The Waiting Room

Evaluation

Matt Duval Candidate number 4468

#1 In what ways does your media product

use, develop or challenge forms and

conventions of real media products? For our A2 Level Media studies final project we decided

to create a short film. For the ancillary tasks we chose to

create a film review page and a poster for our film. Both

of the ancillary tasks and the main film needed to be

closely linked so that the audience could see that they

are all related to each other.

I believe that all of our pieces go together very well. We

have used forms and conventions of real media reviews,

posters and short films. In some cases we have

challenged the conventions of films and media texts.

How we used conventions of real media

products

Our film also has a clear message which is reoccurring

throughout the entire film. The message is that there will

always be someone bigger and better than you. While

researching other short films we have found that lots of

other shorts contain a similar message. For example “the

bulling effect” contains the message “you never know

what your bulling might lead to”. This is one of the

examples of our film using the conventions of real media

products (short films).

How we challenged conventions of real

media products

Our short film has a slight humorous element to it which

is uncommon in short films about bulling. This is one of

the ways that we chose to change/challenge the

conventions of real media products.

The main focus in our short film are the two characters

that sitting on the small black leather sofa. These two

characters change one at a time throughout our film. The

shorter of the two is always replaced with a noticeably

taller person. This happens 3 times during our short film.

It is uncommon that the actors will change so regularly

during a 3-5 minute short film. We have chosen to

challenge this convention to put emphasis on our

message.

#2 How effective is the combination of your

main product and ancillary texts?

I think that my ancillary tasks look good together

because they use some of the same elements in all 3

tasks.

One of the ways we managed to tie all of our projects

together was to include the logo at the start of the film

and on the poster and on the review page.

How effective is the combination of your

main product and ancillary texts?(continued)

We also used a house style consisting of fonts colours

and symbols. We used the same fonts and colours for

our logo, blog, film, review and poster. This helps us with

continuity between the film and the ancillary tasks.

The stars in the review are also the same as the ones on

the poster.

Stars

How effective is the combination of your

main product and ancillary texts?(continued)

The Poster and Review page both contain a still image

that was taken from the actual film. It is of a large black

clock on the wall. This clock is there for two reasons, to

link the two media texts together and to represent the

title “The Waiting Room”.

Clock

My poster (left) is a simple design that was inspired by

another short film poster (right). We decided to use a still

from the film. We used the coloured corner from the

professional poster in our own poster.

What have you learned from your

audience feedback?

At every major stage of my project I have been gathering

audience feedback in order to improve my work.

I have used a variety of web 2.0 such as Facebook,

YouTube and Twitter.

For example one of our comment on YouTube said that

“the opening scene was too long”. When we showed this

to our classmates in school they said the same thing.

We then reviewed the footage and agreed with the

comments. To resolve this problem we speed up the

shot and cut part of it out.

How did you use new media technologies in

the construction and research, planning and

evaluation stages? Throughout our research, planning, and evaluation

stages we used a variety of new media technologies.

For example during our planning we used lots of web

2.0.

We used the internet to research current short films from

professional and amateur film producers. Websites we

used include:

http://www.youtube.com

http://www.futureshorts.com/

http://www.indiemoviesonline.com/free-movies

Ancillary Tasks

These are our ancillary tasks:

A Film Poster

A Magazine Review Page

Magazine Review Page

This is our Magazine

Review Page.

Film Poster

This is our Film Poster.