Pt2 shot list

Shot List  

Descriptions of Group Members pt 2

Descriptions of Group Members:

Addison Saxby

Hi my name is Addison Saxby and I am 17 years old (about to turn 18) and I have a passion for film making. Ever since I was 14 (year 9) I knew that film making was what I wanted to do. I love the Thriller genre that we have been studying this year in AS Media and I really like to get my ideas onto film. I love all aspects of the film making process, right from pre-production and planning to production and being on set, and post-production and editing our footage. I love to be either behind the camera or in the directors chair, but if I am not I still love any job on a film set. I love to shoot my films in a hand held way as it gives the audience a feeling of "being there in the scene" As I head into my PT2 I am looking forward to expanding my skills and making another great film. 

Kayla Lockington

My name is Kayla Lockington, i am 16 years old, and this is my first time doing media studies. I have always had an interest in film so i took this class to see if it could develop my interest. Being in a group with someone like Addison has really shown me all the new possibilities that could be instead of just thinking inside the box. For me when i started media i struggled with some of the essay work as i wasn't used to writing such a lengthy passage, but after time my skills grew and i am now comfortable with the grades that i am getting, although there is always room for improvement. My favourite things about media is getting hands on experience when it comes to making your own film. I have learnt so many new skills like how to use audio/boom poll and how to do continuity editing on a computer.

Plan B

Our teams plan B is a simple chase scene between two main characters. There will be an assassin of sort hunting a man on the run for a crime or something that he has done. You will see the file being passed to the hunter giving a picture and description of the man. They will then run into each other at some point during the scene and this is where our chase scene will take place/begin. He will either run and hide where he gets shot/gunned down or it will be a hand to hand combat scene which we will try and make as gory as possible where you see masses of fake blood flying all over the place, adding to the realism affect and trying to make the audience believe what they are seeing. The only problem with this idea was the location as we wanted to do it in a place where there was old abandoned containers lying around in a field but the ground may be uneven and we don't know if there is enough space for us to shoot a chase scene. Our second location option is to ask a friend (Theo) if he wouldn't mind letting us film at his house as it is a controlled environment with still a lot of bush space and forestry. Overall the concept remains the same but instead of having multiple actors there will only be 2. This will save time and make a lot of the shots easier to film. The costumes will be inspired by The Maze Runner like our original concept but the location will be more densified. 

Preliminary task 2 planning

Media
Question:
1 paragraph of how you found online school covid-19

Consider the following questions
1. How did working from home hinder my planning?
2. Did working from home have any benefits?
3. How positive are you feeling about your PT2 idea and where you're at with planning?
4. What foreseeable issues are there with your planning and having to from next week

i felt it harder to work from home since i couldn't have in depth discussions with my group as some had difficulty with connecting to the internet or joining the call. This made it feel like more independent work than a group effort. A plus side was that there was more time in order to complete tasks to the best of my ability but sometimes it was easier said than done and there were more distractions than there would be in normal school. I am confident with our idea for pt 2 the only thing that i am concerned about is the location and the idea itself although we have a good idea it may be too difficult to actually pull off considering the amount of resources we have available. Our location is at one of our team members house but it is in the country side that is further than i was expecting to travel to get our shots. Other than that we have sorted out the minor details and one of our team members has a positive feeling about our actors. We have just realised that since we are filming in winter the weather changes very quickly. Our idea is purely based on the fact of filming outside with our props and talent but if it is raining our equipment cant get wet and we will have to film inside which changes our whole story line, which is why we are thinking of changing our whole idea altogether.

Props

Preliminary task 2

Props

Clothing:

Our soldiers will be undercover therefore their clothes will be old and tatty, copying the image of a local or someone that is seen as none lethal. The clothes will have a 'dirty' appearance as if they have been on a long journey with an unwashed/bathed look. Our group got their inspiration from the Maze Runner series which idealised with what our group had envisioned for the characters appearance.

