Final Cut of Tatted Gen

This is the final cut of the film opening, i acted on feedback and here is the end result.


Question 1




The Script I followed in answering in the video

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

Our film, Tatted Generation, is a documentary for this we needed to research a few different films so we knew how to actually make a documentary film opening.
First we researched the codes and conventions of documentaries :

Narration - This is a common convention of the documentary genre with voice overs in a clear distinctive voice helping the narrative of the film and encouraging the watcher to listen and think.

Real Footage is another - All of our footage is "real footage" none of it is acted or re created for the film. Interviews and real places are really filmed they are not fictionally made up will be included which is a must with most documentaries.

We used archive footage ( so footage that is not ours maybe old maybe from our time) we used this for things we couldn’t get like catwalks of models and old film footage.

Interview exerts were used to provide thought provoking opinion and information. And really a documentary doesn’t feel like a documentary without interviews.

We used non-diegetic sound (so music) throughout the whole of the opening, maybe taken away for interview exerts, to add an ambience and atmosphere to the opening.

Visual Coding - the Mise en Scene of the whole opening sequence will add to the realness, hint at narrative and go along with narration. For example in the interviews the person being interviewed will maybe have tattoos or piercings or in the background there might be tattoo art on the walls etc.

These are codes and conventions commonly found in documentaries so we made sure have them in mind when planning and filming. We also looked at two films. McCullin and Ed Hardy : Tattoo the world. McCullin gave us an idea of using music to build the tension of the narrative and then also an idea of the titles, how they come inand the order. Ed Hardy gave us an idea of real footage that is used, archive footage and interview exerts with the shots and angles etc but also a way of showing the story in a cinematic way that is pleasing to the eye.

To go through how these conventions and films influenced our end product I will go through 9 main shots/parts of the opening sequence.
1. The music starts whilst on a blank screen before any visuals so tension is being built, the music is easy to listen to and work very well in the background.
2. The narration begins at this point with the first few shots of our real footage
3. Then going into archive footage of old film and catwalk shots used to display our narration points.
4. Back to real footage, we filmed all over to get different shots for displaying the narrative of the documentary.
5. We used visual coding with what the viewer is seeing and what they are hearing like when we were talking about artists and creative we showed some art being painted and paint being mixed.
6. We dropped the complete narrative after enigma was created showing what the main question of the doc was about but still not being transparent about the full way of expression being about tattoos.
7. The cinematic shots of the tattoo parlor, using this mise en scene added more to the enigma and the narrative by the viewer maybe putting the pieces together by the doc being about expression through tattoos.
8. The simple title coming up, like most small documentaries have like that of Harry Hitchens Gay Sex Apps and more documentary fro Channel four.
9. Lastly the interview exert of a tattoo artist that we interviewed along with its cut away shots that kept interest in the interview by displaying different visuals to the watcher. As seen in Ed Hardy : Tattoo the world in their interviews.

Through using these conventions I feel like we hit the criteria of making a documentary like any other, conventionally speaking, using these classic traits made it easily recognizable as a doc and made it feel professional in the outcome, especially with the good quality image that we got from using my dslr that I am filming this on but we also challenged classic documentaries and made our different. This is a media task after all and commonly documentaries aren’t done so we had to make ours as much like film as it is a documentary. What I mean by this is in docs you normally know straight away what is happening and what they are about but in films there is a certain amount of enigma about what is happening. As having enigma was part of the criteria of marking we needed it so we had to in our opening style it like a doc using conventions but also create enigma we did this by not specifically saying the word tattoo till the interviews but linking to expression and culture and then mise en scene helped, commonly documentaries would not do this and through this I fell like our opening is like a blend of documentary and cinematic film.