Evaluation Question 2

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

The first way that our products work together is through the genre. Throughout each product the one genre that is highlighted throughout is Romance. This is something that we decided to focus on more with the poster rather than the magazine as it would have a greater impact on our target audience of 18-25. It is because of this we chose to aim our poster at females, as women are easier to attract and the themes in our film is something that women would relate to more. Women tend to enjoy Romance films quite a lot, so we made sure that it was something we wanted to highlight in our poster. With the magazine review, we chose not to focus on it as much as it was something that we did not want to highlight. We did slightly although our article focuses more on the company who created the film, we felt that it was something that we wanted to highlight because it felt best with what we wanted to put across to our audience. This was due to the convention that we followed from Prevue magazine. Our film, however, is the product that does not highlight the genre as much as people expected. The main theme throughout the film is loss rather than Romance. Both the test shoot and the final film both highlight the genre quitye well. By adding them with the magazine and poster, our genre is clearly highlighted between all products, the magazine does briefly mention the genre to our film and the poster highlights it greatly. So in terms they all do work quite well.

In terms of narrative our products, the poster works the best. With the poster, we wanted to immediately show that barrier between thw two characters. Which is why we chose to place our actresses on both sides of the poster and have the card a poster in the middle. It creates that barrier between them yet it shows they are united but in some way.

 

Film Poster



The magazine was something that did not focus on the narrative as much. This was because we did not want to give too much of the story away. Also, we had decided that our main focus would be on promoting the newly created film company. We decided that this was best as it challenged a convention of most magazine reviews. We tried to leave our audience on a cliffhanger with the article, so that it would entice the audience to watch our film and maybe take a peek at the poster. With the film, we used the shots and non-digetic sound such as the voice-over and score to relay the story's narrative. This was because with the parts that was happening between the scenes the audience may have got a different view from our film. Before viewing our film, our audience would proabaly have to at least see the poster first to get some idea of what our film would be about. The article is a little background information to our film in terms of the crew. So it does not portray the narrtive as much.

We wanted the audience of our film, poster and magazine to be around a simliar age. This is why our film is targeted at 16-25 year olds while our poster and magazine focuses on 18-25 year olds. We chose to do this as it would help to attract a wider audience. We approached this by creating the poster that advertised the romance side of our poster, where the review focuses slightly more on the film company. This helped in terms of distribution as it shows the audience our film in a more wider variety and a postive light. With the film, it was easier to take a more feminine approach which was shown through the use of the non-digetic sound and the genre as women would most probably relate more to the themes within the film and our products.

The film poster and magazine are important to the marketing as it attracts our audience. It would also begin to spread a word of mouth about our film, which would help to increase our audience. They help to tell your audience to a certain exent, what the film's about. Without them, the number of people who would watch the film would be seriously reduced.

Evaluation Question 1

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

The first way our media products challenege forms and conventions is by creating a poster to advertise our film, as it not something that is usually produced by independant film makers due to the reason they are made. Which, after reasearch, we found is mainly for competition entries, self promotion and/or experimental purposes. Our poster shows to our audience that our film falls under the mainstream line than it actually is. Although the time length and content of our film contradicts that. Another reason is the focus of our poster when compared to mainstream posters. The main convention being the advertisment of the film's main actor or actors, we challenged this by using the card and roses to create a motif which the film's main genre. Where the majority of the poster is taken with an image of the main star in the film's costume, we decided to place our actors at the sides of the poster as it also showed that the card and motif was something that we wanted to highlight serves as a barrier between the two actors.

Challenging conventions of leaving out cast

Four Weddings and a Funeral Poster

In terms of our film, the lack of budget restricted us from using a studio to film scenes, therefore most of our filming was done on-set. This, in some respects, made it easier in terms of planning as we did not have to plan how we were going to replicate certain sets and the majority of our film was outside as it was. This was also limtied by the technology we were using during filming as the cameras could not pick up on-set dialogue very well due the quality of the camera.

For example, there image above is during the end scene when Claire (Payal Jaiprakash) says the line: 'It's not easy, you know. But you learn to get by'. However, as previously mentioned the camera's restricted sound could not pick up what had just been said. We had to counter that by lowering the volume of the non-digetic sound over the scene during post-production. Althought it did not help a great deal, it did at a point help to hear Claire's voice.

