1. Evaluation:
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
Our film is mainly based on the Think! Adverts; the message – consequence – has the
same effect on the audience and leaves them with the same type of thought and
reaction, a wide range audience, genre – documentary, drama, informative. We have
developed this by going more in depth to the story and the characters lives, making
it more personal and therefore increasing the effect it will have on the audience by
aiming certain aspects, i.e. sound, at their feelings and emotions. This makes the
distinction clear between an advert and a short film.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our film follows the path of two parallel worlds, showing the consequences of
different decisions. We portray this narrative in our ancillary poster by mirroring
similar images showing each consequence. This idea was inspired by the poster of
the film ‘Sliding Doors’ which has a similar narrative of parallel worlds and we have
developed a similar structure for our own poster. For our magazine review we have
included screen shots from our film to show the viewer a bit more about our film.
We chose shots of important parts of the film rather than irrelevant scenes to give
them a good understanding of our film.
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
We showed our film to the class and had a discussion about the good and bad
aspects of the film and then got them to write down their main opinions on a post-it
note for us to have and learn from. A common theme was about the steadiness of
the shots, we did actually use a tripod for the majority of the shots however we
struggled when it came to the movement for example in the dolly shot. We think
that if we were better equipped, then the shots may be smoother
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and
evaluation stages?
For our research, we used powerpoint presentations to present our short film
analyses, we made a poster by hand to show our analysis of magazine reviews and
then took a picture of it using a digital camera to upload to our blog, and for the
poster analysis we searched on the internet for an image of the poster we were
analysing and then dissected it on Microsoft Word using text boxes and arrows to
2. show what we were referring to. For the audience research we used a variety of
methods to gather the relevant information, such as; filmed interviews, audio
interviews, and electronic questionnaires.
For the planning, we used Microsoft Word for things such as the shot lists, shooting
scripts, short story, etc. The storyboard was hand-drawn and then each section was
photographed using a digital camera and then uploaded on to Microsoft Powerpoint
to make it easier and clearer to present and use. All the files we had created for
research and planning were then uploaded electronically to our blog, using
www.blogger.com
For the construction, we used a hand-held video camera, as well as a Phantom HD
slow motion camera for the collision. We then loaded our rushes onto the computer
and edited the footage using Final Cut Pro, the final outcome was then put on to a
DVD and also on to www.youtube.com