Evalutation Question number 2

How effective is the combination of our main project with our ancillary tasks?

Aside from our production we also produced both a poster and a magazine article to complement it. In our lessons we have been studying the use of advertising in magazines, and so we all had much knowledge of the subject to put in our ancillary tasks.

For continuity purposes once more we looked at how “law abiding citizen” released its posters, and how that related to its film, to see if we could achieve the same with the content of our film.

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN POSTERS

Upon analysing the posters above we found a certain continuity with the advertising campaign for the film. We saw that the font that they used was not chunky which has a large impact on the posters, in addition the colour scheme for the font is consistent too with white and red being common, this in our view was to show the use of both the red as the antagonistic colour, and the white as the protagonists, and we felt this worked very well. Finally the writing in the most prominent poster is vertical, making people take a second look, or a longer first glance at the poster, which could in turn make them want to see it.

In our poster we have written our title vertically and also in red, however not simply to show the colour of a antagonist, but it matches the colour of the inside of the van door in the background. We thought that by doing this the people watching it would automatically make a synoptic link between the red and the van, and so make them track the scene sequence even closer. To anchor this we have contained half the faces of all the characters in the film, but they all lie in the same area with none having and dominance, and so not giving away any of the characters parts in the film.

Our idea of having the foot hanging from the van we feel connotes the death of a character, anchored through the limp nature of how the foot is stead. This is shown through the light being let in through the van, and yet still no movement, naturally if someone was in the back of the van and was still alive, one would presume that they would be moving. The opening of the door was originally a drawback because there was no interior light in the back of the van, but it ended up making the photo look a lot clearer once we had edited it in Photoshop.

We went through many drafts for the poster, originally having a completely different photo which was edited, but in comparing the original and the final product, we feel it compliments our film far more thoroughly through continuity of clothing and props than the original.

ORIGINAL POSTER

We had many difficulties in gaining the correct photo for the poster in order for it to successfully compliment the film. For a start if we wanted the photo to be on scene it meant we had to bring a stills camera with us two, and remember in between shooting to take photos of the scene, this became tiring and was starting to effect the way in which we made the film, in which case we decided that we didn’t want to have a still from an actual scene of the film, because it was such a short film we thought we would create something completely different, something the audience not see in the film, which is the inside of the van, so nothing from the film is given away.

In addition to the poster we also made a magazine article to show which category and where our film would be analysed to the public. To make sure we did this right, we visited the VUE website where many films are reviewed and analysed, the format was quite simple, it required a description of the plot, a star rating from numerous reviewers, and a still from the film. Luckily in our original stages we had taken many stills and so had a variety to choose from in choosing which photo to go into the review. The review however was a great way to explain the film to people who wanted to see it and to people who had seen it and may not have followed closely enough.

FILM REVIEW

In retrospect the ancillary tasks were difficult to produce effectively because of the time frame that they had to be made in. For the poster and review to work effectively and have the correct content we had to create them after finishing filming and editing our film. However this process takes over the far majority of the time that we had been given, and so i think we may have been able to make a higher quality film review if we had more time, but with drawbacks and editing unfortunately this was not the case.

Evalutation Question number 3

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

In the construction stages of our film the video footage was originally imported into imovie, though this proved too low a quality to use for editing. With this considered, we then imported the footage into final cut express which allowed us to add effects and edit audio accordingly. These effects would prove to be incredibly beneficial to the general aesthetic of the video.

We filmed using a Sony Digital High definition Video Camera, which allowed us to use higher quality footage in our film. However despite the fact that the quality on camera and editing was very good, many of the scenes once placed on YouTube became blurry and quite difficult to make out, this was down to the fast pace of the scene changes rather than the quality of the equipment that we were given.

In the research and planning stages large referencing sites such as YouTube where used to look at videos of previous films like “law abiding citizen”. YouTube gave us access to almost every scene from the film and meant that we could analyse the parts that we needed to very easily. In addition to this we used Google maps in the planning of where our film was going to be shot. We plotted on a map where all of our houses were and decided which the best for everyone to go too was. Luckily every member of the group was able to drive and so although the drive may have been long we were able to all get to the same place.

