Evaluation- Finished Film

As you can see we have uploaded this onto You Tube and finished the editing and this is our final film. 

Rhianna preliminary course work

 This piece of course work shows a conversation between Jay and Rhianna. As you can see this shows our new filming skills as a group, showing full shots, medium shots, medium close ups and close ups. It also shows our new editing skills too, for example the transition from entering the door one side and opening it the other side.
 We really enjoyed filming these clips, as we now have a good understanding of how to use the different camera shots and angles which will help us in our thriller films.

Evaluation- Target Audience Reasearch Summary

After we had created the survey on survey monkey and had our interviews with two audience members our findings showed that our audience members mainly liked this particular scene, the point of view shot of the killer coming in through the house they found this shot really effective and particularly enjoyed watching this as it made them confused and scared.
 What the audience didnt particularly like was the death scene, they commented about the use of blood how they would like more of that to make the death more effective another issue that was brought up was they wanted more shots in that death scene to show the killer more in particular.
  I think that in order to make the film better we would have to add in more scenes to the death scene showing the killer more, also maybe adding in a new shot of Alices face finding the body, also a flashback scene to why the killer had his intentions in the first place.
The changes that would be made if we had to start this process over would probably be to take more footage and making sure the footage flows in a better order so that people can understand the narrative better.

Evaluation- Rhianna

Evaluation

When we decided to make our film, we initially wanted it to be a horror/thriller movie.  We wanted to show how teenagers are stereotyped in these types of movies, for example Halloween.  Once we had started we also found that males dominating females also became apparent, there are not many films where women dominate men.

We decided to not make our female character a victim in our film, unlike many other films already out there. Even though the stereotype is there of the weak woman, in our film the woman is the last one standing.

We looked at various films that fitted into the horror/thriller genre and decided on the common theme of having a murderer and a victim.  Being only a short movie two minutes long we had to try and achieve some tension and feel of unease when the unknown person enters the house and goes unseen upstairs. When the film finishes we know that James has been killed, but what happened to the murderer – did he leave the house again, is he still hiding, is the female in the movie the next victim.  The watcher of the movie is free to continue the story on in his head.

The music in any movie can create mood, increase tension and add drama; we added suitable music into our film to help get the mood across to the audience in as we only had a short amount of time.

Our final media product represents a particular social group; that of teenagers and gender. We represent the first social group: teenagers, as being anti social. Our main character 'James' is shown as an over powering teenager, who likes drinking alcohol, showing how we are representing the first social group - teens as being anti social, so playing on that stereo type.

The other social group is gender, and for this social group we used a teenage boy and girl for representation. We wanted to show how males are shown to be more powerful and so try to dominate females. When we started filming we decided that it was going to be shown as the boy trying to force the girl to drink alcohol and then make a move on her. This would show his power, when he is forcing himself onto the girl. The girl would look as if she was weaker, to look over powered by this boy that is in front of her. Our girl does gain power when she decides to look for the boy, showing a slight glimpse of her gaining power by over coming fear.

The best institution to distribute our product would be a television company.  Somebody like the BBC or Channel 4 often show short films in-between other programmes to fill out their airtime schedule.

Our movie deals with some social issues that can be found in our lives today and these kinds of films are popular at the moment.

   

The target audience in age for this film would be between fifteen and early twenty year olds. I feel that it would appeal to this age range as this is a horror/thriller film, and statistics show that younger people prefer to watch horror films, and of these young people, more women than men would watch. I feel that if we tried to appeal to an older audience they probably would not enjoy it as much. As it has a teenage theme, they would not take it seriously. I therefore feel that teenagers would most likely find a connection with the theme and therefore understand it and get enjoyment from the film.

Before making our film, we looked up statistics about our target audience. We needed to consider what they wanted in a good horror/thriller film, what they didn't like in horror movies, and what age of audience horror/thriller films were popular with. After looking at our research we found that our target audience would be 15-20 year olds.

We aimed to attract our audience by relating the characters to the age of the audience and by playing on the stereotypical roles which people might link too as well. Some of the issues shown in the film could be ones, which this age group could relate to personally.

We used actors in the same age range as the audience and kept the topic of our film true to life.  We set the film in a city, on a typical street in a normal home. These were things that our audience would be familiar with. We kept the language in the film typical to the area where the film was shot.

Drinking, and binge drinking are things that teenagers are aware of now as stories of this type are increasing more on the news and in documentaries.

There were so many different pieces of technology that I learnt how to use through out the making of this movie.

