Angus, thongs and perfect snogging - an example of a British teen angst film

Angus, thongs and perfect snogging is shown to the audience as a diary written by main character Georgia Nicholson, played by Georgia Groome. She is a fourteen year old girl who lives with her parents, younger sister and their cat, Angus, She is a counter type and does not fit the stereotypical conventions of a lead role in a teen angst film. She has brown hair, a 'large' nose and comes from an average family not an excessively rich one. 

Georgia narrates the film and it opens with her attending a fancy dress party. We can see immediately that Georgia is the outcast in the film as she turns up dressed as an olive, while the rest of the school turns up in revealing outfits that make them look nice. When she confronts her friends to question why they did not all dress up as hors d'oeuvres to be original they all come up with excuses. Embarrassed and humiliated we see Georgia running through the streets of Eastbourne, a seaside town in Britain, very upset. This really sets the scene for the movie as we see all the stereotypical things we expect to see at the beach, such as older people sitting on the benches and hen parties walking round very giddy. When Georgia reaches her house she gets really angry as her costume will not fit back through the gate and ends up tearing it off

and stamping on it in rage. During this scene the hit song 'She's so lovely' by popular band Scouting for girls is playing.

The next day we see Georgia preparing for her day at school of the new year, this is when her narration first begins, Georgia is attempting to shaver part of her eyebrow when her sister barges in and knocks her causing her to shave half of her eyebrow off. This is when the audience can tell that Georgia is an average girl trying to fit in with everyday life and follow all the latest trends however things never go right for her. When Georgia goes downstairs she gets very freaked out by her parents being affectionate towards each other in front of her. 

When Georgia goes outside she is met by her best friend Jas. The audience see a new side to Georgia as she is with one of her closest friends laughing and joking. When they first walk through the school gates we first experience the social groups within the school, however this is portrayed in a completely different way to the way they are in American films such as mean girls. We notice the groups are not as stereotypical and defined. This is also supported by the costume as their is a uniform, just like the majority of British schools, which makes it harder to differentiate the different social groups. When the two girls walk into their form room they are met by Rosie and Ellen. They all walk over to each other and perform a dance type handshake they have planned, Georgia narrates over this and we learn that they call themselves 'The Ace gang'. The girls are seen outside sitting on the glass learning a new theory Rosie is teaching them to feel their own breasts. While they are discussing this and if they should be doing it they see two 'sex gods' as they call them walk through the gates. Rosie explains how they are Robbie and Tom, they are brothers and two years older than them. Immediately the three single girls, Georgia, Jas and Ellen argue over who saw them first, but Jas and Georgia win as they are more 'mature' and invented a snogging scale. 

The group of girls subtly follow the boys round town that afternoon to learn more about them. Next

Georgia and Jas prepare themselves to go to the organic shop the boys Mum owns, where they will be working, to introduce themselves. Georgia tells Jas to use a deeper voice to try to make herself seem more attractive, so when Jas enters first and starts talking to Tom she uses this advice. However it backfires when he asks her if she has a sore throat. When Georgia goes in she talks to Jas and Tom until Robbie appears and she goes speechless. Jas tries to help her by suggesting she likes apples, until Georgia's mum comes in questioning why Georgia's at the shop as she hates vegetables, Georgia suggests shes buying her favourite fruit 'apples' until her mum announces that apples give Georgia wind. This is a sense of comic relief for the audience as they will laugh at the embarrassment Georgia's Mum is causing her.

When the girls are walking home discussing everything they see Robbie walking along hand in hand with "Slaggy Lindsay" the antagonist in the film who the girls hate. The Ace gang spy on Lindsay the next day and see she wears infills in her bra. Georgia gets very upset and the girls end up sending her to a 'kissing school' at one of the local boys houses to try and move her up on the maturity scale. At the end of the thirty minute session he claims Georgia is a natural and he wants to see her again. 

Throughout the film we see Georgia pestering her parents to hire a club for her birthday so she can have a big party, however her parents seem to try and change the idea into a smaller party in a local hall with her uncle as a DJ. Therefore when her Dad explains he's been offered part of a promotion in New Zealand Georgia says he should take it, thinking it will be one less parent to have to deal with. 

As her party plans look like they may be moving forward Georgia focuses on another important part of her life. As Robbie likes cats just like her she persuades Jas to walk Angus on a lead in the park so she can tell Robbie hes missing then when Jas sees Georgia and Robbie searching she should let Angus go so they can search for him. Georgia sets the plan into action but halfway through Jas gets distracted by Tom playing football and Angus chases a dog causing Angus to run off, Tom triesto help her and in the end Robbie and Georgia turn up and 'rescue' Angus. Georgia thinks everything is falling into plan until Tom tells Robbie Lindsay called so he rushes off, whereas Tom gets Jas' number. 

