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

During the course of the project I have used many different tools to assist me in editing my final project. one of them is final cut express. to help me use final cut I had to look at video tutorials to teach me how to use such program. I have learnt that final cut is used to put all your clips together and fine tune them to look the best they can be. This could be by cutting out all unneeded footage that we took. also you can add lighting effects to parts of the clips, although I did not use any.

Here is one of the video tutorials I used.

To help me create Sound FX I had to use garage band and iMovie. I learned that iMovie is used to import your final edited cut and add the sound FX to the film, i used this to add sound to my animated 'GRACE IMAGES', this allowed me to spice up the clip.

Please note the picture below is not what I did to edit my project, this is just to show you the layout of iMovie.

Live type is a text creating tool. e.g. you can create titles to overlay your video. i did use live type to create my titles for the opening sequence. Live type allowed me to add effects to the titles like fading in and out. It also allows you to do many more animations.

4. Who is the main target audience for your product?

To find out our target audience we first started talking to each other about what the genre of a our film would be. Then we did some research into successful horror films and saw that they were all over 12, apart from cartoon horror films. in the end we concluded that we should make the film a 12.

We managed to attract our target audience by doing many different things. we did not add any gore, this would have made families not take their children, also the age rating of the film would have been a 15. We used mild swearing but not often. this would make the families more convinced that it is just not another potty mount film. 
No sexual scenes or references were added, this would stop the age rating of the film from going up to 15.

Our survey results showed that 30% of people were age 0 to 16 and 45% 17 to 21. This made me think that we should keep the 12a rating in mind to keep this percentage of people coming to watch our film.
Only 56% of the people were male. this indicated that we should also keep the female audience in mind.
Over 70% did not like gore in horror films. This made me decide to have no gore at all in the film.

The opening sequence managed to keep the audiences attention and kept them on the edge of there seat. all of them wanted to know more and I even had a couple of people ask if we were going to make another one.

The main target audience for my product will be 12 year olds and over. This is because we have tried to keep the things that make films that are 15 and over out. this includes minimal or no gore.
I had to do further research to find what the target audience would be. This includes the audience research I did before.

I found out that the best age rating for a film for families to see is a 12a. This is because avatar is the highest grossing film on record at $2,782,275,172.

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

There are many ways you can introduce genre in the beginning of the film. this is often done in the opening sequence. there are different aspects you need to take into account to bring forward the genre. this could be by the props you use and the story line. many ways we introduced the genre of the film is by the first person view of the man running away from an infected.

I also introduced the genre by the news broadcast that is sent across the whole of england, in the broadcast it says that there has been a mass quarantine in the glades at bromley, this indicates that this is going to be a horror. the message on the phone that is played is of a family/people who are moving west to try and escape the infection, but at the end they begin to be chased.

Comparing this to other horror opening sequences, some of the aspects are the same. an example of this is zombieland. you can see that people are running away from infected and some are getting bit them selfs. the part of the film that is similar to this is when the man is running down the path to get away from the infected and he does manage to get away, also he finds a phone were someone gets caught with the infected.

5. How did you attract/ address your target audience?

Before making the film, we thought we should have male teenagers as our main target audience. However, a survey we did revealed that the audience for most zombie films are only about 56% male so we decided to try to appeal both genders. We also asked what the audience wanted in a zombie film, we kept this in mind while filming and attempted to include all the things they wanted.

We tried to make the opening scene as inviting and appealing to the audience as we could.  The film goes straight into action to engage the audience into the film. We used couple of POV shots to try to purposefully draw the audience to the situation of the character.

6. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

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

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our Media product mainly represents young, upper and middle class males showing them to be very business like in manner and appearance. We have subverted the typical stereotypical male lead, which is often a young white male and have used an Asian actor so as not to stray to much into cliché's and obtain some originality. 

For our opening we decided to use young actors (aged 16-18), this is because our target audience ranges from 15-26 so the audience can relate to the characters and think about what they would do if they were in that type of situations.
The costume both characters represents group of professional upper-class business man, this is because the characters are dressed in smart suits.
The main character represents someone who has been forced to do things he is doing and his uniform creates an impression that he is someone with a purpose and he is going to do anything he can possibly to do fulfill his purpose.