1) In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2)How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?
Prezi (presentation software) answering question 2.3) What did you learn from your audience feedback?
We chose to create a science fiction film, mainly but not exclusively appealing to a male audience (yahoo article) based on the fact that our film is more action and adventure.
Our film is limited by film censorship, it has been given a rough classification grade by us, we classified it as a 12a, this prevents anyone under 12 from viewing the film unless accompanied by an Adult. This has limited our demographic however our film should be appealing to those who regularly watch science fiction.We have conducted audience research in the Barnsley area
This has given us a good idea of what people think about our initial production ideas, we could have improved this by asking people from outside barnsley, this would give us a bigger and more accurate demographic, of our county or even nationally.
We conducted a questionnaire: questionnaire analysis
We also asked filmed some interviews:
Our results showed a large number of people liked science fiction films, and many of those would watch a film if we were to make it.
We always planned to show our film in a non linear order, showing alpha 7 'on his way' to confront Charles Preston his creator in the beginning, having a flash back to reveal the lead up to this point and finally going back to the present where he confronts him.
Narrative research
Our original idea was to have Alpha 7 narrate his past through the use of flash backs 'on his journey' so we would have a flashback, then back to him running, then a flash back, then back to him running. This created confusion for the audience so rather than try to make the flash backs more clear we decided to rearrange the order into the following: the opening scene (the present), one huge flash back and finally back to the climax of the film.
We initially put out a first draft of our film and got a graphic designer to look at it, using her advice we changed the way the titels looked.
We later put the 2 main title ideas up on Facebook and asked for audience feedback on which one people thought looked better:
finally after we had finished creating our film we distributed it to our audience through the medium of youtube and face book.
The feedback we got from our final finished product from our audience was that we had done a good job. we have completed our brief and our target audience (in this case our family and friends) thoroughly enjoyed the film, as you can see from the feedback.
This leads the the conclusion that it is likely a large demographic would also like the film.
4) How did you use new media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?
It has made our work easy to access from different computers and easy to update.
Research:
The Internet has been our main port of call for research, mainly we have used google, this helped us find research on genre, posters, advertising and BBFC guidelines.
Youtube helped us find useful information on and for radio trailers, evaluation, planning, trick bits of filming and editing.
We used Youtube for other short films we could evaluate and also used Dvds we owned of a similar nature and genre to our film. after watching these we took parts of the films we liked, either edits, filming techniques or part of the plot and replicated it in our own film, we came to the conclusion that if this was used successful in another film it is likely to also work in our film. the basis of the plot was drawn from the plots of the Island and the man in the iron mask, both where the main character has to confront a replica of themselves.
Examples of this are found in earlier work:
films that inspired our own creativity, for our own film.
short review of a film
Genre Research:
for genre research i looked up a definition of what science fiction meant (i already presumed our film was of that genre type as other films i based it on were also science fiction) i then looked at the definitions and found the one which most accurately applied to our film in order to classify it as 'soft science fiction', meaning that it focuses more on the characters rather than the specific scientific detail.
for genre research i looked up a definition of what science fiction meant (i already presumed our film was of that genre type as other films i based it on were also science fiction) i then looked at the definitions and found the one which most accurately applied to our film in order to classify it as 'soft science fiction', meaning that it focuses more on the characters rather than the specific scientific detail.
Classification:
We firstly gave our film the grade 'we' though was appropriate based on content and narrative, (we gave it a 12) we later backed our own opinion up when we found the bbfc would have classified our film as a 12 after we followed their basic guidelines.
We used Microsoft word and excel to create questionnaires and then enter the information into a graph.
as part of our audience research we also used a digital camera to film some students answering a simple questionnaire, we then edited this on final cut. express.
Because we used the Internet and other digital technologies we were able to plan appropriately which allowed us to film a cafe scene with so many extras successfully with hardly any mistakes.
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| A still of the cafe scene, from the duplicate. |
We Initially wrote the script using word, but this was more of a basic outline of what we had in mind we later used Celtx (a script-writing program) were we could add in more details such as headers, locations, action, characters, dialogue and directions.
This picture is a little bit blurry but explain how we created the illusion of having 'a clone'.
I created the titles using final cut and word for the documents.
for more information about how i did this see:
(examples of how i edited the title sequence)
The picture above shows how we wire framed one of the documents and cropped out certain words, so that we could infer a large amount of information using the key words in the document rather than getting people to read all of the text., i then gave it a transparent background by changing the opacity, finally i feathered the edges so the document 'blended' into the background a little rather than having clear cut straight edges.
