Friday, 15 April 2011
Overall
Well this is the last post before our work gets frozen. Looking back on this experience I felt I have learnt so much from it and have gained a lot from it. There have been tears, laughs, taxi driver strikes, a LOT of technological problems and many many many computer crashes. After all of it though we have come out with a final media project and I am extremely pleased with the feedback we have received from people. I am happy with our final result and due to an excellent team of people have come out with something that I am confident will help us towards our target grades. I know a lot of effort and patience has gone into this so I want to say a big thank you to everyone who has contributed towards making mine and Hannah's project a success :)
Due to issues with technology I have had to type up my personal commentary. I have also added the link to Mr Earl's blog to the interview that me and Hannah did about our video.
Personal Commentary
I feel that overall our final project was a success. It isn’t perfect but I feel like we did an excellent job given the problems, technology issues and lack of time that we were given. I felt like Alex as an actor did a wonderful job especially as I wasn’t too good under pressure and the weather was atrocious and under normal circumstances it would be completely inappropriate to go out in a dress. She froze for 3 full days and had to run over and over again for every shot and retake we did but didn’t complain once and we are extremely grateful to her for being such a good sport. I found that because the music was fast paced it fitted in well with the video. Edward wasn’t given much time to think of anything to compose so we’re grateful that he too worked well under pressure. Although we worked really hard and put in a lot of effort into editing, we couldn’t really do much about the shaky camera work and if we were to do it again, we would definitely use either a different camera man or use different angles to ensure that the camera did not shake. I thought that the use of various camera angles increased the verisimilitude of the video and engaged the audience more as it meant the video was more interesting and didn’t just use mundane techniques. I definitely think that we gained the effect that we wanted by not showing the killers face as it didn’t make it obvious what was going on and it left the audience wanting to know more and asking questions. It left an air of mystery about it and also built up a lot of suspense which was the effect we were after. The point of view scene was effective as it built up tension and I feel like it would leave the audience on the edge of their seats almost holding their breath. Our use of the colour change and the transition between the two time periods was shaky and could have been vastly improved given the time as the wall looked false and it almost didn’t match the colours of the rest of the scene. Saying this I think that the sound effect and the flash put together created the sci-fi effect that we wanted. There could have been less footage of our actors feet and I felt it got a bit repetitive after a while but the music in this half of the sequence and the special effect that Hannah put on the 360 degree turn were very useful in creating the sense of confusion that we hoped to achieve and made the audience aware that our main character was not in a world that she was familiar with. The acting from me wasn’t exactly Oscar winning and we could have really done with re filming the last couple of scenes to improve the sound and quality of our video. The scene where our character see’s the date could have been improved as her reaction didn’t change but I really liked how our actress presented forward confusion and panic. I think that throughout the video we needed to improve a lot on the smoothness of the camera work. The tripod could have been loosened up a little so that the camera man could have turned the camera with ease rather than having jerky camera movements. I think that in the scene where she is in the crowd we could have focussed on Alex a lot more and still have given the sense that she was lost in the crowd and we could have also focussed more on the shots of the conversation so that no heads were cut out and we could have made the conversation sequence a shot-reverse shot sequence rather than all one scene. Overall I feel like our video was a success but it could have still been vastly improved with a bit of re filming to improve the audio and better acting on my behalf.
I’d like to give thanks to Alex Toes, James Stephenson, Edward Fawcett and Mr Earl for their patience and contribution to mine and Hannah’s video. They all did a wonderful job and we couldn’t have done this without them.
Link to Mr Earl's blog - http://vimeo.com/22188579
I’d like to give thanks to Alex Toes, James Stephenson, Edward Fawcett and Mr Earl for their patience and contribution to mine and Hannah’s video. They all did a wonderful job and we couldn’t have done this without them.
Link to Mr Earl's blog - http://vimeo.com/22188579
Audience feedback
For audience feedback I have sent people the link for our video via facebook and MSN messenger and have printscreened their comments. I have asked mainly media students with a couple that do media at university and a couple of others that don't do media so I get a mixed response
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Evaluation
Rachel Mole
Media Evaluation
AS Media Studies – Evaluation Programme (22nd March – 15th April 2011)
- How does your media product:
a) use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our film uses various different forms and conventions of real media products to build up a sci-fi/time traveller effect. One of the conventions we used was the black and white to colour effect similar to that of “Wizard of Oz” to show how our character travels from time and ends up in a completely different time to the one she is used to. The music that we used is fast paced and sinister so it keeps in time with her running and builds up tension keeping the audience on the edge of their seat and throwing them into action straight away keeping their attention. The first scene opens up so many questions so the audience’s attention is grabbed straight away and keeps them watching the film to answer these questions. Our shots hide the person our main character is running away from so it builds up a sense of mystery around the character and keeps the audience interested as it makes them want to find out who our main character is running away from and why.
b) represent particular social groups?