In this clip it explains how you can create the look you are wanting with a few easy and low budget items to help with the realism of your film. Our characters will look grungy yet adventurous look. Hiking boots may be the hardest piece of clothing to find as they are not cheap and only certain types of people own them.

Our terrorists will have simple blackish attire where a normal t-short will be covering the majority of their face as if wearing a balaclava. Dusty shorts or long pants/jeans will be easy to acquire items that will be effect. 

Black vests or this type of armour may be hard to get but if we are able too it would be very effective. Our protagonists will be wearing sandal type shoes with very little 'style' in how the present themselves. 

Synergy and Cross media convergence

Media
Essay
Synergy and cross media convergence

Media question: How do companies use cross-media-convergence and synergy to promote media products and to what extent does that cause a film to be successful?

The use of synergy and cross media convergence used throughout numerous companies allow many films to reach its greatest potential. Big media producers such as Disney or Warner Brothers have some of the highest rated movies in the box office.

Disney has composed some of the highest rating movies historically. Avengers End Game grossed a total of $2.796 billion dollars in 2019 box office sales. Marvel studios spent an estimate of around $200 million dollars on advertising the film. This is a ridiculously absurd amount compared to a New Zealand film such as ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople’, released in 2016, directed by Taika Waititi. This small indie film earned $12 million in box office sales and only had a budget of $2.5 million thus including the cost of advertising. This small indie film had a lower budget than most but still made a record breaking amount of sales compared to colossal global media companies.

The media's market share is largely owned by Disney subsidiaries. In 2019 Disney as a whole company accounted for more than 38% of the total U.S.’s media consumption. Through vertical integration, Disney now has ownership of companies in the same phase of production . They have now gained businesses that edit and produce all of their movies. An example of one of their vertical integration businesses is ‘FOX’ media which Disney purchased in 2019 for a whoping $52.4 billion dollars in order to merge the two companies. One of Disney's largest synergy markets is Disneyland; this is one of the largest tangible uses of vertical integration and helps to not only promote a large amount of Disney films but also generates a large sum of capital per year. According to Disney’s 2017 annual report the Disney parks brought in an $18.4 billion dollar revenue. By having such a generous range of subsidiaries this makes marketing for films owned by Disney a lot easier as it can be viewed on numerous streaming platforms. Through Disney plus this has been one of the largest cross media convergence to occur for Disney. This is a new and innovative way of reaching different audience types whilst also maintaining their big budget name. A monthly subscription for this streaming platform is $9.99. Already this version of cross-media-convergence has earned Disney over $28.6 billion dollars. This is a large sum of money considering that it was only released on the 12th of November, 2019 (less than a year ago).

Disney infinity was an online/multi platform game that could be used on multiple gaming consoles, e.g. Xbox, Playstation. A $1 billion dollar revenue was accumulated from this small game which intrigued the public and had glowing recommendations. IGN reviews says “incredible they're not poseable but they are well-crafted colorful models with a distinctive style that really succeeds in uniting the diverse characters”. Music from films have made billboard charts for example ‘Let it Go’ from Disney's Frozen released on the 26th of December, 2013, made it onto the top 100 global chart toppers. Spotify recorded that the song ‘Let it Go’ is Disney's highest streamed song ever with 298 listens, followed by ‘How far i'll go’ from Disney's Moana, released in 2016. Dwayne Johnson starred in Moana as the character of Maui. This attracted a lot of attention as he is an a-list actor starring in an animated ‘princess’ spin off. This sparked many reviews from critics as they saw this high rated movie star in an alternative type of film compared to a lot of the action based movies that he usually stars in like Hercules, released in 2014.

