We made sure we had good continuity throughout our five minute film by obeying the 180 degree rule as we did not want to break the viewer’s perception of the orientation on the characters on screen. We also kept to the 30 degree rule meaning there is never a big jump between shots unless if it was intended on sequences like shot reverse shot, if we didn’t follow this rule the jump between gaps may be too big and this will make the edit very noticeable to the audience which shows bad continuity. We also did a montage sequence where the Chris was picking up items and putting them into a bag, we did this to speed up the continuity and the sequence as it shows the character is getting ready to leave, also the footage would have to have been longer to shot if we showed Chris placing each separate item into the bag which would have made the scene too long and viewers would lose interest.
We mainly followed the main conventions of a drama showing that our five minute film has realistic situations with believable characters. We also used elements from other genres like using parts of romance at the start of the film where the two characters are talking to each other but also using some action elements with Chris being murdered towards the end of our film.
Our 5 minute film is fairly similar to the film Dear John where John leaves his girlfriend to go to another country whereas in our film Chris also leaves his girlfriend to follow his dream and travel to other countries and is always thinking about the person he leaves at home like where Chris is recording his travels on the hand held camera.
We aim to give the audience pleasure in the form of emotion using ‘Intensity’ as the technique which shows extreme highs and lows of emotion. We show this by showing that Chris is happy when he decides to leave to follow his own dreams of travelling around the world and when he meets Melissa, this then turns into confusion as when they pull over to help someone and it turns out Melissa has been plotting against him which then goes onto being sadness as Chris is then murdered and his belongings are then returned to his girlfriend and she finds the handheld camera and watches the footage that Chris had filmed.
We used a shot at the start of our 5 minute film where Chris appears to be drowning under water where he is really washing his face in the sink in his bathroom. This scene is similar to the scene in Bourne Ultimatum where Jason has a flash back of when he was put under water during his training, both are similarly shot from being under character showing what is happening while they are under water.
In our main film production we are trying to achieve an emotional response from the viewers by adding a lot of drama that can be easily related to e.g. losing someone you love, we did this because since our production is a drama we wanted this sort of response from the people who viewed our film. We tried to keep this feel through our ancillary texts as with our poster we have kept a simplistic, emotional look which stays in tune with our 5 minute film because they both use similar features that give the same feeling, e.g. colour and style. Our radio trailer also follows this theme, it has a calm voice over with soft music to accompany it with a few notable sound clips from the actual film.
I feel that our ancillary tests do well to sell our production as they both have an emotional feel to them which is similar to our film so the audience who see our posters and hear our radio trailer aren’t confused in case our 5 minute film has a different feel to the ancillary texts
Our radio trailer is similar to most other radio trailers that are professionally made, it has music that is either similar or the same as the music that is being used in the 5 minute film. It also has a voice over which explains the films name, any reviews and when the film is being released, which is very similar to many other radio trailers. Our poster is also very similar to other posters that have been made for other films in that our poster explains the films title, what actors are in the film and who are the director, producers etc.
We carried our audience research in two ways, we produced a questionnaire and posted that on the internet for people to fill out we got the results about what kind of films people watch, their age, who they watch them with etc which helped us decided at the beginning what sort of film we are going to produce. Secondly before we made the final cut of our film we showed our unfinished film to our audience and then filmed their responses to a few questions, this second part of research helped us decide what needs to be in our final cut of our film, what they liked and disliked etc.
While we was filming and editing we considered the meaning of our film when we was making decisions about what shots to make to attract a more emotional response from the viewer. In editing we also considered this meaning of emotion through the music we added to the film and the pace of the editing was at a normal or slightly slower speed to add to this feeling of emotion that we have tried to keep throughout our film
I feel that our 5 minute film, when we showed it to our audience they all knew what was happening in the film even though they were all individually different. I found that if a viewer had any different views about the film that was different to the others then they would ask questions to clarify their own views plus to see what the others thought.
The new media technologies that we used during research are we submitted a questionnaire to our target audience and we then collected them back after they had been filled in and entered the data onto a spreadsheet within Excel where we could produce tables and graphs showing the results more visually to make them easy to understand and evaluate. We also used the internet for researching other films, poster and radio trailers to help give us ideas and inspiration for our own
For planning we mainly used communication technologies through mobile phones and social networking sites like Facebook to plan dates for filming and the overall schedule for deadlines which include additional research, editing etc.
