Feedback

these are the feedback sheets we got from the other groups, overall they are all pretty accurate yet still a good response - this is very good for our groups confidence and now we are willing to go back and make the necessary changes to show that we have listened to audience feedback and taken it onboard.

Evaluation

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


In researching to make our title sequence as promising as possible, we looked into the typical codes and conventions of what we were looking to produce - a thriller. The codes and conventions of a thriller are somewhat more complicated than that of a romance or comedy as it involves so much more. You not only need to keep the audience entertained with a tense, interesting storyline but also almost confuse them along the way for affect, you want to mislead the audience with a thriller or in the very least give them a number of possibilities to suspect within the film - making it less straightforward than other genres. We needed to portray this in our title sequence to make it as believable as possible as a thriller, the idea was not to give too much away at all while still creating a sense of tension (even if the audience do not quite understand what is happening it still works to create a certain mood).


It was important that we followed the codes and conventions of fast cuts and shaky POV shots as it not only followed the genre but also the idea of our film. With the audience in the eyes of such a challenging character, it really would disorientate them in a way that we were really hoping for. It keeps an exciting pace as the music is not necessarily upbeat and fast, the audience would not lose interest because everything is being caught by their eye. We used extremely tense music throughout our piece to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. The music plus using black and white really creates an eery feel to our title sequence and the contrast between black and white and normal colour really includes the disorientation of place and time - another important part of the codes and conventions. We really worked hard into looking into every little detail that should be included in a thriller, the missing girl poster is an example of this, though it wasn't necessarily needed it definitely added a lot to our piece as pictures are a part of the codes and conventions.


In looking into the codes and conventions we really had the chance to make this title sequence as interesting as possible. While including all of the codes and conventions we wanted to take one to an extreme to add something more to our piece -this was the idea of setting up an enigma, which just so happens to be the name of our piece. The whole idea of our film is that so many questions will be raised by the actors in the film and the audience about the disappearance and that was really portrayed in our final piece. The typography disappearing in such an interesting way during the title sequence also supports the idea of missing people and even the idea we had of having the audience constantly raise questions. We really included as many of the codes and conventions of a thriller that we could without making anything too complicated. 


How does your media product represent particular social groups?


We decided to target our film towards 16-24 year olds, however the certificate had to be aged 15 to make sure we could cover as much of the targeted audience as possible. We knew that considering what our film was about it could be hard to aim it at such a younger audience but the ending of the film has a morale to it - not to judge people for their past - and the idea of there never having been a sex offender is soon eliminated and the whole film means something quite different. This is why we had to show the man in the title sequence upset - we knew we would have to portray what he was accused of doing in a very bad light. We wanted to aim this film at this age because we feel that this age group is young enough to appreciate such a tense, risky storyline while still being mature enough to watch it. We felt that any older generations (parents and grandparents) would not like the idea as it suggest the harm of children and so a younger audience would have been our priority as they are not as easily offended or worried by such films. This is not to say that the film would not have an impact on them, it would do exactly what it was meant to do - scare, grip and keep them completely glued to the screen. The film would be more aimed at men than women because through research it is clear that they enjoy thrillers more, though this is not to say that women are not being targeted at all as we still know a lot of women will enjoy this film, though the minority may prefer a softer film and so more money would be made from the male audience than female.




What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?


When it came to who was to distribute our film our group were very much challenged for a while, we took time to research into what distributors took on what kinds of films and just how successful they usually are. While we acknowledged Lionsgate had had some successful thrillers we eventually went with Sony Pictures, knowing they would fit our film better. They too had had some very good thrillers and they produced films such as 'the exorcism of emily rose' and 'the girl with the dragon tattoo' this was more the kind of eery, scary feel we were looking for and knowing that they had worked with these kinds of films before was very reassuring and we knew that as our film would take little money to make they were good as they often work with lower budget films. 


How did you attract/address your audience?


We attracted our audience with the very idea of setting up an enigma, once the audience has seen the title sequence they will instantly want to know more because one of the many natural parts of being human is curiosity. The audience are gripped with the music and storyline but they are only shown enough to make them want to see more. Also, the religious aspect is very successful in the thriller genre, so from the success of other thrillers involving religion those that enjoy thrillers would come and see it for that reason also. 


What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?


