BOYS LIKE THAT

MEDIA EVALUATION

BY SOPHIE PROOPS & CHARLIE LAHYANI

IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT

USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL

MEDIA PRODUCTS?

BRIEF A Romantic Comedy is an extremely established and very popular genre. Because of this audiences have certain expectations when they go to see a rom com.

The constraints under which we worked were that we had to create a 5 minute short film with a beginning middle and end.

After researching some post modern products and post modernism media texts we saw a route for our film to go down.

Perfect harmony and fairytale love stories are the norm within this genre so we really had an opportunity to make a blatantly conventional film.

We wanted to play with the genre and over do the codes and conventions to exaggerate the themes of the romantic comedy genre.

POSTMODERN MEDIA There are many media examples of texts or products which deliberately set out to explore and play with this state of “HYPERREALITY”.

As a post modern product we challenged ideas of truth and reality. Truth needs to be deconstructed so that we can challenge dominant ideas that people claim as truth.

If we were going to exaggerate codes and conventions then we would have to deeply analyse them.

In other words the romantic comedy genre has extreme ideas and conventions that could be over exaggerated in our film and exposed as ridiculous.

Hyperreality is the idea of a place (or in our case a film) that is a real physical space but also a clearly fictional representation of the world.

In teen films/ rom coms there are conventional characters which are similar to ‘Proppian’ characters. These are some of the characters used in ‘A Cinderella Story’ which was an inspiration for our film:

CHARACTERS

The Pize The Geek The Helper The Hero The Villain

We combined the ‘Prize’ and the ‘Geek to create Maddie

We used the dog as the ‘Helper’ which is unconventional The ‘Villains’ were Aden’s friends We made the ‘Hero’ Aden

After researching the conventional romantic comedy characters we noticed a trend in the type of characters that appear in them. The world of romantic comedy consists of two dimensional stereotype characters. Our best way to express this was through Mise en Scene to the point that from just one picture of our characters you would be able to see the stereotype they fit into as shown here.

SHORT FILMS These are the conventions we found when watching and researching short films, we focussed on a film called ‘Post it Love’ which is a 3 minute rom com: As we wanted to make a film with a feature film narrative but in a space of five minutes we wanted to research similar media texts (especially romantic comedies) we needed a way to structure out film into a five minute short. The film we found easiest to follow was post it love.

THE GENERIC AMERICAN ROM COM

We needed to see the american romantic comedy conventions in high detail. So after looking at several examples of blatantly high budget and high concept romantic comedies we had our codes and conventions set. We knew what we would represent and how exaggerated it would be.

BRAINSTORM FOR CONVENTIONS With this early piece of development we had few but very straight ideas of what we wanted to post modernise and put into the section of hyperreality. Having so few points meant is was easy to put these into a five minute short and to express them fully within that time.

CHARACTER ARCS MADDIE Maddie is a 16 year old ‘geeky’ girl inspired by characters such as:

Sam - A Cinderella Story

Sandy - Grease

Cady - Mean Girls

Tai - Clueless

Maddie was mainly inspired by the attitude and situation of these girls rather than the costume. They are oppressed by their situation in a way and so is Maddie. For our girl protagonist we had to fully express how she is so deeply in love that she will do anything for Aden. Simililary to these girls.

All of these characters are initially:

Shy & Innocent

Hope for better things

Physical Transformation

Mental Transformation

Confident

MADDIE - MAKEOVER Makeover scenes are very common in teen rom coms. We decided to give Maddie a physical transformation like:

Sandy - Grease

Cady - Mean Girls

Tai - Clueless

Mia - Princess Diaries

As far as Maddie’s makeover was concerned we wanted to make her more “sexy” and “tarty’ than beautiful. All the girls we seemed to research appeared this way after their makeovers and this ridiculous convention was one that would be fantasised and blatant in our film.

This is part of the makeover scene in Princess Diaries This is the makeover scene in our film

Troy - High School Musical

Danny - Grease

Austin - A Cinderella Story

ADEN Aden is a 17 year old ‘popular’ boy inspired by characters such as:

These characters are the “perfect” boys. They are cool, popular, stylish and almost too perfect to exist in the real world. These hyperreal characters inspired us to make Aden. We stressed to the audience who he appears to be in the world of our film. He looks good throughout our film and no matter what scenario is clearly the generically popular boy.

All of these characters are:

Loud & Confident

Meet a girl

Begin to open up Lose the girl

Mental Transformation

Kind & Caring

This shows Aden before when he was badly influenced by his friends:

This shows Aden after he’s changed:

MADDIE - COSTUME To show that Maddie is an outcast, we decided to dress her in a way that is conventional to the stereotypical ‘geek’ character such as:

Betty - Ugly Betty

Quinn - Zoey 101

Wearing bright colours and retro clothes

Glasses

Hair tied up

We found these characters very unconventional compared to other girls in romantic comedies. They seem more extrovert and proud of themselves which was great because in our narrative even this apparently “bold, brave” character will crack under the pressure of a boy. This stressed the importance of the point of our film which was almost mocking the rom com genre.

ADEN - COSTUME To show that Aden is an popular, we decided to dress him in a way that is seen as ‘cool’ like the characters: you can clearly see the similarity between all of these characters.

Troy - High School Musical

Aaron - Mean Girls

Shirt

Jumper

BOY MEETS GIRL

THEY GET TOGETHER

THEY BREAK UP THEY END UP TOGETHER

NARRATIVE

This is how we showed their conversations. We did questionnaires and focus groups with peers about this style and they really liked it. The sound of typing as it comes up works well and it gives the film a nice feel and pace.