During construction the new media technologies we have used were mainly digital cameras which produce high quality footage that we can use.
We also used digital sound recording equipment to capture voices that are also high quality.
We have also used the internet to make a blog where we can post what we have produce during all of the stages.
We used editing software called Final Cut Pro to edit our film together and add effects etc. The video could then be exported as different file extensions eg .mov which can be more effective based on where they are used.
In the evaluation stage we showed our uncut 5 minute film to our target audience using QuickTime Player on a computer, we then filmed their responses using a digital camera and edited the responses together to create one video using editing software. We could then look at the responses easily and make decisions as to what needs to be changed for the final cut of our 5 minute video. We can also evaluate the 5 minute film ourselves using YouTube to watch the 5 minute film and using word processing software to write up the evaluation and also use the blog on the internet to post the evaluation.
Digital technology allows us to develop more creatively because it allows us to have a lot more options on how to record and edit our film unlike using more analogue technology which is a lot more limited. Digital technology with recording allows us to film in many different ways eg HD, SD, widescreen etc. Digital technology allows us to edit more creatively as you can easily cut down clips and remove parts that are not needed. We can also add visual effects that can improve the overall feel to our film. The limitations of digital technology are because there are many advanced features, we may not have the knowledge of how to use them which means we miss features out that we can use. Technology can sometime be unreliable like if a computer suffers a hard disk fail then you can lose all your work and may have to start again if the data was not backed up.
1. In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
As a group, we were extremely aware of the importance of continuity, and what impacts it can have if it is not achieved. We often scrutinised other short-films from other short films that we had seen at college from previous years at AS and A2, due to their lack of consideration towards continuity and their lack of attention towards advanced concepts of film and editing.
The handheld camera made several conventions of continuity more difficult at times – such as maintaining the 180 degree rule (due to the constant changing direction of the camera), and the establishing shot rule (as we opened the majority of new scenes with the handheld camera) – however, we ensured that they were adhered to whilst using the larger static camera (we did have a small issue with the 30 degree rule as the car pulls into a lay-bay towards of the film, but we managed to solve it with careful editing). There are other techniques which actually became easier as a result of the handheld camera. Shot-reverse shots, eye-line matches and match on actions came naturally – and required little consideration.
There were times that we became aware of continuity whilst editing too, such as noticing that Daniel had different coloured socks from leaving the bedroom to putting on his shoes – which we either edited to make correct, or reshoot particular scenes. We were aware that sound had to be faded in and out (as a sudden change in sound is really obvious, even background noise), and that students abused the length of individual shots (which is why we tried to make our film more interesting and engaging by having a slightly quicker pace than our peers)
Our film was initially planned to be a romance/drama, and built our story around it. However, upon careful analysis of both genres, we realised that our film was more of a drama – as it contained very little romance (a small hint at romance in the opening scene), and more dramatical elements such as having likable, authentic characters, and a storyline which is believable and realistic. We tried to allow the protagonist feel both highs and lows throughout the story, and tried to incorporate a narrative which people could relate to, and possibly seeing themselves or friends doing – what we believed makes a drama. We tried to subvert expectations by having an unexpected ending - whilst the audience’s emotions were heightened by Daniel’s (Luke) enjoyment – we would kill him.
Richard Dyer’s theory of entertainment and utopia explained that ‘intensity’ is one of the satisfactions that an audience will receive whilst watching our film. The film plays on highs and lows of emotion, such as Luke being excited that he is fulfilling his dream, travelling Europe, meeting an entertaining girl and having fun, however he is sad that he is leaving his girlfriend who becomes torn to hear that Luke has been tragically killed. We are confident that we have achieved this throughout our film due to feedback we have received from our audiences – in general, they love that Luke is fulfilling his dream, but are sickened and emotional when his life is taken towards the end.
