Nigel's Evaluation

Question 1:
In what ways does your media product use , develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

In preparation for the making of our short film, we had to research different short films and to do so I know I watched many of them to help me choose what ones I would write my analyses on. This meant that I could see different types of genre of short film and perhaps get ideas. I think our short film was inspired by one short film where we liked a concept then changed it to suit us and then used it to basically run our narrative, with the fact Eve is talking to someone who isn’t actually there.

Typical camerawork in these short films were very character related. The shots either were close up on the characters revealing their emotion and body language or they were kept mysterious from a distance with an ELS/LS or a MLS. This is shown a lot in ‘DO NOT PRESS’. The camerawork is very close and the composition of the character in lane is always very visible. This helps show his emotions and body language on screen which fills in the absence of dialogue in this short film. This wasn’t something we focused on in our short film because we wanted to show that she was isolated and what we tried to suggest that was that she wasn’t completely sure what was going on really unlike this character who knows what he is focused on, the button. There is a shot where the button is on the table whilst he eats Pizza which uses a focus pull to show what he is looking at in a different unique way. We do use a kind of close up with the two characters in the frame, this shows their expressions, but most of the shots that we wanted to show expressions with in our short film came from a little further distance than a close up, nearly a mid-shot for example when they were talking by the brick wall and the shot reverse shot showed Eve’s body language and facial expression. We didn’t use many long shots in our short film, which we probably should have. We used long shots with Eve walking along the road but that was it really, that established the quietness of the area. The narrative between these two short films, ‘DO NOT PRESS’ and ‘The Black Hole’ are similar with similar quiet and curious protagonists but they use different camerawork which shows that it can be completely up to the creative mind. I think we should have used more long shots and close ups whilst in the house and doing actions because long shots may show that she is lonely, although she really isn’t because of the annoyance of the hallucination and close ups would show more ambitious cinematography than we actually did although I think that the composition of the subjects in the frame did fit in a way that represented them how we intended to do. You don’t need a close up to show an object such as the button and piece of paper with the black hole show me from those short films. It seems here that the camerawork that we used kind of suited the same style of these two short films, we didn’t go over the top in long shots or anything like that but we managed to create tension and suspense using shots that you could see everything in frame as these two short films do whilst showing the isolation and loneliness of Eve, this is done in the black hole with the first shot of the character standing alone by the photo copier alone with sounds going on around him. This may suggest that he’s being left out or isn’t part of the office crowd when in our short film there is no suggestion that there is anyone else around because there is no sound and she is always alone which has the same suggestion that she isn’t part of the crowd. Like Trespass, our short filmed included a few shots that were POV, this is something that we used as a way to show that they are two different characters, as you can see Eve's hallucination as Eve is walking past her.

Sound was important to us when making our short film. We recorded sound with every shot that we took on a sound device. This meant that we had a different copy of the sounds which were better quality from a shotgun microphone which was pointed towards the sound which meant that sounds around the microphone were largely not picked up which meant we could emit the sounds of planes, and instead capture the sound of nature and silence. Capturing this means that we could make the sound seem quite eerie with the silence and lack of human activity on screen and off screen. I would say that short film wise, the one that gave me the most inspiration for sound was ‘Missed’. This short film was the one that influenced my idea about Eve speaking to a dead person who is in her head, then that transformed to speaking to a hallucination of her, battling her thoughts within. I think the sound shows the emotion of the character being shown by perhaps contrapuntal sound as you can easily tell he is having a kind of reaction to the news of the woman dying, but has a very calm soundtrack throughout. I think some sound which may seem contrapuntal to the situation is when Eve is standing by the car dancing to the song on the radio that she had discovered because she is alone in the world and everything seems abandoned yet she can have fun and dance, with happy music. This scene was important to us as it showed her feeling like she can loosen up, but when she hears ‘Run!’ it all changes and the overall mood changes completely. I think this is the same sort of thing that happens at the end of Missed because the music changes and he looks up to realize that what he imagined isn’t actually true, therefore nothing was actually calm. The characters are completely different which means that sound can be used differently to represent them. Our character, Eve, is less calm than the protagonist of Missed and this is shown by her nightmare for example which uses distorted music and laughs which are contrapuntal to the situation once again. We used ambient sound which we recorded for minutes at a time to try and get good silence for the short film, I feel like Missed doesn’t have to use much sound to actually portray what happens on screen and instead focuses on the narrative and cinematography, I feel like this was similar to ours as we didn’t use a lot of sound but we were very picky with what we actually used such as the ambient sound had to be quiet enough and not contain anything that would spoil a scene, we wanted it how it was intended sound wise and had the opportunity to do so with the amount of time and recording we did of sound and recording crucial Foleys, one that we recorded which took the most effort and time was the smashing of the plant pots, we had several that we smashed on solid ground outside.  

