Evaluation By Jacob Chapman

1. Evaluation By Jacob Chapman

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

3. Much of the concepts and key conventions I learnt from Nick Laceys Introduction To Film) Chapter 2 Film Genre And Narrative. • Throughout our Media production “Remove”, we follow the conventions of the Drama genre to structure our plot as well as devise our mise en scene and other micro elements. A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, crime, and subjects in the world’s news. • These Put the characters in conflict with themselves, others, society and even natural phenomena. The subject we decided to tackle which is often talked about in the world news and is now a phenomenon in today’s society is the effects of social networking. How social networking was formed was mainly covered by the previous production “The Social Network”. Rather than explain its origins again, we decided to tackle its effects. We would also be building on the hype that “The Social Network” left behind as it was a huge success. • This film genre can be contrasted with an action film, which relies on fast-paced action and physical conflict, but superficial character development. All film genres can include dramatic elements, but typically, films considered drama films focus mainly on the drama of the main issue, which is the effects of our Facebook concept conveyed through our “Cannon Crowley” character. In a blog post I go on to speak about the conventions of film posters and teaser trailers in bullet points (Blog post 28 January 2011 Jacob Chapman.) I do not feel I challenged these conventions in any way. We followed the conventions tightly and didn't particularly go off genre. This is evident in many Drama films as the genre is so incredibly broad. Some people thought our film genre was that of a social realism during the feedback process. This is how misleading the Drama genres is.

4. How do you use the form and conventions in all three texts?

5. Throughout all of the 3 texts. We have used mainly dull colours, as well as claustrophobic locations (as shown in the alleyway sequence in the trailer) this signifies the characters mood and the way he’s disconnected from the rest of society. Dull colours and usually very bland looking titles are conventional within the Drama genre. As they emphasize and dramatize emotion. If we did our titles in bright yellow, it would look more conventionally like a comedy. We would be steering away from the genre we have chosen. It would also not get the message we are trying to get off as effectively, so that’s why it is important we follow the Drama genre conventions we researched. The poster and magazine cover to our production are emphasized in the same way. But a blue colour in the poster’s background is used to connect the Facebook concept to the demographic. The Facebook “E” is used in the “Remove” titles end “E”, this is another example of representing our concept. On the poster, a still of main character “Cannon” is used as a main image. Usually as I researched in my poster research, a main image is shown powerfully through expressions or the motion of the person in the image. In the drama genre, the person depressed sad or angry would conventionally be shown. A down “Cannon” is shown in the image, if he was holding a knife, that would emphasize action. So again, were very much keeping to dramatic conventions in all three media texts.

6. The Development Of The Film Poster To gain inspiration for our own film poster we looked at posters from the Drama genre so we can keep it conventional as well be inspired. As you can see in the photo the bench idea was taken from the Forrest Gump poster. As I talk about in my 1st February blog about film poster conventions. We simply fit the Forrest Gum poster with the theme of our narrative concept. E.g The Facebook colours and the name above the characters head as well as the E in the main logo. Much of this signifies our narrative.

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

8. On the poster, the image of “Cannon” is manipulated and edited to a grey colour; this emphasizes a dull emotion and gives the person seeing the poster an insight into the main characters personality. Also our main characters face is blacked out symbolising his lack of existence or perhaps emphasizing he goes missing. During the editing process of our trailer. We used a fade in to black effect when the shots cut, which I think created more tension. Also we timed the bass beat in time with the cutting. Small editing techniques such as this really make a difference when trying to set a tone or dramatic atmospheres for advertising. • I would advertise mainly through television, and of course, social networking. Social networking which has boomed under web 2.0, would be a far more effective way of advertising. As the main concept is about Social networking it seems very relevant to base an advertising campaign on social networking sites itself. Usually on the left hand side of the screen there are advertisements. It is here I would set up a screenshot as well as a link to our trailer to give the audience a taster and when they can see our film. There are many apps you can be a part of on Facebook weather it be music or film. A Film app could post a link via email or wall post to people interested in the “Drama genre” or have liked similar films to ours who have joined the film app. On YouTube because of music video copywriters like "VEVO", have applied a few minutes of ad's before you can watch one of their videos. It is here I would put out our teaser as well as on Facebook and Twitter. Ad's by Google are yet another online advertising source, this is why the world wide web is so powerful.

