauren in her costume

The character wore a long flowing cardigan, something that's not very fashionable. We chose to use this as part of her character's costume as it was a article of clothing that hasn't been very popular since last decade, we wanted to use this as it would contrast nicely with the relative 'trendy-ness' of her rival and her love interest.

The NASA T-Shirt

We decided to make the romantic interest wear something that was quite plain. He wore mostly dark colours, which made us worry in case, as stuart hall suggests, there was an oppositional reading towards his character and he was seen as recluse. We decided to try and steer the audience away from this reading by using his hat, a bowler hat, which is not associated with recluse people as it was quite quirky. We also added a poster in his room, of a slogan from a NASA t-shirt we found online. By using this we help to signify that he is somewhat nerdy and also quirky. We also anchored the preferred reading of him being a nerd by having him wear glasses.

The Poster

However, we were now worried that he would now have an oppositional reading of being unpopular and so we added in the parts where he high fived the teachers, solved their equations and passed someone in a corridor, with the person they passed looking back at him.


Our third main character was popular and somewhat bullied our main character. By introducing her with the shock of the main character slamming into the lockers, we made it clear that she was a bully. We made sure to tell the actress to continue walking, without looking back, to help anchor how she was a bully. We wanted this character to wear clothes that somewhat contrasted with out main character, so we had her wear a skirt along with leggings, to contrast with the trousers worn by the main character. We also had her wear a jacket/cardigan. The jacket doesn't quite contrast with the main character, as it could be seen as a cardigan. This is because we wanted to signify that there was some similarities between the two.  She was also blonde, which helped to signify that she was popular, something that would obviously be anchored at a point later in the movie, and more socially accepted than her ginger counterpart.

Comparing the two character's (the main character and the love interest's girlfriend) outfits, you can see that the main character is wearing bright, colourful clothes, whereas the 'bully' is wearing dark clothes. We used the colourfulness of each of the characters clothes to help signify that they were enemies. With the colourful clothes showing the main character's goodness, and the dark showing the badness.

As well as countertypes and stereotypes of gender, hair colour and social class, points that can be drawn from our movie opening is the lack of ethnic minorities, with our cast being 100% caucasian some critics may see it as subtle racism, like they did with Richard Curtis' Rom-Coms. The choice for an entirely caucasian cast was one we were stuck with, as a result of the area in which we live having so few non-caucasians, we had to mostly cast caucasian people.

Another point is that all our characters in the opening are heterosexual. We made this choice as a reflection of normative representation. Because, but increeasingly less so in our modern day society, the very large majority of people are heterosexual people and in our consuming of media texts we see mostly heterosexual people, it made sense to make it a heterosexual couple, this would make the situations in the film far more relatable to the major target audience, heterosexual teen/young adult girls.

The comic that started the bechdel test

We tried to avoid falling into the trap that is the male gaze theory, where the women we show in our movie are merely objects and not developed people. One example from our movie in which we could be percieved as objectifying women was the shot through Lauren's legs, this would be seen as showing them off and creating her into an object there for the attraction of men. As our movie stands, the opening on it's own, we have failed the Bechdel Test, a form of feminine critique that tests for gender bias.
As my group was mixed gender, we were very consious about conforming to what is called the 'patriarchal' viewpoint, that is to say, we were careful to avoid the inclusion of objectifying women, just having them there for their looks and general exploiting of them for commercial gain. However, with us all being fortunate enough to have not encountered much extreme sexism, it was hard for us to consider what might upset people who may have been victims to such sexism, which is why we played it safe and only included a minimal amount of shots where we could be seen as objectifying the women in our film opening.

Question 3: Distributors

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

A distributor is the company that takes a completed film and gives it the exhibitors. They will often be in charge of the marketing and release date. The exhibitors they give it to could be cinemas, TV channels or DVD manufacturers. There will often be a different distributor for each country of release, which is why there are often multiple distributors for worldwide tentpole movies.

Submarine's poster

My movie is a micro/macro-budget film. Therefore it will be distributed solely in britain, and so will not be distributed by someone like Warner Bros. (the top UK distributor for 2013), who distribute more bigger budget, tentpole, movies.

My film is comparable to the recent film Submarine (Ayoade, 2010), Which was produced by Warp Films, a small indie production company, and distributed by optimum releasing in the UK (now Studio Canal), it was also released in the US, under Weinstein Company. This was also a romantic comedy, and so can be greater compared to my own movie.

Top UK box office films 50-60

Larger and more recent movies, by the likes of Working Title (a subsiduary of NBC Universal, one of the big  6), such as I Give It A Year (Mazer, 2013) were also distributed by Studio Canal. The movie was the 56th highest grossing film in the UK. This  shows that Studio Canal distributes large companies, like Working Title's, films and also has success in the distribution of films.

We noted that films by indie companies, such as warp, often were commercial failures in places like the US, A prime example of this is Paddy Considine's Tyrannousaur (2011), which peaked at 5 cinemas in the US, were the distributor to have spent a bit more money on marketing it could have achieved the potential it looked to have at the toronto film festival.

Studio Canal's Logo

Based upon this I think that using Studio Canal as a distributor for my film would be a wise idea, as they have had successes, support indie companies and have also released films in the same genre as mine.

Question 4 - Target Audience

Throughout the production of our movie opening, we have asked various people for feedback on our movie openings. We chose these people after researching who our target audience should be. The majority of Rom-Coms get a BBFC Rating of 12-15, meaning that this is, realistically, the lower boundary for our target audience. We then considered the ages of characters in Rom-Coms, which varied from the teenagers of Wild Child (Moore, 2008), to the 30-somethings of Bridget Jones Diary(Maguire, 2001). After conducting this research, we initially planned on targeting the 15-34 age range. Upon evaluation and audience feedback, we adjusted this figure to 12-24, with a secondary audience being 25-34, and perhaps also tweens (8-11).

We have used characters from our target audience's age range in order to help target them, as this would increase relatability and so make them more likely to watch the film. We used a location familiar to them to also increase relatability.

We tried to have more comedic elements in our opening (such as the growl after the chess game) in order to make our movie more appealing to the lower bounds of our target audience.

The biggest issue that we could see arising with chasing the 12A rating would be caused by this line in the BBFC's classification guidelines:

Discriminatory language or behavior must not

be endorsed by the work as a whole.

We thought this might cause problems due to the fact that there is no sign, at least in the opening, of condemning of the slamming into a locker, something which could potentially be seen as discriminatory. We looked up the BBFC's definition of discrimination in order to ensure that we were not breaking the rules, we found within that definition this line:

The context in which such content may appear also has a bearing

We felt that the context of making a character a bully in the eyes of the audience would help us ensure we had a 12A rating, and so we did not adjust our opening as there was no longer any need to.

We have also made use of intertextuality, with references to Napoleon Dynamite (Hess, 2004) and Pretty in Pink (Deutch, 1986) to draw in the older part of our target audience but also the secondary target audience of 25-34.

We are confident that we have an audience for our movie, as the movie Submarine(Ayoade, 2010) shows. While this movie was a 15, it was also set in a school, and produced by an indie company.

An example of a somewhat similar teen Rom-Com would be Wild Child (Moore, 2008), which is rated 12A and done by UK company Working Title. This clearly shows that there is a market for this movie.

Please click read more if you would like to see some audience evaluations:

Question 5 - Attracting our Target Audiences

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This is the youtube video for my annotations on targeting my audience

Question 6 - Use of Technologies

This is my answer to question 6

Question 7 - Review of What I have Learnt Since PRELIM

This is my answers to Question 7 of my evaluation.