Us whilst recording audio on set

Mise en scene was an important building block to our short film. In the short films I have researched, mise en scene was used throughout each single one as there will always be, this is costume and every object that appears on screen as most likely, and they’ve been put there or chosen for a reason. In DO NOT PRESS this could be like the pizza, which has some connotations. It could suggest that this man may be a young adult or live by himself since, for starters, he is eating alone and it could be a take away which also suggests youth, me may even be the child of a family and live at home with his parents and they are at work or away. I feel like we used good costumes in our short film. This goes for all the characters involved, including the ones that weren’t in shot for long. I thought about the costumes used in Missed which related directly to their place of work, meanwhile trespass uses casual clothing and darker clothing to represent the darker character. This is something we tried to do with Eve’s hallucination having a darker coat and a different hair style to show it is a different person. The hair shows that Eve’s hallucination doesn’t really care what is going on since it seems to be more or less normal when Eve’s hair is put up which suggests that she has taken care in what she is doing, also it helps show the spectator that it is a different character and personality. I feel like we treated them as if they were completely different people, which they were, I like how we did this because we could have confused things and made the characters very similar, but making them similar but also having their major differences in both voice, body language and dialogue. Mise en scene was used a lot in DO NOT PRESS especially the costume of the protagonist. It suited the situation and built on his character quite a bit even though it was only casual clothes. I think we did this quite well with the person that is found in the house too as the costume barely showed much of the face and body of the man which may just make him seem like part of the crowd and nothing unique or as we were going for was a person surviving in the apocalyptic world. I think this is the overall theme for the short film, they are alone. This is suggested because of the whole hallucination part and the fact that everyone around her either runs or disappears in a nightmarish fashion.

Editing and post production work went on for a while since there was a lot to do as well as there was a lot that we were experimenting with. Before we did any of this, we did experiments in pre-production which allowed us to get an idea of what we were doing. One example that we experimented in pre-production was the lighting in the nightmare and that changed completely when we did the final thing because of the sound, laughter, the experimental shot and the colouring changed to something that I feel went a lot better than the original idea, the laughter that was recorded and picked out worked quite well to make the scene appear more eerie. I think this editing doesn’t compare with any of the short films that I looked at which suggests that it suited our situation more than what happened in the short films. This could be because we wanted to show that our character was distorted and not feeling completely sane or completely in control of herself which I don’t think relates to any of the characters in any short film I researched excluding Missed because that also had a protagonist which seemed to be dealing with a lot of emotional pain but instead they used sound a lot more to show this, with silence being the key, in our uncontrollable scene instead she is surrounded by red and there is a bold soundtrack which is high in volume. This difference is on the different scale but has the same effect, but the high volume soundtrack makes the scene seem more dangerous when the silence makes the scene seem more heart breaking and emotional and when there is music in Missed it is very quiet which adds to this. Post production allowed us to bring everything together, but this didn’t change much that we actually planned and instead allowed us to see that everything came together. In Missed they didn’t use the same character as we did, but the narrative with the fact he talks to someone who isn’t actually there is related to ours, but instead of having them stuck in Eves head, the main character in Missed is imaging the woman, or believing that she is there, we don’t actually know, which may suggest regret or not being able to let go whilst in our short film the hallucination connotes that Eve has been left alone so long that she is imaging someone there who is producing every negative thought she has and perhaps shows a fight with herself.

