holly's evaluation

1.In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products (film openings)

i have explained the differences and similarities all in one. 

Frame 1

The film that influenced me at first was the opening to the film ‘Shaft’ although throughout making the film we have made some changes this was the film that first influenced me. In frame one my influential film started with showing a production company logo, which was Metro Goldwyn Lion. This influenced me as all films start with a production and distribution logo and I thought it would look more professional if we had one too. Our film started with a production company logo, which we named Saints productions. It was quite easy to think of a log name, as it could have been absolutely anything. Our logo is obviously different from our influential film as we thought we shouldn’t spend too much time on making a logo and making it something like the Metro Goldwyn Lion logo would have took a lot of time and effort.

Frame 2

Shafts second frame was ‘Metro Goldwyn Mayer presents’ title, which we did have at first but then decided that at the start of our film we would have a fact page, which gave a fact about people taking drugs. With the film Shaft they had there titles running through the clip while it was filming but with ours we went to a black screen when we showed some titles. Both of the films played music over the top of this frame.

Frame 3

Shafts third frame was just a Birdseye view shot of the location with music continuing through the shot. With my film we have a phone call showed on the screen for the third frame this is again completely different but originary we were just filming one person walking to a destination but things changed.

Frame 4

With frame four in the film Shaft it showed the audience the title of the film in red bold letters but still filming the location in different shots. With my film our forth shot was a close up on one of the main characters as we thought it was good to start showing the character early on in the film.

Frame 5

In frame 5 Shaft and my film had a similar shot it was a close up of the main character this influenced me as I thought it was a good idea to introduce the main character as soon as I could because then the audience get to know the character.  In my film I put a title in this frame with was the name of the actor I thought this was a good idea again because it shows the audience who is staring in the film.

 Frame 6

In frame 6 the film Shaft and my film is again similar as in my film It was a panning shot of the location but also showed titles which was again who was staring in my film. With the film Shaft it showed the location with a bold title of whom the film was staring. This was an influence to me as I thought that it was a good idea to show the audience what actors will be staring in the film.

Frame 7

In the film Shaft frame 7 was a medium shot of the main actor walking towards the camera this was different to my films frame 7 as in this frame it showed a black background with the words based on a true story. This was to show the audience what kind of film they are watching. In Shaft I thought it was good that they showed a medium shot of the main character as it lets the audience know what kind of character he is by looking at what he was wearing.

Frame 8

In frame 8 the two frames where completely different again because in my film we thought we needed to get the title of the film in at some point and thought this was a good time to put it in. Shaft shows a side view again of the main character walking to his destination.

Frame 9

In frame 9 shaft showed us that the man was meeting another man and gave a two person shot. This is what our last shot was except it was the actors view of him meeting the other character, we thought this would work better as it was the persons point of view and you got to get a look at what the character looked and dressed like from close up showing his facial expressions toward bumping into this man.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?  Add images one of a photo from your film and one from the media that shows social groups

In terms of representation all three elements work together to represent elements of a thriller. The 2-minute opening will show how young people can regret a lot of decisions that they have made in their life which could have something to do with peer pressure and they are represented to be frightened and helpless. Stereotypically teenagers are known to be a threat to the older generation as young people go around in groups or also know as ‘gangs’ and can be intimidating towards other people. A lot of younger people can be peer pressured to do a lot of things and this is what my 2-minute opening could represent.

 

These two images show a picture from the Internet and a picture of the two actors in my film. This shows social groups within my film. and represents teenage boys and how they can be intimidating to older people and even other teenage boys. With the two images that i have got above it is showing how one teenage boy can be a threat to another teenage boy. the boy in the right in both of these photos look like the weaker person out of the two, they do not look as confident as the people on the left. 

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLv2mLTatpc

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

I Have decided that my target audience is going to be 15 and over. The reason for this is from the research and my initial idea's my film will contain strong language and Flash images. Another reason why I targeted this audience is because they would be old enough understand the psychological elements, which will allow them to enjoy it more. My target audience would be teenagers and young adults that enjoy watching films that contain a gang and fighting. It is also a fact that males aged 16-35 is most likely to go and see a thriller at the cinema.

My 2-minute opening to a film would target mostly at young boys and men but not my film is not particularly targeting a specific gender, as the story line could be beneficial and enjoyable by both sexes. As the story line is based around drugs and gangs which is a common thing around today which teenagers and young adults may be able to relate to the story line as they may have had been in that situation or know someone who was in a gang.