Smaller companies / indie filmmakers have a limitation to the availability of advertising that large conglomerates such as Disney have. Their lower budget films only allow a certain amount of synergy and cross media convergence to take place. ‘What we do in the shadows’ was a lower budget movie directed by Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clements, released on the 27th of March, 2019. This film had a budget of $1.6 million USD but earned over $6.9 million dollars in the box office. Since having a smaller budget than other big time movies they had to improvise when it came to advertising. Using free platforms such as facebook and tinder were a sole focus in getting the name of their movie out to people. A free art competition was held to generate publicity for the film enticing kids. In order to target the older generation, they created fake tinder accounts being the characters seen in the film. Crowd funding was given the green light in order to create this film but it had to be done with Jermaine Clements fan base since Taika Waititi failed to deliver promises that he made during the last film he made that was generated through crowdfunding, ‘Boy’ released in 2010. In order to create hype for the movie not only did they use immersive marketing to a high extent but they also changed the ‘Wellington’ sign to ‘Vellington’ this caught the eye of not only locals but many tourists, breaking out on news feeds and other tv channels.

Through the internet, films are able to advertise their content a lot easier compared to having to physically promote the movie themselves. Social media is one of the largest platforms for media consumption. An estimate of over 2.59 billion people used or owned social media. In 2019 Disney launched a viral Twitter and Facebook campaign that allowed fans to become loyal subjects of the red queen, the white queen, or a disloyal subject of the mad hatter. The group with the largest congregation of followers would then be awarded with special accesses to an exclusive trailer that no one else could view. It was an immediate viral sensation and to this day the facebook page still has up to 10 million fans. This was the same as ‘The Dark Knight’, this was one of the largest viral campaigns ever made. The crusade had an estimate of 11 million participants that spanned over 70 countries. The movie had the highest amount of pre sales recorded yet earning $25 million in pre sales alone then made an amazing revenue of $1.006 billion US dollars in the box office worldwide. Youtube helped blow up the film's trailer and generated more than 12.5 million views within the first 24 hours. Alone the film has been pirated (illegally downloaded) 19 million times, and is easy to be made available on demand, specially seen on streaming platforms like DIRECTV and Hulu.

Hobbiton is a big tourism attraction for New Zealand. This would be one of the largest examples of direct synergy that New Zealand owns / is home too. The hobbit is a film that put New Zealand on the map and opened the country up to new filming opportunities. The hobbit had a total budget of $180 million US dollars and was released in 2012, with sequels, The Hobbit: The desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: The battle of five armies. The first Hobbit movie made $1.021 billion USD. This was a change for normal New Zealand movies. Having a big budget, the renowned director definitely helped with the publicity of the film and set the quality, making the audience assume that it would be a decent film based on Peter Jackson's past film and books. Audiences of New Zealand compared to big countries like the US or China is minimal. According to some 2018 studies, 3.5 million Kiwis are active media users and they spend an average of 1 hour and 53 minutes on social media networks each day. This is a miniscule amount compared to the U.S. who have a mass scale of nearly more than 80% of their population being active media consumers, this is out of their current population which is 328.2 million.

Big Hollywood blockbusters have large amounts to spend on advertising, but does this necessarily determine the success of the film? Many people today are basing their movie preferences on big budget movies that are seen advertised on tv channels and across multiple social media platforms and often big billboards will be placed in busy areas to generate hype for the film. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a good example of a small town film with a small budget that ended up doing really well. Its availability on tvnz on demand helped to increase the streaming rates of the film, a downside is that kiwi residents may be able to access the film with ease but internationally the film is unrecognised and is deprived from the comedic journey that takes place. Even though the film more than quadrupled its original budget it still came no where close to big budget films like Suicide Sqaud. This movie was released on the 1st of August 2016 and had a budget of $175 million US dollars, it then went on and grossed $746 million dollars worldwide. Although this film had a much larger budget than the small “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” movie, it was still had a higher rating on google with 94% liking the film compared to the big budget “Suicide sqaud” with only 83% of users liking the film. Medium.com says “The visuals — trailer, posters, casting, etc. — compensated for a terrible film, to be blunt”, posters and online advertising blew the public away creating mass amounts of hype for the film. Big A-list actors such as Margot Robbie and Will Smith were active roles in the film, but even still audiences were let down with the narrative and overall storyline, disappointing many fans.