With Georgia's dad away her mum decides to have an attractive decorator come round to decorate certain rooms, however Georgia mistakes this for her mum flirting, as her mums always out with Jem the decorator and Jas and Tom developing their relationship a lot of Georgia's time is spent babysitting her sister Libby. 

At school Jas doesn't sit with the girls one day as she's sitting with Tom, Robbie and Lindsay, when she comes into the PE changing rooms the girls question her, especially when they see she's wearing a thong, however she reassures them by saying shes undercover for them. She also gets them invited to a party. Georgia and Ellen attend together and whenever they are dancing they do their best to avoid Peter Dyer, the guy who held the 'kissing lessons' Georgia attended. However he pulls her outside and pushes her to the ground kissing her at a moment when Jas, Tom, Robbie and Lindsay walk past.   Lindsay turns it into a joke about Georgia, but Robbie walks off disappointed and Jas is in shock at Georgia's behaviour. 

Jas suggests that Georgia go to the pool with Libby as she wants to apologise to Robbie and she knows he will be there with Tom and Jas but no Lindsay. Georgia's uses fake tan which is a shock for Robbie when they're doing handstands. However in the end Robbie and Georgia kiss and he leaves saying he needs to sort some things out. 

Georgia tells Peter Dyer she is a lesbian which is why she cant be with him. However Dave the laugh, one of Robbie's friends questions it and when she explains to him he invites her to see Roobbie's band play with him that night. They go and have a good time but Georgia tells Jas how it is her elastic band theory to get Robbie to 'bounce' back to her.

Jas and Georgia end up arguing and she tells Tom about this. Tom tells Robbie and it causes everyone to turn against Georgia. Feeling lost and alone and scared her parents will split up Georgia goes to her Dads company and ask them to transfer her whole family there as she does not want to be apart. 

Georgia prepares to celebrate her birthday alone without her friends but her Mum buys her a dress and says to get ready they're going out. They turn up at a club and when they go in the whole room is filled with people from her school. Jas walks through the crowd and has helped her Mum to plan the whole party for Georgia as a surprise. The best friends make up and Georgia is called over by her Mum and Jem to meet Jem's boyfriend, the owner of the club. Her heart put to rest and her Dad comes dancing through the crowd explaining how his company ordered him home with a pay rise after her heart tugging appearance. 

There is a cut to Lindsay's birthday party in a club which has her and two friends at the empty club. Next we see Robbie and the Stiff Dylan's come on stage during Georgia's party. During their song Lindsay and her friends crash the party and cut the music. Lindsay tells Robbie he can choose her as she's 'perfect' or Georgia and points out many of Georgia's flaws. Robbie pulls Georgia on stage and claims shes perfect too. Jas and the Ace gang tell Lindsay Robbie prefers his girlfriends less fake and pull out her infills, throwing them to Dave the laugh on stage. After Robbie and Georgia share a kiss infront of everyone they perform there song properly. While everyone is dancing we see Georgia setting Peter up with a girl and Dave and Ellen up together. At the end of the film we see Georgia and Robbie walking along the seafront she ran down at the beginning of the film, hand in hand and finally happy, both also getting their happy ending.

I think this film attracted such a large audience as it is one of the few known British made teen angst

films produced. Georgia is a counter type to many other teen angst films and in it is portrayed to be an average clumsy girl which is much more relatable than other teen angst films are. Also the British audience viewing it will relate to it more than they will American teen angst films as the aspects and characteristics of their lives are similar. 

Analysis of a teen angst film - Wild Child

Wild Child stars Emma Roberts playing Poppy Moore, the rich, spoilt Malibu girl who does everything to test her often absent father's temper. She is known to be a rebel since the passing of her mother. After one final party where Poppy throws her fathers new lovers clothes into the ocean off of their infinity pool, her father decides its time to ship her off to a private English boarding school. Poppy goes to Abbey Mount, the school, with every intention to get kicked out and sent straight back to Malibu with her rich friends and designer brands.

Poppy is firstly portrayed as an antagonist, especially towards Kate, the girl who has been assigned as her 'big sister' at the school and has been asked to show her the ropes, however Kate's caring affectionate personality helps to make sure she is lovely to Poppy

no matter what, and her and her fellow roommates befriend Poppy.

Kate and her friends teach Poppy that the only way to get out of Abbey mount is to do something huge to upset the headmistress, or a series of bad events. Poppy is confused when the dorm adviser confiscates every ones phones and the girls give over 'dinosaur' phones compared to hers. However she soon realises their smart plans when they get their actual phones out after she has left. Poppy becomes rivals with the head girl Harriet and her followers, the real antagonists of the film but plays many pranks with her new found friends. 

