Our opening fulfilled the mafia theme through music, camera angles, lighting and mise en scene. We chose ‘Father’s day’ for the music as it had solemn connotations which match the connotations of a mafia film like this one. Extreme close ups worked with side lighting to keep up enigmas and connotations of mystery as it obscured our characters from vision. The extreme close ups would also help the mise en scene to have a greater effect: The eyes carry connotations of mistrust, we edited them together to show that the two men have a distrust for each other; the sweat has connotations of nervousness and fear which hints to the audience that there is something for the man to be afraid of and this intensifies the enigma of what they are doing. Aside from these things, there is something that makes this opening different and that is the gunshot. This is because the smoke, the suites and the money has told the audience that these men are from the mafia, and that one would shoot another shows that there is a conflict within the mafia instead of with the police or a rival gang as the audience would expect. This is a kind of conflict that has never been explored and has made our opening unique. We believe this will be successful with the audience as they will want to see where this new kind of conflict leads to. It is always important to bring something new to the genre as without it people are generally seeing what they have seen before and this will bore them. I think that overall our choices have worked well and we have evidence for this in a Questionnaire we gave the class. Out of 10 they rated it an average of 8 and agreed with us on the lighting and the smoke and how they related to the theme. Most said they would watch the film meaning it didn’t bore them so we must have succeeded in making it unique. They expressed that they were very interested in the enigmas proving that our lighting, mise en scene, music and cinematography definitely worked in the way outlined above.
The main stereotype in this sequence is criminals and they have been represented in both good and bad ways. Their suites show that they are well off and represents criminals as civilised people. The slow-motion editing makes everything seem calm and smooth which suggests that these people are comfortable and in control, it represents criminals as people who know what they are doing. The gunshot shows the man’s treachery and represents criminals as people with no morals or honour and only have concern for themselves. These stereotypes seem very common in crime films except for the latter, the mafia is usually shown to have respect for their family and partners. Gender has also been represented in this sequence, some aspects go with the common stereotype whereas some challenge it. The suites and the money give in to the stereotype that men are the ones that earn the money and the absence of women from the scene suggests the mafia is a man’s business. We also see the common stereotype of men being violent from the gunshot. However, we also see the man sweat showing he is afraid and developing his character as being somewhat cowardly, this challenges the stereotype that men are the brave heroes. Overall our opening does conform to the common stereotypes but we have challenged them in some aspects, men are mostly portrayed in a positive way.
We would need to find an institution to develop this film and I believe that we would go to Hollywood for this. I believe this because Hollywood is the movie centre of America and the mafia is something that is better related to America than England. The mafia as we see it today is represented closest to people such as Al Capone from America in the middle of the 20th century. Hollywood would likely take a good interest in this film as similar films have appeared from here.
The target audience for our film would be mystery and crime fans of ages 25-40 who enjoy putting the pieces together and to understand the plot. This is a good target audience as it is quite broad so it will include a lot of people and we will be giving them the enigmas and twists that they want. A potential secondary target audience would be action fans, they would want to see the murders and how they are resolved. From looking at the answered Questionnaires of people who I believe belong in my target audience, I saw that they labelled it ‘interesting’ and it had ‘good enigmas’. This shows that our audience does indeed appeal to the target audience.
We have attracted an audience to this film in a number of ways. We set up an equilibrium of the mafia working as normal, but this is disturbed as one member turns on another. The impact of this is that the audience now knows that there is someone in the mafia who has betrayed them. Tension is built in the opening through the secrecy and nature of their actions. The darkness of the room has connotations of being hidden away, this creates a tension of them being caught. From the Questionnaire many people whom we judged to be in our target audience agreed that they felt much tension from watching the opening so we know we have succeeded. The chronology seems to have worked well. Editing the two scenes of the people’s feet together suggests that they are in the same place at the same time and that these two men are linked. The scenes also flow and create realism as each scene takes place where the last one left off. The message on crime in our opening is that it is a dangerous business in which you can trust no one.
We used a variety of technologies when making our opening and I feel I have learned a lot about all of them. I learned about the usefulness of blogs as this was the first time I’ve seen them used for ongoing projects like this one. The same is with youtube as before I wouldn’t have found any use in it besides entertainment, now I know it can be used for homework and research. The internet was very useful as I could work on my project at home as well as at college and contact Luke and Daniel. As for the camera I learned how big a change a tripod can make and how professional and smooth it makes the scenes look, it was very good for panning and tilting. For imovie, I learned how much you can do with a scene even when you think it’s finished.
I think that we’ve come a long way since our preliminary task, this is because we used so much more in our opening that we didn’t think of then. These are things such as better lighting, we used side lighting and low key lighting to create a solemn mood that matches the genre, we did this by buying black sheets and hanging them around the room to make it look darker. This wasn’t present in our preliminary task which used high key lighting that didn’t fit the mood. Other such features were slow-mo and mise en scene, for our preliminary task we were dressed in normal clothes but we changed into suites for our opening and this made it much better.
Overall I believe our product was a brilliant success. In my opinion it’s greatest strengths were the smoke (created using a kettle), the suites and the music. However, it wasn’t without flaws, the starting sound doesn’t fit the genre very well and changes to ‘Father’s day’ quite clumsily. Slow-mo may also have been overused. Despite the flaws, I am very happy with our opening.
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