Evaluation final- Hannah Sell

Advanced portfolio evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

• For our short film we were trying to achieve a successful hybrid genre of social realism and thriller, as social realism seems to be a successful genre in the British short film industry.
• We chose social realism as we wanted the audience to feel as if they could relate to the character and the situation that he is in and feel like this could be them that this is happening to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6bM7j1kTWE-

• We studied a number of short films in previous lessons to help us with ideas and inspiration for our final product. we looked at films like Luke Snellin’s Mix Tape and Andrea Arnolds Wasp, these helped us greatly as we got to look at other short films and got some ideas for storylines, settings and also contributed to our sound decisions.

• Mixtape uses music to express what is happening with little dialogue. We used this as inspiration for our film, we liked the idea of using hardly and dialogue and using music to express what was happening in our film. Mixtape uses music to show how one young child feels for another it sets the scene with an upbeat tempo. we wanted to use music rather than dialogue because it meant we could use faced paced music to make the audience feel on edge, we also sped up part of our film and we wanted to add something fast paced with a beat to it to add top the effect of going at a high speed.
• We used a variety of different editing techniques, we included a slowed down rewound clip of someone being run over. Traditionally in films this effect is used to show something that has happened or something that is about to happen. We used this effect as a memory that would appear frequently thought the film as flashbacks.


How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?

• I think that our two ancillary tasks the film review and the poster link both well together and with the film itself. We wanted the audience to question what was happening in the film and add some mystery to this so we felt we should do this with the poster also.

• We didn’t want the poster to give too much away so we used the film Red Road’s poster as inspiration for ours we tried to keep it as simple as possible.
• We used a shilloute as our main image to add the added effect of mystery which we also wanted to show in our film. Also the fact that the mysterious character that matt is chasings identity isn’t know the poster goes along with this kind of idea of no identities being known and nothing about the film is being given away.
• The bright background also makes the poster stand out and catch the audience’s eye, it also goes with the idea that matt has to wear a florescent jacket in the film and the florescent jacket he is also wearing in the image used for the review.
  

• We tried to create the review in the same format as in little white lies. We used an image from the film at the top of the page lie most of the articles have in the magazine. We also included the small colorued boxes on the left top corner above the text like the magazine does. We wanted it to look as realistic as possible like it belongs in the magazine.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

• We have received several positive comments form our audience to get these comments we posted out film and a blog link on Facebook and received some comments through here and also through You Tube itself.
  

• From these comments we have learnt that our film has worked very well using the conventions we decided on. Though many people were confused as to why our character was running around a scarp yard once we explained the story in detail to them they completely understood.
• We have had many positive comments on the soundtrack of our film and our audience have said it really adds to the feeling of the film.
  

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

• During the creation of our short film we were quite successful in using many different types of digital technology. These included two digital cameras to film with using mini DV tapes. I found these quite easy to use as we had used them last year however one of them filmed in wide screen and one of them did not we had to change this in final cut which I did not no how to do but was shown.
• We used final cut pro which I had some knowledge of how to use but learnt a lot of new skills on this program, these included how to slow scenes down and speed scenes up also how to rewind scenes and resize them so that they are wide screen.

http://files.lynda.com/files/finalcutstudio/index.html#fcp7

• We used garage band to create the soundtrack to our film however I didn’t really use garage band much as I didn’t play a big part in creating the sound but I did learn how to convert the files into an MP3 format to add to our film. I also learnt in final cut pro how to change the volume of clips meaning we could get rid of all the background noise and add music. I also learnt how to fade the music in and out which I did not no how to use before.
  

• The only we problem we seemed to have was with one of the cameras we were originally using a camera that Gareth had but when we went to log our work we found out it wasn’t possible as the camera was using a cassette sized tape and we should have been using mini DV’s. When we finally managed to log out work we saw it was of poor quality and we would defiantly not be able to use it so we took the decision to re-film with two digital cameras that used mini DV tapes.
• The blog was a big use of new media digital technology in the creating of our short film. I didn’t need to learn much to use the blog as we had used one last year. However I did learn how to upload links to with our film such as inspiration for our film and the link to our film itself. We had trouble at first working out how to upload our anamatic onto the blog but soon worked it out and didn’t have any trouble uploading our final film onto it. I also learnt how to upload images onto the blog as I did not now how to do this before and found it was quite easy once I new. This helped as then it was easy to upload the storyboard and various images to go with my research for the film and also images for the poster research and the initial poster ideas.