This year in our project we tried to be as technical as we could, continuity was our main focus. Although due to the length of the time we had for this project it was hard to keep continuity sometimes; for example my hair grew massively between the periods of shooting. We tried to edit this as cleverly as we could as not to let the audience see this. We also made sure we had a wide range of shots such as establishing shots and eye-line matches. This year we also tried to experiment with the angles we used. One new shot we tried was the underwater shot where the character of ‘Luke’ is washing his face. This kind of shot also appears in the 2002 James bond movie, Die Another Day.
There are many differences when you compare the two shots, first the context, in our film the character is washing his face, but the audience do not know this as this is the first shot of the whole film. In Die Another Day, the audience see James being held under the water by Korean Soilders. Also the two contrast as one is light the other is very dark, the lighting in the shot we created does not suggest trouble, panic or fear as the darkly - lit james bond one does.
The narative and style of our film is hard to compare to any others. Firsty most of the film is shot through a handheld camera, which could be compared to Horror Movies such as The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. The narative is focused upon one male protagonist of 'Luke', but this film is a romance, which makes our film rather unique as romantic films are often associated with female protagonists. In this way our film could be compared to hit Rom-Com film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which unlike many others, focues upon the male character of 'Peter' after his break-up with long term girlfriend 'Sarah'. Elements of the story line could also be compared with the 2008 Action film Transporter 3. The main character in this film is male, but the film for some time features him and a young woman driving across europe together. They also vist some interesting and exciting places, an effect we tried to create in our movie.
Originally we set out for the film to be a romance, but when finished and we did audience feedback many people perceived it to be a hybrid genre of romance and drama. At first we couldn’t understand this but taking into consideration the feedback we realised it was in fact more dramatic than romantic! The twist in our plot is that the seemingly harmless character of ‘Mellissa’ actually turns out to be a bad guy and this is what adds the dramatic element to the film. The ending scene is where we tried to create an audience reaction.
The slow motion scene combined with powerful but emotional music was supposed to get the audience to shed a tear, and with some members of our audience this happened.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?
When we first planned out our film we tried to make it a romance. But after audience feedback we realised we had created a romantic drama. My original idea for the poster showed the two characters of ‘Luke’ and ‘Mellissa’ sat together watching the footage that had been recorded on ‘Luke’s camera. When the audience would see this poster they may think that the two characters are a couple, they are sat very close to each other. This would give the appearance of a romantic film.
But the colours in the poster a very grey and miserable, most romantic films have bright and colourful posters such as the poster from the film ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ which I looked at and so this characteristic could suggest otherwise that the film is not a romance. Our radio trailer is very simple, it contains samples from our actual film combined with music from the film. Film radio trailers are not generally complicated and so we decided to follow this trend and create a very simplistic advertisment for our film. What we found in common with most radio trailers was that if the film had been given a good review then this would be publicised on the trailer, to influence people to see the movie. This is why we added the line "5 Star tearjerker says Lovefilm. Our trailer also indicated when the film would be in cinemas/avaliable.
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Audience feedback has been very important throughout the course of the project. Our first contact with potential audience was when we sent out Questionnaires to 30 potential viewers of our film, the people we chose to film the in were selected at random and were of different ages, to get reliable results. we asked questions such as, What rating film do you generally watch, and whether or not they have seen any films which we classed as similar to ours. We also filmed some of our potential audiences' answers. After the questionnaires we recieved back and the answers from our film we concluded that our main viewing audience would be females aged 15 - 25. But a suprising number of males were also interested in this genre of film, mainly because the protagontist is male. This influenced many of our descisons when drafting the script and story line, we needed to appeal to both males and females.
In filming and editing we had a huge task of making sure the meaning and story to the film was constant and the audience would not become confused at the plot line. Because in our film we have a mixture of shots that jump from point of view shots from the main character 'Luke', and normal shots that tell the story, in one of our very early drafts the film was quite hard to understand. To combat this we scaled down the quality of the handheld shots, and added the white noise effect when moving to a normal shot to show the transition. This made the film flow smoother and was alot easier to follow. We also added a title to the scene where 'Luke' arrive in Belgium, this informs the audience where they are. The narration at the start of the film also helps to keep the story of the film apparent to the audience.
Before our final cut we showed a handful of people a draft version then asked them to provide feedback. It was mainly all positive but there were a few critisisms, we listened to these and made sure our final cut would satisfy the audience. What greatly relieved us was that the whole audience interpreted our film in the same way, which was clear to us that the story we had wrote was a success. There we no cultural references in our film and so the film would be suitable to watch for all cultures.
4. How did you use new media technologies in the research, construction and planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout the whole project we have used digital technologies for everything. At the beginning of our project the first thing we did was create our blog to post all our work onto, the layout was modified slightly to accommodate the logos we created for our fictional production company ‘Firefly Media’. Our first audience research was filmed, but we also asked potential audiences to fill in questionnaires. In the research stage we also watched many youtube clips and films to draw inspiration from. The construction stage is possibly the most technology packed stage of the whole project. We used high tech Sony HDV1000 cameras to record the bulk of the film, as well as little handheld ones to get the handheld shots in the film. We then had to edit this footage using Final Cut Pro, a package that requires some skill to operate to edit the film smoothly. We also created a photo storyboard using this package, you can see how our ideas developed when comparing out original storyboard which we drew by hand to the photo storyboard using real characters and locations.
We used Photoshop to create our posters, a package that everyone is aware of but not many people have the skill to use it. Our radio trailer was created using Final Cut Pro, but could have been made using GarageBand, a Mac-only software that edits sound. We also used a Zoom recorder to capture new sound to add to the trailer. We couldn’t have made our film to the standard it is without the new technologies we used. But there are also limits to these, tape failures and computer crashes to name a few. These technologies also require new skills that we didn’t posses so we had to learn how to operate certain things first.
