What Matters To Me?

Initial Idea

After spending a week thinking about important issues, hobbies or people in my life, I struggled to find a topic that would be creative and interesting enough to form my media artefact on. Consequently, during today’s workshop, the rest of my group helped to find a decent idea that was both feasible and different in terms of the way I put my point across to the audience. As a result, I have an idea of basing my piece on films as I am quite the film fanatic when it comes to cinema and I could easily engross myself in films not only as a form of pleasure, but also for escapism and the pure enjoyment of watching the delicate, little aspects of movies that create a massive effect on the film as a whole. Furthermore, as I someday wish to become part of the making of these ground-breaking, blockbuster films, watching the outcome is always fascinating to me, whether it be for inspiration or educational purposes, I can never turn down the offer to watch a good drama.

In terms of my media artefact, I plan to create a mixture of film and image that examines the different reactions of a certain genre through both the male and female gender. Therefore, my piece may reflect the obvious gender-based reactions of genres such as romance and horror or maybe even contradict this idea of the expected reaction, whereby the girls cower at frightening scenes or cries at sad moments and the men either fall asleep or laugh. I hope to capture the contradicting reactions as this will then relate to our previous project of semiotics and what we know as a constructed society of how to react to certain objects and signs. Furthermore, I will capture a group of mixed genders watching different genres to hopefully focus on the individual personalities as we see their true reactions to certain films.

Here is a video I found online of the audience reactions to the horror Paranormal Activity:

As you can see the women stereotypically cower and scream during frightening sections whereas the men appear to be fascinated and I noticed a few that laugh at both the jumpy bits and the women’s reactions. Using this video as an influence, I will create the same type of video but with still images as well as moving.

Final Piece

I stuck to my initial idea of creating a short film on my interest within movies and the Hollywood industry. During the production I found it difficult to capture reactions as there was no lighting in the room, however, by changing the shutter speed to a slower rate and manipulating a few of the images on Photoshop I managed to improve the quality of these images. Furthermore, I felt that by using specific sounds that easily relate to that certain genre that is in question, makes it easier for the audience to understand the meaning behind the images, also adding the dramatic or comedy effect I intended. If I were to create this project again, I would stage the images more than capture natural reactions as I found that my models were more nervous about me taking photos than focusing on their true reactions, consequently, staging the reactions would create the expressions that I wanted. Nevertheless, I still managed to capture the reactions that signify the genres and how typical genders react to whichever type of film.

During the production of this piece I simply asked my friends to watch films under the categories of horror, comedy and rom-com. While they watched I used my DSLR Nikon D3000 to capture photographs using a slow shutter speed as the room was under-exposed. However, once I looked at the photos on my computer I found that they were too dark to use, consequently, I edited them on Photoshop to increase the brightness so the images within the pictures could be easily seen, especially the expressions on their faces which is the focal point of my project. Nonetheless, I enjoyed completing this task as the context of the video is a great enjoyment of mine and capturing the moments and reactions of my friends was good fun.

Feedback

I showed my What Matters To Me project to a few other course mates, I found that I got a few reactions I intended such as laughter during the comedy section. Overall, they found that my idea was unique and a very effective way to draw in the audience by capturing the natural reactions of different genders when watching certain genres. On the other hand, most people agreed that it needed to be longer as they wanted to see more images of these natural reactions. This I agree with, as I stated in my own reflection of my work that I wanted to create a much bigger production and capture a greater variety of reactions so I could get plenty of images yet each one still has its own unique twist. Furthermore, an alternative was given by possibly recording 10 minutes of people watching a movie so I could capture the prolonged, tense atmosphere especially within horror movies, rather than a short, snippet from an image. Nevertheless, a successful feedback session that improved my confidence and understanding of what the audience want to see.