We would not have been able of create the illusion of a clone without digital media technology, We used a HDV 1000 camera and a tripod, to give our entire film good video quality and allowed the camera to be kept still for shots like 'the clone confrontation'.
We checked in the planning stages that this type of editing, having the same actor on screen twice was possible. It was unscripted and was only to see if the type of editing was possible.
practice shot split screen
We realised that handheld shots were not very good and made a film hard to watch and hard to follow, however when doing our film research we noticed very few films ever have 'dead static shots' we noticed there was always some movement even if it was a only slight so we decided to do the same.
we also used a boom mike and a boom pole to get much clearer audio, the microphone itself could be a little as 12 inches from my face, and still off shot, helping to minimise static background sound.
We have recorded all our behind the scenes filming and acting work in 7 confidential episodes they can be found at:
we edited these using final cut and filmed the with a small Panasonic HDC-HS80 .
We also used a zoom recorder it helped us record clear sound for voice overs in our film and for our radio trailer. We recorded these sound files in a quiet room, and later imported them into final cut where we were able to use them in our production.
The audio from out film was all edited on final cut, we didn't add many effects to it other than fades and increasing the volume.
We planned to use 'kitchen noise from our cafe scene however the rather than adding to the scene it only made a annoying sizzle in the background, if we were to do it again we would add the kitchen sound in separately we used a hum remover as a compromise and to edit out this sound.
As a special effect we gave our entire film a slight blue tinge effect using colour corrector, it was not that we had incorrectly done the white balance on the camera. we decided to use a blue tinge because it gave the film a blue metallic look, something associated with science fiction films it helped to reinforce the genre and also made the film look more 'film like' rather than a home made brightly coloured film/video.
between these two photos you can see a clear difference one looks more 'film like' the colour saturation has been reduced and it has a science fiction blue metallic tinge to it created using colour corrector this has been used throughout the film . Also the reflection from the window is more visible in the second photo where as in the first is had been made harder to spot, ideally we should re-do this shot and ensure the shadow is gone this was edited on final cut.
We created a poster to advertise our film, the initial design and layout of my ideas were drawn up on word and then later the final version of the poster was created on photoshop elements, it gave us better features, and allowed more ideas to be incorporated more easily.
(and viral marketing if finished)
(and viral marketing if finished)
after we had finished our film we sent a copy off to a fiend of mine who is a graphic designer for her input and we also exported it to youtube and on Facebook for others to have their say about the film:
Graphic designers email response:
"Hi Joe
After watching your video, I have some constructive feedback to give it a little bit of extra colour and theming running through.
1. There seemed to be a lack of 'colour' in the film. It's emphasis seemed to be black and white but this wasn't continual throughout the film - just random pieces of stills to black and white. However the main thing people would remember about the film would be the association with the blood at the end - only the viewer would recognise that the blood determines which person is the duplicate and which one is the real thing - this would mean that red could be the 3rd primary colour.
2. Don't mix up the titles with different placement effects - pick one and stick to it - I would say the one with the name on top and the mirrored version underneath as this is the main one you should use - it just makes more sense to keep the same 'theme' all the way through.
3. Add a bit of red to the titles - keep that red theme going throughout - it will make that final scene mean more and stand out."
After her input we changed the orientation of the titles and i added in the extra colour to the main titles, after i had created 2 designs for adding in the red to the title, i then put them both on Facebook and asked people to vote on which one was better:
when we counted up who has voted for which title idea the vote was 2 for the first idea and 10 for the second.
Conclusion:
The use of digital media technologies allowed us to gather together a conglomerate of software on the mac's we used in media to successfully and professionally create, plan, advertise and evaluate our film and our ancillary texts. From this evaluation we can clearly see in what stages we could have furthered or improved the speed, quality and effectiveness of our work.
Construction:
We used the editing software final cut to successfully manage to replicate my character (alpha 7 & Charles Preston)we did this by filming my characters in two separate stages i stood at one side of a screen and acted then moved to the other side and acted, we were then able to edit it so my characters were on the same screen at the same time.
Planning:
We learnt about the importance of planning last year, we did not plan our shot types properly and ended up with continuity and we did not plan out any schedule so we had to go and re-film and entire scene. we aimed to avoid that this year.
This year we planned ahead, we checked the bbc weather forecast to check it was not raining so we could film. We also drew a map using word and google maps to direct people to the filming locations. we also used phone and social networking sites to contact the people who volunteered to be extras in our film and arrange a time and a day to film.
directions to bethel community centre
We found that research and planning through the use of Media technologies were key in order for our Film to be successful.
All of our research, planning construction and evaluation has been carried through the medium of blogger.
