Question 2

The ways in which gender is represented in our film are portrayed in two different ways. One of which is a homosexual character who wears skinny jeans and a denim jacket, we chose this costume because it is part of the current fashion trends worn by teenagers today, this enables our target audience of 16-25 year olds to relate with the character. The old denim look was also chosen because in Shane Meadow's 'This Is England' the costume is used to show the time the film was set and also for the audience to engage with the old vintage style. This use of costume is an intertextual reference helping highlight the issues of homophobia and racism also brought up in 'This Is England'.













"Recent controversies over Hollywood’s negative depiction of homosexuality have focused on how such portrayals marginalize and silence gays and lesbians. Organizations such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) argue that films such as Basic Instinct and The Silence of the Lambs demonize gays and lesbians by portraying them as psychopaths.

In his book The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo analyzes the representation of gays and lesbians in Hollywood films from the 1890s to the 1980s, and demonstrates a history of homophobia. He argues that Hollywood’s portrayal of lesbians and gay men has often been cruel and homophobic. Gay and lesbian characters have been defined by their sexual orientation, and lacked any complex character development"

It seems as if we didn't challenge the idea of male dominance which is prominent in such films as Essex Boys and Taxi Driver where woman are seen as an object by males. Yet we twist the idea, this is done by showing a conflict between two males, one gay and the other straight. So in a weird manner we are still conforming to the idea of 'Male dominance'. Our film also suggests that the area in which it is filmed is filled with corruption and crime, therefore representing Norwich as a hostile place.

The villain wears large baggy hoodies which help shadow his face creating a sense of enigma, this technique was taken from the extreme use of  Chiaroscuro lighting in 'A Third Man'. This was used to create a sense of split personality's where the villain is torn between good and evil. Also the hoodie was used to represent the 'Chav' social group. In 2010 there was a huge scandal claiming teenagers wearing hoodies are anti-social and commit crimes from looting a store to stabbing a rival gang member. We used hoodies to follow the common negative stereotyping of teenagers by the older generation which seem to paint all teenagers with the same brush as those small few who actually commit crimes within there estates. Hoodies are also seen as very intimidating so we decided to use extremely low angled shots to reinforce the negative stereotype of teens.


 I wanted the characters to look as normal as possible, as a group we were trying to achieve a gritty British thriller and achieved this by using realistic locations. The normal costume was done because characters like Harry Lime, Pope in Animal Kingdom and Travis from Taxi Driven all appear to be normal yet all have hidden secrets. 

Studying fashion trends I saw that Hoodies were greatly fashionable in the 2000's and that the denim look is highly fashionable now. What I have tried to do is use costume to represent different attitudes towards homosexuality, in the 2000-03 there was no such thing as civil partnerships until in 2004 all that changed. It seems that at the current time homosexuality is widely accepted, whereas ten years ago it was highly frowned upon, so in our production we are showing the difference in old and new views. This technique was highly used in Shane Meadow's 'This Is England' with the use of costume representing the racist views of the time. Our production targets homosexuals and the negative views against them, our main goal was to shock people, we may offend some people, but I think the only way to get a message through is by shock. This technique is also used in This Is England, the uncomfortable scenes help change people views on issues being addressed because they get to see it in a different light. This Is England was originally made to stop the youth from joining racist cults and organisations like BNP. In the same way our intentions was to make a production which highlighted the was homosexuals are being subjectified and stop it. 


To conclude I think that the representation of gay people sympathetic, audiences will engage with the character because he controls the first two minutes, with a range of high and low angled shots following him. The gay controls the shoot and this allows audiences to engage with his character thus feeling sympathetic when he is confronted by the hooded villain. 

Question 1

The opening of my thriller is called "Catch it, Kill it", it is a two minute introduction to a thriller film which attempts to challenge common thriller conventions and stereotypes yet still lie within the genre. The primary location of our thriller is in a toilet cubicle, we got a great deal of inspiration for this from Peter Weir's "Witness". I I liked the ways a place filled corrupt crimes driven by money and power. We also used the toilet to reinforce ideas of isolation and claustrophobia within our film. The first way I think our media product challenges the thriller conventions is by involving homophobic issues. I feel that homophobic attacks within society are a major problem yet nothing is done about it, it's as if homosexuality is a 'Taboo' subject and this is why I have chosen to include it in the film. Before 1976 being homosexual was treated as a medical illness and even a criminal offence. Some Christians frown upon the topic of homosexuality, many believe that being gay is 'Wasting the seed' and 'If a man sleeps with a man like he would a woman both should be stoned to death'. Also in 2008 one in every five homosexual people were victims of hate crimes, this is why i want to make a film on the issue. I feel that homosexual people are being subjectified for there sexuality and not them as people which I think is wrong. With this in mind i feel that our thriller targets issues still around today meaning it is still very much relevant to today's audiences in a time filled with anti-social behaviour and hate crimes against those who are different.

Peter Weir's "Witness" has been extremely influential, the specific sequence where Sam Lapp, the Amish child witnesses the brutal killing of a police officer in the run down seedy toilets in 30th street station in Philadelphia. The great use of extreme close ups, claustrophobic spaces and non-ambient lighting very inspiring. The mise en scene in witness helps illuminate and describe the thriller genre effortlessly. Films like Kill Bill and Taxi Driver have been very influential with the intense use of claustrophobic spaces, for example the coffin in Kill Bill helps create suspense and an ongoing feel of isolation, we decided to use the cubicles because we found they looked very menacing. We decided on making our thriller very scummy and gritty, we feel just as in the Artctic Monkeys 'When the sun goes down' music video the gritty look gives a very British feel, which is what we want to achieve with our production.

