In this post I answer the evaluation question 4 which was "How did you media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages".
After completing this post I have come to the realisation that I have use a lot more media technologies than what I had originally thought I had. Upon reflection, the min thing that I want to change for the next time that I produce a film is that I what to think of a way that I can get around the issue with Adobe Premiere Pro. I loved using the software when I made my "Code 8" textual analysis video and I was devastated when I realised that I would struggle to use the programme with the quality of footage that I was shooting on the PC that I was using. In my opinion Corel is a good programme however it is far inferior to Premiere Pro. This is because Premiere is more sophisticated and more professional which I think is extremely important moving forward.
In this post I will be answering the evaluation question 3 which is "What have you learned from your audience feedback?"
Whilst seeking feedback from my audience, I decided to make two different surveys; one for regular people who have viewed my short film, and one for people in a professional position, such as teachers. I received a whole range of feedback including things such as, what character in my film was the most popular and why? From asking this question, I managed to find out why a certain character was more successful in being funny than another.
Regular Audience:
Professional Audience
As you can see, the results of this question from the two different surveys are very similar. In both surveys, the narrator came out as the most popular, or joint most popular, character. The reasoning behind this also is very similar from both surveys. In both surveys the reasoning for the narrator being popular was a lot to do with the fact that the plot relied on the narrator and both surveys suggested that the narrator was the character to bring most of the humour to the short film.
I have learned a lot from this question in particular because I now understand what makes a character successful and also what makes the character popular. This is a good piece of information to have because I can now take this into my next production and apply it to the characters in that to make all of the characters lovable for the right reasons. This will result in the overall production being a success because all of the character will be liked for their own reasons.
Another thing that I have learned from my audience feedback is that the majority of people that watched my short film were male. Although I included a female character to appeal to the female audience, males watched my short film far more than what females did.
General Audience
Professional Audience
I think that this is down to the comedy that is used in the film along with the fact that there was only one female in my film compared to 6 males. Nether the less I would like to make my production equally appealing to both genders so I think that something needs to be done to change this. Also you can see that 83.3% of my general audience were aged 15 - 18. Although I cannot ignore the results of my professional audience, I think that this figure alone is quite shocking however it is quite a relief as this is the age of audience that I aid I would target short film at and this means I have achieved that. As I mentioned earlier, I cannot ignore the results of my professional audience. As you can see, all professionals that completed my survey were aged 31 or over. This itself is not very surprising because it would be unusual to see someone younger than 31 in a profession such as teaching. What does surprise me, however, is that 100% of professionals that watched my short film and took my survey were male. This backs up my previous statement that something needs to be done to change this. Something that I think I will do in my next production to make these figures change would be to cast an equal number of males and females. Also, before I start production on my next film, I will do some research at what females look for in a comedy movie. This will give me some ideas of things to include to make females find my film more humorous and therefore appeal to a wider audience of females.
The last thing that I have learned from my audience feedback is what they think I should do to improve my short film further. When I asked my general audience how they think my short film could be improved, the results are as follows:
All of the responses that I received were helpful however the main piece of feed back that stuck out to me was the one that states "Try to implement more comedic techniques, for instance the use of the rule of three could really increase the humour." Now I found this piece of feedback the most helpful because, upon reflection, I think that the person that wrote this response has a very good point. The rule of three is based on the technique that people tend to remember three things.This can be applied to comedy by doing the same thing three times however changing the outcome of the third time for comedic effect. A good example of this is "21 Jump Street"
As you can see from this clip, the use of the rule of three has been use effectively which makes the chicken truck blowing up even more funny because it is ironic. I feel like this technique could have been used in my short film to add even more humour and it is defiantly something that I will include in my next production.
I also received a lot of good feedback that I could conciser to improve my short film from my professional audience.
A piece of feedback that I received from my professional audience, which I agree strongly with, is that "The end was very abrupt - I'd have liked the students to have had some type of epiphany such as they shouldn't be two faced." I like this feedback because, again, I agree with it. The ending isn't exactly how I wanted it to be. I do like the idea of the students having a sort of epiphany because this could give the film a "moral to the story" and giving the plot a philosophical meaning. I think that if I including an ending such as this, the film would feel more complete and finished which I am not 100% it does now.
In conclusion the things that I have learned and that I would change for next time are that I will make sure that there would be a equal male to female ratio of characters and I would include female humour as well as male humour to appeal to a larger female audience, I would give each of the characters more gags so that the audience find all characters funny which would make the characters more popular, I would include the rule of three to add another layer of comedy to my film and finally I would have a more philosophical ending to give my film an overall meaning which would make the film feel finished. With all of these changes I will make, and the knowledge that I already have gained from the experience of making my short film "Room" I think that the next film that I produce will end up being a more comedic, more popular and therefore more successful film than the one that I already have produced and I looking forward to making it.
In this post, I answer the second evaluation question which is "How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary texts?"
After completing this post, I now feel that I have managed to justify why my ancillary tasks, combined with my main task, are effective and also realise that I am very happy with how all three of my tasks have turned out. Each of them are how I had imagined they would be and I feel that all three of my tasks were an overall success, upon reflection.
In this post I answer the first evaluation question which was "In what ways does your media product us, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media texts?"
After completing this post, I am now confident that I have made the right decisions about what conventions to follow and what conventions to challenge. I think that by following and breaking the conventions that I have, I have ended up with a more unique media product.
