Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question – What have I learned from audience feedback?

Social Class and age: When viewing my media product to various people, one response among questions that I got that stood out amongst all others was that the social class was aimed more towards the working class youth. As sociological studies show, students who are typically viewed as the ‘underachiever’ and ‘troublemaker’, are typically the working class because studies show that a large percentage of them are materially and culturally deprived, and thus are labelled these things and more because they are put under a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a negative aspect. This has a strong relation to the protagonist in my production. He is portrayed as a student who has an extremely rough and unfavourable time in his academic side of life, and my feedback tells me that this is an extremely positive representation in society (because he goes for an extraordinary goal and becomes something nobody expects). What I have learned from this feedback is that counter-type characters have great power in terms of motivational aspects and influence in changing the portraying of different stereotypes. For example, in modern times, the youth is portrayed negatively, across different forms of media (newspaper articles, television). In other words, youths are portrayed as degenerating by the years. By producing a character who can show characteristics that completely defy the lowered expectations of youth (passion, determination, drive, vision), I would inspire more working class youths to find their hidden talents with my production, instead of succumbing to a self-fulfilling prophecy of underestimation they may be cursed with in their school life. Age-wise, my production shines especially towards 14-18 year olds, as this is range is where the UK has its highest sporting individual population. An individual who gave me feedback said the production is ‘strongly coherent’ with the sporting population, meaning it reaches out to children and young adults across all social classes, as the production encourages sporting success to its viewers’. What I have learned from this is that since the protagonist is young, and he goes for something extraordinary, this pushes the boundaries and portrayed expectations for youths, that they have the capability of achieving advanced and high performance – not due to aging into it, but through hard work and dedication. I learned that a model of a production reaches it to many age groups, obviously depending on the age of the model, and can give a strong and vibrant message through however the model is portrayed. I learned that my message could actually inspire other athletes to go for greater heights rather than just being satisfied with a participation medal. What improvements did I make: To really differentiate my ability to send off a message from my production from last year’s AS production, I decided to have participants look at my production in the editing stages. For example, the magazine and the film poster. I had been told that the Olympic logo placed on both of them was the main aspect of graphology in the magazine that really would draw attention above all else from my audience. In context, the Olympics is one of world’s foremost and renowned events, and applying it to the plot would definitely and the visuals would certainly be a very good selling point for the production. What I have learned from this is how attractive much more attractive something I can make future productions with a good logo, making genre obvious, and more promising to explore. 

Further feedback: (Greg McLeod)

“Nice work! That was really a pleasure to watch. It’s fun to see the placement of each scene throughout the music – it’s a neat progression and visually shows how each phase fit into the mood you wanted to evoke in your vision.”

Through this piece of feedback, I learned that the soundtrack that I had used had heavily been a massive influence in conveying the situation and basic details of my production. I had learned the specific effects of a soundtrack within a media production. For example, a soundtrack can convey the level of seriousness in a situation as well as give key details about a character. It shows what sort of film it will be and has the power to get the audience at either the edge of their seats, or in fact challenge them emotionally, or to just simply build up key moments within a trailer.

“In your production, your character has really challenged the negative black stereotype” (Form tutor/media teacher)

From various films, such as “Boyz n da hood”, and “Anuva hood”, black people are always portrayed as thugs, proper-ghetto type kind of characters. Their character is formed by speech that is accompanied with obvious sociolect. Meaning their dialogue is teaming with vulgar colloquial language, a very low level of standard English, and having grammatically incorrect sentence structures. Not to forget orthography, where certain words are pronounced partially. Their rough ways are further shown with an angry tone of voice that makes them appear to be more ‘gangster’. This makes them appear uneducated, irrational, rogue and violent. This is very negative because it portrays to the masses that black people are dangerous and have no place in a truly successful position of life – and that does not mean being the king of the streets, but actually working for something that matters. Also, there is their exterior, as they are typically dressed in tracksuits and casual clothing – and they seem to have an overwhelming amount of concern towards fashion). In conclusion, they are portrayed as unsophisticated, culturally deprived and unable to go into a life with a bright future, because their vision is severed by society.  I learned that my production changed that. Instead of going in a life of ‘retreatism’ (giving up on life goals and going into a shell that encourages a lifestyle of laziness and an erratic uncaring nature), my character would search for a talent, and go on a journey with it. I learned that many clips in a production can carry great symbolism and is a key way of portraying a specific message. (For example, the character throwing chocolate in the bin, giving away a comfortable lifestyle for the love of the sport.) As well as the poses in the magazine production, which makes hard work among black people look more realistic and attractive.