This is Megan Paterson, she am 19 years old and is currently studying Primary Education at Canterbury Christ Church University.  When she is not at university or studying she likes to socialise with her friends and family, spending time with my friends and family is really important to her. Another interest of Megan's is singing, whenever she has time to spare she like to sing in her bedroom and maybe even write and compose music. She is really interested in musical theatre and occasionally takes a trip to see some west end shows. In 2013/14 she worked at Cineworld Cinema and her love for film grew massively, she often will go to the cinema to watch new films or watch old films at home. She feels that films can cheer you up, give you advice and make you laugh and that’s important to her. Finally one of her biggest hobbies is arts and crafts, she loves making new things, drawing and getting messy. 



   5. How did you attract/address your audience? 

I made up a questionnaire, which had 7 questions in it to find out different types of audience’s preferences they like in a film.

I printed off 20 copies of my questionnaire and handed them out to a variety of different age groups which were 5 copies to people aged 15-25, 5 copies aged 26-35, 5 copies aged 36-45 and the other 5 to people aged 45 and over and then equally was sent out to both sexes.

After all 20 copies were completed I then completed a graph for each question, which showed me the most popular answer for each question.

With the results in mind it helped me a lot to think about how I could make my film better. My film is aimed at people aged 15+ which our group had already decided on to start with along with that genre of the film we wanted our opening to a film to be a thriller.

Question 1

There were 5 questionnaires given to each audience group so there was 5 people for each.

Question 2

6 people liked thriller

4 people liked horror

5 people liked action

5 people liked rom/com

Question 3

17 people said yes

3 people said no

Question 4

9 people said they like the film to start with a dramatic moment

4 people said that they like to be introduced to the characters

7 people said they like to be told the basic premises of what the film will be about.

Question 5

4 people said before the start

10 people said during the start

6 people said after the start

Question 6

13 people said that there should be music at the beginning

7 people said that there shouldn’t be music at the beginning

Question 7

8 people said fictional

3 people said non-fictional

9 people said true story

After looking at the results of the questionnaire it has inspired our group to go forward with the thriller genre and for it to be based on a true story. It was good to get feed back from my target audience, the reason for this is having more opinions, will help my two minute opening to target a wider range of people rather than just what I think people will like. The questionnaire has given me a starting point to lead of off for my upcoming trailer.

6. What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

The camera my group used for filming was a HD Panasonic video recorder which was one on the main bits of technology that we used as it allowed us to record all of our scenes that we needed for our two minute opening to a film. This was an important bit of technology as it allowed us to film scenes giving a really clear image and picked up sound really well even though in our clip there was no talking from the original filming.  The camera was able to move around with us, which allowed me to film in a variety of shots and move to different locations. The camera gave a really good light for filming and I learnt that you could change the contrast of the camera if we needed to. Obviously the camera wasn’t brilliant as we learnt that the sound was not very good and sometimes it was really windy which you could hear but we covered that with a voice over and music. we made the filming with that camera  to make it look as professional as possible.

The tripod was a bit of equipment that I and others in my group had never used before, but became a big part throughout filming as it was used a lot during the filming of our two-minute opening. The tripod is a part of equipment that is used with the HD Panasonic camera. The tripod can be stood at different levels and it holds the camera securely. By using the tripod it made some of our shots more steady which made it look quite professional instead of having to hand hold camera throughout all of the shots we could use the tripod especially on our scenes that included shots like an establishing shot and tracking. If I was to handle the camera myself in these shots the filming may have been quite shaky which would have looked really bad.

My laptop was also the most important thing throughout this project, without my laptop I would not have been able to upload any of the filming that we did and most importantly would not have been able to edit any thing together to make the final piece. My laptop had all the software’s that I needed to complete any of my work for this projects which includes my editing software ‘IMovie’, the internet to carry out any research and planning, you tube where I searched influential film trailers and also looked at many film opening to give me and my group more ideas for our opening film. You tube was also used to put up any videos like feedback from the class and the animated storyboard. The Most important thing was our blogger account, which we have used throughout the whole of the project starting with the preliminary. I have learnt as I have gone along on the blogger as I had never used it before until I started this subject, I found that I got used to how to use the blogger really quickly but I am still learning new things about it.

My Memory stick was used throughout the making of this project, with out my memory stick I would not have been able to get things that I had done at school onto my laptop at home. After we filmed I used my memory stick to put all the filming that we had done onto it so that I could then get home and get it onto my laptop so I could use my editing software. The work that I did for the group was mostly done at home so to get it into school I needed to use my memory stick to transfer my work. I saved every single piece of work onto my memory stick that I did on my laptop or the school computer so that I had all in one place and saved it on my laptop separately so that I had two copies of it.