In this post I created a survey for people who have watched my short film. This was important because I needed to know what was good about my film and how my film could be improved so that I could make a more enjoyable film next time. To get this information, I gave my survey to a number of people who have watched my film as well as some professionals who know a lot about film making.
Audience Feedback
Please take the film to complete my survey if you have watched my short film "Room". This will give me the information that I need to produce a much better film next time:
The results of my survey, as of, are as follows:
Professional Feedback
I also made sure that I made a version of the survey that I could get professionals to complete.The results of my professional Feedback survey are as follows:
There are many things that I have learned from this survey. One of the main things that I know that I should change is how the film ends. This piece of feedback really stuck out to me because I agree with this strongly. Although I am happy with my film overall, I do agree that the ending of my film is abrupt and this has been troubling me ever since I finished my film. I think that a way that I could improve this is by having some sort of philosophical ending where a moral of the story is obvious. Also, the feedback that states that I should include more comedic techniques was helpful because they suggested that I could use the rule of three to make the film more humorous. I think that, although I believe my film is funny, my film could have been funnier so this piece of feedback give me a good place to start to do that.
Overall I am happy with how my film turned out and I am relieved that the editing went exactly how I wanted it to. I am impressed with myself that I was able to produce a film that was so similar to what I had imagined in my head.
In this post, I had to produce a radio advert for my short film "Room". The first thing that I decided to do was to think up a script for the advert in the form of a rough timeline so that I can easily decided what part should go where. The following picture is that first initial script:
After I finished the script, I decided to get straight on and have a go at recording it. I decided to get the same person who voiced the narrator in my short film to play narrator in my advert. I also knew that I wanted to include some clips from my actual film so I made sure that i included them.
After the completion of this post, I am very happy how my advert turned out and it is exactly how I had imagined it when I was writing the script despite some changes that I made whilst editing the advert which I think simply add to the comedy factor of the advert which I knew was important to ensure that listeners knew what kind of film "Room" is.
In this post I will be looking at some radio commercials that advertise movies. This is beneficial thing to do because one of my ancillary tasks is to produce a radio trailer that promotes my short film. Researching radio commercials should give me a good idea of how a decent radio commercial sounds.
The following radio commercial is for the 2013 film "Gravity".
I think that this is a good radio advert because it promotes the movie well by doing a number of things. It uses positive quotes from critics as well as using clips from the actual film. It correctly uses the director's and the cast member's names to use their good reputation to promote the film. There are a number of the sounds used that,whilst being accompanied by the score, portray a feelings of isolation whilst also giving us a feeling of amazement and appreciation which are all feeling that we assume we would feel if we were in space. It is for these reasons that I think that most important thing that makes this radio commercial a good one is the dramatic music that is played in the background that gives the listener a small sample of the suspense that is included in the movie. At the beginning of the advert there is the soft sound of a piano which portrays a peaceful feeling and then, as the advert continues, the music builds up into a crescendo which implies that something big will happen in the movie like it does in the advert, such as a disruption of equilibrium.
The following radio commercial is for the 1980 film "The Empire Strikes Back"
I think that this radio commercial is good because it promotes the film well and it also informs the listener on the certificate for the film as well as where and when the listeners can watch the new movie. Once again I think that the most important thing about this radio advert is the music used in the background. The music in the background is "The Imperial March" from the original soundtrack of the movie composed by John Williams. John Williams is very famous for producing the soundtracks for movies and the narrator does not hesitate to also promote his "magnificent score". The score starts immediately with brass instruments playing in forte and this grabs the listeners attention straight away. The music is intimidating and it makes the listeners want to hurry to the cinema to watch the new film and I think this is the biggest reason why this radio advert is a successful one. To conclude, I think that both radio adverts are good at doing what they are supposed to do and I strongly believe that the music used for the advert is the key to this. What I have learned from completing this post is that the music used in the adverts are either used to reflect the mood that the listener gets from hearing the advert, like Gravity, or to grab the listeners attention, like in the Star Wars advert. For my radio advert, I need to carefully select the music to do one of these two things and I know that this will now be my number one priority when making my own radio commercial.
In this post, I designed a very basic idea of I could use as a poster for my short film as part of my ancillary task. I had the idea of using school photographs of the characters in the film to create the poster. Also I had the idea of getting a photo of a silhouette to represent the mystery behind the narrator in the short film. For a background, I quite liked the idea of having these picture look like they were pinned on a cork board, however I also liked i idea of having the pictures look like they were randomly scattered across the floor. This is a detail that I can make a decision on in the later stages of developing my poster.
After completing this post, I have now got a very rough idea of what my poster could look like. This is a good first stage because I can now develop the poster as much as I want but I will always have this first draft to refer back too. After this, I decided to have a go at logging onto Photoshop and recreating this design using the real photographs of my actors to produce my final movie poster. There were many alterations made throughout the process, such as the title and the layout of the photographs, but I am very happy with the final poster.
In reflection, I am extremely happy with my final movie poster. There were many things that I decided to add and change from my original design however I feel that all of the changes I made make the poster even more effective. I decided to change the layout of the photographs, to begin with, because I thought that my previous layout was a little bit too random and it was quite difficult for the reader to analyse properly. Also I decided to add the writing on the bottom of the Polaroids to add a sense of mystery to each of the characters on the poster. Finally I decided to add pins on each of the Polaroids to give the poster an overall more authentic look which I think is extremely successful.
