Media A2 Portfolio

Evaluation

For our short film, we aimed to achieve something that was original and made people think about the diversity of our society. We did plenty of research into short films, analysing the positive and negative effects of the different elements used. Therefore, we were able to gain a sense of various successful devices that we could then develop within our short film. One film that we were particularly inspired by was " 10 minutes" by Ahmed Imamovic which demonstrates how someone’s whole life can be destroyed in such a short space of time (10 minutes), whilst someone else can just be doing an everyday task. It also highlighted the severe contrast within different cultures – Bosnia and Italy. We found this short film extremely moving, and thought the devices used were extremely successful to emphasise the difference of culture – especially the use of lighting and black and white. Therefore, we decided to use this technique within our film. We were also inspired by the diversity of religions within the short film “Strangers”, so decided base our narrative on two teenage girls, born on the same day, yet living in completely different words.

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

After researching into a variety of short films we discovered that there were certain conventions that were extremely effective within films. We found that a common convention was the use of silence to create atmosphere within drama films. Therefore, we decided to take this idea and developed it within our film. We also found that the mis- en-scence throughout the short films were all very detailed. This could be due to that fact that there's a shorter amount of time to get the narrative across. Everything within a short film seems to have much more focus to detail. During the film a wide variety of shots, angles and movements were used, especially in short films that had dialogue. This is probably because the producer/director wants to portray the characters emotions through the camera shots – especially obvious in close ups. The representation of the characters was also clearer – by using costumes to represent their personality.

We dressed the spoilt teenager in a ‘Juicy Couture’ tracksuit as this is what stereotypical ‘spoilt teenage girls’ wear in magazines and in television programmes such as ‘My Super Sweet 16’. The spoilt girls in the film ‘Mean Girls’ (Regina George) also wear this type of clothing, so we decided to develop this convention within our film. We were inspired to create a film about society and different social classes, due to the current news and appeals for less fortunate countries and individuals. We wanted to highlight these issues and concerns to the teenage audience. We challenged the conventions of a typical drama by not using any dialogue, speech or voiceovers in order to portray our narrative. We relied on just music to help us tell our story, as the tone of the music matched the tone of the film. Many films follow Todorov’s theory of equilibrium and disequilibrium. This is where the film begins with a calm period, before disruption causes disequilibrium (a period of unsettlement). This is then followed by a renewed state of peace and harmony and a new equilibrium brings the chaos to an end. This is a typical Hollywood storyline. We challenged this convention, because, although our film does start with a calmer period (the spoilt girl before the tramp scene) there is never a renewed state of peace. However, we have followed Levi-Strauss’ binary opposition theory throughout the film through the use of colour versus black and white, and also in the contrast of characters and locations.

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

We believe that the combination of our short film and our ancillary tasks complement each other as the film poster and magazine review highlight the key theme within the film, which is the diversity of society. After researching and analysing a variety of film posters from different genres of films we became aware of the common conventions that are used within the construction of a film poster. We found that institutional references were nearly always used, and logos were used most of the time, normally aligned at one side of the poster. We also found that the colours used also reflect on the genre of the film. A picture to highlight the narrative was always used and the characters clothing and positioning within the poster represented the characters role within the film. Several of the posters also used photos merged into other photos which created the effect of lives overlapping and looked very professional. This was the effect we wanted to achieve with our poster as our film included following two characters with two contrasting lives. The titles of the films were also one of the more prominent features on the poster. They were always large and nearly always took up the entire page. The main actors/actresses names were mostly at the top of the page which could be representing their importance within the film. On the poster, we used graffiti in a rundown area as the background, with the spoilt teenager posing in her sunglasses and juicy couture tracksuit in front of it. Her pose shows us that she’s confident, vain and selfish the way she’s holding money in her hand could show naivety and ignorance. We tried to challenge the stereotypical conventions of normal media products by putting the title up the side. This is rare with film posters but we believed this is successful as it challenged conventions and brought across the narrative of the story, in the sense of the two characters challenging the norms and values of society. We made the poster on Photoshop, so edited the wall so that it was in black and white and the girl was in colour – these binary oppositions emphasises the extreme contrast of the two girls lifestyles.

We also analysed into a variety of magazine reviews. By doing this, we realised that there are various different layouts for magazine reviews. This could depend on the magazine that the review has been published in, as magazines tend to review their genre of film, for example, ‘Heat magazine’ would most generally review chick flicks and romantic comedies. An extremely common convention of magazine reviews is the star rating, which is normally positioned at the bottom of the page at the end of the columns. The authors name is also written on the review at either the top or the bottom. In some magazine reviews there is a brief outline of the plot before the actual review is written. Many of the magazines we analysed also had a sector divider, dividing the main review from smaller reviews. Logos are also used along with the production company somewhere within the review. Therefore, we decided to use these typical conventions on our ancillary tasks as we believe that the relationship between the ancillary tasks is extremely important, because your advertising has to be extremely effective and eye catching in order to attract your target audience.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We presented our draft of ‘Two World’s Difference’ to our target audience (our class of teenagers) and asked them to fill in both, positive and negative feedback on post it notes. We presented the results we got on a PowerPoint and analysed the feedback we received. As well as asking our peers to write on post it notes, we also presented them with a questionnaire where we asked 10 important questions. We included the feelings and emotions of how the audience felt whilst watching our film and hoped this would give us a better insight into how our audience perceived our

film. After receiving our feedback, we realised that the audience didn’t feel that they connected with the characters. They were unclear as to whom the personal shopper was and assumed it was just a friend of the spoilt girl. They also felt that there wasn’t a wide variety of shot types and the camera was far too wobbly, which gave the whole film a very amateur effect. Therefore, we decided to re film the spoilt scenes of our film, including several different shot types and representing the girl in a much more spoilt way, by including sunglasses and making her act with a far more spoilt attitude. We also decided to use her mother, rather than a personal shopper to make the narrative

of our story clearer. Another issue we found was that the music was thought to be too dated for our target audience. Therefore, we decided to change it to a more upbeat, mainstream music that our target audience will recognise, as most teenagers generally listen to chart music. We also decided to use a ‘2’ on our film poster, rather than the word ‘Two’ as it made the number 2 more poignant, as there are two girls and also reflected our target audience because of the increase in technology and texting etc.