These are some conventional location used in teen film:

Protagonist’s Bedroom

Date in a restaurant

School

LOCATIONS

A Cinderella Story

High School Musical

Mean Girls

Grease

Our locations were more unconventional:

Maddie’s Room

We decided to use this bedroom because it is much plainer and is a better reflection of Maddie’s personality. The other room is too ‘girly’ and bright. Courtyard

We filmed in the school courtyard because it is somewhere that is central for everyone from all social groups to be. As we only had a few characters it was difficult to show this. As our locations were plain it was easy to concentrate on the narrative which had to be understood as it is only a short film.

Meeting Point

We decided to have the meeting point in the film set in a park. These are some of the potential locations:

This wasn’t secluded enough This was good because it’s

hidden but it was inconvenient as there is no where to leave equipment

We like the well but the bench wasn’t in a good place

This was the final location we selected:

FONT For our poster we chose to use the font called ‘VARSITY’. This style of writing is used on the jocks clothing which is stereotypical for American teen films and so by looking at the poster or reading the review the audience can get a feel for the genre of the film . We stole this stereotypical font, its so obvious and screams “TEEN ROMANTIC COMEDY” at the audience. The font has represented that since Grease was made and has stayed strong as the conventional teen rom com font These are a few examples of the school logos used in American teen films:

Rydell High - Grease

East High - High School Musical

William McKinley - Glee

As you can see the colour red is also common in these logos

HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE COMBINATION

OF YOUR MAIN PRODUCT AND

ANCILLARY TEXTS?

FONT

COLOUR

STRAPLINE

CREATING SYNERGY BETWEEN TEXTS

Our aim was to make a teen rom com aimed at young girls. Our poster and review clearly show this through the pictures, colours, fonts, wording and style.

The colour scheme we chose appeal to our audience because they are considered to be young vibrant colours. Although our main audience is young girls, we tried to use darker colours which would appeal more to boys.

COLOURS The colours we used are also typical of teen film posters and so you could tell the genre of our film without even seeing it.

When looking at film posters for rom coms, we noticed that the two protagonists were on the front but they were divided apart by something vertical like text. Here is some examples:

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE

FEEDBACK?

Pre Production Before making our film we wanted to find out about our audiences knowledge on short films as they aren’t commonly seen by people who aren’t in the industry. We constructed a small questionnaire which was:

Example of an answer sheet

Results

Age Gender

Results

Favourite Genre Time spent on YouTube

Results

Have you heard of future shorts? Can you name a short film?

Pre Production We then also constructed a questionnaire about Romantic Comedies to find out what the audience expectations were and the sort of conventions which we needed to include. The questions were:

Rom-Com Questionnaire

•  Do you like watching teen films? • What do you like/dislike about them? • What is the appeal to teen films? • Who is your favourite character in a rom com and why? • Do you like ‘predictable’ endings? • Do you think a rom com should have a happy ending or a more realistic ending? • Do you prefer unique characters or stereotypes? • Do you find it easy to relate to characters in rom coms? • Would u prefer to be surprised or do you like a conventional rom com storyline? • If you were going to watch a teen movie what would you expect it to be like? • Is the look of the characters important to you when you watch a rom com?

Results

Production During the production process of script writing, we held several focus groups amongst peers as well as with professional film makers to see the reaction as to how our film was developing. Things that were discussed included: • The character representations • The narrative • How to overcome problems such as character transformations in such a short space of time

We ended up producing 6 drafts of our script before finalising it.

These was one of the changes we made:

This scene was set in a park when Aden’s friends spot Maddie and Aden together. We had to remove this scene because there wasn’t enough time as we only had 5 minutes and there were better alternatives.

Audience Feedback After the first draft of our film was made, we asked some people to watch it and to give us their opinions so far.

A main feature which stood out was the writing for ‘football_boy’ was too dark: We then changed the colour to this:

Audience Feedback After our film was made, we created a survey to find out our audience feedback to see their reaction to our film. The questions were:

•  What did you like and why? • What didn’t you like and why? • Did you find the characters realistic? • Did you like the ending? • Did you notice continuity? • Do you like the narrative? • Did the film engage your emotions? Which parts? • Favourite scene • Least favourite scene • Did anything stand out?

Results

Results

Results

The audience in general really enjoyed our film. The most popular

part that people noticed was the opening scene.

HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION

AND RESEARCH, PLANNING AND

EVALUATION STAGES?

Research and Planning

Institutional Research - Wikipedia - IMBD - Google - Cultural Voiceover

Internet (Planning) - Blogger - Survey Monkey

Numbers & Keynote - Questionnaires

Textual Analysis - Youtube - Future Shorts - BBC Short Films - Channel 4 Films - DVD

Construction

Celtx

Logic

Live Type

Final Cut Pro

Soundtrack Pro

Image Ready

Quick Time

Indesign

Animatics

Microsoft Word

Photoshop

Screenflow

Slideshare

MSN Messenger

Free Music Archive

Garage Band

Using the Technologies InDesign Photoshop Soundtrack Pro Final Cut Pro Celtx

Additional Information

MAKING A FILM In our film, we followed the conventions of film making in general. This involved using things such as:

Camera Techniques e.g. Whip Pan

- Continuity - Fades/ Dissolves

Editing

180 degree rule

Different camera shots

Non Diegetic Sound

- Extreme Close Up - Medium Long Shot - Point of View Shot - Reaction Shot

We were inspired by the virtual relationship used in ‘A Cinderella Story”

THE END