Kate & Ed's Advance Portfolio
Monday 25 January 2016
Monday 18 January 2016
Ed Evaluation Q3
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Target Audience
Our target audience is 15-19 year olds both genders. We decided on this for 3 different reasons.
After figuring out our target audience we figured the best way for us to find out what people in this age bracket wanted to see was to ask them either in person online or in any other means, we formulated some pie charts and surveys in order to figure out what we needed to include/change/apply to our film in order for it to suit the people in our target audience alot better.
we began our audience feedback by deciding if our title fit our movie genre, our movie doesn't fit a genre specifically but loosely fits a couple of genres, we wanted to see if our target audience would see if our movie fit at least one of these titles. the slightly vague title means that not much information is revealed about the movie building enigma even in the title stages. the fact enigma is built swayed the voters to select the social realism/thriller as this is a generic convention of these styles of film.
Both Kate and i were very stuck when it came to deciding whether or not our film had a running sound track or a on/off soundtrack, if we decided to have a running soundtrack we would have done more audience feedback work and decided whether to have a parallel or contrapuntal soundtrack. after the audience feedback we decided against a soundtrack this was also helped along by the fact we had time restraints, if we were to redo our project i would probably push for their to be a suiting soundtrack as i feel like it would have helped set the mood for the film and made key points stand out alot more if the soundtrack was contrapuntal.
this was our last piece of audience feedback we made a survey on survey monkey and surveyed a few generic points about our film from the title to the tension points we also surveyed the title sequence which we made up on Photoshop we wanted to see if this accurately portrayed the message our movie was sending about good and bad. from the response we got from the title scene question we felt we made good choices in choosing this title and way of presenting the title.
in these audience feedback the first thing Kate and i did was to apply them to our work as it is all good getting the feedback but applying the feedback to our work really makes the difference, luckily the audience feedback supported a lot of our existing choices in the film making process so little was actually tweaked, i feel if we went into more detail with our question of our audience feedback the results we got may have been more applied and would have affected our work in a more substantial way.
Target Audience
Our target audience is 15-19 year olds both genders. We decided on this for 3 different reasons.
- We like the film, both kate and I are really enthusiastic about the plot itself, we are biased but we had researched similar films and both really liked them and it inspired us to make a similar film.
- We wanted to make a film which would appeal to this age group as it is easier for us to get audience feedback as we are always around this age group.
- Thirdly, we think our film would be shown on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. These websites main audience is this age group so they would be the type of people to watch it if they came across our short film.
After figuring out our target audience we figured the best way for us to find out what people in this age bracket wanted to see was to ask them either in person online or in any other means, we formulated some pie charts and surveys in order to figure out what we needed to include/change/apply to our film in order for it to suit the people in our target audience alot better.
we began our audience feedback by deciding if our title fit our movie genre, our movie doesn't fit a genre specifically but loosely fits a couple of genres, we wanted to see if our target audience would see if our movie fit at least one of these titles. the slightly vague title means that not much information is revealed about the movie building enigma even in the title stages. the fact enigma is built swayed the voters to select the social realism/thriller as this is a generic convention of these styles of film.
Both Kate and i were very stuck when it came to deciding whether or not our film had a running sound track or a on/off soundtrack, if we decided to have a running soundtrack we would have done more audience feedback work and decided whether to have a parallel or contrapuntal soundtrack. after the audience feedback we decided against a soundtrack this was also helped along by the fact we had time restraints, if we were to redo our project i would probably push for their to be a suiting soundtrack as i feel like it would have helped set the mood for the film and made key points stand out alot more if the soundtrack was contrapuntal.
this was our last piece of audience feedback we made a survey on survey monkey and surveyed a few generic points about our film from the title to the tension points we also surveyed the title sequence which we made up on Photoshop we wanted to see if this accurately portrayed the message our movie was sending about good and bad. from the response we got from the title scene question we felt we made good choices in choosing this title and way of presenting the title.
in these audience feedback the first thing Kate and i did was to apply them to our work as it is all good getting the feedback but applying the feedback to our work really makes the difference, luckily the audience feedback supported a lot of our existing choices in the film making process so little was actually tweaked, i feel if we went into more detail with our question of our audience feedback the results we got may have been more applied and would have affected our work in a more substantial way.
Tuesday 12 January 2016
Ed Evaluation Q1
In what ways does
your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real
media products?
