Question time...2

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

What social groups and how it represents it

We tried to represent the social groups in our film sensitively. We did a lot of research into all of the social groups we are representing, so we could portray them authentically. We are representing a 14 year old teenager girl who suffers from depression and is also facing many other problems in her life such as an eating disorder, domestic violence and self harm. Although I'm 3 years older than that of a 14 year old, I look young for my age, so this along with wearing suitable clothes a little make up helped me play this age authentically. Furthermore I have done lots of acting in the past both stage and film, take theatre studies for a-level and I'm represented by an acting agency, so this experience also allowed me to play Sophie effectively as I knew how I could become Sophie and feel the emotions she would be dealing with. Sophie is classed as a vulnerable person in society, not only being a teenager and female, she is suffering from a mental illness and would require help and therapy to battle against her illness.

In our film, I think we’ve stereotypically portrayed woman as being the weak and emotional ones. Whilst the male is portrayed as aggressive and intimidating. Women usually are the victims in domestic violence issues, and the men tend to be the ones to intimidate them.

The Father is in a shirt and smart black trouser, suggesting he is the breadwinner of the family, and likes to be in control. The mother is dressed in casual clothes suggesting she hasn’t been out anywhere in the day, she is a housewife. Both of the parents are middle aged. Sophie wears long sleeve tops/jumpers to hide the fact that she self-harms. She doesn’t try hard with her appearance.

All 3 characters are caucasian, so although this only represents one ethnic groups, it doesn't mean different ethnicities can't face the same issues that are shown in our film.

Question time...1

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

A media product, which is a film, should establish the narration, characters, settings, genre, style, ideology and visual style in the first few minutes of the film. We have aimed to do all of this in our opening sequence. The narration was developed by using research taken from charities websites such as: ‘The Mood Foundation’, ‘Mind’ for depression. ‘Beat’ for eating disorders and ‘Women’s Aid’ and ‘The Hideout’ for domestic violence, and from this expanded our initial ideas and create a plot for our media product. We didn't really base our idea upon an existing film, but as I am a loyal supporter of 'The Mood Foundation' and have raised money for them in the past and really believe in the cause and so was already quite knowledgeable on the condition, the idea originiated from here.

The title 'Welcome to my World' is a common phrase which me use, usually in a sarcastic way. The 'my' being in itallics helps demonstrate the sarcasm. I think the title of the films conveys the idea that the world they are living is rather sinister and dark. It shows how the character doesn't have anyone to turn to, so tries to invite the audience into experience her life with her.

We have three characters in our opening sequence Sophie and her two parents. I think we quickly establish who the main character of our film is. We open with a shot of Sophie writing in a diary. Then we show who her family are, through the kitchen scene. It shows our film is based on her. Sophie is also the character who does the voiceovers which indicates it is her story. Melodramas often have the good vs. evil side when portraying characters. Sophie is the good, where the Father is the evil as he is some of the reason to why Sophie is so depressed. The ideology of the piece is to show that we are on Sophie’s side, we want the audience to care and connect to her. We want the antagonist to be her Father, who is an evil, cruel man who inflicts misery on Sophie and her Mothers life.

We used decided to have our opening sequence set inside which is to represent the enclosure that our main character feels. Filming indoors also mean lots of our footage appears dark and dimly lit which affects the visual style of the piece. We filmed in two different houses, but ensured we would only include on kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom etc. in the film.

Our film is a melodrama, Sophie is suffering with the mental illness, depression, like characters in melodramas she has difficulty expressing her feelings to others. So we hope the music and the voiceovers represent what she is dealing with. She is unable to deal with what she is going through, showing inner conflict, so turns the frustration and pain upon herself, by self harming, drinking alcohol and crying often.

Despite not basing our idea on an exisiting film, similarities in our film can be seen to the film ‘About a boy’ where the boy’s Mother is suffering with depression and tries to take her own life, by overdosing on pills. Sophie also tries to overdose on pills to kill herself in the opening sequence of our film.

Our creation *revised*

Welcome to my world video

Alterations...

After doing our initial opening sequence, and despite the positive feedback we gained, we realised we had some alterations to make...

• Firstly our opening sequence was four minutes long, so we decided that although we liked all of the content, we should cut it down, as we felt it was a bit too long for an opening sequence.
• When cutting the sequence we decided to take out the whole of the first minute, because although we liked it, it wasn't essential footage.
• We redid one of the voiceovers because it was hard to hear, and in fact the one we replaced it with was much better in terms of clarity.
• We put the credits towards the end of the 3 minutes, rather than at the beginning. We also made sure that that we only used the four main credits...staring, directed by, produced by, music by...
• We tried to make the cuts flow better and cut a second or two off a few clips
• We changed the ending of the opening sequence so she didn't die and instead said 'if only it had been that easy' we felt that was a better way to continue the film.

We've created an opening sequence *high 5*

We've created our opening sequence. However we didn't follow the storyboard/script to plan. Nevertheless I feel it was better that way, as we made more interesting creative choices and had new and more practical ideas when filming it...

1. We took out the school scene as we felt they made the piece drag, and didn't add much to the sequence.
2. We changed some of the dialogue at the dinner scene, from the original script, because we improvised when filming it. Then edited it all together.
3. We moved the screaming into the pillow part to straight after the dinner scene.
4. We removed scene with the Father standing in the doorway, because we felt it was too subtle and the viewer probably wouldn't understand what we were trying to imply.
5. We created a different ending of her sitting on the sofa with the tv, but just thinking instead, then taking paracetamol to try and end her suffering.
6. We finished with the mum coming into the room and finding her dead.

We are now going to use audience feedback to try and adapt our opening sequence, to improve it...

La la la...Music and Sound!

I composed a piece of music - which will be the theme tune - with my brother, Chris. Then we recorded the piece of music. It was a duet. So I played the piano, whilst Chris played the brass instrument called the baritone.

We also decided to use the beginning of a Leona Lewis song 'Homeless' as it is a sad, emotional piece of music and seemed to fit very nicely with some of the dialogue.

Furthermore we have also used a voiceover, with Sophie talking. It shows her thoughts, probably from what she has written down in her diary. Nevertheless we had some difficulties when recording with the microphones, as you could hear the affects of using a microphone, so we had to try our best to edit out the microphone noises and turn it down when necessary.

Character Representation

The main character in the film is Sophie. Sophie is a 14 year girl, suffering with the illness depression. She is struggling with dealing with life and so self harms to release the pain. She has nobody to turn to so uses her diary as a way to express her feelings. She has become very down and can see no hope she wants to commit suicide and often has suicidal thoughts.

Her Father is very strict and uncaring where Sophie is concerned. He can not understand her behaviour at all and has no symphathy for people sufferign with depression, including his own daughter. And gets very angry and frustrated with her lack of eating at mealtime and lots of other things she does. This doesn't help Sophie at all. He is cruel and may be one of the causes leading to Sophie to be depressed.

Her Mother is more reserved, shy and timid. She is a peacemaker and wants everyone to be happy in her home. However she is very frightened of her husband as he overreacts and can sometimes lash out at her and her daughter. She doesn't want to upset him, so she dislikes Sophie not obeying his orders and seeming so down.