A2 Proposal

For A2 we are planning to produce a short film, along with a poster for the film and cover for a film magazine. We will have chose a film that we believe we will gain more experience from researching.

For our idea we are planning to produce a documentary/drama (a short film showing the representation of female models in the modern media) like “miss congeniality”. The story is based around a female character who is an FBI agent, who struggles to maintain normal life as well dealing with her demanding job.

Plot

Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock) and Eric Matthews (Benjamin Bratt) are Special Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The bureau receives a threat against the 75th annual Miss United States beauty pageant in San Antonio, Texas from notorious domestic terrorist "Citizen". A computer search identifies Hart as the female FBI agent best qualified to go undercover as a contestant, although she pays little attention to her femininity.
Beauty pageant coach Victor Melling (Michael Caine) teaches the tomboyish Hart how to dress, walk, and act like a contestant. She is unused to such behavior, however, and sees the pageant and its participants as "outdated and antifeminist". Several suspects exist, including competition director and former pageant winner Kathy Morningside (Candice Bergen); her unpleasant assistant Frank Tobin (Steve Monroe); veteran emcee Stan Fields (William Shatner) who, like Morningside, is being replaced with a younger person; and Rhode Island's Cheryl Frasier (Heather Burns), possibly a radical animal rights activist.
Representing New Jersey as "Gracie Lou Freebush", Hart impresses the audience by playing the glass harp and demonstrating self-defense techniques during the talent competition. She unexpectedly becomes friends with Frasier and the other contestants, and when Citizen is caught elsewhere Hart and Matthews continue the investigation alone.
Hart surprises everyone, including herself, by becoming runner-up to Frasier. The agents discover that Morningside and Tobin—secretly her son—impersonated Citizen, and prevent them from assassinating Frasier with a bomb in the title tiara. Hart's fellow contestants choose her as Miss Congeniality, and she starts a relationship with Matthews.

Research

I think this will give us the opportunity to develop skills. One skill in media that this will help improve is special effects. I am hoping to be able to use my graphic skills to develop a really good film poster, I am excited about this opportunity.  I also think we can use sound really well in this film. The use of non diegetic sound will be very useful to create atmosphere. The poster and newspaper article will be really useful to show the use of airbrushing in the graphic industry, I am have done some research into airbrushing of models and found a really good advert done by the “Dove” fragrance company, which shows a short film of a model being airbrushed and how the population need to see perfect faces.

Promotional image for Evolution

Evolution is an advertising campaign launched by Unilever in 2006 as part of its Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, to promote the newly created Dove Self-Esteem Fund. The Centre of the Unilever campaign is a 75-second spot produced by Ogilvy & Mather in Toronto, Canada.

The film opens with a "pretty, but ordinary girl" (Stephanie Betts) entering and sitting down in a studio. Two harsh lights are switched on and the first bars of The Flashbulb's "Passage D", a drum and bass piece with piano accompaniment, are heard. The short credits sequence provides the title of the film and credit to Dove. The camera then switches to a time lapse sequence, showing a team of people adding make-up and adjusting the hair of the woman, transforming her into a "strikingly beautiful billboard model." When the final physical adjustments have been made, the team members all move off-camera and a series of camera flashes begins as the photographer takes shots of the woman in various poses.
One shot is selected from the batch and moved into a generic image editing software interface, where a series of "Photoshopping" adjustments are made to alter the appearance of the model even further, including, but not limited to: lengthening the neck, adjusting the curve of the shoulder, altering the hair and skin, and enlarging the eyes and mouth. The final image is transferred to a billboard advertisement for the fictional Fasel brand of foundation makeup and the piece fades to the statement, "No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted." The film ends with an invitation to take part in "Dove Real Beauty Workshops", the logo for the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, and, in some versions, the website address of Unilever-Dove's Campaign For Real Beauty, for which the film was produced.

                                                                                    Miss Congwnialty Poster