Web 2.0 had a global impact on the way the world consumed media. This was the second phase of the internet, there was no way of social interaction or leaving something so simple as a comment on a post or article. The second stage of development of the internet was characterised by the change from static web pages to dynamic or user generated content and growth of social media. Slowly, on demand videos were made available on tvs, laptops and smartphones. The introduction of technological convergence changed the ways in which we consume media. Before people would rely on a small box radio that came on maybe once or twice a week in order to get their dose of information. In 2011, 86% of New Zealand were online in some way or another whether it may be through smart tvs or laptops. Globally 4.57 billion people were recorded to be ‘online’ users. Films such as Paramounts ‘Paranormal Activity’, released in 2010 made the film for just over $15000, yet still grossed more than $150 million in box office sales. This is because they generated a facebook colony challenging fan requests asking the public to see how high they could get the numbers. The freedom of sharing media is so simple where at the touch of a button an entire film can be sent from one person to another. From this advancement in technology it has allowed snippets of films advertisements to be largely advertised by the public alone as they do most of the ‘sharing’ between each other, relieving media companies of some of the hassle.

Media Ownership

Media

 
Ownership essay
Opening sentence:

Media ownership plays a big part in the overall success and ascendancy of a film. Media ownership is structured in a way that big conglomerates, like the big 5, Disney, MGM, Paramount, Columbia and Warner brothers have possession of big Hollywood blockbusters. These multi million dollar companies produce films in order to gain a profit and add to their business. Many of them own/acquire subsidiaries. One of the Warner Brothers largest subsidiaries are DC comics. Aquaman alone has a net worth of over $150 trillion dollars, making it one of the largest grossing ‘comic’ characters ever. Whilst this sum may interrogate some, Disney has matched Warners Bros with Marvel comics/studios. Marvel characters were first introduced on paper pages that had been made accessible on the internet, reaching a larger number of people, generating publicity. In order to reach a new branch of media consumers, Marvel did a crossover with the Avengers VS. X-Men, publishing it in order to create hype for the new Avengers film. A blogpost by Edward Haynes quotes, “This broadens the audience that the Marvel films can appeal to as more mature people may find Agents of SHIELD a bit light and fluffy to keep them engaged.”. He was referring to the fact that not only did Marvel make comics and films that were targeted at younger viewers, but they also created a cornucopia of adulistic tv shows and films to bolster their media consumers. Examples of this includes series like, Marvel’s Daredevil, Marvel’s A.K.A. Jessica Jones, Marvel’s Luke Cage and Marvel’s Iron Fist.

Disney is the second largest media conglomerate in the world. It is one of the biggest companies in the world and is estimated to have a total of more than $130 billion dollars. Disney alone has an estimate of 84 subsidiaries, most of them being million dollar companies like Pixar and ESPN. Disney has created a name for themselves through the many cross media convergence that has taken place where they have advertised their big budget films on various different platforms. A big one that occured was Disney Infinity, this was a downloadable game for many pieces of software which allowed them to not over take over the film industry but aos the gaming. Disney does not have vertical or horizontal integration with other companies meaning that all the publicity that is carried out for their films is done by them. In 2018 Disney took the top 3 spots for the highest grossing films domestically. Coming in at number one was Black Panther generating around a $700 million dollar profit, in second place was Avengers Infinity War coming in with $679 million and in third place was Incredibles 2 making $609 million dollars. Disney currently accounts for an average of around 40% of the box office sales in the U.S. alone.