 Ancillary tasks:

The posters that I researched were mostly portrait with the exception of one but I believe that was for a reason. The portrait posters seemed to have a subject or the main eye catching object in the center of the image of the poster. This isn’t the case for the imitation game because it needs to be landscape to show off the star name of Benedict Cumberbatch, this means he can be a larger part of the poster without taking up so much room that the text would over lay on his face, it gives him half of the poster instead of being just in the middle basically. We did use this idea in our final poster designs with the image of the subject being quite big in the poster; the images of the characters are displayed in different ways. The final poster that is landscape has the character laying on the mirror looking towards each other, with different facial expressions. This is large on the poster because it is given the room to be, such as the imitation game's poster has. Differently, the Rusted's poster uses a smaller amount of space with black surrounding the blue like image of two people who have been placed together, merged into an image of a room. The images are placed either side of each other on the poster, which means that they are juxtaposed, the comparison in the costume and make up of both characters so they almost look like completely different actors instead of the same person. Paranormal Activitie's film poster was an image taken directly from the film, a famous scene when the two protagonists are in bed, this isnt something we wanted to do as we couldnt find a scene or a shot in our short film which would make a good contribution to the film poster. I think they can choose this image due to the annotations that come from the bedroom scene with the night vision cameras. 

This shows the different parts of this poster, all of these I have highlighted some things that I've talked about.

The title and the composition of the title on the film poster varies poster to poster. On the imitation game's poster, the title is placed on the left bottom corner, the rest of the left side is left for institutional details and reviews, a few words which are from a certain place which describe the film in a couple of words which are from well known places. Paranormal activities title is red and quite bold on the black, I think this is because its a horror style and wants to be dark and maybe the red colouring can connote danger. In our short film, the text and title is coloured white to stand out on the black background, but because its white and not red it perhaps shows that our short film isn't a horror and instead just a thriller, the text is also fragmented which may also suggest that Eve is broken.

These are all common conventions and we put that into place in our film poster. Another thing that we included was awards and accommodations given to the film. This would usually come with film festivals with short and low budget independent films. We chose to include this because it is a convention of short films, of course ours hasn't won any awards! This wouldn't be the case for most short films of course, but we chose to include as many conventions as we could.

Each film poster has a tagline or has a piece of text that is unique to the film or describes the film in general. For example, paranormal activity has 'what happens when you sleep?', this relates to everyone as everyone has to sleep, but is trying to mess with people at the same way as it is trying to put a twist on something everyone does every day, putting this idea in the audiences head that it could happen to them or anyone. We didn't have a tagline, although we included a quote that says 'Thrilling to the end' which may work in the same way. We could have included a tagline which related to our film directly, but we didn't. I think this could have made the poster even better and if I were to do the whole thing again I'd make sure we worked on a tagline to include. I think that our title is almost tagline like as it doesn't include much but describes our film entirely, but we could have given it more thought. I think it worked out better leaving one out in the end as it doesn't give as much away and instead we chose to keep it more mysterious with just a title.

Overall the conventions of a film poster include an image, being landscape and portrait, a catchy and title that stands out, a tagline, awards and reviews and finally the stars that appear in the short film. We did include text to show who our actors were but the main actor of course got the biggest and most room on the poster. We tried to use all of the conventions that we could on our own poster, this I hope resulted in a poster that we can be proud of but if we were to do it again I believe we could have done it a different way.

Little White Lies:

Little white lies is a subscription magazine which contains film reviews, ratings and overall film information. It is read mostly by people in the media industry and people with real big interest with film. This could be said because its not a cheap magazine, costing around £6 every 2 months and the quality is so good that people would often keep the copies because each copy is almost like a piece of art.

