Fish Tank Research

Fish Tank is a British drama film made in 2009. Andrea Arnold wrote and directed this award winning drama. The film won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival the year it came out. Then in 2010 the film won a BAFTA for 'Best British Film'.

BBC films and the UK Film Council, British production companies, funded the $3 million needed to make the film.  Then IFC Films distributed the film making $2,357,852 at the box office.

The film starred Katie Jarvis, Kierston Wareing, Michael Fassbender.

EVALUATION FOR AS FILM

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
Our two minute opening 'when the bough breaks' was a psychological thriller based around the iconic black cab which we were lucky enough to have access to. To produce our film we used a few different methods of filming. We used a Panasonic video camera to film most of our footage but with the last few shots still to film we reverted to our handy back up: the flip camera. Lastly, for the end shot we used the iPhone 5s with a fish eye lens attachment to create a more eerie image of the empty cab which I think worked really well. This year we will be using a SLR camera which will be of much higher quality with many settings that I am excited to explore.

Editing our film was done on iMovie which was a new program for everyone in my group including myself. While producing our preliminary task we were able to practice using iMovie and delve into the many things it can do. It was quite simple to use as there was set features. However, on the contrary we found iMovie quite limited when it came to adding the title sequence to our opening as there was only a option to put writing in the set places which wasn't always what we wanted. I think this year I would prefer to use a software that we can be more In control of even though It may be more difficult to use.

CREATIVITY

MAC 4 have a bit too much creativity, so much that it no longer becomes a positive quality. Our ideas changed too many times as our first idea became too complex and we were unable to create it with the resources and with the little time we had. After agreeing to scrap the first idea we went through about 3 other ideas before finally sticking to the last and final one. This wasn't all to do with our creativity though. The locations such as Starbucks coffee we were unable to film in. Little did we know, Emily's dad is a taxi driver and the perfect location was sitting right in her garage. If I had the opportunity to do it again I just think we would have thought about our idea in more detail and made sure everything would work rather than changing it so many times but that is someone that we have learnt from and we definitely won't be making the same mistakes.

RESEARCH AND PLANNING 
We all wanted to create a psychological thriller genre. This helped quite a bit with researching because we were concentrating on watching this genre of film. As we changed our mind so many times we mind mapped to ensure our film will actually work out. Blogging also helped with keeping me on track as it ensured I kept up to date with reseach and also helped me to organise my thoughts.

POST PRODUCTION
Editing was the best part for me, our original storyboard plan didn't actually stand once we started editing as what we envisioned didn't really fit when it was all put together. The sound was a big struggle but we persevered and finally got it right.


USING CONVENTIONS FROM REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS 


TASK

• Digital Technology: camera equipment, techy stuff 
• Creativity: mindmapping ideas, camera angles, mise-en-scene 
• Research and planning: blogging, watching clips from genre.. 
• Post-production: editing, adding/manipulating sound, title credits 
• Using conventions from real media texts: subvert or adhere to conventions of genre?

Dilon- Thirteen ThirtyFive

I really like this song for our final music video it has the indie feel that my group and I decided we wanted and it also has a female vocalist which allows when of us to play in it. The clicking sounds will allow us to have a beat to ensure our visuals correspond to the music.

However, as it is quite slow i researched into some remixes of this song which have a more distinctive beat which will create a more upbeat video.

I prefer the LCAW remix and think it will fit really well with my groups style aswell as a good beat to work with and help with editing our music video. 

Preliminary Task

I got lumbered into being in the prelim again! We chose the song Black Velvet by
We shot the 20 second reenactment from 20-40 seconds of the song, today at school which didn't take too long despite the giggles. The deadline is next Friday so it has to be edited and uploaded by then.

We filmed the black velvet video however as we didn't storyboard, which we know realise is extremely  important we then went with doing Bruno Mars-The Lazy Song which is a music video done in one take so it was easy to reenact. By doing this we realised that for our final video we want to do something more complex.

Inspirational Music Videos

Since we've been given the brief for the A2 media course I've been watching music videos non-stop. There are some that I can just watch over and over. I think the complexity of some and how clever they are is just inspiring.

This video doesn't conform to any of Andrew Goodwins theory in the obvious way. Is follows more of a narrative. However, it does have many sexual aspects which may be seen to conform to the voyeuristic treatment of the female body.

This music video, however, follows the second point of Andrew Goodwins theory more obviously as many of the camera shots concentrate more explicitly on the female body.
'frequent references to the notion of looking and the voyeuristic treatment of the female body'.
 More over the majority of this video is very simplistic with just the singer playing a piano. I think this also conforms to the 4th point as John Legend is very famous and therefore his fans would want to see him rather than nature for example.