Main Task: Completed Film

Evaluation: Question 1

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

Here is a link to a powerpoint presentation I prepared for this question:


http://prezi.com/gf020sqd7fqa/present/?auth_key=qa33u7t&follow=1gn8lef6jcxi

Evaluation: Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Evaluation: Question 3

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

Evaluation: Questions 4 & 5

Who would be the audience for your media product? How did you attract/address your audience?

In order to gain feedback from our target market, our group wanted to ask for other students opinions on our finished film. We recorded, edited and posted this whole video using just an iPhone so we could have opinions in a naturalistic way from teenagers the same age as our target audience.

Evaluation: Question 6

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

Filming

In the process of constructing our product, our group has learnt many things in able to produce a professional piece of work. By using a digital HD camera, we managed to produce a better quality film to capture every aspect in the frame clearly which made our film look very professional. We experimented with non- HD cameras too and noticed a clear difference in quality with the HD camera.

Our group also learnt that using a tripod for still images and panning proved a lot better than hand-holding the camera because there were no shakes or unsteady filming with a tripod because a tripod allows the camera to be completely still which was necessary when filming certain scenes such as shots in the woods and for the characters in the car to indicate the car had stopped. Also, a tripod can be leveled and altered to suit a particular shot which our group found very useful because it allowed us to use a range of different shots such as panning up, staying on eye level and filming from the ground. These shots were very successful in our piece.

Editing

When editing our film, our group used Final Cut Pro designed for Mac computers. It was helpful software because it enabled us to use many different transitions, add titles and collate our piece together professionally. Each group member participated in editing parts of our film. We found the software easy to use and found quick ways to cut clips we did not need.

General

For each piece of work that contributed to the main task, we had to display this work on a blog which helped keep our work organised and clearly showed the planning and research we produced to help us in our main task. Each member of the group has a personal blog which all our work is uploaded to in order to keep our work stored in one place. On the blog we uploaded posts relevant to our film including research on the BBFC, other relevant films and an animatic version of our storyboard that we had to produce to help with our planning of the scenes. Originally, the storyboard was on paper but to show our knowledge of new technology, we converted the storyboard to an animatic version which was clear to understand through only images.

Evaluation: Question 7

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

I feel that the preliminary task was a good chance to learn about and experiment with the camera in advance before using it to film our main task. Before the preliminary, I had not used a digital HD camera before and needed to discover how to capture successfully. The task also enabled us to experiment with different tools on ‘Final Cut Pro’ and work with simple editing to merge a sequence of clips together. Also, the objective of the preliminary was to work on the continuity of shots and scenes before the main task, so that we knew how to construct a film professionally, making sure that the film flowed. Once we focused on perfecting the continuity and produced a short clip, we learnt how to import our product, edit and cut with tools and effects. This helped prepare us for our upcoming task to familiarise ourselves with the software as well as experiment with camera shots that we thought would look successful in our piece. This was useful when it came to our main task because we knew what to expect.

In the preliminary, we had used the camera and tripod and worked with final cut pro which broadened our knowledge on the technology we’d be using. However, there were aspects of the film that we did not consider when completing the preliminary task such as working with voice-overs, sound effects & music and titles. Because there was little time to experiment with these features, we did not use them in our preliminary and therefore had to experiment with them during our main task. When filming the main task, we had not taken the camera and tripod out to discover new locations before therefore this also added extra time to finding suitable locations and using the camera to experiment with shots we could capture.

After looking back at our preliminary task, we realised that our clip had good continuity and therefore assumed we would get the continuity accurate in the main task. However, when we imported and watched through our footage, we realised that we were not as careful in filming as we should have been with our continuity and so some shots did not flow together. As we were short for time, we could not re-film –also due to the fact that the mise en- scène would be different- because of the weather and other possible changes in surroundings. This is something we would take in to account in the future.