Definition of social realism

Social realism is a realistic style of filming that became a very famous style in communist countries. It is a style that realistically portays aspects of social concern through films. Most social realism films are low budget. They are all a slice of life and are relatable to its audiences. Film makers such as Shane Meadows and Ken Loach very dominant in the social realist film genre.

Social realist film conventions consist of things such as:
Violence
Real life situations
Drugs
Sex
Council estate life
Love
Family life
Crime.

This relates to our film as our film consists of the majority of the conventions above.

   Ken loach

Progress.

We have filmed half of the trailer now, we have created the music and put together a final agreement on the last shot.

The bbc movies review of "this is England"

It's hard to describe Shane Meadows' latest film without making it appear a great deal less interesting than it actually is. It's a semi-autobiographical tale of a young boy adopted by a gang of skinheads in a grey seaside town. And on that basis, This Is England sounds, in short, like typical grimesville British filmmaking - concrete, rain and misery. This couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, the film is fizzing with energy and humour, powered by brilliantly engaging performances.
Chief among these is newcomer Thomas Turgoose as Sean, a put-upon 12-year old who finds unexpected friendship with a group of local skinheads led by the sweet natured Woody (Joseph Gilgun, another stand-out performance). These skins are a far cry from the image of racist thuggery that the movement became known for in the 80s. It's all about the music, and of course the clothes - although Sean is too small for Doc Marten boots, he still gets the haircut, the plaid shirt and the braces. For a while, everything is sweet in Sean's world. He even shares his first kiss with a Boy George lookalike with the charming name of Smell.
"A FUNNY AND DEEPLY MOVING PORTRAIT"
But soon, conflict arrives in the form of Combo (Stephen Graham, also superb), an old mate of the gang whose time in prison has left him with a strong sympathy for the National Front. Combo's racist agenda splits the gang and Sean, tragically, finds himself turning to Combo as a substitute for the father he lost in the Falklands. Meadows is an exhilarating filmmaker and This Is England is his best film to date - an honest, emotional, funny and deeply moving portrait of growing up. Don't miss it.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We have used mobile phones to take pictures of our work. We found this useful as we didn't need to do all of our work online. This is effective as our mood boards can be bigger on paper and it is clearer. We used Apple Macs to edit our trailer which helped us greatly as it is very self explanatory and easy to use. We used the editing software called "imovie" to edit the film and "iDVD".  We found that using photoshop for our film poster and magazine helped us aswell as it is very detailed and advanced. However, we did have problems as the battery life of our camera's was very short so we could only do little bits of filming at a time and then we had to keep charging it up. This delayed our filming. For the planning we used microsoft word and pen and paper. This helped as we didnt need to have internet to write our planning down. We used the internet for our research, we used mostly British film websites as we were working on a British film. We did use abit of wikipedia, this was good but also slightly un-reliable as anyone can post on it.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We had very positive feedback to our trailer from our peers and teachers. We found that the music we used gave the trailer a lot more emotion and helped them empathise. A lot of people commented on the tagline 'Love Will Tear Them Apart' and found quite clever and intruiging which I think would help boost viewings.We were also complimented on the fact the camera work was very steady even though we didn't use a tripod which shows that one isn't always neccesarily needed. Also we were told that we never had a static shot, the camera moved in every scene which made it more entertaining and more realistic. We were also told that without the text they would still have a brief idea of what the storyline was due to the dialogue and enigma's. But the text however is still important so the audience know the story line, text also creates tension.  However, we have learned that we should film our shots for longer to allow space for cutting and still have a lengthy shot then we actually need to as we found that the final shot would have been more effective if it had been longer.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The three main characters are present in all three tasks which helps the audience have familiarity with them. However, there is a different actress in the film poster and the magazine to the film as we has difficulty as we found she wasn't reliable enough. We have used conventions of social-realism films in all three of the tasks; the film poster is in black and white to show depression which links in nicely with the film as thew colours arevery dull as a lot of the filming is on the streets. The shot for the magazine portrays the boys to be quite laddish as those pose is quite promiscous. This will help atrract the audience as we hae found that this is what they look for. The production website link is present on all three of the tasks which is good way of advertisement.  The tagline (Love Will Tear Them Apart) is present in the film poster and the trailer which we have used to attract the audience because of the link to Joy Division.

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

I have broken down a couple of movie trailers. I beleive our trailers challenge the average trailer as we've done many things to make ours seem more individual. Our trailer is a little like the shane meadows film "this is england" trailer. For example every trailer i watched had a narrator as a voice over to talk about the film. We havn't included a narrator over our clips, we included instrumental that i made inspired by a piano piece. This music is inplace with no vocals. so it can play over our emotional clips even more emotion to draw the audiences attention.
Here is the this is england trailer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0jkv2bRFgQ. As you can see, the establishing shot in that trailer is a shot of a British coucil estate, which shows social realism, people doing there day to day thing, walking the dog walking to work etc. Our establishing shot shows a modern day British family life, a teenage boy with his girlfriend and his older brother all together watching t.v. This also shows social realism as it is a British realistic family setting. We challenged the codes and conventions of our film with colours also. For example, Danny in the film is the antagonist of the film. He is made out to be the bad guy, so therefore you would think he wears dark clothing, black clothes to symbolise how sly and dark minded he is. But we decided to change his colours and wear colours such as white and grey. The white usually shows purity and grey usually shows dull, dark, sad. This represents that he has two sides. Also shows that the white represents how he is putting on an act as a loyal and pure person, but the grey represents his other "darker" side. Also there is a shot of me up against a fence looking out into fields. We have used symbolism here as it suggest that he is trapped because of the baby and he is looking out into the open world.

Music

I have created my own music for this trailer. The music i have created is a piano hiphop style instrumental piece of music. I was inspired to use a piano piece by yan tierdsen called L'Après Midi. This piece inspired me because the mood of the soundtrack sounds like a sad/anger type of piece of music but has alot going on, just like our film. If you havn't heard of yan tiersens stuff, here is the piece that inspired me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqOJv0bAA-U

Filming

Today and on thursday 17th of november we got our main filming done, we filmed some of the key shots to our trailer and our final shots are being filmed on thursday 24th and friday 25th. we have also taken some location shots which will be uploaded shortly.

Social-realism posters

Social-realism posters are often very blunt and simple pictures, usually, of the main characters with plain expressions on their faces which can often represent suffering. The colours are often dull; mainly blue. This denotes coldness and hard times. The posters here relate to our film in many ways. The first picture reminds me of the character jack plays, the young timid boy. the look the boy on the picture is giving looks like hes lost in his own emotions and doesnt know where to go, just like the character Jack plays in our film. the second poster shows the young boy in this is england throwing the English flag in the water. This shows the boy throwing away something that meant alot to him, similar to the story line in my film, Jack in the end lets go of his girlfriend who has caused alot of problems despite how much she means to him. The third poster, the movie poster for quadrophenia doesnt really show much relation to my film, however the quote "a way of life" on the poster relates to the background of the characters. All of them living in a working class estate with not alot of money, then the two brothers had to change their way of life from having a working class family life to living on the streets and having to steal for food etc.