Dear whom it may concern,

Thankyou for looking at my blog, have fun seeing our project grow! Hope you enjoy it!

 Faye Higgins

7) looking back at your premliminary task, what would you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full project?

Since the prelim tasks i feel that i have progressed alot more and i have better knowledge of how to produce a film! I learnt how to use the camera and the different shots that needed to be taken at sertain points e.g. extreme close up to emphesis to the audience. I learnt about the 180 degree rule, the camera can only be on one side of the actors during shot-verse-shot other wise it brakes away from exposition that they are in the same place and it doesnt look right. The prelims were obviously practise runs and i am happy to see the progress we have made since then.
We had many rough cuts that we kept building on, Our first one we tried to hide the identity of Jake we also were missing alot of shots e.g. when they bump into eachother (this rough cut was when we had our first set of actors who were unreliable), but then we realised that it is not really what our genre is, that is more horror than rom-com.
On our second rough cut we didnt get many shots to work with, we also needed to get the story across to the viewers as it was hard to get our narrative enigma across to the audience, nobody understood Jake's role and why he was running...
So in our 3rd rough cut we had re-shoot everything. We had alot more shot variations which gave us more to work with to show our knowledge of how to work the shots together but than we realised we needed to expose why Jake is in a rush aswell as why is Anthea in this small town? so we added the Morning shots of Jake and the book signing speech from Anthea. This gave us the opportunity to use shot-verse-shot and we also used the technique of panning the camera across Anthea's make up, to expose that she was famous and getting ready for an event.

The soundtrack was a new project to us as we didn't make one from scratch in the prelim, so this was a challenge and it was a success and fit in with our project wonderfully first time round!

This project has made me realise since the prelim how much pressure there is and how it takes alot of time to complete at its best, the prelim had to be done in a week and with 5 of us it was manageable to complete it, and at the time it looked good but compared to our Film opening it was rubbish! i am proud of the work we have come out with, it was a challenge and was interesting to learn of how different genres should be and what they should include, during the prelim i knew nothing about what a horror should include, i havn't done a horror but i didnt know much about rom-coms either so i have learnt a great deal of the genre itself.

  As a team i feel me and Charlotte worked better in a bigger group, there was less pressure on our shoulders when there were 5 of us in the prelim task (the mask). I feel that we clashed because we had very different ideas and we could not agree on alot of things. I feel that i was mainly putting the movie together during editing and filming where as she was more thinking of ideas. We tried to split the work as equally as possible and we both did a fair amount of research and planning but towards the filming dates I had commitments that i could not get out of at times, so did Charlotte, it wasn't just me been unreliable, but we pulled through in the end.

We had the problem of unreliable actors at first which set us back alot and we couldn't keep up with the other groups because of this so we had to change the actors - towards christmas i felt more confident we were getting somewere as we got alot done quite quickly. Towards the end we have been a bit more laid back as we have had alot of feedback and it was only small changes we needed to make to make it perfect, e.g. add afew things for anchorage that Jake was late - we used the interview sheet and mobile for this.
At times we both did seperate work e.g. i filmed nick whilst Charlotte was on a school trip and she recorded outside noise while i was busy. I feel it was equal imput and i am happy that it worked out.

6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this project?

5) How do you address/ attract the audience?

4) who would the audience be for your media project?

My audience is aimed to be young aged females, aged 12-24. This is because the age rate is 12 due to the matter of Jake using innapropriate language more than once, it is minor swearing therefore 12 is the best age rate for it. There is no sexual moments or use of illegal usage so a 15 would narrow our audience even further than it already is.
Examples of 12/12A age rated movies are ..

• Wild child (2008)
• Just go with it  (2011)
• 17 Again (2009)

The majority of females watch rom-coms it is most likely to be younger women, with the young actors who are not as old as they look, they are both 16 going 17 but they look alot older! we will get more than just teenagers watching this because the slightly older audience (age 18-25) will feel that they can compare to these two actors as they are similar age, so they believe!
The male viewer figures may be alot lower as it is a romantic comedy and the few male viewers will be watching purely because of its comdey and the male gaze caused by our character Anthea Lovell.