We followed the conventions of little white lie's reviews by copying the structure of the page that every review is written on. In this case it is an image at the top of the page, with 3 columns of text. The title is in the center of the page above the stars and director. There is a watermark of REVIEWS on the side of the page which appears on every page that there is a review. There is a page number at the bottom too. These conventions of a Little White Lies review appeared in ours, we pretty much used the structure to make our film review seem authentic to their magazine. This means that we had to build the page on indesign, which meant that we could try and get everything exactly how we wanted it. We didn't have enough text to fill up the whole entire 3 columns to begin with and instead we chose to leave it even though there is a small gap because this would be better than changing the text size or changing the font as this would be not correct in how Little White Lies structure their reviews.

An Annotated Little White Lies review

In language terms, we tried to use language which would suit the audience that we were aiming for. This means we used more sophisticated language and tried to make the whole review quite pleasing to read with several uses of alliteration and short and snappy instead of long sentences that

would mean that less infomation would be transfered. It is also written very creativly, giving opinions and reviews in unique ways so it is enjoyable for the audience to read. The genre of our short film is a thriller, this can be suggeted by our review and how we wrote it so there wasnt much given away and instead keeping everything very cloudy which may create enigma. One thing that the reviews never do and that is reveal much of the narrative or spoil anything so we tried to do the same.  













Question 2:
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Transcript:

In our project, we created our short film with two ancillary texts; these were our posters and film review. Obliviously these are put in place to promote the film and not contain much or any of the short film’s entertainment, this meaning that none of the narrative or spoilers are given away, therefore retaining the excitement and entertainment of the film and instead promoting the short film as something that they would enjoy to watch.  The poster is important because it is a quick way of promoting a film because you just need to look at it unlike a trailer for example, this is usually the case for big budget films so for low budget films and short films posters may be better because people won’t give them as much time when they may stop to look at higher budget film poster. We want them to know that it is a thriller whilst suggesting what it is about without giving little to any information.

Our demographic includes 16-24 year olds, both male and female audience for our short film. This meant that our poster also had this demographic as there would be no point in promoting the short film for a different demographic, therefore we had to use the same conventions as we did in our short film to make sure it stays on the same tone, genre and perhaps even just the expectations of mise en scene, sound and editing in creating an image of the mood of the short film.

The colour of the surroundings of the image is pure black. This suggests that it is a thriller according to my poster research as many thriller and horrors consist of the colour black, this relates with our short film as it follows these conventions, especially with lighting used and the locations being dark inside and even when we filmed outside we didn’t want too much light which shows that we transferred this convention over to the poster, creating a dark setting.

Our poster contains social networking sites on the top, which aim specifically for our target audience as they are the stereotypical users of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This, as we were able to gain our audience feedback, we know that this contains our demographic.

The characters are represented in a way which relates directly to the narrative, without spoiling much and instead just representing their characteristics and how they’re emotional states are presented, perhaps good vs evil is what it all comes down to because they are placed juxtaposed beside each other with clear vision of their facial expressions. These are the same characters used in the short film, the hair and makeup corresponding with how they are presented in the narrative with their personalities and roles in the plot. I think the fact that we chose to give the protagonist and antagonist roles to a female may help target our demographic as it has a variety of conventions and how it represents them as a strong female as well as a female overcoming a problem. The cast also consisted of similar ages to our demographic which may help them relate to the short film too. 

The target audience is very different than our short film is actually aiming for, this means that we should have probably changed the opinions of the review and suggested why they had that opinion instead of presuming that our demographic would read it, I think this is something I’d change if given the change to do it again.  Our review was made to give a review of the short film to an audience that buys a magazine every 2 months containing many reviews and segments which would interest film viewers with not many ads due to the substantial price of the magazine, which may make the magazine more targeted at people with very high interest in film since. Although people may be older who are interested in film and work in the film industry, they will still enjoy a film because of the cinematography and enjoy that aspect so they may fit into our audience since they just enjoy film. A review would appeal to the audience of a film magazine because they would like to see how a film has responses from different people.