Additionally, Laura Mulvey’s visual pleasure and narrative cinema theory explains that audiences often get pleasure from scopophilia – which basically means ‘love of looking’. Audiences are fascinated by having the ability to look at other people’s lives from their perspective – our method was using a video camera; a technique which has been used in the past. Even though the film is obviously scripted, an audience can feel like they are secretly watching what Luke is seeing through the video camera, and allows them to become involved in his personal space
As we are media students, we all enjoy all aspects of watching and making films. Whilst we knew the films had to be original, it would be incorrect to say we were not influenced by other films, or that we didn’t use techniques and ideas from other films. The film I analysed earlier in the year was called ‘The Plan’. This is a short film written by Matthew Kalish, and is story about how the main character packs his bags and leaves for Vegas, and meets a girl with the help of his Polaroid camera. In many ways, this film helped influence our media project, with techniques such as packing his bags in the initial scene, and in some ways – our storyline.
Surely, ideas such as the initial under-water scene, the side-ways view of deceased Luke with cars passing by, or the ending shot of the camera zooming out from the hand-held camera may seem unique, however – it is likely we have been influenced by similar techniques in previous films we have watched.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?
Ancillary texts are often very important in film production, as they can be used to help promote the film in numerous ways. After we had written our initial film treatments for our film, we all shared the same ideas of how we wanted the film to be, and making the ancillary material for our production seemed relatively easy, as we already had an idea of what we wanted to convey to our audience.
After our film had been completed, I started to research into film posters of similar films that I had watched, and films which had posters that looked like they would fit into our genre, such as Remember me, Ondine and Over Her Dead Body.
Although I only analysed one poster, I also incorporated experience from looking at film posters in the past, and my own creativity to produce my own poster.
I think the poster of mine greatly complements the film, and is effective in its contribution towards the promotion of the film. The two characters (Kirsten and Daniel) are sat at the front, with the video camera – showing that in some way, these two characters interact within the film, and that the video camera obviously plays a large part.
The film is blue and incorporates subtle background clouds, which suggests peacefulness (colours you would associate with a drama or a romance). The title is obviously big enough to allow the audience to identify the title of the film, and as this was chosen carefully – it limits the assumptions that the audience can make (i.e. the audience may feel that he is in fact saying goodbye to the girl on the poster, but in fact, it is to a character who doesn’t appear on the poster)
The poster is intended to entice the audience, giving away exciting aspects of the film, without spoiling it for them. I think my poster (and subsequently the final poster), does this perfectly.
The radio trailer was fun, yet often frustrating to create as it was our first attempt at creating one.
Radio trailers, much like film trailers, try to incorporate the most important parts of a film, which may help you get a real sense of the storyline, without giving away any spoilers. For this, we felt that we had to include extracts from our production, such as the beginning narrative from Daniel, and various extracts from Kirsten and Aimee.
I gave additional material for the radio trailer, giving information such as what LoveFilm said about the poster, and when the film will be being shown – elements which were not included on the film poster.
I think as a whole, the three finished products that we created show our creativity, and dedication towards the project. The two ancillary texts greatly compliment the main production, giving away enticing information about it, without revealing anything to spoil the storyline.
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
In reality, the success of any film is based upon the audience. Throughout our film, we had a clear idea of how we would like our audience to feel and what emotions we would like to provoke. We were aware that for an audience to tell their friends about a film, they had to love it, and that’s how we recognised the important on acting upon audience feedback.
After the initial treatment for the film was written up, we decided to get feedback on our ideas – if a selection of people didn’t like the idea of our film, there was little point in continuing.
An initial questionnaire was written up, and handed out to around 30 people, as well as a forum. This allows us to gain feedback on whether or not our film was viable, whether it would have enough of a target audience who would take an interest in our film or not, and allowed us then to customise our film based upon the research that we got (such as less violence as our audience typically watches 12A or 15). Questions were asked such as ‘Do you enjoy romance and drama films’ and ‘what age certificate do you typically watch’
We also filmed various people, asking them more detailed questions and gained more detailed feedback, such as whether or not they liked our pitch idea, or if they had seen similar films such as The Notebook or Dead John. People explained that they like romance/drama because they can have a twist at the end, they are clever, and can often make you feel better.
We used all of this information to produce our film, and, as we had a lot more footage than we had planned for, made around a 10 minute production. Although we were never going to hand in a film this long, we thought it would be a good idea to show it to people in our class and see what they thought of our (real) first draft. As many students knew it had to be shorter, they kindly suggested elements which may not have been necessary in the film, and how we could cut it down.
