Evaluation

1. Evaluation Liam Hassimi

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? The representation of middle class and lower class people were very clear and distinguished. Along come Margaret Thatcher and she closed a lot of industries, a lot of jobs developed around digital arts. A lot more people see themselves as middle class now because of the work that’s around. Politian’s created a new stereotype of people which is being “underclass”, these are defined as single mother’s homeless people and ethnic minorities. The character in “This is England” are very socially orientated and stick up or each other although they seem to look bad and work around the law. The portrayal of working class people has gradually changed quite considerably in the 1990s. Our house song all white heterosexual males new version are all mixed race, which just goes to show how most social realism films are based around ethnic minorities. We chose a black character for the drug dealer and the character involved in deaths, this is because Social Realism films often portray ethnic minorities to come from the underclass belly and rise up through illegal methods but this often leads to being involved in police cases. Billy Elliot was a great film that gave the message that a new generation of unemployment can achieve anything if they work hard. For this reason we gave our production a sense of how the main character (who was surrounded by unemployment and drugs) was trying to get out of the lifestyle that he was living and change what he does to get by. However this is a great challenge as he’s habitant in an area that’s notoriously known for its drug use. Projecting that there is a social divide in what's seen to be a wealthy middle class area is what was key for us, we used the relationship between two characters from a different class to connect the two classes, it also helped us show the broader social issues via the relationship. Our production changed a lot compared to the initial ideas we had. We started off saying that we wanted it to be a pure social realism film with an element of romance which was surrounded by drugs and the notion that the two characters had in their mind that they weren’t free. Our initial ideas were also to give these characters a sense of escapism when they were in areas which were secluded from society. This idea was based on KiDULTHOODwhere there are many working class characters trying to escape from the life they lead but are restrained by drugs, violence and pregnancy. Taking this as inspiration we filmed our social realism and when we were editing it we noticed that we went off at a tangent a little bit. We had a number of shots with the main character who met all of the social realism conventions but we didn’t have many of the other half of the relationship, so we decided that it was best to have her as a icon of good in his heart to show that he was able to love. There was also a feeling that he wasn’t doing much illegal because there was no real evidence of this. To combat this we changed the story line to a young man who is involved in a murder, who is trying to get out of his ways and make a better life for himself. We put this into implementation by adding the police scene in the opening. Source: Social Realism to From Documentary to Brit Grit – Samantha Lay 2009 Wall Flower Press 2009 / Screen Online– Social Realism

3. Creative Process with Correlation considering the film and Brand Image We used a different image on the poster to the magazine to sell our film. Both images have a lot of depth and meaning. Before we decided with the final ones we had a one before that we were going to use. This was the image of our main character crouching down with a view of the sea in the background. This image had a lot of connotation to it; firstly you could see him in a negative posture with his head in his hands this showed you that he was in an emotional state. You could also see the sea and the burnt pier in the background, this gives a feeling of abandonment because the pier hasn’t been restored and the sea could mean a number of different things such as waves which represent anger it could also show calm. We decided not to use this image though due to the fact that it was a screen grab and if it was printed large it would looked bitmapped and unprofessional. Because the image was a long shot so it was hard to establish the gender of the character or the race, which are very important in our project. In This is England the brand image varied on different forms of their promotion, on their products they had a few different images because it gives you different perspectives to the characters each time that you see it, so we decided to do the same. Source: http://www.launchingfilms.tv

4. Brand Image We then took a different image as the brand image; it was a close up of the character, which projects the characters emotion, state, race and gender. These pictures will also be able to be blown up to a standard size of printing. We went against the conventions of social realism posts when we made this new image. They typically have shots of a number of characters which you could see their gender, state and location. We did this because we mainly focus on one characters story, in the other two films there is one main character but other peoples lives are also followed. In kidulthood, there are five main characters; on the poster you can see their location, state, race and gender. They also use the conventions in the brand image for this is England. With the image that I took I edited it in Photoshop, giving the image more contrast between the colours that we used, made it darker and used a blur effect on it, thus giving connotation of drug use in the production. I believe that this works well. Firstly its very easy to define his race which has been a big transformation in social realism shifting interest in white unemployed heterosexual males that are in story lines that verge on the point on reality to multicultural areas with class difference and crime.

