Evaluation

The Morning After

Nikki Harris and Amanda MurrayHampstead Fine Arts

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

After closely analyzing our media product, we feel that it both uses and develops the forms and conventions used in real media products.

Ways our film is conventional:

• Develops a storyline and sets the plot.• Questions the audience through out the short film which keeps them concentrated and alert.

Editing techniques:

1) We used cross cutting editing in the scene where Amy is making coffee and where Ross is waiting in the lounge.

2) Continuity editing (minus the kitchen scene)

Due to some faults the first time round when shooting our film we had to reshoot several weeks later. Due to the different date and weather conditions the lighting differed, however we used final cut pro to edit the images so the lighting would match the previous footage.

Delicatessen.

CLICK ON THE EXAMPLE TO PLAY!

Cross cutting from our film.

CLICK ON THE CLIP TO PLAY!

Ways our film is considered unconventional:

• We have not used music at the start of our film because we do not want our audience distracted from our characters lines.

• We used both a still steady move camera and a hand held camera whilst filming. The reason for us using a hand held camera is because it is a point of view shot to show the inflection of reality.

EXAMPLE OF HANDHELD CAMERA / POINT OF VIEW SHOT from our film.

CLICK ON THE CLIP TO PLAY!

Ways our magazine review is conventional:

• Small fonts.

• We have used stereotypical coloring to relate to our genre that we chose.

• For our magazine review we took a quote and enlarged it, put it in italics and made it stand out which is found in a lot of magazine articles

• Colum format. We made our layout similar to sight and sound.

• We included a synopsis in our magazine review.

• We put the page number and the name of the magazine which our review is in at the bottom, left of our review page.

Ways our poster is conventional:We used a big title, top centre of our poster to catch the audiences eye.We used a tag line on our poster. We placed a star rating center of our poster.We put the release date, bottom right of our poster.

Both our magazine review and our poster follow the conventions of real media products, however one form in which we challenge these conventions is on our poster we have a photo of our two characters upside down, but this does work effectively.

M.I.G.R.A.I.NMEDIA LANGUAGE: 5 Minuet short film used to communicate the commodity. Magazine used to sell the commodity. Poster used to advertise the commodity. (those who might not have their own television or computer.)

INSTITUTION : low budget short film, in that respect it would be independently distributed mostly to festivals. Or any web 2 platforms.

GENRE: Romantic Comedy.

REPRESENTATION: Young teens misbehaving.

AUDIENCE: 15 – 21 (late teens, early 20’s)

IDEOLOGY: The way teenagers may behave under the influence of alcohol. One night stands.

NARRATIVE: Conventional Narrative.

An example of a magazine review.

Although this is not very clear, it is an example of a magazine review from the Sight & Sound. This enabled us to followed the layout of this review enabling us to follow certain conventions coming from a real magazine review.

Our final magazine review…

The break- up poster.

We used this poster as a guideline to help us design our own.

Our Final Poster…

QUESTIONNAIRE:

We created a questionnaire to gather audience feedback. We handed out the questionnaire to 30people so we could see how the answers varied.

On a scale of 1-5 (1 being excellent, 5 being poor) how would you rate the following :

Were there any moments/scenes you particularly liked?

Were there any moments/scenes you particularly disliked or felt didn’t work?

Given a pair of magical scissors, is there anything you’d snip out?

Did the titles look cinematic?

DidDid you like the film?

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

• Our editing techniques worked effectively.

• We could have used slightly more humor throughout our film.

• We could have made the conversation scene in the lounge more awkward.

• The title to our film could have been slightly different creating mystery towards our film.

• There were a few continuity mistakes.

• Most of our audience liked the final scene when our two characters become interested in each other.

• Some of our audience did not feel convinced that there were other people in the house.

• The sound effects (the birds and footsteps down the stairs) worked nicely

• Both our review and poster work nicely together to help advertise our final piece.

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

• We have tried to synergistically link all of our products together after making the main task ( a five minute film). For ‘The Morning After’ (the title) we thought it would be appropriate to make the two ancillary tasks (the magazine review and the poster) predominantly red and black too, as these are the colors we used for our title throughout our film.

• In both of our ancillary products we have the same two main characters displayed (Jack & Amy) as we do throughout our short film. We have also made sure on both the poster and the magazine review these characters are wearing the same costume as they are wearing during our film.

• We have used the same font style through all three of our final products.

We feel that this is how a movie producer would broadcast their products. They want their films to be widely known & this can only happen if they spread their conventions across their products.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning & evaluation

stages

We

We used the web for research on our film and ancillary tasks.

We used a camera to film our 5 minuet short film.

We used Photoshop to make our poster., and edit any images we wanted to use.

We used Garage band to add some music to our DVD menu.

We used Final Cut Pro to edit our film together.

We used IMDb to research short films.

We used Celtx to type up our script.

We used PowerPoint to create our presentation.

We used IDVD to create our DVD menu.

We created our own blog account to help us keep track of our progress.