A slightly shorter film was produced shortly after. We posted this to YouTube, and gained verbal feedback from eager friends and family, showing our target audience, as well as feedback from YouTube and Facebook. This was missing a small section in-between, where Kirsten and Daniel meet, as well as Daniel travelling to Hull – which confused the audience (but was planned to be put in the film). They also suggested that there were perhaps a few too many instances of the 1 second hand-held clips, and that they had no idea that the characters were in Belgium.
Again, we got feedback from various audiences amongst our family and friends, Facebook, YouTube, our peers and teachers. We received a lot of praise from the people who saw the film, and received no negative comments about how the film could be changed.
I think that audience feedback is a very easy aspect to neglect. It is easy to disregard comments you receive from an audience, thinking that you know best. However, given that you have been involved in every aspect of the film (writing the story, seeing all of the footage, the edits, etc), you need to be aware that things may often not be as clear as you would have hoped, and that things DO need changing as your audience may see them in a different light.
To conclude, the feedback we gained from our audience has been vital. Without it, the film is likely to have been very different, possibly a more graphic killing of the main character (who was supposed to be thrown from a cliff), and a more complicated storyline.
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
As a group, we recognised the importance of how thorough, extensive research can substantially affect our media production. With the internet having around 135 million websites, it was able to act as a virtually limitless resource to provide inspiration, creativeness and imagination. Social video websites such as Youtube and Vimeo host vast amounts of content relating to our project, allowing us to view many long and short films by students, hobbyists and professionals to assist us with our research.
We were also able to use new media technologies to our advantage whilst planning our film. Collaboration of ideas within out group could be done through communication devices such as mobile telephones and tools such as Facebook and Microsoft Messenger - and, once our ideas had been finalised, we were able to use Word Processing packages such as Microsoft Word to create questionnaires which would enable us to gather feedback about our ideas. Questionnaires were personally handed out to friends and family, by printing formatted questionnaires with a laser printer provided by college, or sent out to contacts online. They were able to be formatted, and plotted onto graphs with spread sheet software such as Microsoft Excel.
We used websites such as the BBFC to research film certifications, iMDB to research film genres – both of which were helpful in searching and planning our project. Google has limitless archives of resources, including their primary search environment, Google Images and also Google Maps, which is a fantastic resource that allows satellite and street-view images (which was used to aid us to view exotic locations, some of which were 70 miles away!)
Physical media technologies made the entire process seem effortless. We used digital recording technology, such as a HDV-1000 video recorder, and a Flash Zoom recorder to record media for such as our audience research, our audience feedback, our actual film production, our production feedback and our radio trailer.
All of these were imported to an Apple Macintosh, and were edited on a variety of programs. Final Cut Pro was a very important piece of software for editing every video that we created, allowing us to naturally use advanced features to create imaginative effects on both video and audio (such as slow motion, wire-framing, colour correction, adjusting contrasts and all types of fading/cutting). These technologies were frequently used for every stage during our production process, and we feel fortunate to have such cutting-edge technologies provided (among others such as Garage Band and Adobe Elements)
Image editing software, Adobe Photoshop was used regularly throughout the production, which again – was fortunately provided by our college. Pictures were taken with a Canon 450D, and once imported were used in conjunction with Adobe Photoshop to design out title sequences, the movie posters, storyboards, and even smaller elements such as borders for our photo-story board, our production logo and many elements of our website.
Social networking sites such as Facebook allowed us to gather important feedback on the First Draft of our film in the final construction stages of our project. The initial draft of our film was transferred using the remarkable USB flash memory drive, and uploaded to YouTube and Facebook, which could enable us to reach out to thousands of people, quickly and easily – and collect essential feedback to help improve our film.
Like most technology, there were times in which is delayed our progress. We quickly discovered that technology was unreliable, when we depend so much upon it. We encountered hardware problems such as a faulty video player, uncharged batteries and tapes which failed to operate correctly. Due to human error and not backing our work up correctly, we had to re-film several scenes, and regrettably spotted numerous continuity errors.
Technology has flourished our imaginations and creativity, primarily via the Internet. We are able to take inspiration from other artists, directors, producers and editors and develop them into what we have created. The expensive recorders were ideal, allowing inventiveness to come naturally, as well as tools used to gather feedback and research, often fuelling our passion and creativeness to achieve a better film.