Short Film
The original idea for
our film followed Todorov’s narrative theory, todorovs theory suggested that
most if not all media products follow certain patterns in the successful media
world, we decided that the narrative of our short film should follow quite
tightly this theory as it will be easier for us to structure our film into
parts. Todorovs theory suggests that an in the narrative an equilibrium is that
starting phase where things are normal and there has been no disruption to the
characters’ lives, this is the part of the short film where Michael the main
character is looking around the shop at all of the items, he has not seen the
magical mirror yet which cause the disruption stage to begin, Michael realises
the mirrors potential when he stumbles across it and sees his future displayed
on the mirror and shock comes across him, we decided the first time the main
character sees the mirror that the audience do not see what he sees, merely his
reaction. This created enigma amongst the audience as they are asking questions
such as; what did Michael see in the mirror? And why did it evoke such a
reaction. This process was used in one of Bombay Sapphire’s short film
‘Reflections’ the woman and man see the mirror and the mirrors effects however
at first it is hidden from the audience view and just the reactions of the
actors is shown, when researching short films this not only grabbed my attention
as a good piece of camera work but also directly influenced the initial idea of
our short film and helped us to develop these forms into our short film. In the
film room 8, one of my planning and research films, enigma raising processes
were used in the opening scenes; room 8 begins with a prisoner being guided through a prison
courtyard by a Russian prison guard, this immediately sparks enigma amongst the
audience. questions are raised like why is the protagonist in jail and why in
Russia? immediately after this short scene the plain title sequence 'Room 8'
shows it is white on a black background plain and simple similar to a prisoners
number on his uniform. We used this sequence of enigma raising clips alongside
the title sequence being played directly after in order to raise questions
which the later part of the film will answer
the use of inserting the title sequence then
allows a break in the narrative which led to a change in location once the
sequence s returns, we attained this
influence from room 8. In our opening scenes however the camera was on a tripod
in order to keep a still frame, in room 8 however a handheld camera shooting
style is used, I believe this was to not give away too much about the
characters location adding even more so to the enigma however in our short film
we didn’t quite need to create so much enigma and needed the audience to be
able to tell the main character is in a vintage trinket shop. The use of a still camera
allowed the audience to fully takein the mise en scene of this scene, the
ornaments in the shop and the decoration used in the shop. Looking back on our
project the décor in the shop could have been a lot more intune with our film
as the feelings evoked from the surroundings in the shop may be misleading to
the overall feeling of our film, Typically it is
very hard to fit any short film into a certain genre, this is the same with
ours. This is because our plot has elements of a lot of different
genres. The Genres our short film loosely fit into the genres Mystery, Thriller
and Horror as our plot involves a supernatural mirror and the scene at the
end showing a morbid future this has strong hints of horror. However the rest
of the movie is kind of mystery/thriller as they find a mysterious object
and experiment with it, also we are going to use non-diegetic sound to build up
suspense towards the end of the film and to convey different emotions. The fact
our short story doesn't have a particular category it fits into , means we wont
have any particular group of conventions we can put into our short film, if the surroundings in
the shop were more applied to our film I believe the shop would have been the
perfect place to film the opening a good example of parralel surroundings to
the mood of a scene would have been in the maybe one day short film I
analysised in the preproduction research and planning phases, the parralel
voiceover is narrating the mans boring and mundane life the décor in the mans
home is also running parralel to not only the voiceover but also the mans
facial reaction and body language.
The use of a blue tint to
the lighting in the mans home also adds to the overall mood of the scene which
from the blue tinge has connotations that it’s a negative mood.
During the planning of our film
we decided to have little to no diegetic audio tracks we felt for our film
using only ambient and natural location sounds would be more effective and not
distract from the narrative of our short film in hindsight I feel we probably
should have put in some audio even a non-diegetic mood track to induce a
greater sense of suspension in the scenes leading up to the future vision from
the mirror.
The décor in these scenes suits the mood we were trying to go for a lot more as it is the room of your standard slightly messy teenager, this adds to the realism and relatability of our characters, they seem like a normal group of friends in a normal surroundings with a deffinatley not normal mirror. One of the main conventions that we developed in our short film was the splitscreen phone conversation, we did similar things in our as production of a thriller opening where we did a triple split screen phone call conversation at the same time. This year we developed that and did a double splitscreen phonecall between four friends, how we tackled this was to have one friend always a constant part of the conversation and the cvonversation is read as if he is speaking to one person and his friends pop up and out when they have finshed there bit, so seane had the first third louisa the second third and then louie the last third and he hangs up the call. We did this as a continuetity challenge to see if it will make sense, I was really prousd with outcome as it communticates well what we were trying to get across. It also really helped us to cut down the time of our short film so it wasn’t too long, as if we had to have three separate phone calls all explaining the same to the other characters our film would have been too long, so this was very successful way to combat this.