5. Promoting Film Using WEB2.0 A very good way that we could promote our film through web 2.0 would be search queries. When you typed the name of the film in we would have a number of results showing which all lead you to gather information about the film. I did some research into some films that we took inspiration from which was “This is England” and “Kidulthood” for both films there was a few results that they both shared the same ranking for. They were IDMB, Youtube, Wikipedia, Reviews and Amazon. These are all sites that sell the product. IDMB is the Online Movie Database which gives you a lot of information about the films, you can find out a whole mixture of things on here which include the stars, the money aspects, ratings, pictures and movies. YouTube is a website which holds millions of video clips and the second most viewed page in the world, on this is both of the trailers and clips from the film. The clips that are picked are normally added by fans that show the best bit of the film which they most enjoy. This can be very good promotion because you see the highlights of the film which would encourage you or give you the idea that the film is worth watching. This is England had their own website specifically for the movie on the top which indicates that they still do a lot of promotion on it, to rank on Google you have to maintain a high number of page views so the fact that its near the top when it was released in 2006 shows us this. Kidulthood does not however still rank on the first place of Google when you type it in, this could have been their marketing strategy to get a lot of traffic on other sites or to have just have high traffic coming in before the film release. Because we haven’t done a website to promote our film, I think it would be best for most of the traffic to go to sites like the ones above did, this means that we relax about having our website made and promote it elsewhere on the internet. Source: Google Search (http://www.google.com/)

6. Research Feedback Methods Various methods of collecting audience feedback were used for our production. The first method we used was and online questionnaire which asked the users a number of different questions after they watched the trailer. This was very efficient because there was no paper used to do this and we didn’t have to transfer the data digitally because it was created in this way, it also didn’t take very long for people do to it. This attracts people to use this method because its visual and interactive and we can get a response to how they really felt about the trailer because people took their time and engaged with their thoughts on the film by using the interactive elements that were present such as star ratings, drop boxes and sliders. The second method we used was facebook comments; two of the group members broadcasted a status, which could have been seen by around 1300 friends on their facebook accounts. We got some very good feedback from this; I don’t think that it was as affective as the online questionnaire that we used. The feedback from both methods was totally contrasting. With the facebook feedback we had a lot of descriptive feedback, which was around one paragraph long, the people who gave feedback only focused on one element of the trailer. On the other hand the online questionnaire gave us a number of thoughts that they had in different areas of the film.

7. How might you be able to broaden your target audience as a result of feedback? One way to broaden the audience is to make the genre not just a social realism films. We already use romance as one of the elements but we could easily adapt the story line to make it more of a romantic film. This would help to broaden the audience by making it appeal to an audience that are fans of romantic films. This is one of the top genres that people said they liked when we conducted the audience feedback questions.

8. Constructing the Trailer Using New Media Technologies In the filming and editing process we used a lot of new media technology’s. To start off with we used a Sony HD camera, which we captured the footage at 25 fps and in a 16:9 ratio. This was quite a professional method to capture our footage at because the quality of the film that the camera captured was excellent and was in a widescreen format so that it gave us the cinematic feel. When we had the footage we used adobe premiere CS5 to then capture the footage off of the tape which was inside the camera. We used the capture software that is in premiere CS5 and used a firewire to establish a connection between the camera and the computer. Using a firewire enabled us to control the tape which was inside the camera with play, fast foward, rewind and record. When we were capturing the footage off of the tape we used logs, these made it easy and quicker to capture the tape because we could lay two brackets down which in-between them was the footage that we wanted to capture, then created the log so that when we hit control log we could record a number of different logs off of each reel. However we did have a slight problem using this method, in some of the footage we captured we didn’t leave a long enough gap before stopping the tape which caused the problem that the logs didn’t work. Fortunately there were only three incidents of this happening. Finally when the footage was stored on the computer hard drives and was in our adobe premiere library we were ready to start the editing process. We started off by creating our timeline sequence and dragged the footage onto it where we wanted it and made a rough cut to see what it was going to look like and gave us a feel of the final product. To do this we simply dragged the footage onto the timeline and used the slice tool to subtract the footage that we didn’t want. In our first scene we had eight layers of footage which was all made small and showed in a number of places around the screen; this is the police incident scene at the start. We had to do this because if not then the footage would have overlapped itself and it wouldn’t look how we wanted it too. It was a simple and effective scene in our film and we did this by simply just resizing each piece of footage and dragging it when and where we wanted it to be displayed. There was also some slow motion in our trailer, this is when Danny steals the bag. We used the timer to do this after slicing the scene into two, then we just changed the rate to a fraction of what is was initially which gave it the slow motion effect. After the editing was finished and we were happened with it we changed the colour and contrast on each scene to give the trailer the right aesthetics. This made the film give a lot more of a darker feeling by making the colours clash against each other. Depending on the light in the scene was how we decided how much brightness and contrast to put on the footage, this is because in the natural light a lot of contrast looks strange, but if the lights unnatural then the contrast looks a lot more realistic. When we felt that our media product was finished we exported it as an .mp4 file type, this is a very compatible format to have because a lot of devices are enabled to playback this format of footage. It wasn’t exported in Premiere but Adobe Encore which is software that is specifically for exporting adobe files, it makes the footage into an mp4 format and adds all of the codecs. On completion of the export we then had to upload our trailer onto youtube, this took around fifteen minutes and is in full HD 1080p which is the highest resolution.

