A2 Advanced Portfolio- Adam, Eve, Jamie and Jacob

1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? - Eve and Adam.

Short Film

These nine images are from a variety of films that we used as influences during our planning and research for our media film and poster. The ones that were most effective we believed was Mixtape, Strangers and King Ponce; they all appealed to us because in their own way they were very quirky and different. For example, Mixtape is a very short film and shows the audience how much can be given to them in a simple yet effective way. The variety of close ups and establishing shots allow the audience to understand the characters body language and posture in a much easier way, therefore being able to understand, relate and enjoy the short film.

Compared to that of King Ponce which is one of our longer films that we chose to look at, we really liked the way the idea of the film went against normal sterotypes of teenagers in certian ways. For example when the males burst in to the room whilst they are practicing the dance, the teacher decides to sit them down for them to watch rather then kicking them out. This is something that really appealed to us as a group because of us being teenagers ourselves, we felt we could really realte to that.

There is also a scene whilst the boys are smoking where a fade is used to emphasise the hazy and dizzy feeling the character is experiancing. The group really liked using this idea to an advantage in our own media film and have done so.

Our third chosen film that we decided to look at in depth was Strangers, a seven minute long film however; with a twist. There is no dialogue included in the film, this makes the context and story line so much more interesting and includes 'edge of seat' entertainment. We enjoyed how it was cleaverly done with a variety of angles and shots included throughtout the film. Cantered angles and close ups were greatly included and this allowed the suspence to build up and have a peak of tension which the audience enjoys. For a fairly short film, we quickly build up a posotive idea about the two gentlemen and the group who seems to be bothering them, the last shot leaves the audience wanting to know more, they swap bags as they jump of the train and this makes us wonder what is in the bags, why are they so happy to be off the train and why were they being chased by a group of men.
The last image of the nine shows their happiness to get off the train and away from the characters, therefore leaving a sense of uncertintity, this is what we were trying to achieve at the begginning of the film and hopefully the audience will agree too, that we have achieved this.
The most important part of this film was the music for me, it allowed a great amount of tension to be built up and allow the audience exciting and gripping entertainment. During our own film we attempted to do this however; in a less dramatic way, I think this worked well and successfully allowed the audience relate easily to Scott and his situation.

This group of images are ones taken from our own media film. It is exactly 5 minutes long which was the maximum amount of time allowed, we managed to shoot a wide range of different shots and experiment with different angles. The first image on this sheet is an example of this, along with the 5th and 8th, we experimented with these two as we wanted the audience to feel sorry for 'Scott'. Getting the idea from Mixtape to use depth of field to our advantage allowed us to come up with the idea for the shot in the fifth image.

The seventh image on the grid is an example of a fade that we used during the film, it comes at the end of the film whilst we see Laura and Scott on the sofa together. We thought it worked well and was similar to the idea used in King Ponce as it is alike to the idea of him dreaming, we thought this would work well because of Scott (now being with Laura) thinks it is like a dream come true.
Looking at the other shots in the grid, I think they all worked well and came out how the group wanted them to; the angles used and tried out were successful with the influence of Mixtape, King Ponce and Strangers.
I think the variation in shots along with the music that we chose to insert, like in Strangers; the music is a crutial part of the film and it allows suspension and tense scenes to be built up. By using the track 'Somebody Like You' by Adele during the begginning and then creating our own music to have during the later events which changes as the general mood and feel of the film improves, I think this allowed the film to be much more entertaining and interesting for the audience.
Unlike our films we were researching, we decided to use a lot of fades during our film to emphasise the difference and contrast between reality and dream. I think this greatly helped us and like in King Ponce with the fade whilst they are smoking, it allows the audience to easily distinguish the difference.

As short films are one of the leaders in creative and original movies it is hard to identify similarities between our movies and the short film network. In terms of narrative, we wanted to follow films such as King Ponce and Strangers in which we are led to believe the ending will be a malicious one however it turns out to be a happy ending. This kind of technique , which breaks from stereotype, we liked the idea of and we tried to develop into our story as we wanted to make the viewer believe our main character would be lonely throughout the film but surprise them by him finding someone. The lonely love story we developed also resembled films such as signs as the narratives can be closely matched.

We thought that using a non diagetic voice over in our film would follow the trend in most short films of having limited dialogue. We used our voice overs to create this sense of loneliness as if he’s talking to himself which are used in other short films to create the same effect.

The two main characters between ‘signs’ and our film bare some similarities:

Both characters feel alone.
Both find love at the end
Personalities are similar in the way that they are looking for something better with life however ‘signs’ cleverly does this without sound.

These typical features associated with these types of films usually follow the same conventions however films like signs uses body language and facial expression to get this message across. We tried to mimic this sort of emphasis and this is why we included ‘webcam view’ shots to try and allow the viewer to focus on our main characters expressions.

Another frequent element of short films is they usually have an unexpected twist or unexpected ending. We tried to achieve this by our main character one day coincidentally meeting the girl of his dreams whilst working in a garden for his work experience; I don’t think this was achieved as well as it could have been. This is only because we had to cut a section of our movie out due to a consistency error so the sequence seemed very rushed. This rushed sequence meant that our main character avoided the girl in a corridor but then we see the next shot is her bringing him a drink. If we were to make another movie we would make sure the shots were more carefully thought out and was spread across enough scenes to ensure it makes sense. It was easy to become sidetracked as we already knew the story however it may be hard for a viewer to pick up on the story we intended them to see.