With our magazine, there we not many conventions that could be challenged. We researched magazine such as Total Film, Prevue and Empire and decided that we wanted a light review that focused on the film's theme's and more the different side of the production company we had created.

Empire Magazine Review

Sight and Sound Magazine Review

This was because after reading an article in another film magazine called Sight and Sound, we felt that it was best to avoid the way those articles were written as they approached film as an art and it was not the approach we wanted. We decided to the followed the conventions of using two columns and Sans Serif font for the heading and the Serif font for the main text as they are the two most commonly used fonts for magazine reviews.

Our film poster

Also the Serif font that we used fit in well with the design of the magazine and does, in a sense, highlight our genre. With out breakout boxes, we had trouble with what were first going to have in them. But again we decided to follow a convention that is commonly used in Total Film as it was the magazine that we felt best suited what we wanted to show within our film.

Evaluation Question 3

What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback?
Our audience feedback was important as we were able to see what parts, depending of whether it was the research and planning, or the product and ancillary tasks we needed to improve. We conducted our feedback by holding a screening of our test shoot.


At the time we had first screened our film, it was incompleted as no voice-over had been added. Also we had not finished filming the enitre film due to scheduling issues. Therefore, it made it harder for the audience to fully understand the narrative and themes of our film. It was because of this that our film had not achieved its purpose. However, not all of the viewers who watched at the time agreed. The main positive note was that the score we had used fit very well and was clearly suitable with our target audience of 18-25.
This helped us to figure out what exatcly it was that we needed for film. We decided to go back over our storyboard and see what else we needed to film.The main reasons for this was scheduling issues with the cast and the quality of the DV camera we were using at the time of filming. .

 Our audience feedback helped us a great deal in terms of our film as it helped to realise we would have to re-film certain parts to add to what we had at the time.

In terms of research and planning, the feedback again was quite positive, although this time we had less to improve which included adding extra detail here and there to certain blog posts. It, therefore meant our blog was in a good position, which helped us as we knew exactly wht we needed and how to develop our posts. In relation to the feedback we recieved for our research and planning one form had mentioned the fact that our blog posts were hard to locate due to the naming of them. I disagreed and this was something I went back and checked each post had a suitable and rememberable title.

One of the feedback form on our research and planning

Since we felt there was no problem, we had no chose to change as we found it no problem in navigating around the blog. The names of the posts were simple and related to each subject for example, Magazine Planning- Magazine Layouts was one of the names of our posts, and this was one negative the we did not change because we felt there was no problem.

List of Blog Posts

We did not see the problem with our blog and found this it was easy to navigate. We tried to make sure that the titles were simple and easy for us when it came to adding more detail and information to our blogs.

Evaluation Question 4

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

Thew new media technologies I used to help with my A2 coursework:
 Reseach and Planning

• Internet- research into other existing media products- BBC Film Network etc
• Youtube- finding outher existing media products
• logger-document research and planning

Production

• Digital Camera- for location shots
• DV Camera- for Test and final shoots

Post-Production

• i-Movie
• Image Manipulation- Photoshop CS4
• Desktop Publishing- Pages
• Internet- findind cpyright free music, spound effects and other images

Evaluation

• Internet-finding images and specifically Blogger to post evaluation
• Youtube- distribution and audience feedback
• i-Movie-creating podcast

For the research and planning, I found that using Youtube was quite easy to find the things we needed, for example a range of short films. This is because Youtube is available to anyone and veryone, therefore allowing everyone to post thier own video freely for all to watch. It helped me with my rescerach and planning as I was able to find a range of short films that all had different versions on experimentation which helped to give clear ideas in influencing our short films. For example, our oringinal idea was to have the 4th wall broken. This idea came from the short film Sign Language by Oscar Sharp.




It was this film where we wanted to have a light-hearted film that was in some way 'happy-go'lucky' and made our audience feel uplifted. The problem we found was creating an idea that broke the 4th wall aas well meeting those 'guidelines' we set.

We next looked at Gone Goodbye by Keith Rivers, this idea gave us the idea of how we could use a voiceover to tell our story to our audience.



This film helped us to look at the idea of Melodrama and how it might be another possible idea. The problem I found with Youtube is that there is not really a way of advancing your search unless you just click on a number of different videos until you find the video that are satisfied with. Which is very I resulted into using the internet to try and find a site that was soley for Short Films. With using Google, I managed to find the BBC Film Network.