Final Cut Pro was what we were using to make our title sequence and it was really interesting to use, I learnt a lot from it. It was the first year I had the chance to use this program and it was really straightforward, while still offering so many interesting things to do to our video. We also used Motion to make out titles, which was very useful because while other groups stuck to final cuts text we had the chance to broaden our title sequence and try something new. All of this will be extremely helpful when it comes to next year as I'll be able to quickly get back into it and try new things that I didn't necessarily have the opportunity to try this year. Also, using the macs in general has become a lot easier this year as I've learn a lot about how they work and what they can offer when it comes to my editing. 
I learnt how to use effects such as slowmotion and cutting shots to make them seem jumpy and fast paced. There were other things we tried such as blurring parts of the video and making parts of it shaky, whilst we didn't use them they were still useful and taught me a lot.
Motion was very useful as I can now use different types of typography, widening my experience for next year and any othe future times I may need to use these programs. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?


I have learnt a lot in the process of making this title sequence, I understand not only the programs to use in editing but also the ideas behind making title sequences and films. I know a lot more about distributors from the research done and also the importance of small things such as story boarding and planning locations to shoot and arranging what to edit and when. We were faced with some issues when it came to storyboarding and where we were shooting. We had to change a lot of what we originally storyboarded, to get the best possible outcome for our video, as the location unfortunately had uneven flooring and made it virtually impossible to shoot some of the shots we wanted to - we simply had to change angles and the type of shots though we still followed the general idea of flashing between church and forest. This really has taught me to think of everything that could possibly go wrong. We also learnt that just because we really liked something about our work doesn't necessarily mean the audience will (from audience feedback) we had to change music and some shots that we thought worked really well as people suggested it and the outcome really worked a lot better. I've learnt that every part of making a title sequence is important from using the tripod and dolly, to planning correctly, to using the right programs, to research, to audience feedback. 


Overall, I feel that our title sequence has been quite successful thanks to not only the work and time put in but also the response and feedback from the audience and the research taken beforehand. 

Journal 21/2/12

We got feedback from the rest of the class after they watched our title sequence. Some of the feedback was:

• generally positive - mostly three stars and some two stars
• They liked a lot about the video such as typography, storyline, music, quick cuts
• We could improve it by trying out some slow motion on parts and speeding other parts up
• making some of the quick cuts slightly longer so as not to confuse the audience too much

we have taken all of these into consideration and have tried out slow motion and made the fast cuts a little bit slower - though not too slow.

My Journal

After feedback we realised some of the aspects of our title sequence were not quite right, for example the beginning credit was 'Directed By Maddie Carragher' and the first credit was supposed to be 'A film by Maddie Carragher' we changed this and made the beginning part with the distributor slightly shorter as before it was 12 seconds long. We moved the voice over from right at the end of the sequence to just before the music ends - this makes it sound more professional.

Journal 9/2/12

We've just been adding to the finishing touches of our project recently, for the first time since it had all been  put together we let shaun see it, he advised us to change the music and add some bits.

Journal - audience feedback 2

We have put the video up on facebook to be given feedback from and so far we have had some likes but no responses, we will repost at a later date if no comments are made and I will be uploading it to tumblr and vimeo for more audience feedback.

Ideas for Distributor

sony are quite an interesting choice of distributor that we are looking into. Films they have produced that could be seen as slightly similar to ours are:

a film that very much relates to our idea.

Possible Distributors

Lionsgate is a possible distributor that we are looking at from it's previous films such as 'saw' and other films that have some of the same themes as our thriller has.

Ideas

We were talking about typography last week and I had the idea of having the words of Enigma disappearing or appearing one by one to go in with the missing element of the film. One of our group members has done exactly this and is working on making the rest of the titles to suit our title sequence well.

Journal 31/1/12

Today we are exporting the video as many times as we can once we have cut it because final cut wont let us view the actual video, this makes the process of us editing our video a lot harder than it would be for everyone that is able to use final cut as I have to export it see what is not tight enough, go back to final cut and estimate where I should cut it based on the export, then I have to export it again which takes another 5 minutes and then I have to go back and repeat until it's all done. The music is finally on the video and works really well, even better than we expected and the credits are just being finished then they will be put on the video. Even though the macs are slow we're all working really hard to get as much done as we can today.

Journal 24/1/12

Today I finished putting all of the videos into final cut and editing them into the right place, making them the right length etc. However, after putting everything together and putting the effects on, final cut started to play up. Right now after every cut the video jumps ahead and hesitates slightly and considering we have a lot of quick cuts the video is quite hard to watch at times. After speaking to several teachers about it I'm quite confident once the video has been exported we wont have this problem, but for now we are going to put it on one of the other group members personal laptop. Though I am confident once the video stops jumping it will look really good.
RIGHT NOW I AM NOT FEELING THE LOVE FOR MEDIA.

