Audience and Institution

Jack Mickow

“In relation to the media area you studied, discuss the ways audience consumption has changed over time”

            In the area of film, audience consumption of movies has severely changed over time. The past decade has been the most influential to change, as it has been the most revolutionary in technology consumers can buy. These radical changes allow movie developers to cater to more and more as technology has reached to all corners of the world.

            Back in 2015, a movie called “Furious 7” was released at the SXSW Film Festival, lunching it into the public view. Here, they also used many global locations to draw in the public to the movie. Universal studios produced the movie a conglomerate of NBC, who owns Universal theme parks. They implemented this movie in their theme parks and made a ride about the movie. To further their outreach, they teamed up with a brand, OPPO, where they had promotional events about the movie to draw in crowds. On April 3rd, 2015, they released the film and the box office took in 384 million the opening week. This means people flooded into large and small movie theaters to view the movie, showing audiences heavily appreciated the ability to go into theaters. On September 15^th, 2015, the same movie was released on disc. This delay was intentional, as they knew the movie theaters would be the real success, not wanting to put too much into the disc version. There is no where online where you can find the movie Netflix and Hulu do not have the rights to the movie, as people chose to view it in theaters over in home exhibition. Jurassic World had a very similar outcome. They did lots of cross promotion within their conglomerates and blew up the movie with as much advertising as they could do. This lead to the release on May 29^th, 2015 being highly lucrative with 4274 theaters showing the movie. However, they have not put the movie on any streaming service as people chose to go out and watch the movie in theaters.

             Producers began to see a trend where people wanted to watch movies form their home, not always wanting to go out to watch a film. Future movies began to take note, like the movie “Beauty And The Beast.”  It was a very different scenario than “Furious 7”. Audiences flocked to movie theaters and it was the favored way of viewing movies. However, this movie took a very different approach to keeping up with the societal normals as consumption changed.  Before its release date on March 17^th, 2017, they chose to market the movie using Synergy.  Disney, the creators of the movie, teamed up with ABC, to use their show, “The Bachelor” as a way to expose audiences to Beauty And The Beast from home. They did this by showing an ad for it during the episode.  This strategy worked as the box office took home over 500 million. However, this was not their plan to have an audience. They knew people wanted to have home exhibition now, and needed to keep up with the change in movie consumption if they wanted success. They released the movie in 2018 onto Netflix, a popular at home streaming service and to On Demand on June 6^th, 2017. This is the way movies are going, less theater exhibition and more at home viewing. People are doing this as it if safer, more cost effective, and less stressful than having to go out and view a movie. If movie production companies want to stay afloat, they need to keep up with the changing audience.

            The movie, “Joker” was the perfect example of how filmer’s and producers adapted to the consumers push for staying at home for movies. They choose to favor an online release, only doing 335 million in box office sales at its release week. The thing the production crew at Warner Brothers did differently is they teamed up with streaming services, HBO Max and Amazon Prime Video to have the movie release on their websites the same day as the theater exhibition.  This was the best thing to do as people do not want to not leave their house to see a movie, so bringing the movie is perfect. This was a big step in giving the consumer what they want as the previous years people were forced to go out to see a movie.

            People no longer want the theater exhibition. They want to view movies from the comfort of the own home. Moving form theater releases to online releases is the only way producers will be able to keep with this new trend in the consumers of wanting to stay home. I would also believe that due to the Corona Virus, this will speed up even more, as the public no longer can even be at movie theaters, so in home viewing is the way of the future, and movie theaters are no longer what the consumers want.

Extract Practice - 24

In the movie” 24”, the female characters nerves and shows how she is trying to keep calm while being interrogated about a bomb through the use of building suspension by having her interrogated by a man. The authors vision is to portray a scene where the lady is caught in the act of crime, then gets pressed so hard, she begins to crack and the truth starts to come out, along with the mans anger. This leads the viewer to believe that she cannot handle the pressure as the scenes lean toward her plot being uncovered by the man. What gives this away is the use of camera angles, shots, sounds, and Mis En Scene all purposely used to show the true meaning of the story.

            The opening two shot scene shows their exchange in the interrogation room and allows you to see the women’s facial expressions, giving away her cover, allowing the reader to realized she is stuck and is getting in a bad situation because we can see her expressions. The following over the shoulder shot of them talking shows the man getting angry with his aggressive nature, forcing her to start to talk, showing the viewer that she is not able to deal with him. These convey the movies plot of her not handling the pressure as these shots directly show her not keeping up with his talking because the viewer can visually see her face and emotions.