Hollywood is widely known for producing the biggest films hence why some are called hollywood blockbusters. It is home to oversized conglomerates such as Walt Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount pictures and other big named media producers. Hollywood alone produces an estimate of 600 movies per year according to Quora who states that "According to the Motion Picture Association of America, the number fluctuates, but the average seems to be around 600 movies created in the US every year. This doesn't account for every movie made in the USA - many independent films and documentaries don't go through the MPAA, but it probably represents most movies bound for general release.". This is a monstrous release compared to a country like New Zealand where its average film release per year is around 25. This is disregarding private or small films created by local directors/screenwriters. Most of the big named movies or series produced from New Zealand are somewhat funded by the New Zealand film commission. One of their highest accomplishment films was Hunt for the Wilderpeople, starring Taika Waititi,Julian Dennison, Rhys Darby. This had a budget of 2.5 million dollars USD and almost quintupled their original amount. This led to the film becoming the highest grossing film that New Zealand’s box office has ever seen earning a whopping $12.18 million dollars. NZFC’s main aim is to empower the creation of impactful screen stories, compared to the likes of big businesses who are in it for nothing more than the money.

Money is a massive influencer when it comes to any part of a film. By having the right amount of funding it can make steps like cross-media convergence and synergy opportunities easier to occur. This does not necessarily mean that it determines the successfulness of a film or series. The New Zealand film series ‘What we do in the shadows’ directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi was given the greenlight to become a crowdfunded film series. With a budget of only $1.6 million USD this TV show generated over $6.9 million dollars. Due to Taika Waititi’s bad reputation with delivering on promises from a previous film this caused bad publicity and forced Jemaine Clement to step in and relied on his crowd followers to fund this show. In order to market the film they did little low budget moves to create hype amongst the public, examples of their publicity stunts were holding a free art competition, colouring the films characters as well as changing New Zealand's capital sign from Wellington to Vellington, something that generated an unprecedented amount of chatter. Horizontal and Vertical integration can be very beneficial to the success of a film where by having it advertised on different streaming platforms can broaden the amount of publicity examples of this is how Disney has become such a big multi billion dollar industry. They own companies such as editing industries in order to produce their film saving them money when it comes to the production process.

By having a sufficient amount of funding to invest in all the stages of production this can help ensure that the film has the infinite potential for success but this isn't the case for all. ‘The Interview’ was directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and had many A-list celebrities starring in it like James Franco, Seth Rogen, Rob Lowe and Nicki Minaj. The film had a $44 million dollar budget and was expected to have a big sales revenue in the box office but only ended up generating $12.3 million USD. This is because of the controversial message that it was portraying which disturbied higher powers including the population of North Korea who threatened the film if it was not taken down. Whereas While Rider, a New Zealand produced film had a budget of $6 million NZD and grossed over $41.4 million dollars USD. No large actors made an appearance in this movie nor did it have the funding for high tech equipment but it still grossed a massive amount considering the production process that was used.

In this day in age there are so many streaming platforms for media consumption some of them including but not limiting, Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, Spotify, Apple Music, Disney+, Apple TV+, Quibi, CrunchyRoll, the Criterion Channel, YouTube Red. Netflix is currently one of the top websites for media consumption, it is worth $189.92 billion dollars. With such a big company offering movies on demand you would think that it would decrease the levels of piracy… wrong. The downside to these companies is that all of them require some type of subscription or monthly payment. This is what is deterring media consumers as they dont want to have to pay for the films when they could just download them illegally. These streaming platforms are always updating new content to keep customers interested but they are also removing content just as fast. The hit comedy TV series ‘the office’ is being taken off netflix causing disruption amongst viewers and generating bad publicity. Whilst pirating is illegal and losing media streaming platforms money hamilton says, and I quote, "People know there are multiple sites where it is possible to download illegal material. They also know that blocking the most popular ones simply means you'll get pirated material elsewhere”. Suicide sqaud, although being a high budget film it has one of the biggest anit-piracy policy in order to stop illegal downloads.

Audience trends essay

Media
"How does your own experience of media consumption illustrate a wider pattern and trend of audience behaviour?"

