Connect Four

My name is Sarah Olivier
Candidate number: 2150
Centre Number: 16339

Here is the final draft of our film "Connect Four":



My group consisted of Connor Harper, Tilly Hawkins, Jack Bezant and myself. We are very proud of  our final film opening and we hope you enjoy it as well.

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

Title of The Film 

The title of the film is connect four. The film title represents the three main parts of our film. Connect four represents the four friends within the friendship group and how they are all connected together. Connect four is also a children's board game which the group play.

Setting

The movie takes place in a small town with the majority of the scenes in a small log cabin at the back of one of the friends gardens. The log cabin offers the friends a place of solidarity, companionship and refuge. It allows us an insight to the characters feelings and emotions away from other situations. The log cabin is a unique location for filming as there are not many films in the teen/coming of age genre featuring it. Although, it is similar to The Goonies because the friendship group congregate at a house.

Our Titles..

Challenges to common stereotypes:

Our titles challenge the normal stereotypes of a normal teen/coming of age titles. This is because in a normal other film of this genre they tend to follow the teen characters and give a small insight into their personalities (for example The Breakfast Club opening scene). We have challenged this by focusing more on how the titles are presented to show the characters personalities. By having the titles on the games it shows the characters are a fun, close-knit group.

Camera Work and Editing

Story/Narrative 

The majority of the films follow Todorov's idea of equilibrium, disruption, resolution and a new equilibrium. The diagram below shows our films narrative structure compared to 21 Jump Street...

Characters:

1  Kurt Saint - teenage boy, long hair, jeans, trainers, white complexion, troubled background, middle class. 

2  Jacob Burted - teenage boy, short hair, jeans, trainers, hoody, white complexion, sporty, student, single. 

3  Alex Maplin - teenage girl, long hair, jeans, trainers, white complexion, student, popular, likes to shop. 

4  Katie Shane - teenage girl, long hair, skirt, white, student, shy, likes to study, has little friends.

All our characters were modelled on the breakfast club characters...

•           Kurt Saint = John Bender 

•           Jacob Burted = Andrew Clark 

•           Alex Maplin = Claire Standish 

•           Katie Shane = Allison Reynolds

Costumes

Throughout the film you see the female characters wearing make-up, this is a stereotype for female teens and that most teenage girls wear makeup. And we also dress the characters differently throughout the film to help represent what their character is like. So for Jacob he will wear sportswear to show he likes sport and the 'popular girl' Alex will wear really fancy clothes to help represent that she is within the popular group these are all very strong stereotype. There is the stereotype that the more geeky characters generally don't wear as much make-up and don't care as much of what they look like compared to the more popular one.

Themes:

•  Friendship - The enviable friendship between the four characters.

•  School life - Some scenes of the film take place inside a school.

Love - Kurt is madly in love with Alex but when Alex goes to a party and gets with loads of boys Kurt gets angry and breaks up the group.    

Friendship	School Life	Love

Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

We have included many different social groups within our film including the main groups which are; teenagers, geeky girls, popular girls, sporty boys and musical boys. We created an Emaze to display how are film represents particular social groups.

Question 3: What kind of institution might distribute your media product and why?

This is a voice over of Connor talking about our film like he has actually directed it. His director's commentary includes how our film got recognised and how it will be distributed in the future by our chosen media company, Studio Canal.

Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

This Prezi is to show what our primary audience would look like and what their likes and personality would be like. 
The core target audience for our film 'Connect Four' are male and females between the age of 15-19 years old. Who are fairly shy but very sociable amongst people they feel comfortable with and love watching teen/coming age of film. 

Our secondary target audience is the teenager's (Core target audience) parents, who will come with their teenage children to the cinema to watch our film. We made sure that our film is very versatile so that the parents would also enjoy our product.



This graph shows the percentage of age groups that go to the cinema the most often. From this we have concluded that the majority of people who are going to the cinema are 15-24 years old which perfectly coincides with the ages of our target audience.

Question 5: How did you attract/ address your audience?

Throughout this process we have tried very hard to ensure that we did not alienate either of our target audiences whether it be our primary or secondary audience. Our primary audience being teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19 and our secondary audience being the parents of those teenagers. Below is a table of the ways in which we were able to attract and include our target audiences:

Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?

Throughout this process I have learnt a lot about how to use technology and its importance in the media and film industry. I feel like I have thoroughly improved my technology skills from when I started the year to my current film opening and this is my video blog response to Question 6.

Question 7: Looking back at your prelim task, what have you learnt in the progression from that to the final product?

Here is my preliminary task: The Sunshine Killer...



Here are some screenshots from our prelim that I feel show my progress throughout this process:

The brief for our preliminary task:

To plan, film and edit a film opening that incorporated a set of specific shots. These included: an establishing shot, a match on action shot, shot-reverse-shot and two close up shots.

The brief for our film opening task:

In groups devise a film opening that includes a set of characters and an established narrative, both of which must be well researched and supported by information and planning on your blogs.

Here is Tilly and I's final evaluation for Question 7:

Connor decided to complete his own evaluation and here it is:

Film Poster Criticisms

After producing the film poster for our film, we were told that it did not look like a film poster and that the poster looked as if it was promoting a band as opposed to a film.

We chose to create our poster like this because of the inspiration we took from the posters of films similar to ours such as The Breakfast Club, The Goonies and Stand By Me. We managed to find many similarities between all of the posters used to promote these classic teen films and so we used the research we conducted to aid us in producing our own film poster. 

Here is our poster:

Here is the poster for The Breakfast Club:

Our poster has many similarities to the poster used to promote the classic teen film The Breakfast Club. Our poster similarly features a group of teenagers standing together appearing united and has a tagline hinting to the narrative of the film. It was because of this poster, and others we found when conducting our film poster research, that we chose to create our film poster in this way.

Our Marketing

In order to promote our film we had to find different ways of using social media and other free methods of marketing as we are a low budget film and so cannot afford a big trailer campaign like that of Star Wars or other blockbusters.

We chose to use social media platforms to predominately promote our film as they are both free and accessible to all. Here is the link to our film's Facebook page, here we will post updates and teasers of our film before its release date in early April 2016.

https://www.facebook.com/Unofficial-Connect-Four-1678556379051740/ 

We also decided to use Twitter as well as Facebook and so here is the link to our Twitter page.

https://twitter.com/connectfourthe1