Evaluation

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

In a childrens film, there are certain conventions that create a structure so that the audience, children, can understand and easily follow the film. These conventions are : a setting, credits, music, an establishing shot, a theme, the introduction of characters and the establishment of the genre. As a childrens film, we had to use these conventions. We created music to go in the background of our clip as there was no dialogue. This sounds was empathetic; it reflected the mood of the characters on screen which aided the children to understand the storyline. To introduce the characters, we "created" them on screen. We thought this was a clever and creative way of introducing the characters so that it appealed to the audience. As we used iStopmotion, we did not really have a background but just a plain white canvas. This was not very appealing to a younger audience as they are attracted to bright colours. If we had more time to complete and edit our childrens film opening, we would have added credits that entertained the children through bright colours and interesting font. 

photos

Comparison Of Characters

Our main character was the villain called the virus. We decided on him being our main character because we wanted his presence to run throughout the whole sequence. We believe that the character "The Virus", can be compared to Zurg from Toy Story. Both of our films are rated PG and both characters play a similar role. Their violent side comes across well to the children in our target audience and the viewers find it easy to dislike the character from the beginning. 

Target Groups

The target audience for our childrens film opening was children between the age of 6 and 11. We focused on a morale that there will always be a good person to help when someones in trouble along with the idea that the bad characters always suffer. We thought that this moral was good as it is similar to the majority of childrens films and helped represent our characters really easily. We feel that the children who watch this film will enjoy the fun, creative and exciting animations we have used in our clip. Also, the concept of play-doh is very different which will appeal to the viewers as most childrens films are repetitive and very cliche. 

Characters.

For our story, we have created some characters which fit the specification for our film opening. we have decided to make, 1 superhero, 1 villain and 2 civilians. These will be made out of play-doh. Our villain will be called "The Virus".

Our villain of the story was called the virus. We did change his appearance slightly for the final piece to make it more obvious he was the bad guy. We also changed his colour to green as we thought it resembled a "virus colour". 

We added a character of a hand. This was done to create a "angel guardian" figure for our good civilians. He helps out the characters by saving them from sticky situations. The simplicity of the hand added a different twist to our plot and made it unpredictable to our viewers. This contrast with the play-doh works really well and gave a really good effect in our final sequence.

Final Cut of Childrens Film Opening

Here is our final version of our childrens film opening, The Virus. Our main problem with our finished piece is that we were unable to finish it and edit it to the standard that we had wished for. Also, we were unable to complete 2 minutes of footage which was required. The backing music which we added to our sequence was suitable to our themes and onscreen shots but unfortunately we were unable to finish creating a soundtrack which could last the length of our film. However, we believe that we have mastered how to use iStopmotion to create fun and exciting animations which appeal to children. Overall we are disappointed not to have completed the task but we feel we can take many positives and experience from doing this task. 

research

We did some research into the prices of play-doh. We chose to get a variety of bright colours which is what   children like to see.

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