Q2: CHANGES MADE.

I've taken out the thriller bits, and added some stuff everywhere else.

Media Q2 on Prezi

Interesting..

Blighters first ACTUAL music video for 'Heartbeat'

Q4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Media Evaluation on Prezi

Youth Culture

Teenage Riot

The teenager was not recognised as a lifestage category until around the 1950's, with the 19th century came groups of males known as 'Bowery Boys' or 'Soaplocks', who cared hugely about their appearance and spent money on looking good. They became a recognisable youth culture with their own slang, dress code and their own individual music tastes. This was the first time entertainment and fashion industries began to target a youth group, based on what the youth defined themselves with.

Case Study; Fish Tank

Director: Andrea Arnold
Release Date: 11 September 2009
Country where made: UK
Awards Won: BAFTA film Award, British Independent Film Award
Genre: Drama, Realism
Certificate: 15
Production Company: BBC Films







Fish Tank follows the life of a 15 year old girl, Mia, living with her younger sister and mother in low-income housing in Essex, near London.

Director Andrea Arnold was fed up of films about working class being made by middle class people, and not accurately portraying the working class life. Therefore she took steps to ensure she made a realistic, truthful performance to give people, who may have no idea, an insight into this lifestyle. Arnold said: "All my films have started with an image. It's usually quite a strong image and it seems to come from nowhere. I don't understand the image at first or what it means, but I want to know more about it so I start exploring it, try and understand it and what it means. This is how I always start writing." The name of the film, Fish Tank, refers to the way we see inside Mia's world, how she is longing to look out, and also her entrapment in a single-parent family, a housing estate, around people she cannot respect.

Arnold firstly decided not to use an actress and instead, after months of casting, found her leading girl, Katie Jarvis, fighting with her boyfriend at Tilbury Train Station in Essex, where the film was shot. Katie was not a great dancer, which simply added to the realism of her progression in dance, as she clearly improves as the film goes on. Arnold concentrated on channelling her naturalness into the story, sometimes letting her improvise and adding her own opinions. The film was also shot in continuity, making it easier for the cast to understand and follow and adds the element of surprise or unpredictability, as sometimes actors didn't know what they were doing until the day.

Whilst the production company, BBC Films, wanted it to be made as a more commercial film, Andrea's vision was more about authenticity and real life. She fought for it to have a '15' certificate and certain scenes which the company were against, for example where the younger sister is drinking and smoking with her friend, although the actresses weren't actually doing it, the BBC thought it wasn't politically correct and went against broadcasting regulations however Arnold fought to be able to portray life as it really is. The 4 x 3 format, rather than wide screen, was also chosen to concentrate more on the character and her life, instead of the background distractions that can come with a widescreen format.

Within Fish Tank, in many of the home scenes, MTV is on the TV showing programmes like 'Cribs' and 'Sweet Sixteen' and R&B music videos, the unreality of life in these videos, glamorising sex, fame and fortune is contrasted with the way they actually live in the film struggling with problems with alcohol, violence and relationships.

The film shows Mia's struggle to find an identity, she looks for it through dance, after seeing videos of a dance group on the internet, she aspires to be part of it, to have a collective identity within that group. Although the original script was intended to based around a dance film- with Mia getting into the dance group, blowing everyone away with her talent but deciding to leave after being placed in a strip club - the film went down a different route, along the themes of an older man falling for a younger girl, a family falling apart and the revenge of Mia on Connor and his family, which all go to show Mia's personal identity and how it is made up of various aspects rather than just her aspirations to dance.

This film is so popular with young people due to the identification they can get with it , recognising themselves within characters or certain situations, the harsh familiarity of living in a council housing estate with a broken community and feared culture and the accuracy of reality. This film doesn't construct a stereotypical or forced representation of young people, it is an honest representation created by the character of Mia and her surroundings.