The Jury prize is an award presented to one or two films a year at the Cannes film festival in France. This award was given to Fishtank in 2009. We chose put this in our trailer and on our final website as awards will increase the films status which will raise the audience. Cannes film festival is meaningful particularly to European films, Cannes "became...extremely important for critical and commercial interests and for European attempts to sell films on the basis of their artistic quality". 

When choosing our final scene we had to think carefully as we knew we had to make it poignant. The transition between boy and teenager/man is punctuated with the lowering of the hood. Wearing a hood stereotypically connotes anti-social behaviour and is a signifier of wayward  youth within the media therefore when he lowers it in his transition it has more metaphorical meanings to it. We wanted to show that there was a clear difference between his younger self and after finding this unlikely friendship he becomes a different person. Depending on how the audience choose to perceive it some people may believe that its like a flashback and when seeing the older version of Jacob they can see that he's got away from the life he was in and he's now come out of the other side a better person because of the kindness and loneliness of one old man.

Reception Theory

Reception theory is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes the reader's reception of a literary text. It is more generally called audience reception.

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall is one of the main proponents of reception theory, having developed it for media and communication studies.

 This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for "negotiation" and "opposition" on the part of the audience. This means that a "text"—be it a book, movie, or other creative work—is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that the reader / viewer interprets the meanings of the text based on their individual cultural background and life experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader.

A basic acceptance of the meaning of a specific text tends to occur when a group of readers have a shared cultural background and interpret the text in similar ways. It is likely that the less shared heritage a reader has with the artist, the less he/she will be able to recognise the artist's intended meaning, and it follows that if two readers have vastly different cultural and personal experiences, their reading of a text will vary greatly.

In short, reception theory places the viewer in context, taking into account all of the various factors that might influence how she or he will read and create meaning from the text.

Crane shot

Our initial idea for the final shot was to create a room full of cranes in the old man's house giving the sense of awe. However, we had complications when finding a suitable room in a house to achieve the correct lighting and atmosphere. Therefore we used this shot as our final one as we feel it is most memorable and still creates the sense of awe and hope that we aimed to achieve with the crane shot.

Initial Website idea's and designs

When planning our website we deconstructed several existing film websites such as 'This is England' and 'London to Brighton'.

The 'London To Brighton' website was inspiration for our initial website idea because of the following features:

• Music form the film plays as you enter the website which is a heavy, ominous drone.
• The website is very similar to the poster and consists mainly of images as opposed to writing.
• There is a rolling bar along the top of the website which lists several reviews from newspapers, celebrities in the media and film critic websites.
• Along with the rolling bar, there are also 4 awards which the film has won, highlighting the quality of the film.
• Each photo is the link to a page, when the visitor scrolls over the photo the header above the title changes to the relevant title page

When creating our initial website we used similar idea's to that of the 'London to Brighton' website.

We love the idea of using photo's as the links to each page, however we didn't like how squared the photo's were and the shape and position of them.

Similarly we were unable to add the text bar which changed each time the viewer scrolled over the photo. In this case, we were limited by the technology available to us. Because of this, we scrapped this website idea and moved onto the next one. 

This website idea became our final submitted piece.

Features in our final website which still match to our main influence of 'London to Brighton' are :

• Reviews of newspapers and film critic websites
• An award highlighting the quality of the film
• The ident's for the companies which produced the film.

However, some features are not the same as the 'London to Brighton' website. We decided to use tabs for the links to other pages as it was clearer to read and because the technology was limiting. We did not include the fine print from our film trailer as it was shown at the end of the trailer on the main page. We also decided we didn't want a plain background and decided to use a photo which we took, initially for a poster design idea.