Evaluation - Bradley Mills

1. In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

Genre

Titles

Due to the fact that most short films do not have a clear genre it was difficult for us to convey a certain feel or use generic conventions of similar style movies we had to take inspiration from all types of genres and artists.

Our Film

Our title that appears at the beginning of our movie doesn't challenge the conventions of a short film, as you can see we used the fade to black as an opportunity to have our text appear, we decided to use a  white font in order for the text to stand out against the dark background.

We chose to have the text appear over a sound bridge of the preceding and following scenes and as the title appears, the sound of the 'bottle' we see the character holding is heard smashing, symbolizing that the 'Last Night' involved some sort of mischief or problems for this character giving significance to the title and also linking the title to what is happening on in the film.

The BBC short film 'In The Meadow' uses a lot of the conventions that we have used such as the Capital White text on a Black Screen, the  differences are the size of the text and the positioning of the text, where we have placed ours bigger and towards the bottom left corner, with this BBC short film the title appears smaller and central to the screen.

Because we did not really have a specific genre we were not confined to using any particular fonts, we chose to use a font that wasn't too suggestive, the font we used was simple and modern which we feel gave us the desired effect we found the Font on Dafont.com.

Character

This is a shot taken from our movie it shows the character from behind looking towards the mirror, this gives the character a feeling of insecurity and most importantly shows the character in the space that he is in, in this case the bathroom which helps to develop the plot.

with the camera being behind the subject it almost allows the audience to feel as if they are monitoring the character and are always one step behind.

This shot taken from BBC short film 'My dream/Reality' shows the same thing but at a long shot with a bigger mirror, we see the character looking into the mirror suggesting that what she is thinking about is more important than what she is actually doing. The Mise en scene allows the audience to understand a little bit more about her, it suggests that she is a dancer due to her surroundings which are made clear by the long shot and the reflection.

Just like with our film we had to shoot the shot with the mirror at an angle in order for the camera not to be seen in the reflection this short from the BBC short film is shot in a way that the reflection can be seen but without ruining continuity.

This screen shot taken from our movie helps to show what kind of character this person is, it depicts a modern representation of 'Masculinity' and shows the male character looking into the mirror in order to adjust his appearance in this case applying gel into his hair.

This screen shot taken from our film portrays the police officer as a serious and stern man, this is usually the generic representation of a male authority figure however police officers in films usually catch the criminal in our movie the police man is oblivious to the criminal and actually helps him by returning something to him.




This shot taken from 'The Bill' depicts a serious and stern male authority figure,but unlike in our film this film he looks more aggressive because he is aware of the crime whereas our police officer is not.

Narrative

We used props such as the bottles of alcohol seen bellow to help tell the story about what happened to the character  this technique has been done before in movies such as 'The Hangover' the idea was to show that the character had woken up to a mess in which he had created the night before, and this triggers some fazed memories for the character which will later in the film somewhat be explained, in our case the flashback scenes explain why these bottles of alcohol are surrounding him.

This screen shot from the wake up scene in 'The Hangover' shows what we tried to achieve in our film but on a more elaborate scale, due to the higher budget that feature length films such as this have.Just as our film tried to use props to tell a story this film used props to connote activities and helped the audience to understand the plot without having to spell it all out.

We used the alarm clock in this screen shot to show the time, this helps to explain the narrative by providing a timeline, which are relevant to the sequence of events in our movie, particularly because there is a flashback sequence in our film and this could become confusing without providing a  time line.

I tried to help explain the narrative of the movie through the use of different clocks throughout the film whenever possible such as the CCTV shots and the shots with the alarm on screen, however sometimes i had to add in a text layer of the time in order to help the audience understand what was happening.

This screen grab from paranormal activity shows this technique being used to show a flashback sequence but instead on being a flash back to 'last night' it shows a flashback to '1988' like our movie where we added the text to show a date and time that we wanted in order to tell our story this footage was probably taken in the present day and then in editing the time and date would have been manipulated to suggest it was from the 80s.

