audience research results

these are the results of our audience questionaire.

Audience Research Questionaire

we have created our deconstructions of four film openings (shaun of the dead, constantine, kung foo panda and zombieland)
we have also desighned an audience questionaire with questions about what kind of things the audience enjoy when waching a horror comedy film.

Script

This is the first draft of our script. we will add revised versions as the project moves forwards.

Constantine Deconstruction

The film starts with the normal Warner Brother logo sequence, but then as you hear the sound of thunder, the colour of the sky changes and the logo crumbles to dust in the same way as the scenery does later in the movie. This immediately sets the theme for the rest of the film and makes the normal opening logo sequence fit in with the theme and setting of the film. Once the logo sequence is finished the screen fades to black and the films core quote:
"He who posseses the spear of destiny holds the fate of the world in his hands" fades in and stays on screen for 10 seconds this one quote is the basis of the films story. Having the quote at the begining of the film introduces the audience to the story straight away in a very clear way.
The words
"The spear of destiny has been missing since the end of world war II" then appear underneath the quote in order to introuduce the films main concept of crime/horror/mystery.
The following action scene starts off with a long establishing shot of two men kneeling and serching in a long abandoned and deralict church. The man in the red shirt stumbles upon a spearhead wrapped in a Nazi flag. This directaly relates to the opening quotes and brings the audience into the time of the film. The man then walks into the road only to be hit by a speeding truck, but somehow he manages to survive and continues to walk along in a straight line seemeingly un-harmed. This extreamly strange event shows the viewer that the film is indeed a strong fantasy horror in which anything could happen.

deconstruction - zombieland

the scene opens on an american flag, blowing in the wind. everything is out of focus appart from the flag.over this is the sound of the narator, talking to the audience directly in the prescent tense. he seems upset and unhappy.
the camera turnes upside down and the audience can see that it was the wrong way up already. in the background a burning building can be sen and out of the debris that was once trafic comes a man, running with blood on his face. he pins down the cameraman and begins to eat him. everything is now in focus and the narator starts to talk about how he has devised rules to stay alive.tese are as follows; 1. cardio - exercise so that you can outrun zombies, 2. double tap - shoot a zombie twice to make shure its dead, 3. beware of bathrooms - zombies can get you anyware so you have to be able to run, 4. remember seatbelts - sombies could distract you so you need to be safe.
he uses these rules and more throughout the movie to stay safe and alive.
after explaining some of these rules the narator stops talking and the camera changes to slow motion scenes of zombies killing humans and vica versa. this continues to the end with the credits poping up in random places and getting knocked by the people in the scenes. over the top of this havy metal music plays.

this has helped us with our piece as we could think about using some music or slow motion scenes to add effect to a scene.

deconstruction - kung foo panda

the film opens to a custom animated sequence of the dreamworks logo, as we see an animal in Chinese clothes with a stick run across the water and jump into the sky, land on the moon and start fishing. as the dreamworks logo rises it hits the moon and everything turns to gold at the sound of a gong, throughout this sequence some pan pipe music can be haerd. this is to set the scene as ancient china for the viewers.
after a few seconds this fades away and the dreamworks animation presents logo fades in. this is soon followed by a flash of white light that engulfs the camera and out comes the title in big 3d orange font (kung foo panda). the light dims to the sun and as the camera pans down the title is taken away with a cloud. we then see the figure of a large animal walking past flags on a bridge, his face covered by a large straw hat from this point on a narator speaks as if he were telling a story to someone from memory however he uses common language and repetition to create an aspect of humor within the scene. he sees a wooden bar and as he goes in all the other people inside stop fighting and go over to where he sits. as he begins to eat a large yak chalenges him to a fight and he accepts. they fight and he wins using kung foo.throughout the fight we hear the sound of punches, screams and karate screams. these are all added in artificialy using sound effects.we see five more animals appear in the distance all equaly as shadowed and mysterious as the panda. this shows their importance in the film. as they are about to fight a hoard of animals they all freeze and start saying strange things like 'get up.' this shows that it was all a dream. as the panda wakes up the animation style changes, confirming our earlier predeceptions of a dream sequence. throughout this sequence their are no titles or corporation titles on screen. perhaps this is because it is a key part of the film and the director did not want any visual distrctions or perhapse it is because it is a childerens film and childeren are not interested in titles so it would be pointless and distracting.

this has helped us with our piece as we can incorporate some diachronic language into our piece.

James Fordham and Micheal Kuhn's Media Studies Main Task

This blog is a compilation of all the work for our A level Media Studies main task.

This Thursday (03/12/09) we have decided that the genre for our project will be comedy/horror. we have chosen these genres as we wanted to do an entertaining film with a commedy outline.

we have previous experience with the cameras and camera techniques from our preliminary task.
we have another page on this blogg to show how to create effective zombie costume and makeup.

when devising oyur piece we had to consider our potential audience and keep our themes in relation to this audience perspective.