9. What have you learned from your audience feedback? • Our main method of getting feedback was through questionnaires to the class. It was also the most successful way, as we could screen to a variety of different people at once and get many different opinions and ways to improve our teaser. Here is our audience responses as I blogged earlier before. (Blog Post 25th January 2011 Jacob Chapman 206D) • When I witnessed feedback from our first audience. We got predominantly positive reviews. One person commented by "liking the idea of Facebook and how everyone knows what that is". That was exactly our idea from the beginning; we tackled the worldwide phenomenon that is social networking. Which many people around the world can relate too. This would attract a massive demographic following. • Another person commented on liking "the shot where the main character is looking at the computer in the internet cafe, and you can see in the reflection of the glass everyone walking around outside." Cinematography and mise en scene is essentially like art and create different depictions and meanings. This meaning was that the character is hidden and disjointed from everyone else in society, ultimately making him look lonely. Everyone is going about their daily business while this character is in the corner feeding his addiction by going on social networking sites in the internet cafe. Ultimately I feel everyone understood the idea of our character being obsessed with social networking. As there are many shots showing him walking around with a laptop in different locations. Many people picked up on this and commented on this. This shows that all that the work planning mise en scene and cinematography has certainly paid off. • The most positive and most frequently written thing that was said was the soundtrack was very good. The soundtrack as heard below is very soft and atmospheric, and definitely created an atmosphere tension amongst the room. The sound track was "well edited with the motion picture". We managed to the bass to go in time with the cutting so it all goes together. This impressed people. • Another positive review stated that the shots were well configured, one shot shows Facebook another on his travels and it was a "great mix" which keeps it flowing as well as keeps it interesting. • Some people commented by saying they didn’t really understand the plot, and "why the main character is seen at the end bleeding from the nose area?". This was done purposely as a technique of suspense and mystery, a lot like a cliff hanger. It is suppose to make you feel lost and confused. We were hoping that this would make the audience want to go see it because they are curious to what has happened to the character "Cannon Crowley". I had to explain to the audience after what the productions plot was actually about. Perhaps to improve, we need to bring in other shots to make the story more clear to the audience. • Another improvement I was eager to make is definitely managing our time better and keep to the list of targets which were in order. We constantly kept doing different tasks at different times which made us fall behind.

10. More on Feedback • Constructive criticism is always helpful. As not only does it improve the audiences viewing but also rises our grade. We decided to use the class as a feedback as they fit under our target demographic. They are also most likely to understand social networking and its concepts. This was evident when I asked for feedback from my grandmother for feedback totally out of our target audience. She didn't appear to understand our concept nor how Social Networking worked. So our method of feedback was very purposeful.

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

12. For editing, we used the sophisticated editing programme called Adobe 2.0. With this programme we broke the rough cut down and applied special effects. Such as fade in’s, colour contrast changes, sound looping. There are various other effects we could have used, such as duplicating. But that really wouldn’t have been put to much use as our genre conventionally doesn’t really require anything that extreme. Unlike a Sci Fi. Adobe also enabled us to enter our soundtrack behind the image. We extracted the soundtrack from www.soundcloud.com. We decided to use this harmonic soundtrack as it was very harmonic and set the right mood of depression and sadness. Many people during our audience feedback made not of this and praised it heavily. They also admitted the music did indeed set a great mood. As the soundtrack wasn’t long enough we had to loop it with Adobe. We also made the bass in time with the cutting. Adobe enabled us to go into great detail with our project.

13. The internet was of course a massive resource for our research. There is literally nothing you cannot find using today’s internet. It was here I was able to find much research on the Drama genre to build my PowerPoint presentation on the genre. I used websites such as www.allmovie.com and www.wikipedia.org to gain access to knowledge quicker and easier than any book. The only problem that I considered is that the information on Wikipedia would not be entirely accurate as people can edit the information how they like. But I assured myself by reading the references at the bottom of the page. So this is where web 2.0 could be negative, people can manipulate media forms how they want too. Facebook was in particular for us huge on research. We viewed the figures and how many users are on Facebook, we did this to really get across how widespread and powerful social networking is. Also, we captured the logo and did various screen shots of the website which were imperative to our teaser trailer. So all in all, Web 2.0 has been of massive importance for all of our research and teaser trailer footage.

14. Quack Blogging Our Media blog is our primary programme for presenting our work as well as research and planning. This way our work can be fixed into categories so its much more tidier. Another incentive is that our teacher can browse and see what progress we are making. We can also go back to blog posts to refer back to research or freshen our mind. We could also go back to shooting notices about information on when and where to meet. So quack blogging was paramount to the success of our film promotion package.

15. We chose to use our blog and take photographs of various planning. These include in the early stages photographs of possible filming locations, then we posted them on the blog to present our planning. Shots of the editing decisions we had to make as well as shooting schedules were all on the blog. We could also receive feedback by someone commenting on a post, in case we were doing something wrong. This could be from a teacher or a classmate. Most of our planning and research was presented via digital camera. Digital cameras are far better quality making the picture quality far better than let’s say a mobile phone camera. We could then put the pictures in our email, save them to the college system, and post them on our blog. USB sticks are also useful when extracting screen grabs from the edit suite to put onto the blog.

16. Method Of Presentation • I decided to present my evaluation through a PowerPoint. I preferred the idea as it’s a far more written way of doing it. As my main strength is writing. Much of my research and planning was done through blogging and writing. I feel as well it won’t be as time consuming as preparing an entire evaluation video. Much of ICT will be used to make the evaluation PowerPoint presentation. Uploading my PowerPoint to the school system via usb stick or email. Then of course , I will have to put it up on the blog to present my evaluation. So much of the process is very practical and computerized. The use of Microsoft PowerPoint is essentially the software used to create a slideshow with ease. So this is another use of ICT software.

17. Source Catalogue • www.wikipedia.org • www.imdb.com • www.totalfilm.com • www.allmovie.com/explore/genre/drama • www.filmsite.org/taglines.html • Introduction To Film (Nick Lacey)