The camera was the first thing I learnt how to use. I started with simple things first, attaching the camera to a tripod, how to zoom in and out and where to place the camera for the best effect. I had never used a tripod before, but even this most simple piece of equipment made the shooting of our film more professional.

Once we went on to filming, I found out the different shots we could use, how different angles would makes scenes work in a better way and how to use a camera when doing a point of view shot.

The lighting was another factor we had to take into consideration when filming. Not many scenes could be done in one take, so when we went to shoot again we had to make sure that the lighting was the same in the next shot. Not so difficult when you are dealing with electric lighting, but when you are dealing with sunlight you have to make sure that the lighting is the same, so that the shadows are in the correct place. If you do not do this your movie will look disconnected. You have to make sure that you remember this when editing too.

Once we had completed the film, came the editing and as I had never edited a film before I needed to learn how to use editing software. We chose to use Premier editing software on this occasion, and I found that although it was difficult to use at first I was soon getting to grips with things. . I needed to find out how to cut clips, how to put transitions into the movie, how to add music, and title graphics. In the end I found this to be fun to play around with and getting to know the programme better helped give me an understanding of what could be achieved with editing.

  

 

Another piece of vital technology I used was Blogger and You tube. When making this film we had to document all the stages in its making. These two programmes really did help with this task. Blogger was particularly useful; I had never used this software before and found learning how to blog intriguing, and how interesting it was to document and show people how we as new media students were going through this journey from beginning to end learning so much.

Whilst looking back at my preliminary work at the begging of the year, I feel that I have learnt a huge amount during a short space of time.

One of the first things we had to learn and master was how to use the camera properly. When we shot our preliminary film we had never used a camera before, so learning all the things we could do with it made things easier for us. We made mistakes, but soon learnt from them. We had to learn where to best place the camera, how far away you need to be from the actors and in the process of learning all these new techniques our shots became better and our filming skills started to improve. We also became better actors through the year, less wooden and more confident in our newfound roles.

Different camera shots and angles I have learnt can really give a good effect to your film. For example making people look overpowering by using a low angle shot, or really innocent or small by using a high angle shot is very effective. Learning all the different angles and shots at the beginning of the year, really did help throughout this film, as we tried out various ones until we got the right shot for each scene - patience was needed but it paid off in the end.

We experimented with lighting, which we found fun. I had not given much thought to this before but soon became aware how important this can be in a movie and how useful it would be to us. For example when filming a calm scene high key lighting should be used, however to add a more tense mood to your film you should use low key lighting, this makes the scene look mysterious and dark.

Programmes that I have never used before like Premier to edit seemed daunting at first, so when we were filming the preliminary film we used pretty simple effects. As the group became more advanced using the editing software we felt confident enough to play around with effects like fading scenes from one to another. We added title graphics and music, which we had not even thought of at the beginning.

I had never really thought much about the amount of work that goes into making a film, even such a short one as in this particular case. We spent a lot of time getting things to look realistic, like using the knife, and how to make the blood stains real and believable.

The main progression for us, was that we began to think in more dimension. We did not just take a movie of two people sitting down talking to each other in a brightly lit room, with very little dialogue. We had to think about adding interest to the film, using things like, narrative, lighting, different shots, continuity, angles, special effects. All these things were things we had to learn throughout the making of our film, some of them were easy, some of them were frustrating, but I hope that it has made me a much better movie maker.

  

  

Evaluation- How I attracted our target audience

Evaluation- What kind of media institution would distribute your film?

Evaluation- Prezi- Character Representation

Evaluation- Who would be the target audience for your film?

Once we had created our film we felt that the exact target audience for our film was British, Urban, white teenagers, however we dont feel that we needed to address gender.
 We felt that this film appealed to both genders as the males would like the gore and the killings through out the film, but the  females would like to see the woman get her revenge on the killer. We feel therefore that both sex's will enjoy this film.
 Before we made our decisions on the exact target audeince we did some reasearch to see which films were popular with which age group, sex and how often they would watch films.
 The charts that are shown here, show that more women go to horror/thriller movies than men as they usually go in a group. We found that men usually go by themselves or take a girl with them, so adding to the percentage of girls watcgubg movies.
 However you can see that men like action films more than women. This results therefore will encourage us  to put more action into the film, and add props, so this might attract more men to the horror/thriller film.

 We felt that adressing this film to white urban teenagers would be suitable because the main actors are portayed as white, urban so our audiance should therefore make a link with the characters that are infront of them.

Horror/Thriller movie pie chart showing women go the picture more often than men.

Action/Thriller movie pie chart showing men go more often to the pictures  than women.

This chart shows that the most popular age group to see horror films is 18-24 year olds.

