Audience Research

We made a questionaire to try and find out about target audience and to give us ideas on how to appeal to them. The questionaire asked questions about peoples favourite genres, how much they liked crime films and what they like about and what encourages them to go and see films.

From our research we found that the most favoured films genre was Comedy/Rom Coms.

Action/thriller which is closer to the genre of our film was the second most popular and so is a resonably popular genre for the 16 - 21 age group. When asked how much they like crime films on a scale of one to five (1=hate 2=love) its scored an average of 4, therefore shwing that it is a well liked popular genre and so their is an already large target audience for our film.

Generally people who liked action/thriller films said to like them for the interesting storylines and intense scenes. Therefore we will try to make our storyline as interesting as possible and intense scenes to appeal to the target audiences expectations.

Organisation of Resources

For costume ideas we looked at black tight fitting clothing, black leather jackets, glove and boots.

For props we decided on using black torches, guns, bags and items for breaking into the house such as a crow bar and hammer.

The location of our opening sequence is outside and in a government members house. This image below would have been the ideal sort location for our film as it suggests wealth and importance however we didn't have access to a house of this size and so we shot it at my house. Therefore we didn't include a shot in which you can see much of the house so the audience can't tell that its not as high class as it needs to be for the storyline. 

My house:



Cast
We considered many different possibilities as to who we would cast. We wanted a small group of predominately females professional looking spys, but it was very difficult to get people who would be free for shooting all at the same time. Therefore we decided to cast ourselves from the group as we would all have our media lessons available to organise shooting times easily and efficiently and we were all free at the same times. We would also be able to sort ourselves out with the appropriate costume and propps so that woulds make things easier. Our group is made up of mostly females also and therefore the representation we wanted to achieve we would be able to.

Mood Board

We looked through magazines for costume, set and propp ideas and inspriation. Folowing the conventions of spy crime films we looked mainly at black leather tight fitting clothes and guns as propps. We found however that suits were also associated alot with spy films as you can see in the picture on the bottom left of the character James bond from the bond films. For our scene however we think we are going to stick with all black tight fitting clothing as it suits the narrative of the scene better.

Titles

Title sequences are designed to tell the audience the names of the main people involved in the making of the film however they are also used to set the scene and general vibe of the film. The purpose of titles in the opening of a film is to set the scene, establish character, genre and narative. It does this by the use of the visual style of the titles, the transition of the titles and sound.

The order of the titles usually follows this set structure:
The producer
The highest Billing (director of star ususally)
The director
The film Title
The actors
the cast and crew

For our titles we have decided to incorperate them into the scence as intersperse titles as the spys within our film search the biulind they have broken into.

Conventions of the Crime Film

There are many different types of Crime films which can be split into these sub genres:

Film Noir eg Sunset Boulevard, Gilda
American Gangster eg Scarface, The Godfather
Detective eg Poirot, The maltese Falcon
Spy eg Casino Royale
Police eg Hot Fuzz, Starsky and Hutch
Action eg Lethal Weapon

All of these Genres contain acts against police or goverment authority and this establishes them as a Crime Film However within in each sub genre there are much more specific conventions that can been seen that establish them witin that sub genre.

We have decided to do our film opening sequence in the spy Sub genre. We looked at previous spy films for inspiration and for conventions that we could apply to our film. We looked at serious drama spy films such as Casino Royale and Mission Impossible and more humorous spy films such as Charlies angles. 

After looking into the spy film sub genre we found that the story line was usual about a goverment working agency as the hero's fighting against crime; the villians. This gave us the idea to challenge this convention and instead have the hero's be working against the goverment and police and they be the villians to the story. We found that there where alot of scenes invloving sneeking or breaking into places that often took place at night. Therefore we decided to have our openingsequence take place at night and be about a group of spys breaking into somewhere. There were also alot of cosyume and propp conventions such as tight black cothing during night time mission scenes and weapons such as guns.

Sophie,Megan,Rhys,Rachel Prelim

Preliminary Task

Before starting on our main task we did a small preliminary exercise for us to learn and practise some simple filming techniques that are vital in film making. This prelim task needed to include a character opening a door, crossing a room sitting down in a chair opposite another character, whit whom she/he then exchanges a couple lines of dialogue with. It needed to demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot ans the 180 degree rule.

We dicided to shoot ours in the college cafe and have the characters in it to be two friends meeting for a chat.

From our preliminary task we learnt how to achieve the filming techniques required and how to efficiently edit a sequence together. Whilst we filmed for this task we watched back alot of the shots we took on set which was not entirely necessary and therfore we made this a target that we did not need to do this for our actual task and this would make our filming alot less time consuming. We also set our selves targets that we would spend more time on the sound to go along with the sequence as the prelim task sounding a bit dull and that we would not use alot of dialogue in our actual task as ot becomes quite difficult to come up with natural and realistic dialogue.