Although the Internet brings creativity and imagination, I do feel that it can also cause the complete opposite. I think that the Internet doesn’t allow people to truly express their imagination thoroughly, and at times, can allow people to be influenced and inspired by the work of others. Without the internet, ideas would have to be absolutely original; creative and inspiring in its own right.
Question 1 – In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
With our media product this year, our film idea seemed to fit the usual conventions of an emotional drama/romance, however the ending to the film where the main character dies seems to go against these media conventions and was something we did to try and surprise the audience with something they weren’t likely to expect.
At a technical level we stuck to the conventions of editing and filming. We were very careful not to break any rules for example, the 180 degree rule, we made sure not to break this because in our film it would have confused the audience, breaking the 180 degree rule only really works in for example, an action movie fight. We also had to be very careful when it came to the 30 degree rule, the rule that the camera angles should change more than 30 degree so that the shot doesn’t jump. We had problems with this near the end of the film where the main character pulls up to help the broke down car, we had problems filming the car approaching and pulling up and managing to get a change in shot that didn’t look jumpy. Luckily we filmed a number of times and got a lot of shots, which we managed to sort through and get some that fit together.
There is one point during the film that we decided to purposely break continuity; this was at the start of the film as the main character is packing his bag. We wanted the start of the film to be quite fast paced and match the music in the background, almost like a music video, therefore we decided it would have been boring to watch him slowly pack his bag and instead cut together shots of him picking up objects and then closing the bag, this used jump cuts on purpose and overall I think made the introduction to the film a lot better and interesting to watch.
Our film mixes a couple of different genres, we started off with the idea of a romance however the film turned out to be more of a drama or an emotional drama, it still has romance elements with the girlfriend back home but overall it is more of a drama. We kept to some of the usual conventions and ideas that people have when they think of drama films, we had a mix between highs and low points for the characters, we have the main character doing his life dream of travelling, only to meet a girl who he seems to have fun with but she turns out to be a con artist and in the end he is killed, leaving his girlfriend back home heart broken. Although it does keep to some of the usual conventions, I feel our film goes against some of the usual ideas, the twist in the story and the character dying is a shock to the audience and it is that original part in the story that sets it aside from other dramas and typical conventions. Also the use of the hand held camera, showing clips that the main character is filming, makes it look slightly like a documentary we found out from audience feedback, this is something else that makes the film different to regular conventions and makes it more original. It could also fit in with Laura Mulvey’s theory of visual pleasure and narrative cinema, which is that the way you watch films gives pleasure, one of the ways she said people get pleasure was scopophilia, looking at someone when they can’t see you. Our film could fit in with this slightly, people may get pleasure from watching through the eyes of what the main character was filming, this is supposed to be a personal video diary so people enjoy the thought of being able to see something that they feel they weren’t supposed to see.
We made no real references to other films in our production, when we were looking for similar films to ours it was hard to find a feature film that was similar. ‘Into the wild’ was the closest film to ours as it focuses on a man travelling but still it didn’t have that many similarities. However we did get the idea to incorporate the hand held video camera after watching a short film on YouTube, the film entitled ‘The Plan’ focuses on a man packing his bags and heading to Vegas, on the way he stops and meets this girl who steals his camera but leaves a photo with her address on. The focus on the camera caught our attention and gave us the idea to incorporate the hand held video camera.
Looking at theories regarding audience pleasure as well as the Laura Mulvey theory I mentioned earlier, there is another theory, on uses and gratifications which looks at why people watch things, what do they get out of it? The gratification that the audience gets from our film is entertainment, and according to Richard Dyer’s theory of entertainment and Utopia there are certain things that make your world perfect, films give people what they need, people get enjoyment of seeing things they don’t have, also you have to accept the film isn’t real to enjoy it. One of his utopian solutions (what keeps us entertained) is ‘Transparency’ which is people being honest, and especially showing their emotions. I feel this is what our film fits into, the characters are realistic characters and the main character recording his journey is very honest when he speaks to the camera, as well as the emotion shown at the end after the girlfriend finds out what has happened.
Overall I feel our film has stuck to some of the common conventions in technical terms and conventions of the genre, however it has also gone against or challenged some conventions, the twist in the story is something that the audience don’t really expect to see. And overall they get pleasure from watching the film because they get to watch something that is realistic due to its honest, believable characters and they get pleasure from getting to see the hand held shots because it is the audience seeing something that could be personal and private.