Film Posters
Film posters are a form of
promotion just like a film trailer. Because a filmposter is a physical piece
and it is not a film piece, the posters can promote the film in a lot of
different ways and places. Film posters are often seen on billboards buses as
posters in bus stops in shop windows underground stations train stations and
even displayed down the side of buildings in extreme cases, they are also
displayed on nearly every wall inside of a cinema to show future releases.these
pieces aim to catch peoples eye for them to read the information on the poster
in hopeof making them interested in the product and therefore interested to
find out more. Icons have an importance in film posters these icons tell the
audience something through the imagery for example in the I thought I told you
to shut up poster, the font is a bubbly and bold font with two exclamation
marks at the end of the title, there is also humuroes illustrations littering
the background and a larger illustration of a milkman seeming to be hitting his
milk van, from first glance I can tell that this short film is very likely to
be a comedy about a milkman, I have used the icons of the poster to find this
out. In our film poster the dark background with mirror dirt overlayed on the
top points towards our movie being a horror/thriller, the titling and the
imagery being reflected horizontally down the middle of our poster adds the
mystery aspect to our film posters genre.
a large influence for our final film poster design was the
film poster from the short film the 414’s as even though the time frame for our
movies were very different the way the film poster is laid ouut and the dark
background and not very revealing imagery helped to promote the alternative
thriller genre attatched to this shortfilm, although rather genreless our short
film conformed to a few of the conventionss regarding the
thriller/horror/mystery genres so a film poster that semi-accuratley displayed
this was a huge help to get influence from disregarding the time frame
references of course.
The film poster for the
414s is a dark poster with bold lighter font displaying the titles and actors
names etc. the actors names are displayed on the bottom of the poster, the fact
the actors names are noticeably smaller than most of the other font sizes on
the poster tells the audience that the actors are not very well known. above
the title is a sun dance film awards sticker showing it has made its way to
winning a sun dance award, this tells the audience that although the actors are
not very well known the actual short film must be very good as it has won
awards. the main chunk of text 'The 414's' is placed over a dark black
background meant to be shadow, this makes the title stand out especially in the
colour chosen, the style of the text is almost a metal chrome that is slightly aged, this fits
in with the time frame of the movie as from what the imagery on the poster is
telling us it is set in the 80s, we can tell this from the style of clothes the
man in the picture is wearing but also from the props the old style t.v and
phone and the newspaper clipping up on the wall shows latest news story's such
as 'details emerge on raids into US computers'. The tagline for the movie is
'change your passwords.' this not only links in with the title 'teenage
hackers' but also fits in with the imagery on the poster with computers and
keyboards. The website is displayed on the bottom of the poster
www.the414s.com. there are no critics comments at all on the poster, this helps
with the look of the poster as it is an aesthetic poster and looks very nice,
more text would clutter the image, however critics comments would help to give
the viewer of the poster a better idea of the quality of the film. A lot of
these convetions we applied to our film poster as they were very effective with
this one3 and when it came to choosing our final poster design this really
stood out as an effective poster. We also used snippings directly from our film
so they were recognisable once the film has been seen. We also disregarded a
few conventions in order to build enigma, we left out a small motto or line
underneath the title which about 80% of the film posters seemed to have, in
hindsight adding this in may have been a better idea as our film poster may be
lacking in actual information for the film even thought the imagery chosen and
the way it is presented in a mirrored style is quite revealing to the
storyline.
Little White Lies Review
Little White Lies is a high
end, internationally distributed film magazine. The content is split into 3
different acts. The first being the lead review, then there is a series of
feature articles inspired by the film on the front cover, the final section is
the reviews section which can also feature interviews from different directors
and stars of the movies. There is a certain group of people who buy and read "Little White
Lies". These are firstly men, aged between 25-35 who work in the creative
industry. The magazine itself costs £6 per copy but many people buy it on subscription,
this maintains the audience and shows that you have to have money to spare to
buy the magazine or be dedicated to the content. The readers of the magazine
will be very different to the audience of our short film, this is because our
target audience is both sexes aged between 15-19. The part we focused on for
our ancillary review was the film review, we wrote a generic review of our film following the magazine conventions of little
white lies, not only in layout as shown in the picture of my analysis of an
existing film review, but also in language. We had to learn and copy language
techniques used for example rhettorical questions, used in order to make the
audience/reader think about the answear without the option to reply because its
words on paper.
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