2. how effective Is The Combination Of Your Main Product And Your Ancillary Tasks? - Bradley Mills

3. What Have You Learnt From Your Audience Feedback?

This Blog Post is all about me learning from others more about my movie, I want to be able to better my own ability to entertain and reach out to others through film making, I used social networking sites such as Facebook to receive comments about my movie, I pasted them the link from youtube and waited for a response.

Responses

Facebook

I searched on Facebook mainly for our movies target audience of males between the ages of 15-25 but i also wanted a more general view of our movie so I also asked outside of our target audience.

The biggest negative with using Facebook to receive feedback is that Facebook is a social website and not everyone wants to be bothered by questions about education related matters, particularly during half term, so for every ten people you ask to give you feedback on your project you will only get about 4 or 5 constructive responses.

I asked Tom aged 18: what he honestly thought about the film and his response was not what i expected "it was Hilarious..." the reason the response was surprising is because we hadn't set out to make a comedy, but we   never really had a genre so these kind of responses to our film had to be somewhat expected. Tom found the drunken scenes funny "and when your cousin pushes you into the bush lool'' these shots were supposed to show the character having fun but also starting to maybe overstep the boundaries of good and bad, i believe that the drunken scenes served there purpose because of the reaction of the audience but if they lost its feeling of nervousness for the main character then they were not effective, So i started to ask Tom and others did the fact that you found those drunk scenes funny did that stop you from being nervous about the characters problem with the policeman at his door.

Jack aged 21 replied ''no because when hes with the police man again i still thought he was gonna get arrested or something''

But the main opinion on this that I wanted to hear was from Tom because he mentioned the fact that he found the drunken scenes really funny Tom replied in answer to my question ''the funny parts made me think why he could be in trouble in with the feds and if the police knew about every crime he committed or just one'' This is the reply i was hoping for because if the atmosphere could have been ruined by these scenes if received poorly, however on reflection i feel as if it is good that the atmosphere does lighten up for these scenes because the character is experiencing fun at the time along with the audience and then later has to deal with the consequences of his actions, or so he thinks so along with the audience.

 When I asked Tom what particular shots he liked he replied " like the bathroom scene no joke the camera thing is sick and the music ipod bit" we shot the bathroom scene and at first it was one of our worst scenes because of the length of the shots, we decided to cut all the shots in this sequence down to be short and snappy and i am happy that this worked, I now know that if there is anything that you are unsure will be well received by your audience then you should change it until you are more confident in your product, and that sometimes a shot that is 2 seconds long can be just as effective as the same shot lasting 10 or 12 seconds sometimes a shot being short is actually better like in this circumstance. Where before we had negative feedback about this sequence now it has been highlighted as a good scene because of the changes we made.

I spent a lot of time editing this film, I had an idea in my head of how i wanted the music scene to be edited before we even started filming, i edited in the music and faded it up and down when the character moved closer to or further away from the music source, and when the music source changed from speakers to headphones i added a tinny effect to replicate that, to have the idea in my head and to be able to edit it the way i wanted and to receive positive feedback from that was nice to hear.

CCTV shot

Harry aged 23 ''i thought that was pretty good, with the security camera shots and some of the cuts were pretty sick'' The security CCTV shots were also an early idea i had in my mind before we started filming i felt as if there needed to be interesting ways to show these crimes because if it was just shot from one camera angle or one perspective the flashback scene being long would become boring, it also adds to the feeling of his actions being 'criminal' as we connote CCTV cameras with catching crime, and this suggests that the character will be caught adding to the tension.

Michael aged 16  left  a comment on  my wall in response to the video, he said he particularly  liked the shot at the beginning where we put the camera underneath the  bed in order to make the sequence more artistic, we cut from a high  angle shot to this one on the right, in order to show the character  getting out of bed which otherwise could have been a very dull shot.

Although Michael wasn't very particular with his comments I am happy with this piece of feedback because I felt at the time that  this shot would be good, at first the lighting wasn't right so we fixed the lighting by using the black umbrella instead of the white one to create a feeling of darkness whilst still being able to see the important footage and ended up with a nice shot that received some good  feedback.