From the scummy cubicles to the gritty lighting, the characters in in the "Witness" toilet scene are used to express Peter Weir's feelings about American culture, showing how it is a corrupt country driven by money and bloodshed. We attempted to achieve the same thing in our thriller, using the two characters to help represent the homophobic attitudes in contemporary Britain. I think that using a suburban area, which seems relatively busy as a murder scene will shock some people, also I think that the suburban area helps because it doesn't fix the film to one location, it could be anywhere around the country. In our thriller we seem to reinforce the idea of male dominance because the gay character shows attributes of a female character.

Strangely the killings in Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" were very influential, because the difference between Ordell and Louis is show by the location of there killing. Ordell is very controlled and takes his victim to a dark suburban plot, where as Louis kills Melanie in the middle of a car park in broad daylight. The locations say alot about character, Ordell is calm and collected whereas Louis is ruthless and doesn't care who knows. We used the idea of location to represent characteristics and views on homosexuality, the cubicles show how the topic is pushed to the side and ignored by society (shown by the run down toilets) and also how people like to keep there true feelings on gays locked up until they crack, just as the hooded characters did when he saw the opportunity to attack.

As a group we also wanted to highlight the idea of hoodies being associated with crime, and reinforcing the stereotype of anti-social behavior committed by them.

News story by Matt Drake...

Britain was mourning the latest innocent victims of violent crime last week after a spate of senseless murders.

"In every case, the killer’s sullen face was hidden beneath the disguise of feral society – the hooded top.

Across the country, violence, vandalism, theft and disorder are an everyday menace, created by faceless gangs of youths with little fear of ever being caught. Streets, trains, buses and shopping centres have become no-go zones for terrified citizens who have been intimidated by hoodies for too long. The latest victim, just 14, was set upon yards from his home on Thursday night and fatally stabbed in the throat by a baying mob of hooded thugs.Today the Sunday Express calls for a crackdown on this terrifying trend and demands that police officers get tough and order hoods to be removed in public places.Just as banks ban people from wearing crash helmets on their premises, we believe high streets and public transport would be safer if hoods were outlawed and exclusion zones imposed."

This is just one of many articles which generate a stereotype of teenagers as " Hooded thugs", It is news story's like this which make the older public scared of the younger generation. In our thriller we are reinforcing the idea of hooded thugs through the killer wearing a hoodie to protect his face, casting a shadow which shows a darker side to his character. 

Question 6 :

Before I undertook the Media AS course I had no pre-excisting knowledge of the website "Blogger", this online blogging site is vital to the Media AS course. Blogger allows students upload, organise and showcase work in a sufficient way, Blogger is also useful because you are able to search for work under specific labels making it easy to navigate through blogs. The blogs are also very useful because it allows students to document there work digitally meaning there is far less paper work to take care of because finished work can be stored on the internet.

There was a drastic learning curve when it came to the cameras, being a skateboarder myself I was used to filming other people skateboarding which is relatively easy. There is a drastic difference when it comes to serious productions like our "Catch it, Kill it", I have learnt how camera angle and composition can say so many things about a character and even change the way the character is perceived by the viewers. Realising that a picture says a thousand words, using two minutes of footage to my advantage I tried to fill each shot with as much hidden agendas and inter textual references as possible. noticeably the consistent link to Peter Weir's Witness with the toilet sequence, we also did this because we liked the way that Peter Weir's film showed a difference between to different cultures and attitudes towards each other, yet in our production we use sexuality and try to fixate upon the negative stereotyping of homosexual people. This was done to shock the audience, not warp there views to believe hate crimes are justifiable.
My knowledge of camera angles has also increase tremendously from vague to a wide understanding. I have learnt  different camera angles ranging from extremely low close ups, pan shots, tracking, follows and master shot. i know understand the connotations camera angles can give, for example in "Catch it, Kill it" there is a extremely low angled shot of the hooded character (Will) as he ambushes the other character. The extreme low angled shot represents Wills power, intimidation and also how he is over powering. whereas if there was an extremely high angled shot over will it would completely change the mood of the piece by removing wills power and authority. If i wanted to create a consistently smooth shot from any angle we used a tripod or even a dolly. Yet sometimes we found it hard to get a smooth panning shot using the tripod because it was very awkward to maneuver and the turning plate would stiffen creating awkward jerks during shots.

Keeping to our timed filming schedule was very difficulty because we would have to adapt our ideas constantly due to actors not turning up and radical idea changes. In the end we had to postpone the shoot until  we had a solid idea which was simple and meant we didn't have to rely on other people, which is why the only actors are Will, Austin and I. We realised that filming in winter would be changing because of the early nights, we soon found that some of our footage was unreadable to others and resulted in re-shoots, yet the dusky weather created perfect locations to shoot because they included common aspects of the thriller genre like wet, cold dark streets and also gave a very dismal representation of Britain.
When we captured the film we used a program called Adobe Premier Elements, although being very limited it helped me generate new skills needed for editing very quickly. whilst editing I experimented with the fade to blacks and cross dissolves found in the large effects library, yet some successful and others looking very amateur. Sadly with Adobe there wasn't the option to alter brightness of shots manually, there was just the option to increase brightness, which sometimes resulted in the shots looking extremely pix-elated and tacky. At first editing was very tedious and un-successful, but once there was a chronological outline of the final product it was easy to see what needed to be changed and helped visualise the final product.
Music for the film was extremely hard to find, after searching many internet outlets such as unsignedbands.com, ccmixter.org and mobygratis.com. Personally i found it hard finding a suitable track which was full of suspense and speed, i then realised that most fast paced soundtracks made our video feel like the opening to an Action film. But this affect was used very well when making the trailer for animal kingdom because it enabled the film to appeal to a wider audience than just thriller fanatics. When placing titles we didn't want to distract the viewer from the action on screen so we placed the subtly in the corner of shots.