This site helped to find films that were of any genre and any length. The maxium of which was around 16-17 minutes. This helped as I was able to find a film that used nothing but sound such as Get Off My Land byDouglas Ray and a French silent made completely with Lego called Malhuer. It was helpful and also has the features that Youtube has of embedding videos. The site was a lot easier to use because it was soley dedicated to short films. It helped us as it gave us great ideas to see what the purpose of short films and how we could use that in the creation of our short film.

The search engine Google helped us to find offical film posters so we find how what conventions to follow for the layout of our poster.

They helped us to see that the use of white background was effective and it something that we used in our poster layouts and creating the poster itself. The search engine became very useful as you can easily advance your search which made it easier when looking into magazine articles as well. We were able to find images of magazine articles from well known magazines for films our such as Empire, Total Film, Prevue and Sight and Sound. That allowed us to get a feel of the magazine and how and what they focus on when it comes to the article.

Sight And Sound article of Daze of Wonder

Empire article on Twilight

With Blogger, this helped us as due to the fact it is online, it made it eaiser to document our research and to see what else needed to be done. The fact we could embed videos and add images made it eaiser as we did not have to write down the film and try to find it at another date as it was already uploaded to the blog. This meant that our decisions in what we could add to the blog became slightly more variable in comparison to AS. Also the new layout of Blogger, although it may not seemed to be very important made thre site easier to use, and it allowed us to expand our experience with the site even further. Such as being able to add links and embed videos.

With the the production of our film, we used DV Cameras, for our test shoots. The main problem we encountered was the DV Cameras we had were not very high quality. As well as using tape to record. An example is with our test shoot.  Albeit technically and creative wise.  We were also able to become more confident in filming Point-Of-View shots as we wanted to try and connect the audience with the character. One of the main forms and conventions we followed was the one plot twist. Which in most short film is usually revealed at the end of the film. As well as the circular narrative. We created a simple twist that when revealed at the end of the film would be more effective and have a greater impact on the audience once revealed.

 

It was because of this that we had to rely on voiceover, we were going to add to it. But the dialogue with Claire (Payal's character) when she says the line, 'It's not easy, you know. But you learn to get by' is just about heard.For this part of the research we only used basic shots and it helped to give us an idea as to how we would create the other angles and different shots when it came to actual filming.

One of the location shots taken on a camera

For the poster shots, however. We converged technology and used our mobile phones to take the shots. There was not much of a difference with the quality because most phones have mega pixels of 3 and upwards. Therefore it meant we could get a good quality photo by taking a simple picture from our phones.

Poster Shot taken on a phone

Although however, we did not use the photo in the end because of scheduling with the cast.
In terms of Post-Production, i-movie was used for our test shoot. The consumer based product was easy to use and to break down what we needed from our shots we had filmed. The problem, however was that it was limited in what we had wanted to do with our film due the fact it was consumer based and therefore limited the amount of experimentation we were allowed to add to our film. Our poster was created using the image manipulation software, Photoshop. However, the problem that we found with Photoshop is that there is so much that you can do with it, that we did not have enough time to go through the entire software. So to a certain extent our ability was limited because of that.

Our Film Poster

Where with most mainstream fiilm posters, they tend to have a large photo of the main star and then the background and rest of the film relies on small element of the film. Take the 2003 epic historic film, The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise. The poster has a picture of him in the background and a slightly fading image of a scene from the film. Yet at the top in wide letters in his name. So it suggests that rather than main focus of this film is Tom rather than the genre and the film itself.

Film poster for The Last Samurai, 2003

This was something that we chose to ingore and again the use of the internet allowed us to find posters which helped influence our decisions in the creative process of our film.

The use of Blogger for my evaluation was useful as most of my coursework had been posted on here so it meant that it was easy to access. Again, the internet provided useful with the search engines and gathering the right information for putting my evaluation together. Throughout the production of the coursework, certain technologies we used had affected our decisions.  

Questionnaire

This is the questionaire that was given to audiences to answer for Audience Feedback for the magazine review which was created by me.

It has been created by Google Docs.

This has been embeded therefore, if any responses that are made they will still continue to be submitted. So audiences are able to directly fill it in from here or via a link that can be sent to Facebook, Twitter, Email (anywhere).

Final Film- Practically Strangers 2011

This is the final version of the film.

This was distributed via YouTube, Facebook and Twitter so that we could collect feedback for audiences.

Embedded onto the Blog:

Magazine Review