Our project represents teenagers as being vulnerable but stubborn at the same time. It reinforces the idea of females being victims and men being the dominate gender. Our film has three actors in it that are all teenagers. Our main character is being chased and is running away from something or someone that she find fearful. She manages to run away and escape the person chasing her which represents teenagers as being clever and street smart in the face of danger. The intention in the second half of the film was to represent teenagers as being stubborn as the two girls don’t seem to be listening to each other. Our main character believes the other girl is trying to help her which again, reinforces the representation of teenagers being vulnerable as well as being easily misled as she is putting her trust in a total stranger. We tried to make it seem like the character that she meets in 2011 is suspicious and not to be trusted giving the impression that teenagers can be quite twisted and misleading as they are still in the stage of life where they do not really take others into consideration as much as they should. They only have to look after themselves so have not really got a caring nature towards others.
- What kind of media institution might distribute your media product?
I think that Warner Brothers would be perfect to distribute this film as they would distribute it really well. The majority of the films produced by Warner Brothers are family films and most have a sense of fantasy about them. For example, “Harry Potter” is a fantasy, family film and “Sherlock Holmes” is a family film with a murder-mystery storyline. Our film has fast paced music and sci-fi mixed with murder-mystery and it’s a family film so Warner Brothers would be perfect to distribute our film.
- Who would be the audience for your media project?
The audience for our film would be mostly teenagers but it would appeal to the older audience as well giving it a wide audience. This would be due to the complex mystery that surrounds our main character and the action. Our film is appropriate for all ages but a young audience may not like it as it is a more serious film with no humor or comic qualities but may still appeal to teenagers because of its sci-fi nature. We chose to make our project attract the younger, teenage audience because it was something we could easily relate to and through our own personal experience of the cinema, realized that it is normally the teenage related films that bring in a large audience and spark up more hype. Teenagers are generally more interested in the cinema as it is a social activity that they can enjoy with their friends and they usually have more time to go than an older audience.
- How did you attract/address your audience?
All of our actors are young and the modern day girl is wearing casual clothes instead of a smart business suit making the audience feel more at ease with the character. We tried to ensure that our project fitted in well with the codes and conventions of a typical teenage drama film as well as being a sci-fi/mystery film. We stuck to the stereotypical views that teenagers cause trouble and are a nuisance to society by trying to make Samantha (the girl in 2011) selfish and suspicious but went against it with our main character as she is vulnerable and scared and needs help rather than trying to cause trouble. This attracts teenagers and an older audience as it allows them to see the characters through their own eyes and make their own judgments about them.
- What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Technology is extremely unreliable and requires more maintenance than originally thought. I have learned how to use premier pro and can now put together a film easily without many complications. I have learned a variety of different shots and techniques to use when filming and how to put together an efficient sequence. We have learnt how to edit a film so that the continuity runs smoothly and it looks professional. We have put in a lot of time and effort and regularly saved our work as we quickly learned that the software we used crashes a lot. We learned that the camera's were not as efficient as we expected them to be so we had to be very careful whilst using it so we didn't pick up much background noise which, as you can see by the video, was a problem as we normally ended up picking up more background noise than we did speech. If the camera's were of a better quality and we had a boom mic maybe we may have been able to pick up the speech of our actors better and there might not have been an awkward buzzing created by the camera itself.
- Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product. In the preliminary task we didn't put in as much effort as we should have so we failed to make it look professional and creative as we would have liked. We did not use a varied amount of camera angles so the final preliminary task had poor quality. If we put more thought into it and more time and effort we would have definitely made it look a lot better than it actually was. We took the time we had for granted and realized quickly that filming took a lot longer than we originally thought. It isn't something you can just film with one quick and easy shot and have the video look perfect, you need to do a lot of re-filming, experimental shots to ensure you know exactly how the shot has to look like and you have to pay attention to the little details so that the continuity flows smoothly throughout the video. In the preliminary task we broke the 180 degree rule but we were not aware of this at the time so in our continuity project we took great care not to break it again and it improved the quality of our video greatly. We have had to use lighting to the best we could as in our preliminary task we filmed outside in the dark so Hannah had to make use of any light, torches, artificial lights we could find and put them to good use. We learned that we had to be precise and extremely patient with anyone that may help us as we used Lucy, Hannah's little sister, as a camera woman for our preliminary task and it did not go well as tempers flared up quite a bit. We didn't take our preliminary task as seriously as we should have but we learned from our mistakes and in the continuity project and final project we put a lot more time and effort into it, improved our camera skills, patience, knowledge of camera angles and knowledge of how to edit our videos so that the continuity was spot on. I have learnt how to overcome a fantastic amount of obstacles and how to organize a group of people. As one of our actresses dropped out at the very last second we had to organize last minute actors under pressure and had to quickly think on our feet so that we could use the limited time we had. I have learnt new skills involved in working in a group and individually and I have learnt how to use various different kinds of technology and limited resources to an efficient standard. My skills improved in all aspects of the project from drawing up a story board with detailed annotations and writing an effective script and editing it to fit with the effects we wanted to present forward to the audience. I have had to work under pressure a lot so I have gained more organisational skills that I perhaps did not have at the start of the year. I have also learnt that personal issues should never interfere with work so I have had to work hard to keep a positive and professional attitude whilst working in a team when there were some issues outside the classroom that involved conflict between the team. As we didn't let any conflict interfere with our work we were able to still keep up with what needed doing to a good standard.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)