How did you use media Technologies in the construction

and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Vicky Hunt - CAGED

The Blog

One way in showing the process from the product and audience research to the planning of our advanced portfolio. I did this on the website www.blogger.com. This blog shows the creation of my trailer, from the initial idea to the actual finished product. The blog different pages, product research, audience research, planning and a final evaluation of my product.Each process stage was shown in chronological order, this was the easiest way to demonstrate my research, and doing it in such way helped me when planning set up different essential documents, such as shooting logs and the storyboard; Also doing this showed me what I have planned and how much I have left to do. I added in different use of other programmes such as presentations on PowerPoint, slide share and YouTube.

How did it impact on our research of our characters?

• When researching our characters we used various different techniques, I would say the most successful was through second hand research such as watching trailers like Bullet boy and Fish Tank and what appealed to audiences before and now using them in our trailer, for example Kyle shows characteristics of Tyler from Bullet Boy. In doing this research websites such as YouTube were helpful looking into how Bullet Boy showed their characters in the trailer and how as the audience we perceived them. In our film we show different classes from middle to working class with automatically through self fulfilling prophecy can appeal to wider audiences. As our film challenges the norms of boy chasing girl it shows most of the power is in the girls hands and she is the one who makes the decision out of the two males challenging the normal view of Social Realism films. In doing this the film Fish Tank was good evidence to look at as it showed us how previous directors shown strong female characters.

• Another method I found helped me throughout this process was social media networking with asking people on FaceBook and Twitter ideas and improvements on our characters, as our film is targeted to young people as the target audience people on these sites were perfect to get opinions from to modify how our character is shown in the trailer. This is a productive way to gain insight into young peoples, not only did it help our film I learnt a lot more about my peers in a social able enjoyable way of young people in British Society, but also giving our audience input into our film.

As the main aim of Social realism is to show the true reality of those living in a British Society, with realistic problems and focus on real life relatable characters. Therefore when coming up with the initial idea and the creation process of our trailer we had to research Social issues that would not only appeal to a British audience but also hit the zeitgeist at the time it will be released. We found that still a major issue was the riots the summer before and how it has impacted Britain, we also found that not enough media coverage of the families affected by the riots had been shown this is where we came up with our idea. Then we had to start looking over newspaper articles, reports on the riots to help us gain information to start planning our trailer. Therefore in doing this we knew it would be a hard hitting contemporary issue.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-14452468

When looking into who our target audience would be we knew how British Social Realism appeals to a niche audience, we found evidence of this when asking young people from various ages and backgrounds what social realism films they watched and out of 5 90% had only watched one some were none at all. Therefore to be able to make our film a success we had to make sure it appealed to the widest audience possible. Therefore when researching our target audience we asked young people over social networking sites such as twitter and Facebook asking for their opinions on whether they would or not watch the film and their opinions on how we can modify. As our film is especially targeted to young people we put our trailer up on YouTube asking people’s opinions on how we can improve this and make the trailer more appealing, as we have found through research word of mouth is one of the main method of marketing and getting people to come watch a film therefore we had a marketing group of youth people asking their inputs on what we should put in our trailer to attract young people, this is where the input of violence (Alex in the boot) and romance helped us understand the key aspects of things we need to put in our trailer to help it stand out. As successful films have done in the past we put on a preview at ‘Birmingham’s Electric cinema’ for sixth formers in Park Hall, although there was a limited number of us it still was a huge experience and opportunity to get our target audience of young peoples opinions, therefore taking back their feedback we could reshoot scenes and add footage and modifying certain editing aspects to attract more to the young audience at this present time.

What did we film with?When filming the trailer we used a hand held camera and a tripod, the hand held camera was definitely important when doing our filming as it gave the affect of realism, which through research we understand how the hand held camera affect is getting more and more popular (Paranormal activity). Having the tripod was also a huge advantage as it gave a more professional affect of the footage as it was not wobbly unlike certain parts of my footage last year. Although the filming equipment used was not of the standard of professional films I believe certain aspects of having it amateur helped us show the realistic approach of the film fitting in with the social realism genre. Having a small hand held camera made it easier for me and my partner to access it and carry it around to the different locations. I definitely found the USB on the camera to be a safe and secure way of importing our work onto the computer to begin power director. Although I found filming with these hand held camera at times challenging, for example when our actors had to speak and they were outside the wind came as a challenge as it automatically made our films look unprofessional as could hear the wind interference, although this was time consuming we had to re-do footage it was essential to make our film to the best quality. Choosing locations which were windy were essential as it was part of our narrative but getting rid of the wind was done by using small microphones which we then synced the voices to the footage.

Software used when editing In editing our film we used Power Director 10 which we used for both of our productions in AS and now A2, this software is easy to use and understand. Within the software there are various different editing techniques from fading in shots and adding transitions within the shots, we your own titles being able to add.

I found this software to also be reliable when saving the work and producing the film I had no difficulties which made it less stressful when filming, editing and finally producing my trailer.

Being able to have the transitions makes the continuity of the trailer easier for an audience to watch as it provides interest throughout, as Power Director 10 has different transitions it didn’t make each shot the same but also allowed us as directors to add more professional approaches to our films making the audience more engaged to the trailer.

Within the narrative of our trailer there is love mixed with violence, therefore being able to have all these transitions in our film it was easy to show contrast between the love fade in shots and the harsh quick shots of violence, therefore being able to show the tense atmosphere and mood.