Ecaluation 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

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We used a number of different technologies in the research, planning and construction of our short film. Before we settled on a final idea and narrative, we used Empire online and Empire magazines to research into film posters and reviews to see what appealed to an audience. YouTube was another website we used to research into short films; from this we were able to look at interesting editing techniques and different music used in different film genres. Imdb was another website we used to research into short films, from this research we were able to understand the conventions used in short films. We visited the cinema on a number of occasions where we watched films for inspiration; as a group we watched ‘Inception’ this film has inspired us to leave our film on a cliff hanger.

In the planning stages of our production we used a range of technologies such as the BBC website; we used this to look at the weather to help us arrange our filming schedule. This saved time as by looking at the weather we were able to plan to film all the outdoor scenes on the days where the weather was supposed to be good and the indoor scenes when the weather wasn’t so great. We produced our filming schedules in Microsoft Word this program was quick and easy to use.

When it came to constructing our project we kept a blog created on blogger.com which helped us to keep a record of our ideas and progress online which making it easy for people to access and see our idea which meant people were able to give us feedback on each part of our product.  We used adobe Photoshop to edit our poster; this program was really good use as we were able to explore with different tools and techniques to produce a final piece that was interesting to look at and appealed to our target audience. We edited our short film in Premier Pro; as we used this program last year it meant  we were familiar with it. Premier Pro was a good technology to use when it came to editing our short film as it didn’t limit us; we explored the program and discovered a variety of techniques which helped to improve our film by making it more interesting and appealing to our target audience. We used techniques such as changing certain scenes to black and white to create a depressive feel to the scene ,slow motion to emphasis certain scenes and sped scenes up to create our time lapse. We used Apple Garage Band to create the non-diegetic music for our short film it was a difficult program to use at first but once we figured it out we managed to create relevant non-diegetic music for our short film.

The Internet was the main technology we used as we used it in all four stages the Internet has made it much quicker and easier not only for the research of our project but also for constructing and evaluating as it has meant that we were able constantly upload our progress and get feedback from our audience. The main websites we used throughout the construction of our film was YouTube to upload our vlogs, short film and for research. We used script writing websites where we created our script for our short film Intersection. Freesound was a website we found which allowed us to find additional diegetic music such as the alarm clock at the beginning of our film. We used Facebook to receive feedback on our poster and final edit of our film, we uploaded our video from YouTube to Facebook connecting the two technologies together by uploading the link to Facebook we increased the amount of people who were likely to watch it.

The equipment we used throughout this project was a Canon 400D still camera to capture photos for our poster and to capture images of our filming locations to put on our blog a PC/ Mac to edit and create music our film and Sony HD camcorder to capture scenes for our short film.

Evaluation 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Evaluation 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback? on Prezi

From receiving audience feedback we were able to improve every aspect of project. We showed a wide range of people our film poster; most of the reviews were very positive such as 'Thinks it reflects the plot of our film well with the two narratives'. Even though the majority of the feedback was positive we did get some negative feedback such as 'The hairline of our actor on the left needed editing as is looked poor' as a group we decided that we agreed with this feedback and therefore we decided to edit our poster further. Also when we originally planned our film we decided we were going to cross-cut between the two narratives; cutting between scenes of Lucas in the successful life to Lucas in the family life but once we showed this to our audience we realised that it was difficult to understand so we chose to change the colour of the successful life to black and white conveying a sense of loneliness and depression however our audience still didn't understand it was two completely different lives. Therefore as a group we decided to rethink how we were going to show this, we came up with the idea of showing the flash forward and then all the successful life and then return to Lucas at the train station and then flash forward again to all the family life scenes. We agreed this worked well and therefore decided to keep our edit like this. Overall i think audience feedback is very important even though we didn't listen to all of our feedback we took it all in to consideration and changed the parts of our project that we agreed needed to be changed.

Evaluatiion 2. How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

Evaluation 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Below is the link with the answer in response to this question.
http://www.wix.com/honor_mcadam/intersectionevaluationtask

Ancillary Task 2 - Film Review

We decided to do a film review as our second ancillary task. Our review has been created in Microsoft Publisher and has been written in the style of an 'Empire' film review insluding the following subheadings; Plot Review and Verdict.

Ancillary Task 1 - Poster

This is the final edit of our poster we changed the hairline slightly we agree is does look loads better. We have shown this edit to our audience they also agree that this poster works better. I am really please with the final outcome i think the poster looks professional and conveys our film really well. The pictures and font work well together the use of the black border behind the texts helps to really highlight the title 'Intersection' making it easy to read at a quick glimpse. 

Poster Progress

We showed this poster to a number of  poople and asked for feedback, below is the list of comment we revieved:


Positive:

• Liked the bench feature as it is shows the 2 lives.
• Reflects the plot of our film really well.
• Like the suttle image of the train station in the background as it shows that it is an important scene in our film.
• Like how the background isnt white of plain the train station makes it look much more interesting. 
• Liked how the bench was at the foreground as it makes it stand out and it is the main focus of the poster.
• Good font used for 'Intersection'

Negative:

• The hairline of the image of the actor on the left needs to be edited more as it looks poor.
• Maybe remove the black colouring behind title
• Maybe devide the page down the middle to show the seperate lives.

Its good to see that most of the feedback from our poster is positive and that people think that it reflects the storyline really well and the the train in the background doesnt take the main focus away from the protagonist on the bench. We have taken the negative feedback into consideration. We agree that the image on the left does need to be edited more and therefore this will be our next step.