JOE BARKLEY age 18 gave me a list of things he took from watching the  film

''good story line - thought provocative; so the audience make predictions and expectations

and then are relieved, and interested when proven wrong''

This  feedback was particularly useful because it was clearly from a member  of the target audience who understood the kind of constructive feedback i  was looking for and knew about media texts.

In  conclusion I have learnt from the feedback that the majority of this  target audience like the more experimental shots such as the CCTV and  the under the bed shot of the alarm clock and if i was to re do this  film project i would include many more artistic shots and try to provoke  stronger emotions from the audience

I also asked about my movie posters

the problem was I kept having to send links and pictures to everyone in order for them to see the posters and Facebook wanted to repeatedly security check me.

The problem with Facebook is that the feedback i was getting was not of a high quality and lacked any constructive criticism, so I asked two media students if they could watch my movie and leave some comments in the hope of gaining some better quality feedback.

Hannah and Hannah


''Overall I thought this was a good effective short film. I like the narrative structure you used as you cut back to the clips of the night before which refer to what is being said in the dialogue. I think your soundtrack was good and adding to the tone of the film and you had a good range of shots throughout. I especially liked the 2 scenes (supermarket and train station) where you used editing to make it look like a CCTV camera and it worked well as it looked like a real image a CCTV camera would see in the end. One thing I would say is that at time the image was just slightly too dark and so you couldn't see very well what was happening on camera as could of done if perhaps there was some extra lighting. Overall I thought this film was really well done and I liked the twist in your narrative at the end that threw where people thought the narrative was going, off track and added a sense of humour to it as well.''

The feedback I revived here made me think of my film more judgmentally whereas before with Facebook friends I was getting very basic responses with the two media students i gained some real insight, although Hannah and Hannah both aged 18 are in the right age range of our target audience, they are female which in a way is important in terms of seeing how well our movie has appealed outside of our target audience.

The movie Bridesmaids was successful not only because it appealed to its intended female audience but it also ended up appealing to the male audience too which had a 35% male audience as apposed to the 20% male audience usually expected for this genre of movie in its opening weekend so therefore I believe these comments are still very valuable to me as a film maker.

''I like the narrative structure you used as you cut back to the clips of the night before which refer to what is being said in the dialogue.''The point about the narrative structure is helpful because at the beginning of our process of making this film we did not really have a structure for how we were going to show the crime scenes, but I decided to use a chronological order to help the audience make sense of what they were seeing and I hoped that it all made sense to the viewer, this comment confirms that it helped.



''I think your soundtrack was good and adding to the tone of the film and you had a good range of shots throughout.''

The soundtrack was the hardest part about making our movie because I did not have a specific genre or feel that I had to portray to the audience I had to search through websites of royalty free music for hours in order to find a suitable soundtrack and the use of shots I feel could have and should have been more advanced and experimental so that's where I disagree with the comment.

The most helpful part of this criticism is the more constructive comments such as...

''One thing I would say is that at time the image was just slightly too dark and so you couldn't see very well what was happening on camera as could of done if perhaps there was some extra lighting.''

I believe that my group were too happy to cut corners in the making of this film and that showed in the scenes outside where we didn't use added lighting to enhance the quality of the footage this screen shot taken from our movie shows the lack of quality that the street lighting provided us with for our footage.

Poster option 1

Poster option 2

my Personal opinion about the posters is that i prefer poster option 1 but I decided to get some audience feedback online, and came to the conclusion that the majority of people prefer the poster option one, the key points that they were making where that the first poster seems to stand out more and look more professional I think that is because of the strong eye contact that is made with the first poster i believe this is key to the poster, the other key point i received from feedback is that the blue numbers made the poster look as if something interesting is going to happen in the movie.

i decided to ask people who had'nt seen the movie what they thought about the poster because they are the people that the poster would be targeting in real life.

4. How Did You Use New Media Technologies In The Construction, And Research, Planning And Evaluation Stages - Bradley Mills

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