EVALUATION QUESTIONS

Media evaluation questions and answers


How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The current overbearing representation of teenagers has connotations of criminality, drugs, being out of control, alcohol and trouble-seeking. We aimed to represent teenagers as mature and ‘average’ but with slightly younger characteristics-such as lack of time keeping from the female protagonist and time lapse shots of the male protagonist waiting.

Our media product uses different techniques to represent an ‘indie’(which is short for individual, creative) style social group through sound, editing, camera shots and mise en scene. The female protagonist is dressed mellow colours and floral patterns, this represents the current ‘indie’ style of females. She is surrounded by artwork in the establishing shot, art is a main focus of ‘indie’ for its expressiveness. The male protagonist is also dressed in current ‘indie’ style, both of the characters are not dressed in designer clothes or well known brand names because the term ‘indie’ embodies not being mainstream.

The social group is also represented through our choice of soundtrack, the fact that we used music from an unsigned and uncopyrighted shows this in itself, however the style of music is a mix of acoustic, folk, and indie to represent the social group.

The editing effects we used were sketch-like for the credits, art is typically seen as a factor of the ‘indie’ social group as it is a form of creativity and expression, and that is what the term ‘indie’ is based on, being individual and expressive.

Our camera shots also are art focused, as they are bright and colourful, and the location is at the seaside which is a place of natural beauty, another factor of ‘indie’.



What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

We have learned a lot and come to have a good understanding of the whole process involved in creating a movie sequence, using the camera, tripod, imovie software on the apple mac and much more. Operating the camera and tripod was not very hard, though we learned that it could be difficult to align the camera to take a level shot, or that the tripod was sometimes stiff. We accommodated to this by taking extra time to make sure the camera was in suitable positioning and turn the camera while holding it, not just using the handle on the tripod.

We also learned how to use the program imovie on the apple mac. Once we learned which keys to press to perform actions it was fairly easy to edit our camera shots. We also made use of the video fx options on our work with the credits. However sometimes the mac froze when we had been doing a large amount of editing, so we had to wait until it worked again.

Another program we learned to use on the mac was garageband. This is software that we could use to make a soundtrack for our product, we made a sequence of music but in the end we decided that it was best to use music from a band because it was done professionally and sounded better for our movie opening.