Final production.

This is our main product final cut.

Evaluation Question 1.

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

In our media product we chose nine shots from our film where we used micro elements effectively as shown below.

(From left to right starting at the top.)

Image 1: In this image of the girls sister i feel the costume was closely thought about, as she doesn't care about the main girl (her sister) so she's dressed carelessly. As if she hasn't thought about her outfit, but also dressed as though nobody would want to fight with her with boots on and her hand in her jacket pocket.

Image 2: This image i feel is very effecting as the way it's edited making the sky look pink is showing the girl views everything in a disoriented way as she doesn't have a very good life.

Image 3: In this image the it's shot at eye level, it shows maybe somebody is watching her, allowing the audience to feel sympathy for her. The cinematography was thought about carefully here.

Image 4: This is an image of the main character sitting by herself, while her friends are together in the distance. We edited the main characters 'friends' in this shot at the second tree as there was only three of us there at the time so we couldn't take a shot with all three in the shot.

Image 5: We chose this image from our film for cinematography, as we thought about cinematography here and we had to time it right for when the girl was swinging. I feel thing image is very affective in allowing the audience to ask questions as to why her identity is never revealed.

Image 6: This image is from the note scene, and as you can see we thought about our mis-en-scene very carefully here. Chose to put those teddies/dolls on the chair showing she has those sort of things in her room to comfort her as she has a very lonely life where nobodies care about her.

Image 7: We chose this image as we thought about the lighting very much in this. Made it darks so in conveyed the creepiness of the letter from the girls dad. The dark lighting also allows the audience to see the note, but not too much of the background which is effective when you see this scene in the film.

Image 8: When editing this shot we felt editing is as though the camera was in night vision was effective as usually parties are in the evening so doing this shows the audience this was in the evening as we didn't have a night vision camera to take these pictures on.

Image 9: In this image we had to think about the lighting very carefully to get the best silhouette we could. The first attempts at creating a silhouette were poor because the camera wouldn't focus and kept going in and out focus, so in the end we used our school cinema and turned the screen on and filmed while it was a blue screen to achieve this silhouette.

(From left to right starting at the top.)

Image 1: This is from a short film called 'Frendo'. You can clearly see int his shot straight away they have thought about their mis-en-scene as they have made sure they've used a mouse with a red scroller on to convey danger, this inspired us to make sure we thought carefully about the colours in our film.

Image 2: This image is also from a short film called 'Frendo', here they have thought about their lighting as the person they are trying to show, vision is blurred where they are drunk therefore the lighting here is how they are seeing the street lights at night moving the camera to blur the lighting.

Image 3: This is from a short film called 'Snap' In this shot, the person in the film taking all these photo's has captured the emotions very well by using photography, which inspired us when using cinematography in our film to frame the cinematography well.

Image 4: This image is from a short film called 'Lifeline' here they have thought of the lighting as it's a kind of scary film, so in the titles here they have carefully used lighting to create and eerie atmosphere creating tension for the audience.

Image 5: This image is from a stop motion called 'nice white clean'. Throughout this stop motion they have edited the pictures so they are vibrant colours, we have done this in our film and looking at this stop motion allowed us to do this.

Image 6: This image is from the titles of a film called 'mud boy' i feel the editing in this title screen in simple but effective. After using this as inspiration we did our title screen black with white writing. It gives nothing away about the film at all but it still says the name of the film, so doing it's job.

Image 7: In this image from the film 'mud boy' the cinematography is well thought about. The camera being at ground level, giving the impression somebody is on the floor, giving the audience suspense right from the beginning of this film.

Image 8: This shot also from 'mud boy' was carefully thought about the camera shot being below the level of the girl but you still see a childish skirt so the audience know this girl has just found a body choosing to make sure they've incorporated the boys hand. Shocking the audience, we've used some shots in our film to shock the audience like they've done in this short film. (cinematography)

Image 9: This image from a stop motion called 'satisfaction' was edited in a similar way in which we edited some of our image, when watching this, this made us realize we could convey different emotions/feelings to allow the audience to feel confused which they have done in this image.

Evaluation Question 2.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

When we made our ancillary tasks (poster and review page) we carefully considered the pictures we used for them as they had to relate to our film. We decided to use images from within our stop animation for the poster and the review page otherwise people would watch a film which was in no way related to the advertisement for them.