The review targets the demographic that Little White Lies Reviews has is dedicated film lovers, usually working in the media industry or just a very strong interest in it. The first thing that you can tell that we were trying to sound and copy the style of the usual Little White Lies, by using a lot of long words such as this sentence at the beginning  of our review.  This means someone has to be educated to be able to read or perhaps educated to even enjoy this type of text.  They would like to know films that the review goes in favour for because they would want to watch it, this promotes our short film. With a poor review, people will have less motivation to go and watch a short or low budget film, but will sometimes still have success with people in its demographic and instead do poorly with people who it isn’t targeting .

Film marketing with these kinds of low budget films and short films may make use of film festivals. This is shown on our poster, like the magazine, perhaps this audience is suggested to be very interested in films, therefore a very minimal audience is being targeted when taking your film to a film festival but getting an award from a place such as festival can help promote your film to people who like film and perhaps even people who it doesn’t target. The film review would help our film gain attention with the positives and because it would be placed in a popular magazine which is only truly bought by people with creative interests, therefore perhaps expand our demographic if positive.

Question 3:
What have you learnt from audience feedback?

We collected audience feedback through our whole project stage. We researched in the planning phase, production phase and all through to the post production phase. Some of the responses we took and altered our own work due to the response but some admittedly we chose to not stray away from the original idea too much due to over complicating things.

To collect our data we used different ways to do this. Pretty much all of it was online, be that messaging services and survey websites which we could use such as straw poll, which we could send the link to loads of people who fit our demographic to give us a quick answer by ticking the box which they liked more. This was ever present in our decision making throughout our project; this helped us understand what people wanted. For example before making or planning our short film, we wanted to know what type of short film we should create. We had an idea of a short film set in an apocalyptic setting but nothing dangerous being the subject such as zombies and instead having a unique narrative such as with Eve and her hallucination, but before we chose to do this, we wanted to know if the setting interested our demographic or if it was too overdone. In the end I feel like this helped us craft two narratives which ran next to each other in our short film, as Eve is trying to get home through this abandoned land which isn’t given much detail but we do suggest that there is hardly any presence of humans but is also at the same time battling with herself within with her hallucination popping up to send her into an emotional spiral. This was all achievable by audience feedback as it gave us the confidence that we were heading in the right direction with our short film and we could play with the narrative to make it unique.    

Our demographic is 16-24 year old people, both female and males. This allowed us to figure out what our audiences would like and then we could ask our target audience questions and survey them on what they like and dislike so we could hopefully improve our short film to be more successful with people that it aims with. This audience is easy for us to find especially because of our age as would have friends who are this age therefore part of our demographic. Of course we didn’t just want to ask our friends so we did put our surveys out a little further to get an idea of what general people in this demographic may prefer. Of course we couldn’t do a mass scale survey but we managed to get friends of friends that we didn’t know on a personal level to give us information and their opinions which may have made it fairer and more trust worthy because they may have been more honest. We tried to ask as many people as we could to use the whole of our demographic, so people between 16-24 years old and both males and females we would ask therefore we didn’t ask the same people over and over which would have made it unfair as an example of their opinions as it would be one person’s view.  

The name of the short film which ended up being ‘Second Self’ was chosen by a large amount of people that we asked so we chose to go with that as everyone was also in agreement and audiences seemed to prefer this to all the other titles such as ‘Alter Ego’ and ‘Gone’. Our original title was ‘The way home’ which the audiences didn’t like so we had to change it to suit them, this was what we referred to our project whilst in production and planning and early into post production as was honestly just a name that we could call it until we chose the final title, which was heavily influenced on our audience feedback. One of the people we asked gave a detailed answer which was interesting to see the reasoning behind their opinion, saying ‘without being too direct and straightforward’ such as some of the other names that we had the on the list of suggestions like ‘Hallucination’. Basically ‘Second Self’ doesn’t give many details away but at the same time suits the short film and ‘captures everything it should’ in the narrative and overall mood of characters and general short film. So here in with the title we changed it because our demographic preferred something else. This means that we tried to fulfill what our demographic want and would like, targeting our audience.