Question 2 – How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?
When we were planning our film and when we were recording and editing it, we have always set off to leave a lasting impression on the audience. This year we wanted to come up with a film idea that wasn't too exaggerated and complicated, instead we wanted to focus more on a simpler narrative, fewer characters to focus on and a story that left an impact on the audience as a believable story that could actually happen in real life. That is why we chose the drama/romance genre, we thought these genres can be quite hard hitting and emotional and wanted to create our own twist on this genre. That is why we also set out to achieve something that does something different and twists the regular conventions that people have, there is no happy ending, the main character dies, we wanted to leave an impact on the audience and make it quite emotional, therefore we wanted to build up believable characters, especially the main character Luke, who the audience are meant to like, he is living out his life dream, and then the twist at the end is supposed to shock and in a way upset the audience. We also wanted to focus less on a complicated storyline so that we could concentrate on getting good shots, in various locations, making it interesting for the audience to watch. I think we reflected some of these in our ancillary texts, in the poster I managed to get across various parts of our film. I had a background of clouds to try and show some of the good shots we have for the film, I then faded the main character and his girlfriend into this background, this shows the audience they are obviously close and that it may be a romance. However one of the main things we did to make our film different was include shots on the hand held video camera of the main character. I felt seem as this plays such a big role in the film it had to be the main part of the poster, that’s half of the poster is taken up by the video camera, this tells the audience that this must play a role in the film, then on the screen of the camera I included screenshots taken from the film which shows the audience some of the great shots we filmed. In the radio trailer I think we managed to get across the main part of the storyline without ruining the end, we also added a voiceover saying things such as ‘top tear jerker’ this lets the audience know that they should expect to be upset. The radio trailer was hard to get across some of the aspects within our film as we focuses a lot on the visuals, but we managed to create something that gives the audience an idea of what the film is about.
Overall I think the two ancillary texts are both good at selling our production. The poster is good at showing off some of the visual accomplishments we achieved in our film, whilst giving an idea of the main characters and what the film may include, for example, the video camera. This could be compared well with the poster I analysed before creating mine, the poster for the film ‘Into the Wild’ (include poster) is very simple, it shows one male character, sat on top of an old bus with his travelling bag. Like my poster it tries to show off some of the scenery and nice visual aids. The radio trailer is good at selling the production not just because it gives a good idea of the storyline for the audience but also because it includes a narrator, including in quotes such as ‘top tear jerker says love film’ is a good way of selling a production because it makes the audience feel like it must be good if someone is saying that. It is done a lot in the media, for example, when DVDs include magazine quotes and ratings. (Include examples)Overall they sell our production well and use techniques that are done frequently in the media to try and sell products.
Question 3 – What have you learned from your audience feedback?
After we managed to get a brief idea for our film, it was important that we considered who our audience would be and what they’d think of the idea. Therefore we created a questionnaire, which asked questions about the types of films they watch, their favourite genres etc. we posted this on a forum and handed it out to around 50 people, from that we got an idea of the films people liked at certain age groups, but to get a real idea of whether people would like our idea we conducted some audience research by interviewing a number of people, all different age and sex, and asking them what they thought of our pitch, and whether they would watch the film. This audience research was very important, and helped us to work out that our target audience was young adults and not just females like we had thought, but also males. After carrying out this research we were happy that people would watch our film and that the idea was good, therefore we went on with our project.
As we had over 300 shots from filming, editing was a very long process; in the end we had a ten minute film that we were very happy with. However to meet the requirement this needed to be cut down, we did cut it down to around 5:30, but we then had a problem with whether the audience would fully understand the narrative.So we decided to trail our film and produce a rough cut, we put this onto YouTube and Facebook, and also showed it to classmates and friends. The feedback we received from that was that the film was really looking good, they all enjoyed it, a few did mention that the storyline wasn’t really easy to follow just because they weren’t sure where the main character was during parts of the film. With this feedback we were able to go back to editing and add in some subtitles, for example saying, ‘Zeebruge’.