This chart shows that the most popular age group to see action films is 18-24 year olds.

Looking at these pieces of information we as a group have decided that our target audience can be slightly younger from 15-24 years old.

Evaluation- Forms and Conventions of Media texts

This is my power point presentation on the forms and conventions of media texts.

Evaluation- Rhianna, What i have learned about Media and Technology

This is just a video of myself talking about what i have learnt through out the year, it explains what technologies i have used, my progress from my preliminary task, how it feel to work in a group, how do you make a group work, growth over this year in our group, would i continue to make this type of work again, what i was bad at, what I'm best at and the skills that i have learnt through out the year.

Evaluation- Prezi - Technology Used For Course Work

Evaluation- Target Audience Feedback

This video shows all the target audiecne feedback in more depth, just a breif explination on what has been said about our video.

Evaluation- Survey Monkey Results

 These print screens show our survey results from the survey mokey website, showing that 10 people have taken our survey and how they feel about the film that we have created giving us information on what we can improve to our moive.

Evaluation - Audience Reaction

This is four members of our audience watching our final piece, the purpose of this piece is to get there reactions about the movie and their personal opinions on what they felt could be improved to our film and what they liked about the film.

Evaluation- Facebook Evaluation

These screen shots show our film and our survey uploaded onto the social networking site Facebook.
Why have we done this? To get our target audience to give us feedback on our opening scene, what they liked what they disliked how we could improve it further did they like the effects and did they get the genre.
 These questions are all important so that we can here other peoples opinions on our film so we can develop it further.

Evaluation Target Audience Interview- Female

This is my target audience interview i asked again a few questions from my survey that i created on a survey monkey on my film and see what they liked what they didn't and how to improve the film over all.

Evaluation- Reflections

Today we have been interviewing people for our survey, asking them questions on how we could improve our movie better, what they liked what they didnt like. The results from this will be uploaded onto youtube later on today.
We have also shown our movie to four people a mixture of boys and girls, showing them has been great so that we can get feedback again like an interviewing process.

What we have also done is made a survey and we have had a few responces in so far, once there are a few more that have taken our survey we will put up the results on what they have said.

Evaluation- Target Audience Interview- Male

This is my first target audience interview, i did this interview to get an insight on what my film was like and if i created a good film and collect the over all any improvements that they would like too see if i added to my film. 

Evaluation- Target Market Research- Survey Monkey

This is the template for our survey, on the website, 'survey monkey'.
As you can see, we have asked multiple questions to get some understanding of were we are goig wrong and how we could improve on or problems.
 We have asked a variety of open ended and closed ended questions so that people don't have to always keep adding the same comments onto our survey.
Down below are a few screen shots of our template for our survey:

This first one shows the title of the survey which is clearly shown at the top here which is 'Target market research' , you can also see we have shown the start of the questions.

This is the end of the questions, all of these print screens show the template of what the survey will look like when people go to answer it. Once we get our results back from the public, we can then go off and improve our film

Construction- Strengths and Weaknesses

This final strengths and weaknesses post shows how we managed to get to the end of our film with the loss of one member.

Construction- Strengths and Weaknesses- Middle

This video shows the strengths and weaknesses of our film so far , now we are half way through our filming and this shows how we are coping so far.

Podcasts Construction- Strengths And Weaknesses

This is our first podcast on our strengths and weaknesses of our group so far, this is at the beginning of our film showing how we plan to make this film with the time we have left.

Construction- Adding Non Diegetic Music

Construction- Non Diegetic Music

Here we have chosen our piece of music this is the tention building music for the scenes when one of the  main characters James goes upstairs after the argument he has with Alice and then is stabbed by the killer this music will also build the tension as the killer walks into the house with out anyone knowing and the opening scenes of this movie will also have this music on as well to give a dramatic feel to the  very beginning of our movie.

Construction- Prezi- Editing

Construction- Reflections

Reflections

This week our group has finished our film and uploaded it onto YouTube.
We are now just finishing the rest of the blog posts this week and one of these blogs posts will be showing our interviewing  stage with the people that watched the 2 minute opening scene from our film, to give us critical feed back.
 We have also created a survey for people to take after they have watched our two minute opening scene so that we can get more feedback on how we can improve our film further, if we find out were we have gone wrong or were we can improve, we can overcome that as we exactly were to go and what to do.

Here are some screen shots of the making of our survey on Survey Monkey.

 This shot shows the first page of getting started up when creating a survey.

And this shot shows, the survey that i have written so far.

