4) Who would be the audience for your Media Product?

A certificate of 15 years would be on our Media Product as it would not include any sexual references but the product would contain violence and some bad language that would not be appropriate for people of a younger age but on frequent basis.

The BBFC permits the following within the bounds of the 15 certificate:
Theme: No theme is prohibited, provided the treatment is appropriate to 15 year olds.
Language: There may be frequent use of strong language; the strongest terms are only rarely acceptable. Continued aggressive use of strong language and sexual abuse is unacceptable.
Nudity: There are no constraints on nudity in a non-sexual or educational context.
Sex: Sexual activity and nudity may be portrayed but without strong detail. The depiction of casual sex should be handled responsibly. There may be occasional strong verbal references to sexual behaviour.
Violence: Violence may be strong but may not dwell on the infliction of pain, and of injuries. Scenes of sexual violence must be discreet and brief.Imitable techniques: Dangerous combat techniques such as ear claps, head-butts and blows to the neck are unlikely to be acceptable. There may be no emphasis on the use of easily accessible lethal weapons (in particular, knives).
Horror: Sustained or detailed infliction of pain or injury is unacceptable.
Drugs: Drug taking may be shown but clear instructive detail is unacceptable. The film as a whole must not promote or encourage drug use.

People who can associate with our character, Owen Haynes, such as a troublesome childhood or releasing anger through a sport like boxing would be the audience of our Media Product.
People interested in boxing may watch the film due to the boxing impact; they may watch it as the theme is attractive to them.
Gender wise, our film would attract more of a male audience due to the content of violence and boxing there is involved.
The film would also interest the younger generation such as teenagers and people in their 20's as they are the people more likely to be able to relate to the film and characters within it.

1) In what ways does your Media Product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real Media Products?

Our opening sequence uses many conventions of film opening sequences; we looked at opening sequences such as Green Street, Dead Man's Shoes, Snatch and Legally Blonde.


Through watching these, we established some of the main conventions of film opening sequences. We believed that the main conventions of the beginning of a film were:



Introducing characters - We have introduced our main character, Owen Haynes, through the use of voiceover and his boxing image. The main focus of our sequence was to present Owen to the audience to incorporate his way of life and his childhood difficulties. We changed the accent and native of Owen from Cockney/English to Irish as we believed that the Irish accent put on by our actor, Toby Zahiri-Sellers, sounded more 'thuggish' and fitted with his character and appearance.

Introducing Story Line - This was also shown through the use of the voiceover. The voiceover explains the main plot of the entire production; it projects Owen's childhood, his path to boxing and implies his misdemeanors-

''My name is Owen Haynes. Last summer something happened in my life to make me realise I gotta make something of myself; my mate, Danny, from school, convinced me to join his gym. Little did I know it was specialised in boxing. Boxing really wasn't my thing, you only had to look at me to know that; when I started I was the same small, scrawny little bastard as I was when I was a kid. I was constantly looking over my shoulder, I didn't think that anything could be worse than my childhood. I always wanted to get something out of life, i think now is the time for that to happen..."

Our voiceover was inspired by the voiceover of Elijah Wood's character Matt Buckner in Green Street. We thought that it was a clever way of introducing the actions and thoughts of the character.

Introducing setting (through use of mise-en-scene) - We used two settings in our opening sequence to help portray elements of our character; the gym and the alley way. The gym helped give a sense of the character's background via his personality and hobby of boxing. Also, the gym helps foreshadow the violence that would happen later on in the film. In addition, the alley way is in association with crime, drugs, etc which helps define Owen Haynes' character and hometown.


Grab Audience's Attention - In order to grab the audience's attention, we covered up the face of our main character to present the character in a mysterious manner. In the voiceover, there were things about Owen that were revealed but not everything as this also adds to the mystery of his character and this makes the audience want to find out more about him.

Genre - Our film opening sequence consists of various genres.
These include:
Drama
Sport
Crime

Filming Completion

After completing the filming of the alley/walking scenes, we were on course to continue filming our Boxing scenes.

On Thursday 4th March, we used a friend's garage to implement our Boxing sequence. After spending approximately 3 hours, we collected enough footage - 8 minutes 37 seconds (to be precise) - in order for our group to work with and commense on successfully editing our opening sequence.

Due to our actor being ill, we had to put back the filming of our 'child on a swing' and 'child walking' scenes from Thursday 4th March to Friday 5th March. This piece of filming has now been completed and the voice over of our character Owen Haynes is the piece of audio/filming that is yet to be completed and is expected to be done on Monday 8th March which will then put us into good stride to start finalising our opening sequence.

Production Logo

This is our production company logo. We made this using programmes including Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro.

Music ideas

Our first sample of music for opening sequence was to have a bass and a drum kit for the whole sequence, with strings in the middle to resemble his childhood. We chose to use a bass and drum kit as the sounds create tension and correspond with the images we are portraying.

Our final music piece was very basic and just drums and bass throughout. We kept it basic so that the voiceover would be the main focus of the sequence.

Fonts

Font 1: We thought that this font could be good as the small lines surrounding the letters look like lines you would see in a picture to show something was moving. We thought this would relate to the theme of boxing, as there is a lot of movement, like his gloves and the punchbag.