My own consumption of media, in many ways, demonstrates and mirrors the current trends in today's audience behaviour. Society has had a gargantuan influx in the amount of media being consumed through various streaming platforms. I myself have conformed to the meticulous ways in which I consume media. Social networking and other main streaming websites/platforms are the soul apparatus I use. For example Instagram and Netflix would be my top for media consumption. I have a screen time of 8 hours and 25 minutes, yet almost 35% of that is taken up by Instagram alone. Netflix is now a big part of my media consumption instead of going to the movies on a regular basis all you have to do is watch a movie within the comfort of your own home. Cinemas are on the slow decline but myself as well as a small circle of friends still enjoy the social and cinematic aspect of going to see a movie in the likes of somewhere like Hoyts or Event cinemas.

Netflix had a total net income of over 1.86 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, whilst the company's annual revenue reached 20.15 billion U.S. dollars. Alone, the widely known streaming platform has more than 125 million subscribers worldwide. 1.2 million of those viewers are from New Zealander. Many influential and prominent filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan have joined the chorus in a protest against netflix saying, “Netflix has a bizarre aversion to supporting theatrical films. They have this mindless policy of everything having to be simultaneously streamed and released, which is obviously an untenable model for theatrical presentation.”. This is all to defend the honour and tradition of seeing a high class film/blockbuster in a theatre(cinema). The Box Office helps to make a films main revenue and sell the majority of the ‘tickets’ but without having to sell tickets and just stream the film from an online platform it takes away the cinematic and tangible experience that you get when seeing a film. This is where fragmentation between audiences has taken the biggest toll, through the easy access of different films and videos. There is where the biggest separation between generations comes into play. Ages like the silent gen and baby boomers are cable TV’s biggest viewer range, with channels like TV 2 and Bravo being a high demanded broadcaster.

Social media is a more recent and upcoming streaming platform. It has a popular usage rate with an estimate of 3.484 billion active users worldwide. The top 5 social media sites being used globally are, Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp, FB Messenger and Webxin/Webchat. The estimated gross age range of users that have the largest utilisation contingent are between, 18-24 year-olds and 25-34 year olds. Millennials and Gen Z would be the most target audience for this method of media intake. This can also correlate with my generation, also known as the iGens and how myself included will spend hours scrolling through different social networking feeds rather than going out and purchasing something such as a DVD.

Disk sales have gone down more than 86% in the last 13 years, because people are no longer interested in hard copy pieces of information or sourced media. Audiences are now interested in on-demand and digital copies of films. The percentage is only increasing as new streaming services such as Disney+ or Youtube Red are being introduced, thousands of videos/movies can be offered within seconds yet it costs the same amount for an average subscription as it would to purchase a film on hard copy. This is one of the main factors in which younger generations are spending most of their time on the ‘internet’ because it is cost effective for a student with a budget. There are over 4.388 billion internet users internationally and 4.22 million of them are New Zealand users alone. Around 95% of New Zealand's population accesses or uses the internet everyday. This can contrast between the different age groups where elderly people may find it harder to ‘get online’ whereas generations like the iGens have grown up with this technology and over time many technological convergents have taken place where in the past you had to try and look for a signal in order to listen to someone speaking on a box radio, that was how people received the vast majority of their information. Whereas nowadays you can get a smartphone that has radio stations alongside the streaming of movies,music and even mobile gaming.

From the information of a survey that I recently conducted nearly half of the ages were between the ages of 15-20 and out of those over 65% of people watch more than an estimate of 250+ per year. This is because of how accessible film and media streaming is in this day and age. 40% of those were claimed to be watched at a cinema, which then contradicts the research done by other websites who claim that cinemas may be entering extinction. People prefer to watch a film without breaks unless they are small insignificant moments e.g. going to the bathroom or getting a drink/snacks. This is the perfect example of how a cinema works in how you are unable to pause the film so you have no other choice than to watch the film to its fullest extent otherwise you may waste your money.