Construction- Adding title graphics

Adding title graphics media from hipstertitch

Construction- Reflections

Reflections 

Today we have decided that we will be editing the death scene of our film.

 When filming this piece, it was fun to play around with the fake blood that was used to try and get the splattered effect we were looking for.
 When filming we also had to show Alice finding the dead body and screaming. This was difficult because we had to judge how long the scream should be for and where I should be looking, how the body was shown and how my body language was shown. This took multiple takes, however we got there in the end.

 This screen shot shows the death scene that we have edited so far.

Construction- Making use of Todorov Theory

Making Use of Todorov Theory

 Todorov theory is shown in our two minute opening film from start to end.

 This screen shot first shows the equilibrium where every thing is calm, just a normal conversation between two people.

The next two screen shots show that there is a sudden change from calm to a disruption showing an argument between two people that are shown in the screen shots, another scene that shows a bigger disruption to the calm is the death scene, which is near the end of our two minute opening film.

 As you can see we have incorporated this theory into our opening scene, we have obviously not reached the return back to the equilibrium yet as this is only the opening scene for our film but as you can you can tell from the film, we have shown the entire Todorov theory just in the opening scene.

 If we had made a full movie we would have filmed the solution to the problem which is James' death, the solution being that the killer dies later on in the movie, returning from problem to calm, therefore returning back to the equilibrium again. we as a group really feel we have approached Todorovs theory very very well and have applied it to our film the best we could and we hope it is successful.

Construction- Reflections

This week we have been filming; we have filmed the death scene, the main part of our two minute opening film. This was really fun to film as we had to use fake blood to try and make the death seem as realistic as possible.
 The down side to this week was that it took longer than expected to shoot, but we got it done in the end.
 We have also edited this week, trying to link the scenes into each other. We are now looking at adding effects to the clips that we have linked together.
 We are looking forward to nearly completing our film and adding the effects, as this will be a new experience for us.
 We have also had fun making our poster, especially adding the effects onto the photograph that we had taken. We wanted to get the right balance to suit the film and create a good visual piece. 

Construction- Reflections

Construction- Reflections

Today, we as a group have been creating a blogpost about Binary Structure. Binary Structure is the stereotyping of age, race, sexuality, region and gender.This will help us get our blog up to date, it will also help us with the rest of our filming as we will know about all of the stereo types, meaning we will know or target audience for our film.
 The lows of our group this week is that one of our group members has been ill so production on our coursework has been slower than usual. We are still adjusting to only two members in our group however we are still coping.

Construction- Reflections

Reflections

This week our group has had a loss of one member, as he has left the group this has been one of the lows of our film production. However we have called in another person in to fill in for this member.
 Also this week we have filmed parts of our opening two minute scene, which we are quite pleased with.
 We have had fun filming as we got to use a variety of shots and angles and tried out being actors/actresses for the day.
 We will be going to film the murder scene soon which we are quite excited about as we get to play around with make up to try and make the murder victim's wounds look real, we will also be trying to film a point of veiw shot soon, which i feel this will be challenging but fun to try out for our opening scene. 
 The last thing that we have done is edited the parts of our film that we have filmed recently, this might take some time but are enjoying it so far.

Construction- Todorov Theory

There are three different moments which define a narrative. These are:

1) Equilibrium- Start of the film where everything is calm to start with, everyone is most likely to be happy.

2) Disruption-  Middle of the film where there is a disruption to the calm, everyone is more likely to be sad. 

4)In the process of solving problem- Near the end when everyone resolves the disruption.

3) Return to equilibrium- this is where the problem is resolved and returns back to a calm mood( the equilibrium).

This keeps the audience hooked and interested in the film, this theory is mostly seen in all movies as it is a safe plot to follow.
Usually in a thriller movie by the end the antagonist should be killed there fore following the structure of Todorov's theory. However this does not apply to all thriller films. some have a twist and start from the ending and finishing with the beginning, such as the film 'Cloverfield'. these films rewrite Todorovs theory

Planning- Reflections- Important

Reacent events of this week have left me alone to create the rest of the movie and finish the blog by myself as my partner michael has dropped out of sixth form, i am nervous but i feel that i will get through this with a lot of hard work and will power through to complete this all.

Planning- Master Catalogue list

These screen shots are of our master catalogue, each of these screen shots show the process we will have to take in order to film. As you can see, we had to show where the film will be set, the props used, characters, and the actors.

This shows us what kind of things we might need to include into our two minute opening scene.

Each one of the pieces helps us define our characters, look at what props we need to use and why they need to be used, where the film is set and why make up is required.

This catalogue will help us to keep track of everything and anything so that we can keep our movie on track.