10. Constructing the Poster and Magazine Cover Using New Media Technologies I created both the poster and the magazine cover using Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is a piece of software is the benchmark in image manipulating programs its extremely versatile and undoubtedly the most popular in its field. To start off with I had two high quality images which I based the two artefacts on. I had to start off by creating the canvas for both at a size which had the right ratio for a poster, I then had to create separate group layers so that they both had a background group layer and a text group layer. This helps me to position where I wanted everything, layers are like layers on an onion skin and the further down you over a layer the less you see if there’s a layer over it. When I had these two layers I started to add the text onto both of those, the first set of text that I added was the logo. When adding text in Photoshop you have numerous different options to manipulate it as much as you want. The only manipulation on text that I used when creating the two artefacts was kerning which is the spacing between letters and the size. With all of the text added I was then ready to start manipulating the images and making it look more like a poster by making text stand out and give it the right aesthetics. On the poster I created an effect at the bottom with a black both and paths that looked like a city silhouette, this was a simple thing to do. I started off with creating a box with the shape tool I then I finished it with a black fill. When I finished this the harder bit followed I had to use the pen tool to create the silhouette, the pen is a tool in Photoshop that enables you to create paths. Paths are a vector which is made using coordinates; you can blow vectors up to any size you want without it distorting. To create this path I found an image of a city and just went around the edges with the pen tool, then finished it with a black fill. Instantly the rectangle and the city established together and gave me a very good base to put the logo on because it stood out. I then added a motion blur onto the background image and added contrast to give it the feel of the film.

12. Use of PowerPoint in the Research and Evaluation Stages In our initial research stage we each created PowerPoint's which gave us a large understanding of the genre social realism and the history of it. It made it very easy for us to present the information. We sourced the information off of internet sites such as launching films which is a very good site to get information off because it’s been written professionally and with a lot of knowledge about the subjects. In a powerpoint presentation its easy to insert images and text and arrange everything the way you want it to look, but one problem that I did face was embedding videos off of youtube and other movie sites. However there is a way around this, I found the solution on the internet which enables you to do this. Use of Blog in Planning Stages We used a blog to do a majority of the planning on, this is very useful because we could easily present our work on here. The blogging system we used is “Quack Blogging System” and was created by an employee of the college; Dan Harmen. It was very well built and we didn’t have many hiccups with it, which is good for the first build of the system. The blog helped us make regular entries, and comment on eachothers posts. This was most definitely the best way to present our planning stages because you can see the build up to the final product and it’s so easy to go through the blog and witness all of the work that we put into this project. Creating a new entry was very simple, you just had to log in and in the navigation area there was a “New Post” button which you just had to click then it gave you a large field to write in, which was editable due to the word processing tools that it came with. One of the setbacks of this blogging system was that you only had fifteen minutes to publish your post and anytime after that if you published your work you would lose it, a member of our group lost a large piece of work after doing this. Another setback was that you had to navigate to another page when uploading files; unlike in systems such as wordpress. This made the posting time longer and it was often hard to find the files that you uploaded because there were no thumbnails. You could also make new pages in the blog which meant that you could have separate sections to the blog. I made a page which had a html form contained in it, I used this to collect feedback from people. It just made it easier for people to leave feedback because with one click to the page URL people could use the form.