While playing for the school Lacrosse team, a sport Poppy finds herself very good at, Poppy discovers that Abbey mount is the school her mother once attended before she had Poppy.

The girls come to a loss when none of the pranks

seem to be working but think of one final idea, to seduce the headmistress' son, Freddie, who is strictly off limits. Poppy and the girls attend a school dance where Poppy trips and hits her head, Freddie takes her outside to get some air where he confesses he likes her and asks to take her out on a date. Poppy thoroughly enjoys the date but comes back to a complete disaster when she finds her friends reading an email she supposedly wrote to her friends back in Malibu claiming how much she hated everyone at this school including her roommates and new found friends. The girls therefore start ignoring Poppy and she finds out Freddie has received this information as well making him ignore her too.

Feeling lost and alone Poppy sneaks down to the cook's room where she uses a phone to ring Ruby, her best friend in Malibu. However this leaves her feeling even more awful after Poppy hears Ruby stating how much she dislikes Poppy and how she is sleeping with Poppy's boyfriend. Feeling completely alone Poppy is playing with her lighter, still in the cook's room, and sets a curtain alight, hearing footsteps she puts this fire out before rushing back to her room without getting caught but accidentally leaving behind her 'i love LA' lighter. Looking out the window minutes later she See's fire and wakes up the whole school alerting them. Realising Drippy, one of the girls, is missing everyone starts to panic Poppy realises where she is and rushes back into the burning building to help her escape. She begins to be seen as the protagonist in the film but everyone is still upset with her for the email. When the fire has been put out Freddie, who found the lighter, returns it to Poppy to stop her getting in trouble but refuses to let her tell him what happened. Although Poppy has suddenly realised she does not want to leave she goes to the headmistress and confesses to the fire. 

The disappointed teacher tells Poppy she will have to attend the honour court, a court within the school where the students decide on the punishment. While she waits for this to happen Freddie finds her crying and is in the end convinced that the fire was an accident and Poppy did not mean for this to happen. While Poppy is in the court her friends discover it was not her who sent the email and go to the court to defend her, this makes Harriett accidentally confess to restarting the fire in an angry attempt to turn everyone against Poppy. 

Poppy is forgiven by all her friends and is seen in the Lacrosse finals, her Dad attends this match and is so shocked to see how much she has changed, in her appearance as well as her personality, but also how much she looks like her mother. At the end of the film we see Poppy with her new friends and Freddie sitting by the pool in her Malibu home, she is ignoring Ruby's calls now she knows she is not the friend she once thought she was. The film ironically ends with the group stood about to jump off the cliff into the Pacific ocean, the same jump that sent her to the school in the first place. 

This movie attracted a large audience in my opinion, as many viewers felt they were living their dream through Poppy. They get thrills out of her being rebellious and are given a ‘false’ view of boarding school life, like Mean girls it also contained experiences that the target audience can relate to, such as teen arguments, and heartbreak.

Analysis of a teen angst film - Mean girls

Mean Girls is one of the most popular teen angst films, released in 2004 with the famous actress Lindsay Lohan playing the main character. Cady, Lindsay Lohan's character, moved from the African bush where she was raised and home schooled to a busy American town where she will attend a high school and struggle through typical teen troubles.

Cady's first day is a struggle where she makes no friends and eats her lunch in the school bathrooms, however on the second day she instantly makes friends with two students, Damian and Janis, who help her find a suitable seat in her form registration class, however these students are anything but popular. She soon meets the schools popular trio known as the 'plastics'. Led by Regina George the main antagonist

within the movie, her loyal follower Gretchen Weiner and Karen Smith who is known as "one of the dumbest people you will ever meet". They invite her to sit with them, something unknown in the dynamics of the school's social groups, but  Cady senses trouble and is unsure not wanting to loose her first friends here. Her friends convince her to go and sit with the plastics so she can find out some of their deepest and darkest secrets.        

Cady starts off sitting with the plastics but soon finds herself falling for a boy in her math class, that boy being Aaron Samuel's. But when Cady lets this slip to Gretchen and Karen they warn her off, explaining how he is Regina's ex-boyfriend and that is not a good idea. They promise they will keep her secret, but of course in stereotypical teen girl life they don't. Regina calls Cady that night letting her know she knows but

telling her she does not care. However she portrays this differently when she gets back with Aaron and purposely dangles him in front of Cady. Cady runs straight back to her original friends for a shoulder to cry on. They convince Cady to remain friends with the mean girls and they will help her to sabotage Regina's lives, something that Janis has wanted to do since Middle school. Cady sits with the plastics permanently and tries to ruin Regina's life by giving her foot cream instead of face cream, allowing Aaron to find out she is cheating on him, giving Regina protein bars instead of diet bars and trying to get Gretchen to spill all of Regina's secrets. However in the midst of all this Cady becomes one of the plastics, dressing and acting like them and even falls out with her closest friends.