The picture used on our poster works very well with the name of our film. The poster basically sums up our film, we felt by editing the picture on our poster to make it look like the main girl is swinging was effective as just a picture of a girl on a swing would be very boring.

We when creating our main product we wanted to create a storyline to confuse/shock the audience and i feel we have done this. The pictures we edited are very surreal, to do this we edited them so the colours were either vibrant and bright or dull and washed out to show the viewer how the main character feels. This is how we made our film different and to enhance our shocking storyline as we didn't just wanted natural colour pictures, we wanted the characters feelings to come across with the editing of our pictures.

Evaluation question 3.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From audience feedback i have learnt many people like our ancillary tasks, we haven't yet had a criticism about them. On Tumblr; a blog site of mine somebody wrote underneath our poster that they'd like to see the film. as shown in the print screen below.

We put our final cut of our film on Youtube and got feedback via youtube and Facebook.

This is a print screen of the feedback we got on youtube. We have positive and negative comments.

After we got our negative feedback we changed the main criticism which were that the 'typewriting' went too slow, so we sped it up and the second one was that people couldn't read the writing on the note scene so we slowed it down.

I then linked the video to my Facebook page and i got feedback on there.

This is a screen shot of the feedback i got from Facebook. Nine people liked it and as you can see we also got two positive comments. One saying she loved the camera work, the other saying she thought it was good.

So what i have learnt from our feedback is that most people like our film, and we only had very few negative comments.

Evaluation question 4.

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

For our production 'swing life' we used many technologies from the begining to end of our film production and ancilary tasks to get the best out of our main product, poster and review page. Not just to create and edit but also to get feedback on our product.

These were Adobe Photoshop, Video camera, Still photo camera, Youtube and a range of social networking sites, imovie and an Imac.

Adobe Photoshop;

This image above is an image of Adobe Photoshop. We used this programme to edit all our photo's for our stop animation on. We also used this to create our ancillary tasks, Review page and poster. When using this i learnt many new skills.

Video Camera;

The image above is the style of camera we used when filming the filmed parts in 'Swing Life'. This is a very good quality camera, we also used a tripod to keep the filming steady as this is what we needed.

Photo Camera;

This image above is a similar style to the Still photo camera we used to take all our pictures on for 'Swing Life'. We needed the camera we used to good quality as we didn't want any blurred or out of focus pictures, unless edited like it on Adobe Photoshop.

IstopMotion;

YouTube;

This image above is a print screen of my Youtube account where I've put all the video diaries to embed onto my blog and our 'Swing Life' to receive feedback.

Apple Imac;

This image above is a picture of the Apple Imac we used to edit our main product and create our ancillary tasks. We had to use an Imac in order to use Photoshop, Adobe premier and Istop motion.

Vicki's video diaries.

My video diaries.

What was the best part of the filming process?

What was the worst part of the filming process?

Holly's video diaries.

What was the best part of the filming process.

What was the worst part of the filming process.

Audience feedback.

Holly also put the link to her deviantart on her facebook which the posters and review pages are on to help ensure we get feedback and for the people who don't have deviantart can comment under the link.

Audience feedback.

This is our poster and review page which Holly put on her deviantart to get audience feedback.

As soon as they were uploaded the poster and the review were both Favorited once each.

PDF file. Different technologies.

These are screen shots of where we've changed our PDF file to show a different media technology. This will also allow more people to be able to view our poster and review page as it's in this file.

Film review

Our review page we made for our film.

Final poster

This is our final poster for our film. We chose to use this poster picture compared to the other before we preferred the colours of this one.

We added appropriate writing to the top of our poster like the production company, actor.

Rough cut of 'Swing Life'

This is the rough cut of our Media film 'Swing life' without the soundtrack and silhouette on.

Changes to our film.

For our film we have now decided to do an animation instead of a film. Although we are having a silhouette speaking in our film so it's half and half. We tried doing it as a film, but it comes across better to the audience in animation form. The mise-en-scene looks a lot better.

Storyline:

Starts off with a documentary feel of a girl who is talking about her family life, in between each sentence (the silhouette) for each family member we have flashbacks of the truth as the sentence she says isn't realistic. We are using stop motion as this flows together better and the colours don't portray reality, if they are more realistic colours they are more dream life.

Posters 3 & 4

Second two posters.

