Evaluation

Evaluation

Question 1

Our media product builds on the idea of making a film dystopian and trying to create and world where society has broken down, we need to make sure that we made our scenes look and resemble our synopsis and what we have said the world will be in our trailer. So we decided to make a story around a world in which a disease has controlled and taken over and killed the majority of the population and which breaks society so everyone is just trying to survive. We also stated that the majority of the population has died so we could just film with people in the background so we had to film quickly and efficiently where as other big films will be able to shut places down to prevent anyone walking past. I feel we managed to do this extremely well and where very clinical when it came to filming the right shot in the little time we had. Also we had to think extremely carefully and had to plan intensely about our location as we could not just walk into the road and make cars dirty and throw bins over ect so when had to really plan where we wanted to film and how we will make that scene seem deserted and empty and I feel we planned efficiently and correctly as there was only one incident where a van drove past in the distance but that was easily edited out. Furthermore the idea of one man trying to survive and find his family and establish some sort of community and safety is conventional in this genre of film. We tried to develop the idea of a man trying to find his family because we feel like this is a classic story in dystopian films. However we knew that if we were going to chose this story line so we knew we would have to develop on the idea and make the idea our own and I think we have done this very well in terms of we have changed it slightly to be some sort of pursuit and every time he gets close they are not there and then throughout the film there are little side story’s in there as well and we feel that adding these up makes for a lot better story line that he looks for his family and finds them type of film. Also basing a lot of the main characteristics off hope of finding his family. We felt that by making him suspicious of a lot of things and also does not let his guard down easily and making the character be more inclined to play things safe so he finds his family rather than a character that talks to anyone and goes anywhere without thinking about it. And I feel that we did this well especially when he walks into his own home he is still got his gun ready even though he lived there, he still does not feel safe enough to let his guard down. However to challenge the genre we though about having the trailer based on one persons travels where as other trailers in our genre focus on the main character in a group or a team for example I am Legend the main character will smith has his dog, in Mad Max they are in groups and in 28 days later he finds a small group of people, Where as ours just features George (our main character) alone through the whole thing apart from the end where he is getting approached by the bandit. The reason for doing this is because we felt that we really needed to set the scene with our character as we relayed a lot on the life matrix to base our character on through the results. The life matrix really helped us develop are charterer so that he suits the genre but also is different and challenges. We feel he challenges the normal main character because for one he is younger where as a lot of characters are either fathers or older men trying to find there family where our character is a 18 year old boy trying to find his family, Also In a lot of dystopian films the main character I feel is quite fickle and will approach anything, where as based on the life matrix we tried to make our main character more capable and masculine and more too himself rather than out there and runs in to anything. The reason for doing this is we used the results from the life matrix survey and what we wanted out character to be and that’s what led us down the direction of George and then throughout the planning we developed our main character and I feel like this main and very good main character for our genre.

Question 2

Our main task was to make a trailer and our two ancillary tasks were to create a film poster and a magazine front cover for our film. So we had to research the codes and conventions of these types of products and also look at a lot of example to make sure we do it right.

I think that the combination of our trailer and our other two ancillary task work very well because we managed to keep the theme of our film throughout the tasks. The poster and the front cover and film we had to make sure that we used the same items of clothing our main character wore throughout the tasks the reason for this was because the continuity would not be very good and also the storyline of our film is that a diseases has broken down society and killed most of the population so our main character would not be changing clothes so we had to make sure his clothing is the same. Furthermore the style of editing didn’t change much for our trailer to our ancillary task which had a good effect and also made we stuck to the conventions of a dystopia film throughout all tasks.

Trailer

When editing the trailer which was my task I had to make sure that I thought about the other two ancillary tasks to make sure that we could keep that editing style and that the other members in my group could re create the editing style on a film poster and a magazine front cover. It was important that during the editing process I was communicating with the other members on my team to make sure they knew what I was doing in terms of editing so they knew what style to create for there task. As you can see form the picture I have made the scenes more grey to make it seem more unpopulated and also to make it look like a more apocalyptic scenery and as you can see from the other two products this style is continued.

Film Poster

With the film poster we all needed to communicate to make sure we could make sure we could keep the dystopian theme consistent throughout, so we had to take a lot of time in choosing the correct picture. We also researched a lot of film posters to get an examples of film posters so I looked at, The Book of Eli, Mad Max and 28 Days Later, I feel these are some very good examples to look at and in particular I think The Book of Eli poster is the style that suited what we were trying to create the best because this also has a grey and dark tones which fits the dystopian film but also has a beam of light that suggests hope or a solution to the problem in the film and this is something that we looked at re creating and I feel we managed to do this using a picture took from behind our main character look to the horizon and we feel this gives the same effect as the The Book of Eli but we also keep the grey and dark tones that we have in the film trailer and the magazine poster which give a dramatic effect.

