Evaluation 5

Evaluation 4

Evaluation 3

How do your products engage with the audience and how would they be distributed as real media products?

Transcript

Target Audience

The target audience we had aimed at were young drivers who are aged 20 years and above. This is due to the fact that anyone younger than 20 who's doesn't drive, will have very little knowledge about reckless driving and the dangers of driving recklessly in Qatar.

During the pre-production of our short film, we have looked at both secondary research and primary research to help us decide what was our best choice in topic. We have done this research in order to find out what location would be relevant, who to include as our actors, and what questions we would like to involve for our interviewees to answer. We has done research on our codes and conventions in order to allow the audience to relate well with our chosen topic.

Our short film documentary is based on reckless driving around Qatar with the opinions of various past and/or current drivers as well as medical incorporated individuals included. For our film to stand out, we have used the typical locations of where young people go and drive recklessly like Sealine (the desert), and Lusail. For a more professional view, we took the location out to the Lusail Circuit where we had also had the opinion of a safe Motorbike rider.

For our interviews we had not scripted the responses for it was based on realistic thoughts to show our audience that these events are true and that many fatal accidents may occur in real life. There were no costumes involved because we filmed for a documentary and not a fiction film.

In order to attract an audience, as a group we had created an intriguing postcard with the picture being the main subject, for it to represent our short film documentary. It is a great way to promote our shot film towards our target audience who are young, perhaps reckless drivers.

Evaluation 2

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding'?






Transcript

We created a website with the sense of branding. The utmost priority, as seen in our website is that we have incorporated the black and white scheme on every page as a reference to our logo which uses the same the colours, thus strengthening the sense of branding among our products. the websites header also uses the same font as the postcard situated next to our company logo. 

The inspiration came from the various short film websites we analysed, through which we realised the minimalistic theme is the most suitable. Finally in our website we have included social media to allow our audience to interact with us. These social media apps include Instagram, Facebook and Google+. Also, we included a 'contact us' page for fan mail and collaboration requests.

Evaluation 1

How do your products follow conventions? (Jack)

Our products follow some general conventions associated with short film documentaries. This is firstly seen in the use of melancholic soundtracks to implement the hybrid genre associated with reckless driving. The Hybrid genre commonly associated with reckless driving is a mixture of the following main genres, Action and dramatic. This allows our documentary to stay in the back of our audience’s mind. I used simple yet professional looking transitions between shots in our short film documentary, I did this to make our documentary not only look better but follow generic conventions associated with short film documentaries. Our short film follows generic conventions as well as challenging them, this is why our short film documentary is so successful. To complement the short film documentary our group created posters and a website not only to follow with conventions usually associated with documentaries but also to promote our short film documentary. Our postcard follows conventions through the use of composition, colour scheme etc… these are all generic conventions although in order to challenge them aswell we did not freeze frame a part of our short film documentary we actually had a photoshoot to make our postcard look more professional and challenge generic conventions. Our website follows conventions through the use of simplicity and basic layout to not over complicate our audience. This works well

How do your products challenge conventions? (Sanaz)

Conventions are what the audience expect to see in a media product. As a group we tried progressing from A2 in terms of conventions. We learned that certain conventions can define a genre so we previously mostly only followed them. However over the course of our time making different products we learned that genre conventions are not set in stone, that genre is a more fluid concept that is less easy to define. This made us feel more comfortable with subverting conventions, deconstructing them and even challenging them instead of simply ascribing to them. Most documentary conventions are followed, such as the use of interviews, dialogue, voiceovers, and a non-diegetic score as previously mentioned. However, we ended up subverting and challenging several conventions along the way for the sake of creating an effective delivery system and an overall coherent, thoughtful short documentary. Creating an objectively ‘thought-provoking’ documentary is not always about following established rules, but rather modifying or tweaking them to both the producer and consumer’s liking to contribute to an overall efficient and methodical outcome. One prominent example of challenging conventions that we decided on very early was the purpose and message behind the documentary. We got this idea of tweaking a more abstract narrative convention while conducting our audience research. A focus group stated that they had a high preference for documentaries that take strong stances on social issues rather than documentaries that play devil’s advocate. As a representative sample of our target audience, the focus group believed documentaries that don’t argue for a particular side or turn important issues into ‘debates’ are in abundance, so we decided to forego to objective approach typical of most expository documentaries and instead opt for a more personal, subjective approach on a controversial topic. although our short film documentary consisted of all males and no females due to the fact that men are more interested in different stunts than women. Another convention we challenged was the font used that

