Evaluation Homework

Evaluation

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms 

and conventions of real media products?

Whilst planning our film we used our research to interpret what scares people and what sort of horror appeals to them. We used a sense of realism as that is some feedback we collected from our research. We also took another aspect of our research in consideration whilst thinking of our film as we left suspense to draw the audience in and to only give them snippets of what they will experience when watching the "whole film".

A lot of movies that we researched involved a lot of point of view shots and wide shots that we involved, wide shots allow the audience to observe the surroundings 

and make the character seem isolated and alone which conforms to a typical horror. The lighting in this also demonstrates the idea that the girl is in a "safe" location which adds to the stereotypical conversions of horror. This shot also reflects typical teenage behaviour and what excites them, being alcohol and freedom, the girl also hides this from her parents which is evident in this scene. 

We also involved a lot of over the shoulder shots and point of view shots when the stalker is shown to leave his identity a mystery, the lighting in those shots also represent his nature and bad intentions as it is dark and his clothing being black and his hood covering his identity. The shots of him we involve include close ups of him evidently stalking this girls social networking sites and of him calling her just to hear her voice. This also conforms to the idea teenagers are vulnerable within society in relation to advertising there social life online, making it obvious they are home alone, posting pictures of themselves everywhere etc.

 The first shot we are exposed to of the girl is a low angle shot, showing her power in the situation of her saying bye to her parents, therefore reflecting her freedom and also reflecting her mood being high and happy. This shows the girls childish nature due to her coming out to say goodbye to her parents, it is also reflecting with her clothing being casual and her hair being up representing elements of venerability. 

There is a point of view shot that is a high angle showing how her status within the clip changes, as she becomes more vulnerable. We were inspired by the film: Paranormal Activity when filming our opening as it has a lot of wide shots also conforming to realism which is something we chose to follow in our horror. We feel that our opening does not conform to the sterotypical style of horror having the setting correspond to the genre also we feel that the opening credits portray our genre, although we deliberately wanted the audience to be aware of something but be distracted by the feeling of the main character being happy which the sound reflects. 

Question 2: How does your product represent particular social groups?

In our opening film, we chose to focus on teenagers being vulnerable and how they are perceived through social networking sites and the effect of it. We used extreme close ups to capture the moments where we are exposed to the stalker stalking the girls pictures, also we showed constant close ups of imessage chats showing how teenagers are so dependent on contacting there friends through technology. Our other character represents older men and how they are alone and creepy, also represented by the clothing he wears. 

Throughout our opening, we see the girl applying makeup which shows how she cares about her appearance instead of being responsible and focusing on the important things such as her safety, which is later on mocked by her leaving the front door open and the stalker being let into her home.

Question 3: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Question 4: How did you attract/address your audience?

ADD SCREENING

Question 5: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? 

FINAL DESTINATION

Click on the animation below to view video clip.

THE SHINING 

Click on the animation below to view video clip.

Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Macs

We used the macs to edit our footage, It took some time to get used to due to it being so different to the windows software. We used a programme called 'Final Cut Pro' to edit our actual footage. I also used my personal Macbook air to edit on.

Final Cut Pro

This is the programme that we used to edit our footage, called 'Final Cut Pro'. Ive never used this programme before so we had to use alot of youtube tutorials on how to do certain things (such as audio adjustments, cutting clips, changing the sounds). Due to me being the editor I learnt a lot about this programme via google, youtube. I personally prefer iMovie due to it being easier to use, although Final Cut had a wider range of transitions, and settings that could be beneficial to our movie. Due to me previously working on iMovie I had a general understanding of the programme so thought that using final cut pro would allow me to understand how that programme works. Although this was difficult as Final Cut pro was only installed on my personal mac making it difficult as I was unable to edit it during college. Although half way through editing the programme was installed on the school macs which was a big releif.

Youtube

I used Youtube in order to find ways of working Final Cut Pro by watching tutorials, I also used Youtube for our soundtrack 'Girls just wanna have fun', we emailed the person who posted that video to ask for permission in order to use that audio for our final piece.

SHOW EMAIL

 

Cannon

Using the camera again was not a problem due us learning from our preliminary task, however we gained a deeper understanding of how to zoom and focus by changing the settings from automatic to maual for particular shots. We also had a shot of the main character looking in a mirror so angleing the camera perfectly so you couldnt see it in the reflection was something we had to try a few times.

Arri 300

We did try and use the lights whilst filming but we chose not to use them as it moved away from our genre of horror so we chose not to, also our location made it difficult due to the stairway being so narror, so keeping the light consistent would have been difficult. Therefore we chose to use natural lighting, as we did want to take  the realistic approach.

Alice Programme

I used this programme to gain a better understanding of mis-en-scene in films and how setting and props correspond to the genre of the film. We took this into consideration as our location was a house opposite a park which creates mystery and fear, we also filmed at night when it was dark following the stereotypical horror style.

Microphones

We used these microphones for the first time whilst doing our final film, as in our preliminary task we didnt consider using them. Due to us following a realistic approach to our genre of horror, we had to use the microphone in order to pick up ambient sound. Although we did experience muffled sound being picked up which was a problem, so we did use some presynchronized sounds in order to cover the certain diegetic sounds we did not pick up.

 

Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product

Preliminary Task Evaluation

The Meeting

Evaluation

This is my groups preliminary task, representing our filming skills, involving continuity editing, such as match-on-action also applying the 180 degree rule and shot reverse shot. In my previous post I presented our planning that we did in order to ensure we had a solid story line, also to make sure we were able to include continuity editing. We thought match on action was a great editing technique that was easy to involve in our story as the actress Beth had 2-3 doors to open so we could see the speed at which she was travelling due to the match on action creating a fast flow which added to the build up of suspense. Although I think we could have chosen our actors more accordingly due to the time of filming as it was difficult to get hold of both actors when we had to film as their lessons clashed, which prolonged the filming process. This also affected one of the shots of Beth going down the stairs as we were unable to get hold of her as she was in lessons, so we decided to embed the 'shaky camera' technique that one member of our group did as we believed it worked well as it gave the audience a better understanding of her rushing as we were able to hear her breathing heavily and see how fast she was running as we were the spectator. There were a also a few other problems we were faced with such as the music, at the beginning we though it would be a nice introduction although we had difficulties fading it out when it was necessary when dialogue was involved. We overcame this problem by watching youtube tutorials on how to fade music in/out on iMovie as it was a new programme to all of us. When Beth gets into the room we see the back of her and she bends over slightly, followed into the next shot where the camera is now in front of her we had to put in a transition as we didn't get the shot of her getting up from that position which made it look jagged, as it was very noticeable so we thought the transition allowed both shots to merge better together. Also, through the conversation between both Beth and Kennedy we focussed so much on ensuring we follow the 180 degree rule we forgot to involve shot reverse shot. In order to show we understood this technique we made a clip of us demonstrating it:

Our original genre of our preliminary film was horror misleaded into a funny ending, similar to scary movie, as you can see thats one of the films that influenced our initial idea, but unfortunitly we had issues with lighting as we had to do all our filming in the school so getting the lighting very dark was difficult as we were in school during daylight, so to develop other elements of horror we added camera techniques such as shaky camera, putting the spectator in the actors position.