Font 2: We liked this font because we liked the way in which the letters were all slanted in different ways. It makes it not look quite stable, like our character. The letters slanting different ways could show that our character does not know which way to go- revenge, boxing, forgiveness, etc? Also, we liked the way in which the letters seem to fade out at the top/bottoms. We thought that this could represent the way in which the aspects in his life are fading- like values, family, and even his ambitions.

Font 3: We really liked this font because we thought it was different.There are a lot of slashes through the words, looking like a knife has been through or suggesting violence which relates to our film. Also, on the 'R' there is a cross going straight through it. This stands out and links to the title of our film which is religious; ''Eye for an Eye''

Font 4: We liked this font because it gives a sense of danger and suspicion. It could look like graffiti on a wall, which matches one of our locations; the alley. The letters are not placed in line, corresponding with the character who is also out of line in many respects.

Font 5: We thought that this font was good because it hides some parts of the letters, which could represent the character of Owen hiding behind his boxing and anger. The font, like the film, asks a lot of questions.

Font 6: We thought this font looks like it could have been written by a young child. This corresponds with Owen's personality as he is still living in the past, and is obsessed with his childhood.

Font 7: This font reminds us of prison, which links to our film as Owen ends up in prison by the end of the film. The way in which the letters are not linked up could represent how he is not complete as he feels he still needs to get revenge.

We narrowed down these seven choices to two possible fonts; Font 3 and Font 4. We decided that one of these fonts would be the most appropriate for our film opening sequence. After debating over which font to use, Font 4 was our final decision. We chose Font 4 as it looks like graffiti which relates to our character growing up in a run down area and the film itself.

Sound/music

We have been deciding whether to have music in our opening sequence, what music and where in our opening sequence to have it. Our opening sequence starts off with our main character taping his hands. This would not have any diegetic sound, so we think that there should be some sort of non-diegetic sound. However, in the next part of our sequence, there would be diegetic sound of the natural sound of the character boxing- e.g the sound of the punchbag being hit, panting.These sounds would be effective as the main focus of sound in our opening sequence, but we still feel we would need a soundtrack for the silent parts of the opening sequence. The next part of our sequence is when our main character hits another character, and cutting to see that the victim is dead. We definitely would need music which has a change in pace, pitch, etc to signify some change. After this, it cuts to the main character walking down an alley, which seems to be more into the beginning of the film rather than the opening sequence. Because of this, I thought that there should be another change of music. We thought we could have the music only just starting here, but then decided that there needed to be some sort of music in the beginning too. Also, the voiceover begins at this part so it would be too much sound starting at the same time.

Script

Ideas for Script

My name is Owen Haynes. I'm 23 years old. Ever since I can remember I've not had a father to look up to. It's just been me and my mother living in our little council house in London's East End. I have not had a good childhood. I got pushed over and beat up a lot. My mother suggested telling teachers but I'd get battered from head to toe. She told me how my father was an amateur boxer which inspired me to start lessons. As I became older, the anger grew on me, and I wanted revenge.

My name is Owen Haynes. I'm 23 years old and training to be a boxer. My father was an amateur boxer and his career inspired me. Ever since I left school I didn't see why I should put up with bullies any more. I wanted to be on the other side of things; I wanted to be a boxer.

We put these ideas together, with other ideas we had thought about to create a final draft:

Final Script

Owen Haynes: My name is Owen Haynes. Last summer something happened in my life to make me realise I gotta make something of myself; my mate, Danny, from school, convinced me to join his gym. Little did I know it was specialised in boxing. Boxing really wasn't my thing, you only had to look at me to know that; when I started I was the same small, scrawny little bastard as I was when I was a kid. I was constantly looking over my shoulder, I didn't think that anything could be worse than my childhood. I always wanted to get something out of life, i think now is the time for that to happen...

Location

We are basing the location of the film on our main character, Owen Haynes. We thought about the type of character he is and decided that part of portraying this would be his environment. We thought that it should be set in a small rundown part of a town which has always had a bad reputation, and is struggling to change it due to things like vandalism, gangs, theft, drugs, etc. This is so that you can see where some of his violence, and of the childrens' violence in his childhood, have partly come from. It also adds to getting across his overall character.

We thought about places in which we could go and film in which match our specification. We have found a place to film, which has a long, vandalised alley leading to an area with some buildings and a park. The park could remind the audience of the references to his childhood, and also add to the effect of the area as it is stereotypical of gangs of teenagers to hang around in parks. The alley has connotations of crime, too.

We also would need a gym to film in, for the boxing parts of our sequence. Boxing is one of the main themes of our film so it needs to be strongly conveyed and would show the passion our main character has for it. Additionally, it needs to be in a gym to make it realistic and believeable, so we have thought about using quite a small gym to make sure it fits in with the environment and the lack of money that the area would have to spend on it.

General Ideas

-We want to incorporate black and white transposing images in our opening somehow, to represent the difference between past, present and future. We also thought that the whole film could be in black and white, but darker for a change in time period. This would give the whole film a dark and edgy feel to it.

-We thought that it would look good to use a translucent effect in part of our opening sequence, to show that two ideas link in our film, but that they are not physically together.

-We thought that it would look better and more realistic to use real home videos if we can of our main characters' childhood, rather than filming a child specifically for our sequence.