Magazine Front Cover

Just like for the Film Poster we also looked at a number of examples to give us an idea of the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover. I looked at a Empire front cover which is for I Am Legend as I feel this is a very good example of a dystopian film magazine front cover. We used a picture of our main character as the main feature of the front cover but also tried to keep the same editing style as the other tasks. It was a bit harder to keep the same style of editing because there is a lot of text and other features that take away from the editing but we still tried the keep the tones grey to fit in the editing style of our other products.

Question 3

Throughout our tasks we where constantly making sure that we where getting feedback from either our target audience or other people that were willing to give there opinion, this was extremely helpful as it gave us a massive insight into what parts of our work we where doing very well on and what parts we needed to improve on. I believe that our most important feedback was the feedback we got for our preliminary task as this was extremely important in making our main task which was a trailer and the prelim shot was a way to show the style of filming and editing we where going for. Here is our feedback for our prelim shoot:

"The shot of the seagull gave an eerie feel. Also, I think the last shot was very effective because it makes him look larger and more powerful."
"I think the strongest shot was the one taken from ground level, I think it is the most effective because not only does it show him stepping over the camera, it's also quite unexpected, it also shows off the background so that we realize how bleak and deserted it is."
"I thought that the film clip was an introduction to a nature program because of the scenic shot of the animals. I didn't see the gas mask on the face, so therefore didn't understand what it was about." 
"The scenes were very effective and supported by the music, however, the person walking along very merrily and did not reflect a serious tone."
"The contrast between filming the animals juxtapose with the main character walking through the empty street. The poster shown on the fence gave clear context as to was going on. It loosely resembled the film '28 days later'." 

This feedback was extremely helpful as it gave us an understanding of what editing styles and types of shots to include in the main trailer and what to take out. Someone did comment on the fact they could not see the gas mask on the main characters face so did not understand what the prop was for. So for this we made sure we included shots that clearly shows that it is a gas mask he is wearing in our main trailer so that the voice over makes sense as this does mention that gas masks need to be wore at all times. This is an example of where the feedback we have received has helped us in improving our main task. So we learned the importance of audience feedback in improving our tasks and making sure we have got some feedback for each of our important tasks to help us in our other posts.

Life Matrix

Before we started filming we looked at the life matrix as we feel this was a very good way to find out what our target audience will be, this involved us putting a questionnaire together and we had to give these questionnaires to as many people we could so that we could a large number of results to make graphs to help us determine are target audience. With the results we made pie chart so that the data is easier to read. We learned that the majority of our target audience is tribed wired this means that they are more involved with social media, free spirited, young and single so we had to try and make sure our film appealed to this group one of the main ways we did this is by making our idea as creative and original and how we did this is we thought of a disease that has completely took over a country and how his has resulted in society breaking down and how there are few survivors and we then developed the story so that it would appeal to our target audience, also we learned that another large portion are rugged traditionalists this means that they are mainly male and hold on to the more traditional values, to make sure our film appealed to this audience we had to make sure we made our main character has some traditional values so we made our main character more capable and masculine.

Question 4

Throughout our three tasks we used a wide verity of media technology's and other programs to get the best results. One of the main media technologies I used was Imovie to edit the preliminary task and the main trailer, The reason this program was used over programs such as final cut was because I was already familiar with Imovie from previous task and I also feel that it is very easy to use and operate where as final cut would be a completely new program for me that I would have to learn from scratch although it could be potentially better however for me the time needed to learn how to use the program so I could use it effectively is not worth it. I also feel that throughout the editing process of the preliminary task and the actual trailer my editing skills on Imovie have improved. We also used a top of the range camera and tripod to record our trailer, the camera was easy to use as we have operated them before. My group also used Photoshop to editing the poster and magazine front cover, the reason we used Photoshop was because we felt that this was by far the best program to use for editing photos and creating the ancillary task, if you were to compare it with the likes of fireworks you would see that the features of Photoshop allowed us to edit our products a lot better and more detailed. I also used websites such as YouTube for research of examples of dystopian film trailer to get an idea of the conventions in a dystopian film, I also used YouTube to find un copyrighted music for our trailer because I feel that I was able to narrow my search down to get the best music for our trailer rather than using a website that may not have as much choice. However in the preliminary task I made my own music using a program called Logic, the reason for using this is because I also study music technology and have a good understanding of logic,