Teenagers/Tweenagers and young adults are going to be our main audience, also fans of rom-coms such as Notting Hill, Nipoleon Dinomite, P.S i Love You etc.. will be interested in our film as it is inspired by these films and has various similarities to them.
The audience we got feedback from were age 16-17. We asked several people (not including the class students) and they enjoyed our work which shows that we have achieved what we were looking for.

3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media project and why?

2) How does your media project represent particular social groups?

The film i have worked on is a rom-com, there fore typically for the female audience. The young cast may bring teens and young adults to watching it, it is not a romantic, it is both romantic and comedy - this will give the male audience a reason to watch the film as it is comical.

The stereotype of Anthea is a typical American young rich drama queen, this is going to make girls want to watch it to see how she lives her life as a famous young adult. There is no physical disability in our rom-com because we didnt feel that there needed to be, without been disrespectful. The stereotype of the character Anthea is that she is a fit, good looking and can be either blonde or brunette- we have given her brown hair to give less impression of a scream queen (typically blonde). The heels and the sun glasses signify she is trying to impress whilste been undercover/ trying to fit in without been noticed. The bags she is carrying are big well known brands to show her welth e.g. the louie vouton hand bag.
The stereotype of Jake is that he is a working class young man looking for work - signified by the interview sheet. He is unorganised as shown when you see he only has 30 minuits to get to his interview and him running around. These aspects of Jake will be comical and possibly make the female audience feel in power as the male protagonist is not as organised and well achieved as the female.
This binary opposition is a good contrast as it has two completely different social classes - this means that middle class and working class audience will be watching as there is no limit as to who it should be about.

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our film 'Spotlight Love' is a romantic comedy. We use alot of conventions to show this by having the normal structure of a Romantic comedy - 

1. Meeting unusually.
2. Something that brings them back together.
3. A complication/ Brake up.
4. The make up/ Solution to the problem.
5. Happy ending.

These were the main 5 points we focussed on to structure our romantic comedy. Our basic story line is that the two protagonists, Jake and Anthea, meet by bumping into each other in a town that Anthea is holding a book signing, Jake is our comical character because he is a working class character that doesn't know alot and is a bit clumsy at times, were as Anthea is a very well known actress so she is very responsible and 'lady like'. Jake is the one that tries to find Anthea to return her phone, he finally finds her through phoning her manager, They meet up and swap back phones, he makes a fool of himself and she finds it funny, this makes them meet up again. They meet up afew times and finally start to fall in love, this is when the bad times occur. Anthea and Jake are found by paporatsy and put in the newspaper, Anthea's manager (has a secret crush on her) and her parents are not too happy so organise her to do a photoshoot in New York. This makes them fall apart but then Jake follows her to the airport before she flies off to New York. They reunite and fall in love, getting married not long after. - This is the basic idea of the story line. 

The best friends & family of both Anthea and Jake are introduced and they are also seen as comical as they are both Scottish - in many rom-coms e.g. Nottinghill we have a celtic comical character. This brigs a bigger audience, We also have the 'not so nice' characters, in this case it is Anthea's parents and her manager who seems to have a 'crush' on her but really he wants to be a success himself - Cinderella story had the step mother and step sisters as the complicators. These three characters are to become the compliction of the path towards Anthea and Jake's happiness but with a bit of help from the best friends Jake follows her and they fall in love all over again. 

We follow many codes ad conventions of the Rom-com but we also go against them. Our soundtrack doesn't use dialogue, unlike Juno and many other films, we didn't use this code of using a lyrical song. We wanted to have a sound to flow with what was on screen rather than lyrics to describe the feelings. Establishing shots are used in many rom-coms like 'Wild Child', '17 Again' etc, we didn't use this we jumped straight in, not only because it was a time waster but we had more than one place we were set in as we followed both characters.