Mise-en-scene:

Sound:

Editing:

Camerawork:

How do your products represent social groups or issues? (Mariam)

Characters -

• Ian Maund: Stereotypical male representation; ‘biker’/racer image, sports enthusiast, strong build and frame, etc. However, challenges social stereotypes in his penultimate response where he attempts to choke back tears (display of emotions unconventional for males, especially in documentaries where content is meant to be sincere and personal to provoke reactions). Subverts age expectations to an extent: while he does proactively encourage control and regulation in driving amongst youth/the newly licensed, he fully embraces the ‘stunt driving’ lifestyle. Cultural representation: foreign to country of focus, part of a ‘gentrification’ process?
• Torque: Stereotypical cultural male representation: reckless/stunt driver - this is stereotypical of an Arab male his age, which happens to be our primary target audience. The fact that a member of the demographic we are targeting happens to act as a narrative foil that helps us spread our message means that members of our target audience are more likely to have a negotiated or even dominant preferred reading to our product and conform to our line of thinking i.e. reckless driving is dangerous and needs to be controlled. However, due to the highly provocative nature of our product, we also expect oppositional reading and in fact address it with a plethora of facts, statistical evidence and logical reasoning/common sense.
• In terms of cultural representation, our products generally represent Qatari culture quite realistically since Qatar has one of the highest number of traffic fatalities in the world This is in fact the subject of the documentary, wherein we attempt to challenge cultural perceptions and modify cultural norms, which is where oppositional reading would occur. It can be argued that the postcard is quite stereotypical with the expensive high-end vehicle shown.

Final Film

Final Website

In order to view our website, please copy and paste the link below:

https://lastride.squarespace.com

Preview:

Final Postcard

Website Process

We have used squarespace to create our website. We used this because it was the only website that allowed people to create good quality websites.

Our website consists of different linked pages that take the viewer to either 'Home, Live, Gallery, About, and Contact us'. We are still in the process of completing the website meaning that we still have to add relevant images that we have taken in order to have our final outcome.

Postcard Process

In order to create a final postcard for our short film documentary, we assigned ourselves to go out and take appropriate images which link in well with our theme, which is reckless driving, and imported the images onto photoshop. On photoshop we changed saturation, added text, and layered some images to get our final outcomes. We have made three postcards which we are to choose from for our audience to view and think they want to watch our short film documentary.

Postcard drafts

In order to create these postcards, we have put them into adobe photoshop and added the writing in the font and size we preferably found appropriate, added our logo, edited the images so they became brighter and more visually appealing.

Final film process

Our final film is coming together really well thanks to the software we are using which is called Adobe premiere.

Evaluation of first draft

For our first draft we have included various shots that we have taken as a group in the past few weeks and put them together using adobe premiere. As a group we are aiming to make our short film at least 5 minutes long in order to make sure that enough information about reckless driving is included for the audience to see and understand how driving in qatar can be dangerous to both young and old drivers. It was essential that we included music, voice overs and clips into out premiere file in order to create a suitable documentary for our viewers.

To make our our short documentary film better, we are going to include more shots which are of supercars doing different stunts like drifting, speeding, and doing donuts etc. and with this we are adding more sounds and transitions like the cross dissolve to allow the clips to blend into each other to invisibly to make our short film documentary to look professional. Once we have included the other shots, we will then be able edit properly and complete the final film in order to present. 

In conclusion 

Film first draft

This is a video that my group and i have made, although there are no voiceovers yet, which we will add once we record a suitable voice for it. Also we must add more shots in between the interviews of super cars doing different stunts in order to make our short film interesting to the audience.

Images of Mustang Shelby for postcard

The images below are ones taken in order to use for our postcards. These images were taken at the sheraton in the west bay area near corniche where we were able to get the sunset just as its going down.

Statistics

Editing Process

When editing, we use Adobe Premiere in order to be able to insert a range of video transitions in between each video clip. The most common transition used in between the clips is the cross dissolve where two videos fade into each other as the next one is starting to appear. The soundtrack that was used in the making of our short film documentary is called 'Say something', an emotional song that is great since our documentary is about tragic reality of the young people driving in Doha.

Deconstructing First Shots

Filming Prep (BTS)

This is a BTS of our interview with Ashraf. In this short clip we are going over and reviewing the questions and answers due to our interviewee not being able to speak english fluently.

The images below were taken by jack where we had filmed the opening shot with the Doha skyline and had the one to one interview with Ian Maund.