Mindmap

I've created a mind map of our creative journey to help visualise our ideas, as well as aid us with future brainstorming.

Audience profiling

Our questionnaire determined that our main target audiences is mostly men aged 13 to 18 and in order to better appeal to this audience I've created a mood board that shows the interests of our target demographics.

Our audience's interests

Most people aged 13 to 18 would prefer a more fast-paced action filled introduction, though this is not what we're doing at the moment and are taking their preference into account. Western movies can appeal to many different ages. For example, our demographic would prefer Django over Fistful of Dollars, because Django is a more modernised Western.

Conventions of Western openings

Movie introductions in general mainly aim to draw the audience into watching the full movie, this could be done by creating an eye catching settings or action. For Westerns, introductions are mainly are usually slow, and suspenseful. They'd also feature a minimal amount of characters, usually introducing the main character, and his personality. Western movies are conventionally set in desert locations, most introductions will show this setting in order to show their genre, and interest audiences by the unusual location. Django's introduction is a great example as it is extremely slow, which is quite conventional to the Western Genre. There are many exceptions such as 'The good the bad and the ugly''s introduction which features a gunfight between several men. But that too, kicks off with a suspenseful beginning before the action. Another way of drawing audiences in, shown brilliantly by Django is how unclear the introduction is. In the way that it shows a man dragging a coffin through the desert, which may seem odd, and intrigue audience's attention, to help with this, western movies do not give out too much information during the introductions and seem to include little to no dialogue at all.

Western movies tend to have very simple narratives revolving around a single character. Usually revenge, or bounty hunting. Furthermore, western movies usually include lengthy shots, which once more makes them slower. Unlike Django, Western introduction scenes such as 'A fistful of dollars''s introduction scene, do not include the score. This makes it easier to hear the foley sound effects of gun shots and other sounds. The silence would also adds good Cinéma vérité as a score would take away from the realism. 

Levi Strauss' theory of binary opposition is usually followed in most Western movie introductions. This is because it is a good way to establish the characters of the movie, showing simply who's evil and who's good. a good example of 'this is the good, the bad and the ugly'. Which not only introduced the characters very clearly, (Freeze frames), but also contained many conventionalities of the western genre such as, horses, ponchos. Very western buildings like the old wooden saloons with swinging doors.



Once upon a Time in the West has a very conventional opening, including clean cuts, minimal dialogue, and long shot lengths. As you can see it is very suspenseful because by revealing little about the character, people wonder what he will do next, which is usually very unexpected in western movies. There is no score playing and the shot/reverse shot technique is used many times to show the characters expressions, like at 2:05, the man wears an angry expression, which may convey to the audience that he is evil, which makes up for the lack of dialogue.

Planning, (Soundtrack)

Originally, the group was conflicted between the type of music to have during our film piece. We were sure that we wanted to have conventional western music such as 'Once upon a time in the west'. though we decided as a group that this would be too slow for a score, as we wanted something faster paced at the end, though slow paced as to start. So we decided to use two soundtracks, from a western video game.

• This would play during the beginning of the scene, as it would help set the atmosphere because of it's slow pace. But I'm still unsure whether the group will decide between this sound track or 'One upon a time in the west' by Man with a harmonica. Another reason for wanting a quiet and slow background is for it to build suspense, as well as to allow clear delivery of the few lines of dialogue the characters have. During editing the score will most likely fade out as the characters begin conversing, which would help focus the audience more. I also believe that this score would play at the end as it's more fast paced, and I found that it transitions nicely from the other score. It's also quite conventional in the Western genre to have a fast paced song in the beginning, such us 'the good the bad and the ugly' 's score. Although these decisions are not final, and we may decide to change soundtracks based on how the shots fit.

AJA Feedback

Some tasks missing here Youssef:

- Planning mindmap (use Text2mindmap site)
- Conventions of Western openings
- Moodboard

You have not met the targets given in my previous post. Very little has been posted since then.

Try to come up with more of your own tasks to add - see example blogs on OCR Weebly (Kamini blog in particular):


http://ocrmediastudies.weebly.com/as-inset-materials.html

More effort required. You need to concentrate more in class. You are also expected to work on this for homework every week as well.