We first picked up the contrast so the shadows were darker and the highlights brighter. Made a new layer and pasted another image of torz over the top of the image, one where she is closer to the camera. We then changed this layers opacity to around 60%. Duplicated this layer and used the effect 'motion blur' to create the look of movement. This layers opacity was at 45%. The text is bold and set to an overlay 'blend mode' and then has a white glow around it. This layers opacity was at 40%.

First we desaturated the image, then picked up the contrast so the shadows were darker and the highlights brighter. Made a new layer and pasted another image of torz over the top of the image, one where she is closer to the camera. We then changed this layers opacity to around 60%. Duplicated this layer and used the effect 'motion blur' to create the look of movement. This layers opacity was at 45%. The text is bold and set to an overlay 'blend mode' and then has a white glow around it. We duplicated this layer and gave the top layer a motion blur effect. This layers opacity was at 40%.

Posters 1 & 2

We decided to make more then one different poster so we can use two of them or just pick one and have a choice. Some films have more then one poster so we thought if we find it difficult to choose we can use two.

These two posters are the first two we did which are the same picture but done in a different way.

For this poster we started off with the characters full body swing shot. Made it black and white. Got a new image and pasted it over the origional image, then made this one black and white too by desaturating it, then made the layer opactity to around 40-50%. Then did this again with the same image and made the scale smaller. The text is bold and then has a black edge around it. It is all set to an overlay blend mode. Duplicated this layer and gave the top layer a motion blur effect. This layers opacity was at 40%.

For this poster we firstly opened the image of the character on photoshop, we then duplicated this image x4 each time making the scale of the image bigger. Each layer was set to a opacity between 40-60% This gives an effect of the character moving. The text is bold and then has a black edge around it. We duplicated this layer and gave the top layer a motion blur effect. This layers opacity was at 40%.

Filming.

We're planning to so our film on Wednesday 16th February which is this evevning. We have changed our film a little as we have decided to take pictures to make it into an animation instead of actually filming it because the idea comes across better to the audience and it the mise en scene stands out more when we edit the pictures so they main props stand out.


Storyline.
The basic idea of our film is people reconstructing a suicide victims life from footage they've found from the home of this person. The storyline is still the same but we're just making it so it's somebody else acting it out instead of the actual victim as planned at first.

Filming obstacles.

Filming take one: We filmed our film then lost all of our footage by recording over it with sound.

Filming take two: We then filmed it again and the footage wouldn't transport on to adobe premiere to edit. We tried many ways to try and get the footage on there but it wouldn't convert.

Filming take three: We filmed all of the footage again and when we started to edit this the footage wasn't good enough to use therefore we are going to have to film this again to aim a higher grade.

Filming take four: We planned to film again two weeks ago but we couldn't due to the house we're doing it at not being free.

Filming take five: We managed to get the filming of the silhouette done which came out perfectly fine.

Filming take six: We planned to film this again on Monday but the actor was ill therefore we couldn't so we are now planning to film this weekend, hopefully with no obstacles in the way.

Silhouette scene.

We were previously going to use a brown wall to do the silhouette on, but we tried this and the silhouette didn't come out very well, so we re did the silhouette in our school cinema on the blue screen. The silhouette came out a lot better on this so we have decided to use that for the silhouette parts in our film. This is a still shot of the main girls silhouette in our school cinema.

Film names.

We thought of a variety of names for our film between all three of us which are shown below.

- Confessions.

- un-cut.

- Unidentitfied

- Whisper.

- Victim.

- Confidential

- Split

- Dual

- Swing life

We asked members of the public to see which one they prefered and the results are as follows;

- Confessions = 6

- Un-cute = 5

- Unidentidied = 6

- Whisper = 2

- Victim = 7

- confidential = 1

- split = 3

- Dual = 0

- Swing life = 9

Therefore we decided to call our film swing life.

Storyboard.

Shot: Medium close-up.

Actions: Silhouette of main girl talking.

Duration of shot: 5 seconds.

Sound: The diagetic dialogue.

Dialogue: I've been planning to do this for a while now, it all started at the family party.

Shot: Over the shoulder shot.

Actions: Girl about to walk to the house for a family party.

Duration of shot: 2 seconds.

Sound: Non- diagetic sound, quiet music from the party.

Shot: Over the shoulder shot.