In communication we had many technologies at our disposal. The school “leaning environment” which everyone in the school has access to gives every person in the school a Gmail account. In using Gmail we could immediately share documents with each other in a very easy format, additionally we could also copy in our teacher so he knew when and where we were filming, and this was used on many occasions to book out the equipment when we needed it, and was use full for our teacher to then be able to ask us for it back. What made Gmail especially help full was the fact that we all had blackberry Smartphone’s and so when sending an email everyone would receive it like a text and made the process far quicker, it was like having our own online blogs to instantly talk to each other.

Upon publicising the film, Facebook was a great tool. It was good because when i posted the film in my status i knew it was going specifically to an audience that would be interested to see this genre of film in a cinema, in addition to this when people commented on the video we could use this as primary research, and analyse the comments that people had made. Not only this but it was a free and effective way of showing our film to as many people as possible.

We also used Microsoft word to type up a lot of our research and Microsoft excel to quantify the data which we had collected from our research.

Evaluation Question number 4

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

There were two main methods which we used to obtain our audience feedback, one through Facebook, and the other through questionnaires that we handed out to people. However what was key about both of these is that we provided pre and post production questionnaires to compare the feedback that we received and see if what we made was what people actually wanted.

In the original questionnaire process we had 6 main questions that we asked to gain the best feedback that we needed. We based these questions on a number of variables. These variables were designed at our specific audience; because we were asking the majority of our questions to people who were at our school our general age base was between 16-18 years of age, this therefore simplifies the situation for us, the most quantifying we had to do was the sex of the participants.

To begin with Facebook, we ran links through all of our statuses on Facebook asking people if they wouldn’t mind filling in a online questionnaire that we had made. This was easy for us to analyse because we could digitally see the results and did not have to quantify them ourselves, whereas the questionnaires that we handed out, we had to quantify ourselves which was time consuming, and not what we wanted when we had so much cutting to do.

Names	Comments	Out of 10
Amber Olley	Very good film with fast and exciting shots. The lighting was interesting as it gave a sense of reality.	8 / 10
Kate Sophoclides	I liked the film. The narrative was easy to follow yet I like the way there were flash backs to represent the time passed.	9 / 10
Jonathon Shell	The film was exciting and easy to understand.	9 / 10

Having said this, by handing out questionnaires before our production started it really did help. They showed that people had mainly watched both actions and thrillers. We had only one person who said that they hadn’t seen both, but the majority said that they had enjoyed action more than thrillers. However even having this feedback and deciding that we wanted to make an action films, there were large drawbacks, not only budget, seeing as we didn’t have one and most action films require lots of special affects which are expensive, but also the basic filming equipment, which during filming showed a good picture, but once uploaded to Google lost all of its quality. Not only this, if we decided that we did want to make a stunt ourselves, not only would we be hampered by a budget, but also health and safety would not allow through the risk assessment that we had to follow.

the information that we gathered was helpfull because it pointed us into the right direction to make something that people actually wanted to see, and not over complicate things like we almost did from the start. on originally embarking on doing this we had many elaborate ideas of making drug baron films and things that we would have been unable to pull off, however through analysing our research we were able to make something look the best we could possibly make it without OVER complicating things, as our film is still rather complicated for some people to follow.

Although the post production questionnaire could be seen as less helpful, it was more satisfying than helpful, because we could see what people thought of our film that we had spent hours and hours filming and cutting. This was mainly because it was just when we showed it to friends and family. However the Facebook side was far more analytical. We sent the same questionnaire around afterwards with an additional link to our film, and left space at the bottom of the questionnaire to see how people would rate and genre our film to see what they thought it was, and whether they enjoyed it. We could then compare this against the original data. However, a problem that we noticed by the end is that numerous people classified our film as a thriller, whereas it is meant to be an action film, with thrilling parts in it. So in this case it showed that some of the information we gathered in the original pre production questionnaires, may have actually lead us in the wrong direction