Genre

Crime/Gangster Conventions:

• Likely to take place in a big city in the US
• Most public scenes are done in seedy alleyways and wharves of the urban jungle
• Survival of the fittest state of mind
• Power struggle takes place between the main character and main foe
• The whole gangster life is glorified greatly
• Family comes first
• Gangs are allocated by immigrant roots (Italian,Cuban etc)
•  Fairly immune to the law 
• Material goods (Cars,clothes,houses and cars) as well as women take a big role in measuring the success of a charachters
• The hero is usually a drug lord and his main way of making money is through drug trade (Usually cocaine)
• Betrayal is very common
• The end justifies the mean

Two classic gangster movies that portray many of these conventions are "The Godfather" and "Goodfellas"

The Godfather:

Goodfellas:

My Film:

The genre and conventions shown in these films are relevant to the type of movie I am looking to make with my group so I plan on using the information I've gathered from my research to remember what kind of conventions I should include in my film to attract my target audience.It also gave me an idea of what's too typical and cliché in gangster genre movies.

Preliminary task self evaluation

Evaluation 

For my preliminary task I was asked to make a short film with my group following a script titled "Feed the fish". We decided to take a humourous approach with our short film whilst still managing to show our ability and understanding of how different types of shots work together effectively. I believe that the first half of our film indicated that we were able to edit our shots to create match-on-action as shown when our main character walks into a bulding and up the stairs. However, as the film got to the middle there were a few clear jump cuts which effected the overall look of the film as well as indications that we didn't take lighting into consideration as the lighting would blatantly change between two shots. 

 In my opinion, the editing at the end of our video worked well. We filmed two characters spinning in seperate rooms and later duplicated and sped up these shots to show that this was meant to be character 1 changing into character 2.The editing was done poorly on purpose to show light hearted humour.

A strength I believe we showed in our short film was using the music at the beginning to establish to the audience the genre of our film.We used the opening tune to "Looney Tunes" when following the main character around a building to show that he isn't to be taken seriously as well as to help make the long journey a little more interesting. On the other hand this also didn't help our film as we found from our feedback that the energy of the music overhadowed the energy of the characters.

We could have also worked on planning our filming times better. For example, we filmed on two days and didn't realise that our costumes in the first and second half of the film were not the same.

My Film:
Doing the premilinary task has enabled me to learn a lot of new skills in filiming and editing in a quick time and I think I'll be able to apply this knowledge onto my actual film opening by learning from the errors I've made and using the feedback I was given by my class to ensure that I make the best opening sequence possible.