Media Transition Task

A Level Media Transitions Evaluation

1. How did you choose which film to swede?

Post modernism is about taking something iconic that has a large audience following or is well established and reworking it. As a large fan of the film I wanted to recreate 'Mean Girls' because I felt that it would demonstrate my understanding of the task well, taking something that had a lot of iconic quotes and camera shots to make a teaser trailer that an audience would recognize easily. I thought it would be fun doing something of this nature and making it our own. 

2. How did you identify which parts of the film to recreate?

Mean Girls has a lot of 'famous' parts which an audience would be pick out so I found the official script and highlighted what I thought were the most well known lines and phrases from the film, then created a chronological order of their appearance of the film. Because the trailer was only a teaser, I felt that it was best to use two or three and add the soundtrack to the film over the scenes.

3. Describe the filming process - What was straight forward? What was a challenge?
Knowing what I wanted to film and being able to use the camera was what made filming straight forward, however everything else was a challenge. The whole process was a challenge as initially I was the only person willing to do it and as a group task this is already tricky, however the two people that signed up with me to do both dropped out after one lesson having not done anything to contribute (one of their names is left on the trailer for courtesy purposes). So I had a day by myself of research and planning. Then I was joined by another member who helped along, however when we went out to film there were no people around to do the scenes that we wanted to do, so with an empty college we had to improvise what we could create in such a short amount of time. With only one lesson to complete this, we used my iPhone and emailed the videos and images we had used to create some form of footage. I had the idea to extend the running time of using the introduction of the studio title at the beginning and adding clips that we could print off the internet and film for extra seconds. My boyfriend ended getting involved so he could help with setting up the tripod etc, as we acted. Sadly actors we had asked and had been confirmed to do it where unavailable and dropped out on the day we needed them. The whole period of filming was a nightmare and had to be made up of shots that we could do ourselves. I came up with which scenes we should make and came to the final decisions.

4. Describe the editing process - what was straight forward? What was a challenge?
Using new software is always a bit difficult but having edited videos before made the process a lot more straight forward, yet the challenge to overcome difficulty with the software crashing and the videos not connecting to the Mac was hard to overcome at first as it was out of our control. We managed to get the clips in order nicely but a challenge was the issues with sound. Some clips would play louder than others and some wouldn't overlap or change when instructed. This took a lot of effort to single-handedly go through the clips, second by second trying to alter the components that made the sound project. Once this was fixed we wanted to change some of the orders and songs which meant repeating the long and difficult process again.

5. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your finished swede?
Strengths - 

• It uses key songs that are recognized to being attached to the film Mean Girls.
• It has a cringey feel to it associated with sweded films
• It looks homemade
• The clips aren't too long to bore audiences
• It has key parts from the film throughout

Weaknesses -

• It isn't very interesting to watch
• Key characters aren't shown because of actors not showing up
• The cinematography could be improved
• The acting and accents used
• The credits

6.  How successful do you feel your swede is?
I don't feel our swede is very successful because of how little time and people we had involved, a lot of the work seen in the film had to be improvised as no one was around or available to work with us. I just don't think it reflects the effort put into the film through poor quality which could be misconstrued as laziness.

7. What would you improve?
I would have used more clips from the internet and not had credits at the end. Looking back it isn't necessary to use them. I feel that it needs more energy put into it.

8. Compare you swede to an existing example - how does yours compare?

I did find a really good example of how I would have liked to have staged it, however it seems to have been removed. This is another example of a Mean Girls sweded film that takes a different approach:

Although this is a lot different from my example (see above) it does follow the idea of sweding something by creating a 'home grown version' and creating scenes. I like the more comical approach with using a male to play a female and comdey wigs. I think this would have been an easier version to do considering how little people and time we had than trying to make a lot of key scenes into a trailer. Ours feels a lot longer than this video, despite the above example having a face to camera talk. This one embraces the internet culture that sweding tends to use which I believe is far more effective.