When Regina finds this out she rushes to the 'burn book', a book the girls have created which has nasty comments about all the girls and Damien in their grade. In this book she sticks a picture of herself writing nasty comments before taking it to the school head teacher and claiming she found it in the girls toilets. She accuses Cady, Gretchen and Karen, who have all turned against her, of the book as they are the only girls in the school not in this. All the girls in the school are taken to the gym and attend a type of therapy, counselling session but when Janis spills what they have been doing to Regina she storms off. Cady runs after her and they endure a screaming match, before Regina is hit by a bus. The film comes to a sudden pause here before we see the end where Cady retires to her old ways and wins the mathlete competition with some of her teammates. She then attends the prom with them, dressed in her new mathletes jacket. Cady beats all the other candidates, including Regina, Gretchen and Janis and wins prom Queen. After a heart tugging acceptance speech that she is not required to give we witness Cady getting her happy ending with Aaron and the plastics splitting up and going there separate ways, joining new social groups within the school ready for their final year.                                                                                                                              

I think this movie attracted such a large audience as it not only focuses on real aspects of teenage life, it contained light humour and drama to attract the target audience. The film could relate to a large majority of the audience as many young teens experience social groups such as the ‘plastics’, but it also attracted a different sort of audience with the humour used, separating it from a drama. 

What i have learnt from the production of my swede.

In class when making a film I realised how difficult it can be to plan everything correctly.

The first thing we had to think of was planning the film and deciding who we wanted to play parts in our film and where we would film each part making sure we got a range of mise-en-scene. We had to make a sweded film so chose to re-make the first Harry Potter. We thought of different scenes we could remake and then we had to decide what actors we needed. The characters we needed to cast were: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Uncle Vernon, and Professor Lupin. We also needed someone to play the voice of the sorting hat. As we only had a group of 4 people we decided we needed to double up on characters to play. Then we only needed someone to play the part of Harry as he was in almost every scene so we could not get him to double up with someone. This became difficult as we had to decide who we wanted to ask to play the part of the lead character. We also had to find someone that wasn’t in our class that had a free period so that we could film in the time we were given. This showed me how difficult it can be for movie directors as they have to decide on all the actors and actresses they want to play all the characters and normally they would have many more characters than we had in our film.  

We also had to decide what props and costumes we needed in our film. As it was a non-budgeted film we did not want to buy things to film so we thought of how we could find these items. We made envelopes out of scrap paper and then used a sheet of plain A4 paper to make a Platform 9 ¾ sign, so that we could use this to create a new setting. We also made glasses for Harry Potter to wear out of paper. We had to find books for Hermione to hold so we just used our own school books for iconography, lastly for Harry Potter’s luggage trolley we managed to speak to the school science department to see if they had one we could borrow. We then found black material for cloaks, an old hat for a sorting hat and we found twigs outside that we could use as wands.

We could then move onto preparing to film but we had to consider a risk assessment, deciding what the risks were and how we could avoid them. We highlighted a key risk as dropping the camera so we decided we would leave it on the tripod when filming and if we had to carry it somewhere we would make sure to hook the strap on to our hands. Another risk was tripping over when filming so we decided we would walk between locations and only run if it was needed for the film.

The biggest problem we faced when filming was when we tried to set up our tripod as it did not have a spring meaning we could not adjust the height of it. This would have caused great difficulty as we wanted to get a range of shot levels in our swede. However we managed to swap our tripod before we started filming.

We had a time limit of an hour to film everything we needed for our piece; we exceeded this time limit, which is therefore something we need to work on improving in the future. If we had been filming a professional film the timing would have been important due to release and premiere dates.

Preliminary Task

We had to make a preliminary task, inwhich we had to film someone walking through a door, walking to a table, sitting down opposite another person, and having a conversation with them.

We created a small storyboard before filming this piece. We had to make sure we included certain things, which were:

• Shot reverse shot - which shows that two characters are talking to eachother within a sequence or film as we can tell they are facing different ways so assume they are communicating with each other and we pick up a conversational tone. 
• 180 degree rule - which is a filming guideline which makes sure that each shot has the same left to right relationship as all others. 
• Match on action - Which helps to portray the continuity of the film and also helps to cut down the length of the film by removing any unnecessary parts. 

Doing this task has gave me confidence when filming as i had previously had no experience, i feel when it comes to filming our teen angst film i would still like to improve on this and attempt more advanced shots such as tracking and panning and i also plan on using more angles such as low angles to emphasize the power that a character has more power than another etc.I also learnt about Match on action and the 180 degree rule which I feel can help me in all future filming.