Costume Planning (1)

Since we have two characters only, the importance of costume design is amplified, we were unsure of who to base our character's costume of. We were also limited by what is available. This is because Doha has no costume shops and it was especially difficult to get costume parts such as a poncho, which is a very conventional western piece of clothing. 

As a group we discussed basing Ringo's costume off of John Marston from the Red Dead Redemption, though we could not as we decided to make our film introduction more futuristic. Though we've decided to carry on the color scheme, though simply make the clothing more advanced and fitting for a sci-fi western.

 So, in the end, we believe  the image above most accurately presents what we had in mind in terms of costume for Jesse Ringo, as well as Bill Greaves, though the color scheme would be different for the both in order to make a fine separation between good and evil. It is especially difficult to research costume designs for reference as not many sci-fi western movies exist. I think that Jesse Ringo should look more rugged which shows that he is evil, I also would prefer Greaves to not look like a conventional hero, more like an anti-hero. This is to perhaps confuse the audience, and to introduce the characters as neutral at first, which may draw audiences in as to why they are having a stand-off.

Film logo design

Initial Logo

 Creating our logo, was a group decision that took a long time to make. Initially we were unsure of what logo to go with. The logo to the left was our initial design, which we thought captured the Turbo and Hooch atmosphere that we wanted to project, and that would appeal to most of our demographic.

'Final logo design'

We ended up changing our logo design, as the first logo felt too spread out and we wanted to squash all of it's aspects together tightly. Al though this logo might evolve over time, it is our best one yet.

Camera techniques decisions.

After a discussion with the group,  we decided to try out camera techniques that'll convey meaning or connections. This decision is mainly done due to the fact that our scene relies heavily on suspense, therefore we keep the dialogue to a minimum. This makes it extremely hard to show the audience what our character is feeling, or thinking or even looking at.

To overcome this, we've decided to use a variety of techniques found in our story board, which may help with clarity. focus pulls will be used to show a character's relation with an object, or other character. For example, pulling the focus from a gun, to the character holding it can be used to show control, or danger.

We will also use continuity editing techniques such as match on action shots to stop the introduction from being boring. Having a stare down between two men would be extremely dull without different shots and actions. With the angles, we will probably not use low or high angles, as these may convey power and weakness and as it is an introduction, the audiences shouldn't know. Originally we want to keep the techniques brief to fit western conventions, though this may appeal to our audiences more.
                                                                           

Survey results

Our audience is shown to be mostly male, so clearly this is our target gender,, knowing that many males answered the survey, most of the answers will reflect what our male audiences would want to see, this information is crucial in allowing us to fit our film to our audience. 

The age group question shows that most of our audiences are mostly of the 13 to 18  age group, this  means that most of our content should be suitable to this age group.

We have decided to follow the audience's preferred title, although our original title was 'the pursuit of Jesse Ringo.' The title is usually the first thing anybody hears of a movie. We had to make sure it was the preferred title. 

This result aided us with the dialogue of the film, we were originally unsure which word the audiences were familiar with while the different western movies we researched used a different word, and a different type of lawman. This will also aid us in the development of our main character.

Contrary to what it might seem, this is actually crucial information. This is because it directly affects our main character's appearance. We were also trying to get a conventional hero look. 

Once again, most of this helps us with our character development. As well as script writing before we're able to film. This decides whether the introduction would be a more of a dialogue based introduction, (A conversation between characters). Or a suspenseful stare down. 

Audience research : Focus group

We needed more audience research before filming our introduction to a movie, and while our survey provided many answers, they were closed questions. We needed to make a focus group to record the opinions of a group of people. Using our survey we were able to our demographic, and chose the people to be in the group based on that, though we weren't able to find people of our target age.



Although there is still much to discuss with the group, the information gathered from this focus group was very helpful though not completely reliable, as it's not of our target age. We have decided as a group to film our western unconventionally as it seems that's what the focus group seemed to prefer. Though some points we chose not to focus on, such as the fact that they preferred fast paced westerns, we believe that for an introduction, slow paced suspense works best. Though we have agreed to modernize our introduction, as it was originally meant to be set in the past, but we've had to reconsider that after most of our research that people prefer more modern movies.