Main Excercise Commentary

In our group, we decided to go for the social group you would normally expect to see in a chick flick film. We felt that we were all familiar with what you would see in this group so when it came to representing it I thought it was quite easy to do and was shown clearly in our piece.

Each member of the group researched a film that had the same social group as ours such as ‘Hairspray’ and ‘Camp Rock’. Most of them have the same sort of main character who aspired to be more popular or successful. We then looked at how they were represented through how they were framed, what they were wearing, the music played in the background and so on. We considered each aspect we researched and tried to apply this to our own chick flick/musical film.

Hairspray



Camp Rock



We showed this ‘girly’ and overly confident representation through, firstly, her dress codes. The dress that we picked out for her was very over the top and feminine to suit the characters stereotype. We made her bedroom have a similar girly feel to it with posters on the walls which represented her age as well as her social group. Finally, the music we chose reflected our characters stereotype. With a woman singing quite a upbeat and feminine sounding song, I thought it helped to represent the social stereotype of a young, over the top, girly teenager.

We chose our audience to be similar to the main character of our piece. Aiming our piece to an influential age of musical girls in their teens, we thought that this type of film would get their attention. (Audience Research)

The films we researched were aimed at the same age so we knew that we would not only be representing a social group but it would be representing the age and possibly the personality of our chosen audience. The music chosen was picked out to sound similar to the modern music teenagers listen to and the clothes and style of the main characters, although is much more exaggerated would be similar again to how a teenager might dress.

The company that I would expect this film to be distributed by would probably be a company like Disney as most of their audiences’ age group and social group is similar to ours. Most of their films are near enough the same to the one we have made with a chick flick and musical theme.

After the preliminary task, we had decided to use a different camera so that there was less problems uploading the shots onto windows movie makers. However, even when we did use the cameras that we thought were necessary, there were still a lot of problems when learning about the technologies.

Filming with the cameras given to us worked perfectly fine during our filming and we had little trouble getting it to work other than small problems we easily got around such as changing the battery. It was when it came to uploading them onto windows movie maker that proved to be difficult. The entire group had had some kind of experience with windows movie maker so all of us felt confident about editing. However, we soon realised that we would have to use adobe premiere as half of our shots were filmed in wide screen.

Learning about this new technology was hard to get my head around as it seemed much more complex as windows. However, as we began to become more familiar with it I realised there were a lot more things on there to help us with the editing such as a preview screen. Uploading the shots was much simpler and over all the new technology proved to be very helpful.


Looking back on my preliminary task, I think that I have come a long way in terms of understanding technologies and how much time and effort it takes to organise even a short film.

In our first practise, our organisation was already fairly good, as well as our group communication. However, I realised that there is always room for improved and used the mistakes from the first exercise to make the second one better.

Knowing what I missed out on in the first exercise helped me remember what the group is likely to forget in the main exercise such as outlines and photos of the locations, pictures of the progress of filming and editing etc. The mistakes we made in our first task such as technology issues, actors not turning up and so on, helped us deal with them early on in the process so they didn’t take up to much of our time.

Learning about the technology made a great improved when we began our filming and editing. Although our cameraman felt more familiar with the one used in the first task, when it came to editing our piece, there were a lot less issues uploading it as we did in the first exercise. Even though we did have some problems with the cameras given to us (having half the shots in widescreen), the technology was more familiar to our lecturer so these problems were easily overcome.

I think that the most important and most effective thing that I have learned in both the preliminary and main exercise is how important it is to stay in our groups and work together. By having such good group skills, we managed to stick well with our schedule and get everything we needed done before our filming on time and spread out evenly through the group.