We decided to use the Voice recorder to add any speech into our film opening as it made it sound so much better. I had never used this piece of equipment either so I was learning how to use it and played around with it for a while practicing until we were ready to record our final piece. There was not a lot of script within the film as it was only a two-minute opening so I added the voice over in to make it like it was what the actor was saying in his head while he was walking. Getting used to using the voice recorder at first was out of all the equipment we used, the hardest to adjust too.  When I saved the voice recordings to take home to my laptop I couldn’t actually get the recordings up so I had to learn how to convert the recordings to ‘mp3’ so that they would work on my editing program.

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the main product?

As a group of three we were asked to use three camera techniques in a short film clip of only 2 minutes. The camera techniques included continuity, shot reverse shot and 180-degree rule, as I was familiar with all three shots I found it easy to link them all together. My group decided that we would have a story to our short film, which was that there would be a Married couple arguing and then the wife goes to her room and reads her favourite book about the events of the 1940’s. She falls asleep while reading the book and then dreams about being in the 1940’s with out her husband and her dream turns into a nightmare. When she wakes up she is thankful for the life that she has already and apologises to her husband.We simplified the storyline and then identified who would be playing what part in the preliminary task. Ollie, Malcolm and Kennedy would be acting in the short film and I would be filming it, we decided that we would edit the short film together. 

We did a small storyboard of the short film clip and went into filming straight away. We found it very easy to film and we had filmed it in no time, leaving us plenty of time to edit our clip. We used final cut express to edit our filming, as we had been given a chance to have a nose around of the software a few lessons before myself and the rest of my group did not find the software that difficult to grasp. We had put the clips in the right order and had used transitions carefully, I would have expected a few problems doing this but it was all very self-explanatory and in the end it turned into an easy and fun job.

After editing our clip and watching over and over again we decided that there was something missing. We all agreed that the clip needed some sort of music in the background. As a group we all thought of a song that would fit perfectly in the background. This caused a slight problem for the group as we had no way of uploading a song to the computer and the computer had no songs on it. In the end we resulted into spending £1 on iTunes just to get the track we wanted. It used up a lot of time but as a group we were already a little ahead anyway. After we added the song we used final cut express to fade it in and out in the places we needed it. The film clip was then complete and we used all three techniques and also added music. As a group we enjoyed Planning, filming and editing our clip. The task helped us discover the group’s strengths and weakness's that we could later improve on to help us with our film-opening task. My group was proud of our finishing results and felt the preliminary task was successful. It helped my group gain more knowledge of the future software and technology we would be using later on in the course.

Since filming the preliminary task I feel like the main task has come along so much better.We were asked to film an opening to a film with it being as professional as possible. The first thing my group did was sat down together researching and looking at films and then came up with a pitch that we would work on. We did this by using ideas from influential films. We started research and planning before we did any filming. Our initial idea was to have an opening of a film that involved a fight between two men and then after researching into it, it seemed to difficult with the limited time that we had. Ollie and Malcolm who would have played those characters would have had to do a lot of research into how to stage fight, which would have been very time consuming. Our final idea was to have a man come back to his home town where many of his memories happened, sadly mostly ones he wished to forget especially when he bumps into a man that he had an unfinished drug deal with a few years ago.

After we had decided on who was going to do each role for our main task we all started to get on with our individual work. With the preliminary task we worked together with a lot of the roles but with the main task we decided that we would do more individual work and would then as a group show each other what we have produced and give each other advise on how it can be better. We did work together on one thing, which was the storyboard as we did change the pitch slightly a couple of times, so we had to work on the storyboard as a group.

In my group I am in charge of filming and editing the clip and I felt as though I managed to use the camera a lot better and was able to upload the filing onto a computer with out having any help as I had remembered how to do it from the preliminary task.

I feel like I have got so much better at editing with the main task as when I filmed for the preliminary task I found that I was quite slow as I was only just getting used to the software. I used a movie-editing program called ‘IMovie’ which is software on the apple mac. I learnt how to edit the different scenes together and how to add in transactions between each scene. After I had edited and put together a rough cut of the two-minute opening we showed it to the class and then got some feed back that would help us to make the film even better which was only a few changes which we took forward and a changed the opening from the feed back that I got and now have our final product.