Pretty Girls Make Graves

Directors commentary

Audience Research.

Before we started any part of the procduction process we did alot of audience research, we conducted questionaires into what our target audience liked in a film and we watched films that had the same target audience as our production.

We gave questionaries to 100 people aged 15-25 both male and female and we found that social realist and dramatic films were favorites in our target audience.

Through the questionaires we found the five most popular films in our target audience from each sex. The top five films for the females were :

1)Moulin Rouge

2)Mean Girls

3)Kiduluthood

4)Twilight

5)Slumdog Millionaire

The top five films for the males were:

1)Kidulthood

2)Transformers

3)Bullet Boy

4)Fast and Furious

5)Taken

From this information and after watching these films we found out that females preferred more romantic films and males preferred more action and dramtic films, so we decided to make a dramatic thriller with romance and action so it had appeal to both sexes. The idea of gun crime is protrayed in our opening this was because guns were a consistant wepon throughout the male films and some of the female films, which is why guncrime was a issue we wanted to address.

Audience comments

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout our project we used a digital camera. During production we learnt a lot about camera techniques for example high angles give a sense of weakness while low angles give a sense of empowerment, which helped us show our protagonists emotions. During the construction of our product we learnt a lot about different technologies’ especially the editing software (Final Cut Pro) and the music software (Garage Band). During the editing we used the basic knowledge of Final Cut Pro that we learnt from the Preliminary task alongside the techniques we learnt during throughout the main task. As we got more confident with the editing software we used more adventurous effects and more daring cuts to give our opening a more dramatic feel. One of our main difficulties was making the flashbacks look more like flashbacks than present events. To do this we wanted to make the shots look drained of their colour but had great difficulty finding the right effect, we soon learnt that the “Old Film” effect drained the colour and a blurred border gave the flashbacks a more surreal look. We also learnt about simplistic editing techniques like cutting different clips and adding fades to make it continuous. We also learnt how to make music smoothly fade in. We also learnt how to effectively make a full timeline and how to use each level of the timeline. At one point we had trouble with the sound on our timeline, as there was only one level with music causing the sound to only come from one speaker so we had to learn how to replicate the sound and put it onto another line in order to make sound more effective. We used non liniar digital editing which meant we were able to repeatedly edit different aspects of our film at different times as it was needed.

The soundtrack to our opening had to be uncopyrighted so we had to create our own in Garage Band, with none of the group having used garage band before we had to ask for help from the Studio Skills teacher who explained how to use Garage Band and helped us convert our finished soundtrack to a Mp4 file and on to Final Cut Pro so we could edit it on to our time line. We found using garage band quite difficult because we couldn't manage to create our own sound despite the fact we tried so we decided to use a garage band pre made tune. Finding the pre made sound that would be effective was challenging because there were so many and we wanted to find the perfect sound.
After we learnt to use Garage Band we started to experiment with the ambient sound effects that we already on Garage Band to give our opening a more filling sound as the voice over and the soundtrack together did not sound very good. The ambient sounds were also difficult to find because they were in abstract places, but we worked on it and eventually found effective sounds..

We also learnt different way in which to record our voice over, we started by just recording on the camera and talking right into the microphone which worked well but the voice sounded quite crackly. We then tried using the radio microphone which worked a lot better.

How did you attract/address your audience?

The genre of the opening sequence is a dramatic thriller and we used many different ways to show the genre and grab our audience’s attention. Our target audience was young adults both male and female mainly ages at 15-25. We chose the name Pretty Girls Make Graves as the main protagonist is female and we want the audience to be in suspense to weather she will kill someone or not. We could not target our film to anyone under the age of 15 as it had elements of violence and two of the main themes are the drug trade and gun crime as these are both big issues in todays society. Our opening location is on a plane showing the main protagonist alone suggesting that her family and friends have abandoned her. It also suggests that she is independent. That’s when the over voice narration kicks in and explains why she is alone on a plane and reveling that she has been sent to live her dad, which most teenagers can relate to as most families are split nowadays. The next time the audience sees the girl she on a bridge smoking looking upset, making the audience wonder what has happened, as the voice over explains we see flash backs of what seems like a chase scene grabbing the audience’s attention, making them wonder why she is being chased and why she needs to hide. We then see her again looking happier with a boy this is clearly shown as a memory. The idea of teenage shows that the girl has had a normal life (something every teenager can relate to) at some point before her “love” was killed. Our film is also a social realist film as it comfrounts issues that is happing in everyday society today. We also know that social realist films appeal to our audience group, films like Kiduluthood and Bulletboy proved popular with our audience.





Audience Profile.

Age : 18

Gender : Female

Profile: Our main audience would be girls from the ages 15-20 as they are learning independence and we also found out from our audience research that girls prefer romance films and given idea of teenage love, we feel it would appeal to them mostly.We wanted to target it at teenage girls who want to be rebelious which is why our main protagonist smokes because it is one of the main forms of rebellion.

Intrests: Music, films, socializing and love are keen intrests of many teenage girls, also the idea of rebelion is consent throughout our product so our audience would be intrested in law breaking.

Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you think you have learnt from the progression from it to the full task?

During the Preliminary task we learnt how to thoroughly plan our shot lists and storyboards which help is with our pre-production work. It also helped us to easily choose the genre for our thriller, which was a dramatic thriller.

The story line was then discussed. During the preliminary task we learnt what needed to be conveyed through each shot to show that dramatic thriller therefore we used a variation of light and dark locations to show conflicting futures. The locations then needed to be discussed and what we learnt from our preliminary task helped us because we were able to see how effective locations would be and how the mese-en-scene would be portrayed.

We learnt how to fit the character to our films genre comparing to our preliminary task. In our preliminary task we learnt that costume could be an effective instrument to give the product a sense of realism. We had to research our films genre before starting filming in order to know what the conventions are. We found that thrillers are a sub genre for horror.

Learning from our shot list we had to change some scenes that were impractical and didn’t fit with the themes. This was a repetition of what we did in the preliminary task. An example of this is we were going to have the main character meeting during a flash back but we did not find it very effective and it also went more towards a romantic genre rather than a thriller. The majority of our product was filmed outside which is a contrast to the preliminary task since it was only done inside. We took our lighting into great consideration we chose to have our final task predominantly does with natural lighting because it would create a great contrast to the flashbacks because there is very little lighting which gives it a creepy look. We did this because in our preliminary task we used unnatural lighting, which didn’t work very well. During our final task we only used non-diegetic sound and all the sound is post-production, whereas during our preliminary task the sound was all diegetic. During our final product we learnt how to use garage band to make the soundtrack to give our film atmosphere.

During our preliminary task we learnt how to use final cut which we were again able to use during our final task. From our preliminary task we learnt how to use the 180° rule which was useful to make our film look realistic and effective. If we had not used this rule our footage would not run smoothly.

Overall a lot of the skills we learnt from our preliminary task were useful. We learnt how to use a variety of camera angles and learnt how to effectively represent genres.