In my film analysis I found that I referred to short films in their colour and lighting. For example in 'black hole' i noted that the colour and lighting were dull and dreary to create the effect of a monotonous office. I also noted in my analysis of 'goodbye to the normals' that "the colour and lighting seem quite everyday in this shortfilm and I think they wanted to have it like that so we do get a sense of normality. It might not be necessary to different lighting in our film and perhaps we can keep it normal to allow the audience to concentrate more on story and character" This is the kind of lighting we wanted to use in our film and I think we achieved this as we didn't see the need to make lighting too eccentric or too dull however we used extra lighting in the happy ending to create a more happy feeling. Here is a link to my film analysis http://advancedportfolio1164.blogspot.com/2011/01/short-film-research-adam.html
Ancillary Task

We thought our poster follo.wed some conventions of current posters such as the colour scheme. Our poster follows the theme of orange and black. The reviews and fish are orange and the title, studio block, awards, sponsors and website are in black. Following this sort of colour scheme helps to create a poster that is easy on the eye and is a popular theme within posters. The 'inglorious basterds' poster to the left shows this same colour matching theme as the red colour of the flag is seen as blood, in the title and the year of release. The background and knife match the white of the title, this is something we tried to follow to make our poster look more professional.

The font used in our poster varies as the title is already in the picture which we liked the idea of as not many other films do this and we believe it works well. The orange font used for the reviews closely matches posters such as ones for 'Juno' as they are follow the same colour scheme of orange and a smooth rounded font.

Our review followed the magazine 'little white lies' closely as it follows the layout of their film reviews. The layout of our review compared with the little white lies is very close and this is what we were trying to achieve as 'little white lies' has a nice proffesional touch to it. We're happy with our review as we think someone would enjoy reading it, aswell as looking at it- Adam

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary task? Eve, Adam, Jacob & Jamie
After looking and reviewing the film, poster and various aspects of the film including sound and editing we decided as a group that our film was fairly successful, the sound and editing made the film much more effective and really made the coursework piece much more interesting and appealing to the target audience.
We have decided that we would like to review our film and poster in a different way, rather than writing and making in in a more essay form. As a group we sat down and talked about how we would like to present our evaluation of our piece of coursework, we came to the decision that we would like to record ourselves (as a group) doing a voice-over of our views and comments on good and bad aspects of the film we have created. We thought this would be different and fit in well with the idea of the blog and we thought it would be able to portray our true feelings in a descriptive way about the film itself.
Here is the video that we created to show our final views on our poster and how we developed our ideas. We decided this would be the best way to evaluate our poster because it gives us the freedom to discuss issues while being recorded as a group.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback? Jacob and Jamie

We have tried to use many different techniques to obtain audience feedback, this is so that we get a wide range of views and ideas from different people, which could potentially improve our film, poster and review. During filming we used some of our test shots and created a small video to show the basic idea and film settings and then posted this to youtube and our blog to see what people thought of the initial idea. We only got a small amount of feedback from this and used those ideas to continue filming. When the film was finished including all music and titles, we uploaded it to blogger and to youtube to get even more audience feedback, we then decided that we didn’t gain enough from these the first time so linked our film to Facebook (An online social network) and asked friends to comment on the film giving us ideas and thoughts on shots and story from the film as well as music and titles.

Here is a link to our audience feedback work on Facebook: http://advancedportfolio1164.blogspot.com/2011/03/facebook-raw-footage-feedback-jacob.html

I think we learnt a lot from our audiences and used there advice well, many people said that they liked the idea of our film although said that there was a chance that it may be too much of the same style of storyline which is used in many rom-com/romantic films.

I think that we learnt from this and then used a stereotype that isn’t used often of a ‘blogger’ who is still around in the real world. What I mean by this is that many films use a stereotype of a young boy obsessed with computers and therefore he never leaves his room and sees sunlight, we tried to bring our character away from this by listening to what our audience said and giving him an outside job of gardening and showing images of him in a bright college corridor. - Jacob

Audience feedback is very important for big budget films as without it they would risk creating a film which does not reach its target audience or any audience at all. Test audiences are used in order to receive this feedback and obviously people would review parts of the film during production to make sure certain scenes, the narrative and the sounds in the film are to a good quality and entertaining. Film reviews and premieres are also key because if these are negative this has a huge effect on the amount of cinema viewings and therefore the inflow of money made from the film. With such large budgets and reputations at stake negativity has to be avoided at all costs.

If we were ever to produce our own full length film in the future we would definatly use what we have learnt about the importance of audience feedback and make sure it is extensive. As we had limited resources, equipment, money and time we could not explore and exploit the full advantages of using audience feedback. Although the tools we have used in order to receive feedback (Facebook's online social networking service) aswell as speaking to family and friends have fit the purpose of our task.

When using test audiences film producers would have to make sure they are showing their film to a suitable audience in the first place. For example they may be producing a film targeted at stereotypical teenage female students, who (following a stereotype) may prefer to watch rom/coms and dramas, so if the company are producing an action packed, gun filled thriller, in this case the time and resources used may have gone to waste if they already have an idea on the reaction of the audience. However, this can also be very useful as their could be some very different results, and it is always important to cover all outcomes to give yourself the best chance of creating a film which will satisfy your target audience whatever the size.
- Jamie

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction, and research, planning and evaluation stages - Eve, Adam, Jacob & Jamie

Evaluation on Prezi