Evaluation Questions

1. Evaluation Questions by Ben Alder Candidate No: 2004 | Centre No: 56215 | Varndean College | A2 Media Studies

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? • Our Film: • Our film itself is a Crime/Thriller, even though we originally wanted to make a Noir film in the end we clipped our film to a Crime Thriller and filmed in Noir style giving our film its distinction from other products. There is a genre called Crime-Noir but even our film isn’t quite this as it isn’t technically a Noir as it lacks conventions such as a predominant female character (femme fatale) and dark places are used to a lesser extent. • Noir aspects we have merged into our film are: • Crime | A general theme in a lot of Noir films • Dark Places | The film is based in dingy alleys and dive bars • Film Style | Classic Noirs are mostly black & white due to the time of their popularity which is the style we used. Even though Modern Noirs are now more depressed and toned down colours we prefer the classical style. • By taking these aspects of Noir and giving them a more Thriller-based edge we have developed two genres in a hybrid similar to Crime Noir and Crime Thrillers. By merging them together we have generated a quite unique film, given better resources perhaps we could have exaggerated and focused our ideals a little more... • Continues on Next Slide > Q1

3. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Our Film: The way the film adapts the Crime Thriller genre derive from its story and video content. The story is based around an ex-crook which is similar/the same as other crime protagonists such as ex-con’s, ex-cops and so on with people involved on either side of the law. The footage then punctuates this by displaying the protagonist being caught by two strangers and the inclusion of the sinister looking antagonist resulting finally with the scenes of Poker. The film quickly establishes the crooked intent of the game so this enforces an initial identity generated by the audience. The narrative of our film uses many devices used in other films such as the element of Gambling yet the story is a little different compared to others. Sin City which is a prime inspiration of ours is about redemption and Smokin’ Aces which is another Crime/Thriller is about a heist. Both Sin City and Smokin’ Aces use common narrative themes yet our film is about our characters want to not return to his old ways committing swindle crime against others. There are films where the character agrees to work again for ‘one last time’ for their old group/boss so our story is quite a contradiction to existing conventions of Crime/Thriller films. Continues on the next Slide... Q1

4. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Our film’s genre was a little hard to hit on the head during our Research and Pre-Production Planning. We originally planned a Noir film but because of the nature of the narrative and the lack of Noir characteristics such as a Femme Fatale for example the film became more of a Thriller finally when the footage was seen. It adapts to the Crime/Thriller title quite well, although no onscreen violence or guns were seen due to our restrictions, my idea was to use a form of crime that was acceptable – in other words gambling. By using this I then built the story around a character who is not out for redemption like most Crime/Thrillers, but to simply stop and live the normal life. The film genre may keep to what exists in both genre’s, but the twist on the traditional redemption storylines is what develops our film from others. Were we allowed to use weaponry and were we to obtain a prominent female figure then we could’ve added to both sides with a Noir femme fatale but also a more thriller like weapon-based tenor. Mickey Rourke’s character in the film Sin City (Marv’s) storyline is littered with redemption against the man who killed the woman he loved while they slept. This is a very common theme in the film with Bruce Willis’ character (Hartigan) also seeking revenge against the man that caused him and an innocent little girl so much grief. This film was influenced our Noir origins due to the pure look of the film alone. The moody colours and yet vibrant red’s, yellow’s and so on made it very appealing. Q1

5. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Our Poster: Our poster is a very conforming piece as opposed to our film itself. Due to the induction to internet and TV advertisements posters are more and more ignored in a general sense. Though they are still used in cinemas and with bigger films on bus stops so a poster will usually still be a staple of a films promotion strategy and so on. In our poster there are the conforming conventions such as the large dominative titles such as the films title and actors etc. The poster chooses to follow already established conventions as it serves only to illustrate our film to the potential audiences. The images are very standard representations of the ‘boss’ figure above who is seen smiling sinisterly while the protagonist below is seen looking very sombre. Since the film is in classic black and white style the themes one can derive from this is very limited so the cards finally narrow the choices down to Crime or Casino/Gambling. The posters design is also very simplistic, though a lot of posters may try to represent the grand or vastness of the film its promoting others simply provide small signifiers, enigma’s and personifications of the themes displayed in their film. Our poster is a go-between of these as it contains full images but only of people not such vast objects such as landscapes, environments etc... Q1

6. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Our Magazine: Our magazine cover is that of which could be used on the real life magazine EMPIRE. EMPIRE is a long-running very popular magazine of the mainstream magazine market. Big films are the content this magazine contains and since our film is designed to be a big film this magazine best suits our product. Our magazine cover follows the generic conventions of a magazine cover except in the example provided we don’t have any Secondary Story. This is due to our emphasis on our film being a new big film of which the magazine will focus on to help drive interest. The image which tends to be the variable on a magazine cover is nice and in the centre and the whole magazines colour scheme has dropped down to match the colours of our film and it is quite iconic thanks to the black and white motif with the subtle but very effective red tie. For our cover we haven’t challenged much, we have taken advantage of current conventions to construct our piece which works well, with a magazine such as EMPIRE there wouldn’t be too much compromise because it will already have standards to maintain. Using its big and bold recognisable image will be the best we could do to promote our film, it says “This is good enough to make the front cover of EMPIRE. Q1

7. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? Altogether we have created a combination of 3 pieces of work, 2 of which being supportive tools for the other. Our film is the product of which our ancillary texts have the task of promoting, the more texts there are to support the film the general belief is that the better it will do. Though of course this may only be for ‘awareness’ the product itself will define its popularity. Our poster is a text which will set to increase the ‘knowing’ of the products existence; it must represent the film as well as glamorize it to a certain degree to derive interest in the product. Posters themselves have been used to support media texts for many, many years dating back to the former half of the 1900’s. As the film industry has evolved so have the techniques of which raising awareness have to keep up. Companies have started with much more elaborate means, the most recent of which tending to rely on the ‘boom’ of the mainstream use of the internet supported by such things as Web 2.0 and so on. Yet even with these evolutions in advertising techniques the poster and its close cousin the display are still highly popular and in use. Outside cinema’s, on bus stops, in retailer stores and many other places posters are still displayed and because the vast majority of notable films use this method it would be foolish for newcomers not to. Our poster henceforth is a welcome addition to the combination of our products as it will help raise awareness of our products existence... The poster may raise awareness of our films existence some people may need to know more about the products content before they decide to consume it (physically see the film). The magazine article will be the thing that does this, even though we were only required to design a magazine front cover the principle stands. The magazine cover is designed not only to draw potential consumers towards a magazine they will do so purely so they can find out more about the product which is why the magazine cover plays an important role in the combination of our product and supporting texts. Continues on the next Slide... Q2

8. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? The actual article in the magazine will be an opinionated look at our film by professional reviewers of whom people will respect their choice and react accordingly by consuming products that the reviews are in favour of and avoid those of which the reviewers do not favour. Of course we can’t predict perfectly how the public and reviewers will react to our film as often there will be films that may look good but fail to overall deliver and then their will be occasions where films fail at launch yet pick up small increasing cult followings. Though the internet now plays a big role in reviewing and previews and so on magazines still demand a market and will have established readers of whom the cover will interest and of whom will also place judgement on the film itself individually or via the advice and critique of the reviewers. The magazine front cover is a minor part in the entire combination, it may be a representation of how our film’s brand image may be seen in the media but other than that with no physical content and so on it serves little other purpose. Of course our magazine cover took thought though, we needed to research and review possible magazine choices. It would be foolish to place a blockbuster in a more art-house based magazine such as Little White Lies; so we had to think big. The UK’s leading film magazine that reviews all the bigger films with an established fan base and high demand for each of its issues made the most sense. EMPIRE previews, reviews and features most if not all of the latest or upcoming blockbuster and moderate releases. There are examples of certain films receiving more than one front cover to propose the magazine’s enthusiasm towards it such as The Dark Knight. Q2

9. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? Our Possible Use of Web 2.0: Web 2.0 is a describing term for a collective view on the current status of internet activity where compared to earlier dating internet statuses. The current state of the world wide web is classed as Web 2.0, there is a much more community based status-quo online then the one sided browse mentality of the internet years ago. Instead of simply posting and reading data users can now edit, and add to existing bodies creating a collective of user-input and knowledge on the internet. The term community is seen everywhere such as Social Networks such as Facebook and Bebo where users join up with friends, family and even new people to form close groups of shared-interest chat as well as a great method of staying in touch over vast area’s due to the accessibility of the internet being fairly easy worldwide. Another representation of society would be forums; informal gathering places of users everywhere who generally don’t know one another yet due to their shared interests will come together forming discussions and sharing of thoughts, feelings and information to one another just as a community would do. The internet has allowed such a vast mix of people worldwide join in many ways giving the sense of community between people who may otherwise be located on such vast distances such as other continents... Reviews, film details, opinions and so on will also spread across the internet quickly too meaning films also develop online presences of sorts as people discuss, debate and so on. The poster may raise awareness of our films existence some people may need to know more about the products content before they decide to consume it (physically see the film). The magazine article will be the thing that does this, even though we were only required to design a magazine front cover the principle stands. The magazine cover is designed not only to draw potential consumers towards a magazine they will do so purely so they can find out more about the product which is why the magazine cover plays an important role in the combination of our product and supporting texts. Continues on Next Slide > Q2

10. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? If we were to utilise the internet in our promotion package we could’ve utilised such things as a film website which we have drafted a picture of a potential site. The site contained a news feed filled with updates on the films production. It also had our teaser trailer, film information and even links to a possible Facebook page and Twitter Feed. The site contained one other piece of promotion which is a flash game link; our idea was to have a Hands of Red themed poker game for iPhone’s and iPods as well as an online version on Facebook. This is quite a unique idea however there are known to be other films that have done similar things. Web 2.0 based promotions are increasingly popular with mainstream films, using Facebook users can easily join on to the group via other people and so the product image spreads off to more and more people. Utilising variety online has been proven to be very fruitful, The Dark Knight for example used Web 2.0 and generated a Viral Marketing scheme that really generated a buzz prior to the films release meaning the box office values really enjoyed the reaction from the audiences built pre-release. With our film we could adapt a lot of other methods too to hopefully resolve with the same results instead of creating the opposite, a zzub. Q2

11. What have you learned from your audience feedback? For audience feedback we played our piece to our media peers as well as those extrinsic to our media class such as friends and family. Those who gave feedback gave generally positive remarks though there did exist an undercurrent of “errs” and “hmms” at certain things. Unfortunately our feedback is a little biased as the people we managed to show it to were people our age for example our Media Class as well as friends which restricts the audience feedback to Males and Females who are 16-19. Although this may be the case the fact that we received honest criticism still meant that we could make constructive changes to the piece. The titles of our film when we played our piece to the audience was a major flaw, in our defence we had not completely finished that section of our editing so any criticism could be turned into constructive criticism. Main complaints were the placement and font problems of our titles; the font was varied throughout the film and as we had learned from an titles pro, it looks much more professional for titles to remain one or two complimenting fonts as to prevent a piece from looking tacky. Although an excuse for different fonts could be humour, that is not something our piece wanted, we were producing a serious piece and had to maintain a professional look. Our soundtrack was a matter of debate during audience feedback, some say they liked the combination of it and our piece yet others commenting saying it didn’t suit the piece. Personally I was a little on the fence about the soundtrack, it does sound nice over the footage but in personal opinion it seems to not compliment the piece perfectly. Action films tend to have more (Rock-y) soundtracks to compliment the action. Most thrillers however will have a more tensing minute in the background to supplement the action. Our movie contains action but the footage didn’t really reflect this. However the audience seemed to like the complementation of the track so perhaps catering to the audience is more important in this case. I learned a lot about soundtracks affiliations with films during the process of making the soundtrack. Such as the suitability of some pieces over others and so on. Continues on Next Slide > Q3

12. What have you learned from your audience feedback? The footage itself had some very pleasant feedback, for some shots we were a little her and there but the feedback such as; “that shot looks nice”, “nice effects” and more was very nice to hear. We learned a lot during our filming and the audience feedback told us that our initiative and the odd improvisation pays off. Audience Feedback can be very helpful to producers of media texts such as films. Even experienced producers have to show rough cuts to bodies such as distribution companies. They will be hoping to either receive positive or constructive feedback otherwise they could be asked to scrap the project which would mean a real let-down for the effort involved in producing the rough cut. Even though it was for a game, SEGA the games software company showed demo’s of their upcoming Sonic 4 game during production. Feedback from the old-fans of the series is what they were hoping for and using this they changed certain things within the game before release to cater to the fans that they planned to please with this new delicate addition to their Sonic the Hedgehog series. We could’ve tried something similar; if we were to show our trailer to people not in our target audience we could use their general feedback to make changes that could possibly expand our target audience. Of course we would then have to meet compromise between our current and our new target audience brackets and such, but by doing this we and other media texts could possibly make more money due to more people possibly interested in seeing the film due to our broadening our target audience to cover them as new members of our audience. From our feedback we learned what the views wanted to see; how the titles were place, what they looked like and how much narrative to clear up in the then absent voiceover. Perhaps a wider audience feedback would’ve have been more constructively especially where the soundtrack was concerned, due to time constraints however we had to press on with our final adjustments... Q3

13. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? We have used a LOT of technology during the entire course of the project, without this technology we would not have been able to achieve a lot of what we have done. Computers especially have become vital for a lot of the processes surrounding the making of a media text. For us we used Blogs for a start; blogs aren’t particularly new but our blog us to add to each others work as well as post new work which is an example of the communities talk referring back to Web 2.0. The editing software we used is an example of the integration of digital camera recording and the capturing software on a computer. Using Adobe Premier we compiled resources such as our film and its soundtrack and pieced them together into our final piece. Software further backs the Web 2.0 theory that consumers are now becoming producers. If one were to purchase Premier they could edit together their own footage thus becoming a producer themselves. YouTube is an example of the collective of those producers, though content mostly could be considered amateur. Research: During all our project we have relied a lot on computers, during our research phase for example we had to produce a lot of secondary research which is research from existing sources. We used the internet to research and compile ideas for our film from other existing media texts. We used Microsoft PowerPoint to document our research onto slides for presentation. The advantage of this was that PowerPoint is very easy and simple to use making compiling the information easier and tidier. Compiling work into PowerPoint makes for easier analysing of how much data we had gathered due to the slides comfortably containing information on each. Q4

14. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? Planning: All our planning work was compiled on to a blog on which all of our documented work has been placed. Using the blog we could regularly post updates and changes to our planning and research as well as document editing decisions and filming schedules. This blog not only allows us to post information and informative comments about our work; we can illustrate by inserting images, shorten posts by linking to external sites, post documents and presentations to save time and much more. Our blog is the spine of our entire body of work, everything is compiled there as posts or documents. The blog made everything easier to keep track off as we could sort them into categories that when clicked showed us how much work we each had done for each categories. To keep in contact to make sure plans were kept or in case plans needed changing me, Sam and Charlie used Facebook private messaging to keep in touch. We had a few fair sized conversations over PM’s deciding on where to meet for filming or for our meetings to discuss our project. We also kept up with what work each of us should have been doing. Facebook played a subtle but very helpful role in keeping us together outside of College and our Media Class... Q4

15. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? Construction Filming: For our filming we used a digital camera-recorder which captured the visual as well as any audio that occurred during shots. Digital Camera’s have constantly refined themselves as technology involves, for example we recorded to high quality tapes though the SD Card which is a removable data storage medium could’ve been used as the camera boasted a Card Slot. Our camera allowed us to film in HD which has now become a must have on all new camera’s due to the mainstream inception of HD. HD is now on TV’s Games Consoles and not just in the cinema anymore. The camera kept steady and high quality recordings of what we filmed and we could edit on site the camera’s lighting and filming effects via the onboard software. To transfer our data into a computer we utilized Adobe Premiere, the software re-recorded what was on our tape and saved it into the computer. Adobe Premiere is an example of the technology now available on computers that allows users to manipulate video data. It is part of a suite of manipulation and creation programmes that is now readily available for any computer owner to use. Q4

16. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? Construction Editing: Adobe Premiere is where all our visual editing went down exceptions being our AK47 Title Card and of course our soundtrack was edited in alternate software. In Adobe once our data was imported we could cut the pieces of footage shorter such as the scene in the alley. The original shot lasted around 10-15 seconds yet we cut it to around 4 seconds as we only needed to highlight our main characters distress between the two strange male figures. Cutting shots short happened throughout our editing, it is one of the most basic editing tools. A visual effect we placed upon the whole piece would be the black and white effect over all the video footage. This was so we could establish that our film has had influence from its Noir origins. The effect was relatively simple as well to place onto the piece. Adding the titles took some of the most work, we had to decide on a final two fonts and then the text placement. The fonts had to be kept simplified to prevent the piece looking messy and unprofessional. The placement is also paramount as it can ruin shots and the whole structure and flow of the piece itself. Adobe provided facilities to edit the text and place it onto the video. Final adjustments would be arranging the clips into satisfactory order as to prevent the video from looking chronological as this is something to avoid in teaser trailers according to many conventions sources. Also the soundtrack had to be placed on which was a simple case of importing the audio and placing it in line with the video. Finally the whole piece had the once over by us and Adobe was used to export it into m4a. format so we could upload it to YouTube for display purposes... Soundtrack: The soundtrack was made in Audacity. Audacity is an audio manipulation software that can import audio or record it via microphones or from a computer itself. Our soundtrack was compiled from audio clips available on various free audio sites. By recording from the computer we had a lot of clips that were cut together. Effects used include a Fade Out at the end and a slight amplify to make the piece louder. Q4

17. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? Evaluation: The software this writing is in is what I used for my evaluation, Microsoft PowerPoint is a software I am very familiar with. I’ve used the software to make videos using the Custom Animation’s plus GIF’s giving the effect of active flux motion found in movies. PowerPoint is good because the preset options are helpful in laying out the text and images I have used in this piece. By brushing over what we have experienced during the creation of our media texts and previous work we have done in light of our project All our other work including the eventual placement of this PowerPoint itself is and/or will be on the blog. Thanks to all our previous work and the ease of access associated with the blog made referring back to previous work in this PowerPoint much easier. The PowerPoint tools I utilised in the presentation of my evaluation includes the ‘Foundry’ template which changes all the fonts, slide layouts and colours to a set scheme. I also used text boxes to layout my text and data in a tidier fashion, especially when using images to illustrate my work. PowerPoint gives me an advantage with displaying work due to a lot of previous experience with the software. This I hope will be reflected in my evaluation questions themselves... Q4