Media A2 Portfolio
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Friday, 17 December 2010
Evaluation
Evaluation
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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?
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?





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
Audience Feedback Questionnaire
Thank you for watching our short film - Two Worlds Apart. Please could you fill in our questionnaire below so that we are able to make any necessary changes to improve our film? Thank you J
1. Did you enjoy the narrative of our film?
2. Please can you rate our film from 1-10? (10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest)
3. What was your favourite part of the film?
4. What was your least favourite part of the film?
5. Did our film have an emotional effect on you at all?
6. Did our film make you think about diversity of society?
7. Did the characters interest you and were they represented well?
8. What did you think of the mis-en-scene and location?
9. Who do you think the intended audience is?
10. Could you suggest any changes that would make the film more effective?
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