Evaluation essay draft (without pictures)

For my media investigation and production task I focused my work on the representations of heroes and villains within the crime and action genre. From this I expanded on the types of heroes and villains, their characteristics and common stereotypes through research into existing texts.

In my research I focused on films such as:

· Big Hero 6

· Superman (1978)

· Wreck It Ralph

· Despicable Me

· 10 Cloverfield Lane

· No Country For Old Men

With this I also researched into the TV programme Game of Thrones along with Shakespeare's plays of Romeo and Juliet and Othello.

For the practical piece, I produced a TV extract based around the representations of heroes, villain and eastern Europeans, working alongside my classmate Stefan Okopskyj. We decided to create a TV extract that focused on a drug deal between the Russian mafia and British agents as we found this was a good way to show the hero and villain stereotypes.

For pre-planning I watched various films (listed above) to help me get an understanding around existing hero and villain films, along with genre conventions and the character representations.

To go alongside our moving image, I also create a poster to advertise the TV extract. With this I researched into various TV advertisement posters such as “Lost”. This helped me to get a wider understanding of what is usually included within a poster, enabling me to add the information that I needed.

In my research I focused my work on the stereotypical representations of heroes and villains. Whilst focusing on typical genre conventions of violence, espionage and weaponry that is commonly associated with heroes and villains, I also focused on their appearance and characteristics. For this I focused the appearance of the hero roles dressed in a “James Bond” style suit, tie and cleanly shaven, whilst dressing the villains in darker, more sinister colours. Often the colour Red is associated with a sense of danger and violence, this fitted perfectly with the villainous theme. In my research of heroes and villains I found that often characters are not always what they seem to be, yet sometimes they can be worse than originally anticipated. One example of this is followed in my research in the TV show Game of Thrones. For part of the TV series, the plot follows the villainous character of Joffrey Baratheon. Although the character is shown to be the obvious villain, the character plays on how much of a villain he actually is. In this the audience learns not just his intentions, but also how he is just pure evil. By carrying out this research I was able to expand on how evil the main villain of our TV extract can be. With this I then made the character follow the stereotypical evil villain, which can be shown through his actions and appearance.

To help show the representations of heroes and villains, I also took into considerations the camerawork and lighting. In the scenes where the hero is making contact with other spies, I made sure that the coding and movements for the earpieces were clearly shown. I also used darker shots/downward shots the show the negative representations of villains. Overall we decided to focus the practical on both heroes and villains, showing the story behind the villain taking the hero hostage, but also the hero “saving” the day by fighting the opposition and escaping from the danger.

Overall in the project the main strengths were:

·      The storylines – When creating the characters I put a lot of detail into the characters and their actions that they had throughout the practical, including their stance on the printed advertisement poster

·      Setting – When filming our TV Extract we used the main setting of a Ukrainian club to get the feel of the eastern European heritage and setting

The main weakness of the practical was based around the camerawork and editing. There are a few camera shots which I would change in future for the practical piece where characters are slightly out of shot or the colour is slightly off. Overall the finished outcome was to a good standard with the cameras and software that are available for us to use within the sixth form.