After showing our audience our second version of ‘Two World’s Difference’ they said that they liked the wobblier camera in the tramp scenes, as this represented the characters unstable, insecure life. The audience also liked the contrast of the two environments and felt that our mis-en-scene set up portrayed both the characters lifestyles well. However our audience were not clear on the genre of our short film – a contemporary drama. Overall, we found our audience feedback extremely useful as it helped us to develop our ideas into a film that the audience would be much more interested in watching.

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

During our whole production, we learnt how to use a lot of new technology and software. Throughout our filming we used two different cameras; a Sony with standard definition, that we borrowed from college as well as a Panasonic standard definition that we borrowed off a friend. Right through the construction of our film we had many problems with the editing software. Firstly, our film wouldn’t upload on certain computers, which prevented us from starting to edit. This made us struggle with time management, which therefore, restricted what we were able to do in such a short space of time. When we finally managed to upload our film, we found out that our home computers had different software (Windows Live Movie Maker). This meant we were only able to edit our film at home where we had started it, which made the time we had even less. This also disadvantaged our construction as the other editing software would have produced a far better quality production.

As we were editing on Movie Maker, the shots gradually got smaller on the screen every time we edited a new bit which unfortunately, we were not able to fix. We used a wide range of technology throughout the research, planning, construction and evaluation. This included Photoshop, which we used to create the film poster. We used it to edit the colours of the background into black and white so that binary oppositions were used and also to add red lipstick to the spoilt girl, so that she

appeared more materialistic and ‘snobby’. Adobe Premier Pro was also used to import our film, and then we transferred it onto Windows Movie Maker as we knew how to use it and we had very little time to edit.

We also used voice recording and mobile phones to communicate with one another throughout the filming process. We used a blog to store and present all our work. We produced most of our work on PowerPoint so that the audience were able to view it as a slideshow. However, we also used Microsoft Word for our production log and most of our written work before we imported it into a PowerPoint, Microsoft Publisher to make our magazine review, paint to cut our pictures for the short film analysis and Microsoft Excel for our ghannt chart, which displays our time management. As a group we believe that our production was not as successful as it could have been due to lack of resources and the editing software. We also placed auditions to find appropriate actors for our film from the drama department. However, these actors/actresses were not able to act on the days allocated on such short notice, so we had to take the roles. This restricted us in certain ways as we are not drama students!

One of the main sources of technology we used was the internet. We used this throughout our production, to help us gain ideas and analyse other typical media products. This helped us gain more knowledge and experience about what we wished our final products to look like. ‘YouTube’ became extremely useful to us to look up different short films, and take typical conventions we liked and challenged them to suit our product. It also benefited our construction as we were able to upload and distribute our video and gain audience feedback, so were were able to change certain things about our film from their feedback. We also used a variety of internet sites to help us communicate between other members of our group and our actors, for example ‘Facebook’ and ‘MSN’. We also used these to gain feedback from other peers about our short film. The internet persuaded more of our peers to watch our film due to technology becoming a large part of everyday lives. To add in music we used the website ITunes which is a popular music website where both mainstream and older music is available. Using ITunes made us able to see the most popular songs and we adapted this to our benefit, as we wanted our product to be up to date and attract the mainstream audience. Many costume ideas also came from the internet. We researched stereotypical spoilt girls and found many wore branded products like Juicy Coture etc. The impact on using the internet throughout our production shows how technology has moved forward in time and suits our target audience. We also used blogs which enables us to upload all our research, planning and production and helped us to communicate with one another. We used 'slideshare' to upload powerpoints onto our blog.

If we could improve our production we would try and use a High Definition camera to make our production look more professional and enhance our overall mis-en-scene. We would also try and arrange actors and actresses a long time in advance, and have backups just in case they were to pull out at the last minute. However, we are happy with our finished product and enjoyed making it. We also believe the point that we were trying to portray came across within our narrative – the extreme difference of these two teenagers lives, even though they were born on exactly the same day and have exactly the same name. We learnt a great deal from using digital technology s as E-media now enables you to upload your film on websites such as 'YouTube' which enables you to gain audience feedback and improve your production. We also learnt that other editing software, for example, Adobe Premier Pro would have enables us to produce a higher quality production. The mindmap below shows our progession from the AS coursework to the A2 and highlights how much we have learnt.

Conventions Powerpoint

Evaluation

View more presentations from Harriet Hearn.

Media A2 Portfolio

Thursday 5 May 2011

Audience Feedback Piecharts

FINAL NEW Magazine Review

Friday 17 December 2010

Evaluation

Audience Feedback Powerpoint

Audience Feedback Questionnaire

Magazine Review SECOND DRAFT

Film Poster FINAL