Reflection of our media product

Our media product allowed us to successfully portray the failed justice of a victim of sexual assault, there are clear themes of isolation and a troubled mental state, with symbolism indicating an attempted suicide.

I would say that upon reflection, we were able to adhere to the codes and conventions of our chosen genre in order to generate the correct tone that we wanted to. Our use of mise en scene allowed us to explore how we could represent the issue that sexual assault can happen to anyone at any time. By having a plain clothed actress with simplistic hair and make up designs we were able to show off an 'average' teenage girl who is attacked by our antagonist who we do not show explicitly however we used intelligent camera angles to still 'show' the attacker in shots.

Our opening scene to our trailer depicts the rape through a combination of straight cuts between close and extreme close ups of the attack and the POV walking through the forest of our actress after she has been attacked. Originally we had planned to have a male actor seen in these shots however there was a clear issue with how distressing these scenes came across and we believed that we could more accurately justify the emotion attached to this act by having the attacker be 'invisible', as there is no clear sign as to who could act in this way, and in our piece we tackle the issue of who is to blame for the issues faced by the victim.

By not having an actor seen we tackled the issue of how society reacts to victims of assault and we displayed the lack of input members of the general public offer up. The hypodermic needle theory suggests, for our piece, that we should encourage people to speak up about their negative views towards sexual assault however it is evident (seen through a high angle shot of our actress on public transport, isolated from society) that it is not only the attacker that is at fault, but everyone who fails to act in order to bring the attacker to justice.

A slow-paced remake of "You're the One that I Want", from the film Grease provided us with a non-diegetic soundtrack that dominated the sound for the trailer. Whilst there are other tones underneath this track, the vocals from the song dominate the trailer. We chose not to have any narration in our teaser trailer as the words from the song are perhaps more emotive as they are subverted by the actions of the antagonist and the attempt of the protagonist to reach out and escape the feeling of isolation. "The one I need", here could refer to how our actress is portraying a character who is desperately reaching out and trying not to be alone in her time of need, yet in every shot we see her there is no one nearby to help. Indeed, the only shot where members of the general public are seen, Grace is separated by a sheet of glass on the bus.

Our ancillary texts enabled us to further exaggerate the need for focus to be on the protagonist and helping the recovery of the character, and bringing light to the identity of the attacker in order to bring him to justice. Our film poster utilised the idea of shadow art in order to 'hide' the identity of the attacker, half covering Grace's face. This was done to signify how often the victims of sexual assault dont find justice as proving their case is either difficult or faced with difficulty. The other main villain in our piece is society as a whole not standing up for the victims of sexual assault and therefore not bringing the villain to justice.

Our tagline was particularly successful at demonstrating how we had presented the full narrative of our planned film as the climax of the piece is Grace realising that the attack was no fault of her own and the villains are the attacker and society's failure to help her.

When creating our website for our full length film, we looked towards other pieces in order to help us identify what made a successful website.

The centre piece of our website is a close up shot of Grace looking towards the audience, in a still image our protagonist breaks the fourth wall against reviews from film companies that cover social realism films and drama film that our similar to the genre of our own piece (social realism). Our title is enlarged, making a one word title more effective as we allow the audience to identify with the protagonist however there is still a clear sense of tension due to the audience understanding that society has failed to act in any of these cases and this makes the piece real. Again the tagline helps to provide insight into the full narrative of the piece.