Actions: Panning of girl walking to the house for the party.

Duration of shot: 3-5 seconds.

Sound: Non diagetic, Music from party getting louder as she gets closer.

Shot: extreme close-up.

Actions: Girl opening door to the kitchen.

Duration of shot: 2 seconds.

Sound: Non- diagetic music getting louder, as she opens the door.

Shot: Point of view shot of the girl.

Actions: Hand held, panning through the kitchen.

Duration of shot: 3 seconds.

Sound: Music getting even louder from the family party in the living room.

Shot: point of view shot, close-up.

Actions: Feet walking to the living room door then it pans from the feet up to the door and then a close-up of her opening the living room door.

Duration of shot: 3-6 seconds.

Sound: Music from party getting louder as she opens the door.

Shot: Medium shot.

Actions: Girl gets the vodka out of the cupboard.

Duration of shot: 2 seconds.

Sound: Non diagetic music from party and diagetic sound of getting the vodka.

Shot: Medium shot to Extreme close-up. x 3

Actions: Pouring vodka then drinking it, this is repeated three times as shown in the 6 shots above.

Duration of shot: 2 seconds x 6

Sound: non - diagetic music from the party.

Shot: Point of view long shot.

Actions: Girl walks to a chair.

Duration of shot: 2-3 seconds.

Sound: Non diagetic music at the sound it is in the living room.

Shot: Medium shot.

Actions: ---

Duration of shot: 2 seconds.

Sound: Music form the party and people chatting amongst themselves.

Shot: medium shot.

Actions: ---

Duration of shot: 3 seconds.

Sound: Music from party and chatting amongst the party.

Shot: Point of view.

Actions: Camera falls.

Duration of shot: 2 seconds.

Sound: diagetic of the camera hitting the floor plus music from the party.

Shot: Medium close-up

Actions: Silhouette of main girl talking.

Duration of shot: 5 seconds

Sound: The diagetic dialogue.

Dialogue: My dad loves me.

Shot: Medium shot.

Actions: Note being slipped under girls bedroom door.

Duration of shot: 1-2 seconds.

Sound: --

Shot: Extreme close-up

Actions: Picks up note and reads it.

Duration of shot: 3 seconds.

Sound: Breathing maybe?

Shot: Medium shot.

Actions: rips up note she has just read.

Duration of shot: 2 seconds.

Sound: Diagetic sound.

Shot: Medium close-up

Actions: Silhouette of main girl talking.

Duration of shot: 5 seconds

Sound: The diagetic dialogue.

Dialogue: My mom really cares about me.

Shot: Medium shot.

Actions: Girl gets milk out fridge and places it on side, then she sees post-it notes.

Duration of shot: 3 seconds.

Sound: Diagetic sound of her getting milk out.

Shot: Extreme close-up.

Actions: Girl flicks through post-it notes left by her parents on chores that need doing.

Duration of shot: 3-5 seconds.

Sound: Diagetic sound of flicking through post-it notes.

Shot: Medium Shot.

Actions: Girl rips up post-it notes her parents left for her.

Duration of shot: 3-4 seconds.

Sound: Diagetic sound of girl ripping up post-it notes.

Shot: Medium close-up.

Actions: Silhouette of main girl talking.

Duration of shot: 5 seconds.

Sound: The diagetic dialogue.

Dialogue: I'm really close to my friends.

Shot: Extreme close-up

Actions: Fingers moving to open/ send text.

Duration of shot: 2-3

Sound: incoming text sound.

Shot: Medium close-up

Actions: Silhouette of main girl talking.

Duration of shot: 5 seconds

Sound: The diagetic dialogue.

Dialogue: My sister has always cared about me.

Shot: long shot

Actions: Just standing there.

Duration of shot: 4-6 seconds

Sound: Unsure - maybe soundtrack

Shot: Close-up

Actions: devoid of any emotion on girls sisters face when her girl is being hit.

Duration of shot: 4 seconds

Sound: Unsure - soundtrack maybe

Shot: Mix up of all the shots.

Actions: Mix up of the whole of the footage.

Duration of shot: 7-10 seconds.

Sound: blurred sounds from the whole of the footage.

Shot: Close-up

Actions: No action, just quick flash of girls face with blood and make up down her face.

Duration of shot: 3 seconds

Sound: Sound of a gun shot.