Whilst research and planning, we decided to try out the techniques that we wanted to use such as the shot with two exactly the same actors talking to one and other as if they were other people. We used Stephen to test if this would work and what our limits were when doing this. We then used audience feedback to see the successfulness of the editing and whether people thought that having this narrative which would rely on shots like this be a good idea.

The majority of people thought that it was a good piece of editing and as we thought this was able to be successful on shoot we decided to go ahead with it and try and be ambitious with editing and shooting. The audience here gave us confidence that if it worked it would be good post production work and work well with our narrative therefore we could do what we intended to do with the same actor with two characters idea and bringing them into the same frame which may make the characters seem more believable.

http://strawpoll.me/6474095/r

Once we had our film synopsis, we got good feedback but also helpful things people didn’t like. This helped us develop our film idea and script to suit what people wanted. We cut a lot of our script to try and cut some of the past flashbacks and instead focus on the present and how Eve is coping at the time that it is set instead of why she is like she is using these flashbacks as we had several comments which suggested that we had made it far too confusing for the audience to follow. Once we had done that we felt like we had then sorted the confusing parts out of the narrative and film synopsis which meant that we could focus on how we can present the film visually to escape any more confusion, only showing one flash back which happened in a dream, you see Eve wake up right after having this experience with a filter making the screen red and laughter showing that it isn’t real but could be contrapuntal sound since it wasn’t funny at all, instead we tried to make this creepy. This I hope  made it clearer that there was a flashback/dream sequence to the viewer since we had several people in planning and research say it may become confusing.

Dan Mongardini on the synopsis: Good, I like it. The Distant past is confusing and it all seems a bit cheesy.

After completing the rough cut, we were able to present it to people and ask them for their opinions. It showed us that we were heading in the right direction although we knew that there was a lot of work to do with editing because of the amount of shots and cutting we had to do especially with the special editing effects such as the two shots with the same actor in them and syncing diegetic sound with the video such as the audio we recorded alongside the video. Knowing we were on the right direction, we could focus on tying what we had done in production together without really adding much more other than a title, at the time.

Another piece of feedback we got was more detailed and explained exactly what they thought. It suggested that our actor was good at performing and gave the character over well, even though this is none of our work except casting. It suggests that some of our shots were unclear and that they got confused about the two shots with the two characters in frame and took extra thought to understand what is going on. At the time there wasn’t much we could do apart from try and make it clearer that they were both different characters by giving them more screen time to define that they were completely different. The POV when she is walking around the corner with Eve’s hallucination is sitting on the wall is a clear indicator that they are different personalities. They commented on how the footsteps were unclear in scene 6, so we chose to up the volume of that so you could hear it better but not over exaggerated to make it unrealistic as we wanted to keep our realism as much as possible.

Luke Forster on a rough cut: I like the premise. Couple of patchy parts still needs some work.

AS Film Crew on a rough cut: Good intro. POV in scene 5 unclear. I thought they were the same person. Takes time to figure it out. POV in scene 6 (ceiling footsteps) also unclear. Enjoyable. Good performance. Looking forward to the final polished version.

So overall, we used the audience feedback throughout our project to change and adapt our short film to suit the demographic that we were aiming for. We set out on fulfilling what our demographic wanted instead of purely what we wanted and used the feedback to make things much clearer. We took evidence of most of the audience feedback we did but obviously some of it wasn’t recorded as we forgot or it just wasn’t possible at the time. I feel like the audience feedback strayed us into the right direction and allowed us to make a product that reflects our demographic.

Question 4:
How did you use media technologies in the construction, research & planning and evaluation stages?