We felt this cleared up any issues confusing the narrative and made this our final cut, it was then important to gather feedback from those that mentioned the problems before, they said it was much easier to understand now and that they really enjoyed the film. It was also very important for us to gather more audience feedback on the final product, we again uploaded to YouTube and Facebook to get comments and just as we did for research, we interviewed a group of people after screening them our film. We asked a range of questions, such as whether the characters were believable, whether the music suited the film, if they found the narrative confusing and whether they enjoyed the film. Overall people were very impressed by the film and really enjoyed it, they thought the characters were believable and that the handheld camera shots worked really well, it was good to find this out because they were things we wanted to achieve and if the audience say it works then we achieved it. Audience feedback is crucial throughout the whole process, in planning you can learn what if the audience would watch your film, whilst editing they can give you suggestions of areas that may need improving and finally they can give you a verdict on if the film works and if it is enjoyable to watch, our target audience enjoyed the film, so I feel we have been successful with our project.
Question 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Media technologies have been crucial throughout the whole project, we have constantly used technology to help us carry out tasks and create our film. When we first started the project it was clear that we would have to put a lot of work into research to create a good idea for a film. The best resource available for research is the internet; the number of websites available relating to films is endless. The website that we used most for research though was the video sharing website ‘YouTube’, we used this site to watch countless short films, created by professional, amateurs and students who have had similar projects. This site was brilliant for gathering ideas and inspiration for our film. Another site we used a lot was IMDB, the internet movie database; this was very useful for looking at genres of films and examples of films that fit into different genres.
New media technologies were also very important when it came to planning our film; we were able to communicate together as a group through the social networking site ‘Facebook’, using messages and group chats to share ideas and links to resources. We also used the computer to create a questionnaire which would be used to get research into our audience; this was done after we had an initial idea so that we could distribute the questionnaires, created on word, and get feedback to find our target audience. As well as this we also filmed some audience research by interviewing a number of people and recording their answers, for this we used the HDV - 1000 video recorder and we edited the footage together on Final Cut Pro before uploading to YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyuhglojCV8
We got the chance to use some quite professional technology when it came to actually filming for our project. The camera we have used was the HDV – 1000, a video camera that allowed us to film in HD giving a very high quality product, also for recording sound we used a Flash Zoom recorder, this enabled us to record sound separate from the camera, meaning there could be further distance between the camera and the actor and the overall sound was a much better quality. We have used both of these a number of times, not just for the main film but also to record audience research and feedback and the Zoom recorder was very good for recording sound for the Radio trailer.
As well as offering very good equipment to film on, the college has a range of software for us to edit on. We imported all our footage to Final Cut Pro, a great piece of video editing software that allows us to cut footage, alter contrasts, sound levels and add effects such as fades and slow motion all very easily. As we had hours of footage we spent a long time on this software and became quite confident using it, as we used it more we tried new things and became more creative whilst using it, we decided to add slow motion into parts and spent a very long time getting a number of different clips to match up in the final scene. Another piece of software we used quite a lot was Adobe Photoshop, image editing software that we used to create, photo storyboards, title sequences, production logos and our movie posters. We used this software a lot for the movie poster and it was very good for using various different images taken on a high quality camera, and cutting different parts from each image to create our posters.
Once the film was finished we were able to use new media technologies again to get feedback on our film, we did this in various different ways, first of all we uploaded the video to YouTube which offers millions of people the chance to view it and leave comments, we also uploaded it to Facebook and sent out links to friends, we got some very positive feedback from comments left on both these sites and we also got feedback of anything we could go back and improve, so this shows that technologies being used to get feedback were always allowing us to keep improving our film. We were also able to film people again, interviewing them and finding out what they thought to the film and whether it could be improved.
There were times when we had problems with technology which is to be expected but it slowed us down a number of times. We had problems with the camera not being able to read tapes, running out of tape space, battery life running out during filming and with the hand held camera a strange blue dot that hovers around in one scene that sadly we couldn’t do anything about. We also had some problems that were down to our own mistakes as we filmed over footage we hadn’t put on the computer, therefore having to re-film a large amount again.
Technology has aided us in every aspect of this project, it has helped us be more creative, and inspiring us to try new things for example the slow motion shots. The internet has been the most useful source for researching and planning our project, allowing us to communicate with each other, share ideas, look for similar films and even finds royalty free music to use as the soundtrack for our film. The high quality equipment we were able to use allowed us to make a film that looked very professional, and the software we had available allowed us to use our imagination and become more creative, not just with the main film but with the radio trailer and poster too.
