The Double Crossing Dame

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? My main media product ‘The Double Crossing Dame’ was a short film in the style of film noir. Because of this I had to use concepts that were conventional to the genre, such as low-key lighting, hard-boiled speech and a detective storyline, in order to create authenticity. Low-key lighting produces shadows behind the characters, which evoke secrecy and deceit. I was inspired to do this after watching the opening sequence of ‘The Killlers’ (1946). Director Robert Siodmak ensures that the lights from the windows illuminate only part of the killer’s faces. I produced a very similar shot in my film (above) as I found the technique to be particularly effective in creating a sense of mystery and dehumanising the character.

Hard-boiled speech is the ‘tough’ dialogue detective characters use in hardboiled noir fiction, most commonly associated with violence and sex. As this style of scriptwriting is conventional to noir, it was essential that I incorporated it into my script. Film noir’s main protagonist would usually consist of a private eye or police detective and he would be lead astray by a beautiful femme fatale. These stereotypes are reflected in my noir through the characters ‘Max Wilde’ and ‘Loretta Kane’. My film challenged the conventions of noir by not using a professional soundtrack and relying solely on diegetic sound to create atmosphere and tension.

The film poster and magazine review were both very conventional in their design. This was to convey a sense of professionalism across my media products and I achieved it through studying the qualities of real media products at industry standards. These included Empire magazine film reviews and posters advertising The Matrix and Watchmen amongst others. Credits, tag-lines and a release date are all conventional for a film poster. Whilst stills, vertical text columns and star ratings are conventional for magazine reviews. I incorporated these conventions into my own work.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? It can be necessary to create a brand identity for your product across the different platforms in which you are distributing in order for it to be successful. My media took the form of a short film with two ancillary texts - a poster and a two-page magazine review spread. To generate an identity for ‘The Double Crossing Dame’, I used the same visuals and themes throughout all three texts. For instance, I placed a quote from the magazine review as an advertisement on my poster and the same title font is evident throughout all three pieces. Also as the film is in monochrome, the poster reflects this vintage look by using no colour either. The combination of my texts work together to promote my film and form a package of media. This has meant that I can include all the work together when viewing it as part of a portfolio, which is very useful in demonstrating my ability to produce a project of this size and caliber.

What have you learned from your audience feedback? As I uploaded my media to Google’s ‘Blogger’, it meant that I could share it with my peers via social networking sites such as Facebook. They gave me their opinion on certain aspects of my work and, although in most cases they were non-expert, it did help highlight some of the flaws that I would have missed. For instance: 1.The sound levels on my film needed to be adjusted as some scenes were too quiet and others overly loud. 2.The font size of the release date on my poster dwarfed everything else and needed to be shrunk. 3.The font styles appeared amateur and required more professional formatting. 4.The blog needed more pictures to illustrate the points being made and to improve the general aesthetics. After making the changes proposed I feel that the standard of my coursework has greatly improved. This is evidence that audience feedback is vital for producing high quality work and I will continue to use audience feedback when developing future projects.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? In the production of my coursework, I have successfully used new media technologies to create an online blog for the first time using Google’s ‘Blogger’. Inside this blog I used html to apply a still from a popular film noir as the background to show the theme of my work. Html was used to embed a variety of different media into my blog including pictures, videos and even powerpoint presentations.

I embedded online resources as reference for my research. These included video clips from YouTube. I also uploaded my own film to professional video site Vimeo. since uploaded all my films and made a profile for myself to promote my own work. My poster and review pages were uploaded to Yahoo’s Flickr as it allows users to upload photos in high resolution and embed them using html. This meant that I could display the images on my blog in a larger size and in higher definition. I decided to use Microsoft Powerpoint as the format for this evaluation. It has allowed me to clearly address the questions proposed in the marking criteria in a way that makes suitable use of my digital technology and ICT skills.