            The cross cutting going from the interrogation room to the computer room shows the intensity of the scene, adding to her anxiety as she is getting choked out without help. This allows the reader to see through her actions as we realize she is vulnerable because she freaks out. Also, the speed of the cross cutting gives more anxiety to the shot as this speeds up the movies tempo. The next jump shots create a similar effect, when the guy flips the table, she squirms and begins to fall apart. This once again shows her starting to break. This means she cannot handle the pressure and revels she is in over her head, exactly what the author wants to show. These editing shots point towards her breaking point as they express her distress and lack of ability to fix the situation.

            The dialogue is probably the number one thing that shows the dire situation as we can hear it in her voice that she is timid and afraid due to her high pitched, very slow voice. On the other hand, the man uses a loud overcoming voice to try and break her. She also cannot give an answer to him as when asked, she tries to avoid the question. The score in the movie really drives the tension in the room upward. The low drumming and high pitched noises are used to show her lack of ability to answer, driving the directors vision of showing that the man is going to win her over and break her.

            The props in the movie like the tables, camera, and chair all are used to show the seriousness of the situation. In the interrogation room, they are all used as devices to get her to open up. He flips the table, shoves the chair into the wall, and eyes the camera to scare her. All of these are all intended by the director to get her to open up the man, while causing her pain so the reader can understand the situation. Also, these are done to draw in the audience as it is live action and shows her at her most vulnerable.

            Finally, the costumes in the movie show her lower statue as she wears a collared shirt not buttoned up all the way, not pressed, and is dark in color. This all points towards the idea that she doesn’t care about her appearance because she isn’t put together. This is a similar theme in most criminals and crooked people and the director is hoping that most would be able to know this and acknowledge she is a crook getting ready to break under the pressure the man created. Most of the people going against her are wearing proper fitting suits and are very presentable, showing the contrast in the two parties, just as the movies author intended.

            Overall, my idea on what the director was trying to do was pretty spot on. They wanted to create a serious, yet intense scene that conveyed the idea that people cannot handle the pressure, especially if they did something wrong. My idea was pretty spot on, I said that those in the wrong cannot handle the truth and all this was found by my interpretations of the shots, camera angles, sounds, and mis en scene.

Final Project CCR

        Attached is my creative critical reflection for my final movie project. We did as best as we could due to the COVID-19. I wanted to be honest and not lie as to why the video came out the way it did. We have came so far in media and we are afraid this movie is not our full potential due to COVID19. We wanted to develop it so much more. We wanted to incorporate a chase scene and finally have dialogue. In my CCR I reflect on how we tried to base our approach on real action movies so we could get the best thing possible. I was honest and explained how we did and did not complete this. It was a hard fight but we got as much as we could. The Corona Virus totally ruined our progress.
       In my CCR I go into depths as to why it has affected us so much. For example, this virus has essentially stopped us from going outside. This put us in a terrible situation as out video takes place outdoors. Another problem created by the virus was that it limited our ability to meet and film as we were forced away and not able to film. It was such a hardship to do this project, we had no answers. We looked to our teachers for answers on how to finish, they could not give us an answer. There is no chance to finish this project, yet what we have is on par with big action movies. This makes me proud as we were able to do so much before we were forced to stop. I hope to still be given credit as we gave it our all with the time we had. I have individually progressed so much from our first video many months ago. Overall, it was a fun project that I really want to finish because we had a perfect setup and vision.

Partial Final Movie

Attached is our final project movie, it is not done due to COVID-19 and I had no way of meeting or editing it further. We have done the best we can given the situation, the movie is not done.

Commercial

Attached is my Nike Commercial. This was done at the start of the school year

Music Video

Attached is a link to my Music video, "Closed on Sunday" by Kanye West. This was done about half way through the school year.

Editing Part 2

Our filming has not progressed much since last class. I had sports after classes and the timing was not working. We hope our timing  will not be affected by this Corona Virus. We realized there might be a little bit of a crunch with our filming due to to this. We are too far progressed on our editing, and don’t have enough good video to use. This isn’t a big deal as we have planned out a filming time, but we want to keep moving. Due to this, our editing has moved forward a lot. The peer reviewer gave us a few things to key in on and I think we have capitalized on these and made a much better movie. We redid the whole sequencing from clip to clip so make a smoother line of events. This also helps the reader keep interest, as they constantly done see our poor mistakes.

The biggest challenge we faced during this was the sound. When I was with Alex I screwed up the audio. It was all shifted and I didn’t know how to undo this. I went without letting him know and then we realized it was an issue. I should not have not hid this and it created more problems than it was worth. We had to go back in, and remove the music, and insert it again to set through the video properly. We also had to cut some clips and reedit them to fit the new format of the song. All of this was not major, but it shows us we couldn’t keep redoing everything when we make a little mistake. Another thing we did not too well editing was the importing. For whatever reason, we were having trouble inserting out clips into the software, and spent way to much time trying to just get the videos ready to work with.