CAROLYN.

    She’s the mother of the family who is very uptight and feels under pressure to make sure her very imperfect life appear perfect. We first see her outside doing her garden, being admired by the neighbours. However the feeling of admiration is not reflected by her husband who only comments on the fact that her shoes and gardening shears match, which is no coincidence. She starts off though as the most normal member of the family because everyone else seems out of the ordinary with her husband and daughter being pushed around to appear completely normal, like a perfect household.

    As the film moves along her relationship with Lester only gets worse with him catching her with Buddy and so on. Even though all of this happens we still see Lester not taking it out on Carolyn like you might expect, she doesn’t seem to know how to have fun or relax. Her life is what appears perfect to others but actually she’s all about image which doesn’t help her popularity with Lester and Janie. As she starts to loosen up she never lets go of her ways but throughout we do see her obvious vulnerability.

    Her being vulnerability is shown in many scenes like when she is desperately trying to sell the house to the two women but it’s just not happening for her, they find many imperfections in the property and this really gets to Carolyn. When they leave she has a personal meltdown where she cries and slaps herself to try and tell herself that she hasn’t done anything wrong. The thing is though that she is just too uptight and we see that just because she hasn’t made a sale she is so upset. She then starts to have her affair with buddy and we can see her best side shockingly. She obviously feels bad for Lester but can’t stand to show him her feelings. She is a prime suspect for his murder but in the final scenes shows that she does love him by losing the gun, not yet realising he’s already dead.

Breakdown scene.

This shows how she is in the dark in her life. She closes the blinds after failing to make her sale and cries. The darkness of the room, which is lit solely by light squeezing in through the blinds, connotes that she is in the dark about something that her family know but she doesn’t. The camera focuses in on her which denotes that she is alone and connotes that she is drifting away from her family at this time. The colours in the scene are very plain so that we focus on her face which has brightly coloured makeup on it. The only props in the scene are the blinds which block out the light likewise she is blocking her family out of her life. She and Lester are growing apart but she is the one losing out as he is just starting to enjoy life.

The importance of cross media convergence to audience and institution.

With the industry of film being a large money maker by itself you would think it would be making enough profits on its own without help from a variety of other industries. But that’s not the case as the industry actually need media convergence as it greatly boosts profits by getting the name of your film and characters out into the world. Cross media convergence helps with distributing and marketing but most importantly it enlarges the audience of a film.

The British film industry is struggling to make its profits as the companies don’t have the money to distribute their films onto a range of markets such as subscription TV, cinema, and DVD. This then creates a vicious circle as they can’t make profits and therefore the same will happen to the next film they produce. Cross media convergence and synergy is vital in getting a range of viewers (four quadrants) as it can make money through the films name or contents. However this can’t be done by the companies if they don’t have the money to get the film out there in the first place. Also to get viewers you need to have the right content in your film, so without the money, technologies and actors as well as synergy, directors won’t be able to use cross media convergence in the production of the British films. This is shown by the king’s speech, a film made in Britain that cleverly used trailers in the UK and the US which were different. The British trailer just simply showed the film as it was but the American one had sound effects as they like them alongside the very stereotypical British theme.

Another way to use cross media convergence to advertise is like in the Batman poster whereas Batman is a 15, children can’t watch it but they still released a poster aimed at children to broaden the target audience. So they released a poster where he is drinking milk. Another example of this is Kick Ass where before the film which was a 12A or 15 was released they did a comic book about the characters which younger people who couldn’t spend money on seeing the film could read and still enjoy the story. As the story of Kick Ass wasn’t well known the comic also got its name out to the target market of the actual film. These are films both produced using American money which is why they can afford extra marketing and to appeal to the entire four quadrant of the audience. 

Synergy marketing is a very big part of marketing films and getting them available to the four quadrants and to people worldwide. An example I have stated already is the batman poster where he uses body by milk to get the younger audience to know the film. Body by milk has also done posters with other films and business’. To contrast this we can see a film like The Kings Speech which uses normal posters to advertise as they only have a smaller target audience that can’t be reached any better through synergy advertising than it can through the cheaper alternative of normal advertising for the film alone. 

The king’s speech uses some cross media convergence in its posters. This cross media convergence is that they have designed their posters in such a way so that the wording is set out like the keep calm and carry on posters that are very well known and very British. The reason for this poster form is to bring in a larger audience from around the world. For example like their trailers the King’s speech posters follow a stereotypically British theme which helps market and sell the film to Americans. This is not something that a film like this is England can use in its advertising to America as it is not a stereotypically British theme. 

Social media also plays a large part in this as most films have facebook and twitter accounts along with their actors and directors. They also have things such as blogs where they blog during the production stage of films. This something we have seen for a long time in things like the added features on our DVDs which show us deleted scenes and things such as how something was done. This is England also used social networking sites along with MSN to make the film such a success, so this is in a way free advertising for the film that much of the target market have frequent access to. 

This has shown how film distributors adapt their marketing techniques to suit the area of the world or part of the four quadrants so that the film is more likely to sell. Although I have focused on synergy marketing film companies also use other media like toys and clothing products to get their the product out to a variety of different people.

AMERICAN BEAUTY - JANINE SCENE.

KICK ASS NOTES.

KICK ASS-

HOW IT WAS PRODUCED-

·         It was made on a budget of $28 million.

·         Double negative did a lot of the special effects; also they used CGI through green screens to make a lot of the scenes.

·         $8 - $9 million was spent on special effects.

·         Mark Miller and Jane Goldman developed the script further from what it was.

WHAT IT WAS BASED ON-

·         Based on comics from marvels chief writer Mark Millar.

·         He also worked on wanted which took $350m.

PROBLEMS WITH MAKING IT-

·         There was false promotion as the trailer included some humour.

·         This idea of humour is thought to have given viewers the idea it was a bit of a spoof.

THE DIRECTORS VIEWS-

·         He put his own money into the film so he took the largest cut.

HOW THEY SAVED MONEY-

·         The final box office figures were just over $96 million worldwide.

·         They saved money by filming in the UK.

·         The cast was very low budget without any big A-list stars.

TECHNOLOGY USED-

·         Set in Manhattan, filmed in London using green screens.

·         Used media composer to get high res plates of Manhattan.

·         Phaze UK’s facility includes four fibre-networked Pro Tools|HD® workstations, as well as a mix stage outfitted with an ICON D-Command® console.

·         Noise-reduction plug-ins from Waves, iZotope, and Avid.

HOW RATING AFFECTED PERFORMANCE-

·         The film was rated a 15.

·         This meant that a large portion of the target audience (teenage boys) could not go and see the film.

·         Also some of the more extreme scenes would have to be removed.

CONTROVERSY-

·         The film was not seen as well in the US as the girl in it says c*** which meant more people went to other films.

·         Teenagers do not want to see a film if they have to see it with their parents.

PROMOTION-

·         Posters were made that featured the characters on separate sheets.

·         More posters were produced to show the heroes in more detail, these also included web addresses for each character which in fact lead straight to the Kick Ass website.

·         Advertising costs were nearly $10.5 million and Lionsgate, the distributers, took a large cut of the box office figures.

THE SOUNDTRACK-

·         Material ranging from Elvis to The Prodigy.

·         Soundtrack snippets from 28 Days Later and Sunshine.

·         The "music composed by" credit lists four names: John Murphy, Henry Jackman, Marius De Vries and Ilan Eshkeri.

·         Kick-Ass is a case of temp-track love. To get the film feeling more like a film in the early stages of completion, scenes are often cut to existing movie scores as a temporary placemat. Sometimes this music fits so well that it's hard for the director to consider replacing it.