Filming

Filming was very interesting because we shot everything outside of the school, which was something I personally had never before done. I didn't think about some of the problems we would have filming outside of school other than the obvious ones like weather and having to find the time when we could all do it. When it came to filming we soon realised that we hadn't quite thought through everything we could have and we faced a few problems.

First of all when in the church, the flooring was uneven which we had not anticipated so the dolly would not work sufficiently. We had to then go back to the church and I had to move the bottom of the dolly whilst someone else held the camera part and as a result we had to film from a different angle and ended up changing the shot completely. 

We also didn't use the tripod at one point where we should have and it was very noticeable so when we went back we had to reshoot that as well. 

We ran out of batteries in the church and had to borrow some from the priest who had only an hour ago told us how organized we all were... slightly embarrassing.

In the forest we didn't realise just how awkward it would be to get a straight shot without the camera tilted at an angle. Luckily we learnt from the previous trip to the church and used the tripod for everything that wasn't POV.

overall, though we did have some trouble we most definitely learnt from it and it will help us for when we ever next come to film. 

Journal 19/1/12

Today we shot the missing girl poster part of our title sequence, we had some trouble with the weather but we worked around it. Once we got back to school we began putting everything in final cut. We chose what we wanted and cut it down, now we need to finish it and add effects. We've now got all of the shots we need to begin making our title sequence. We have converted it all into final cut and have out around half of the video in the correct places, leaving space for where the title sequence will be coming up on a black background.

To do list for our group

Our group need to:

1) shoot the missing poster image shot, rethinking how we are going to use it
2) now we have uploaded the video we need to put it all together on final cut and cut it so it is tightly together without jumps or skips (with the exception of where the missing girl poster shot will go)
3) play about with the effects on final cut and decide on what would be best or our video (we know that we will definitely be using black and White at some point)
4) download the typography we have decided on and put it on our title sequence in the appropriate places
5) edit the music together and put on our video

Once we have done all of this we will be ready to hand our video in. This should take approx two weeks at the very most though we're hoping to finish it all by next Thursday.

Missing poster sign

This is the poster we will be adding into our video very shortly, we need to do a couple of shots with it in and then we will be completely finished with the videoing.

Journal 17/1/12

In todays lesson we learnt how to use final cut properly. Jack gave us a tutorial and we got a chance to test out some of the final cut on videos and upload our own ones and started to convert them and get ready to edit, my group are now ready to begin editing, we just need one more shot of a missing girl poster to add in and we can work around that for now. We discussed animating it but realised it would have been too hard and could have ruined the realism of the rest of the piece.

Journal

after our dilemma at the church we thought carefully about the forest and using the tripod to keep as much of the footage as steady as we could, though it was inevitable that some of the footage would come out shaky because it was a POV shot, we came up with a slightly different way of using our title sequence to make this all much less noticeable. We used Dawn of the Dead as our inspiration to use faster cuts between each shot and have the credits come up on a blank screen, we also are considering effects we could use to make the shakiness less visual to the naked eye.

Journal

We got all of our shots done at the church which took roughly an hour. We checked the shots on the camera and they looked good enough quality to use but once we had got back to school and uploaded them to a big screen we realised it was too shaky. We had to return to the church and change some of our original shots to make the dolly possible to use on the uneven flooring. After using the tripod and dolly differently we came back with even better shots and our end video will have made a lot of progress thanks to this.

Storyboard

Journal 12/1/12

We used today's lesson to film shots 3,5,7,9,11 and 12 which we needed the church for. We were at the church for approximately one hour and used the dolly and tripod, though we realised it would be a challenge to use all of them because the floor had uneven stones on it. We watched the film back on the camera and were confident with what we had, however, when we came back to school and watched it on the big screen it was far too shaky and the quality of the video was overall not as good as it could have been and had previously looked. Mr Grimsley suggested different ways to move the dolly for a steadier shot and gave us advice on how to maybe change the shot completely to make it better. We took the advice and went straight back to the church, once we had re-shot and uploaded we were much happier with the outcome and felt we had really progressed in this lesson with camera work. We also re-shot some of the outside shots using the tripod to again make it steadier.

Journal

we have now been given permission to use St Michaels Vicarage as our church to film in, we thought we would have a slight issue finding somewhere that would let us use its facilities to film but we luckily ha dno trouble and we will begin filming there first to make sure we have everything we need from them as not to disturb their church too much. We have also found some problems with our calendar so later today we will be having a group meeting to find a way to work around that and finalise our decision for filming.

Animatic Storyboard

This is our animatic.

Journal 5/1/12

Group meeting on animatics and storyboarding:
we have chosen the music we will be using for our animatic and retaken all of the pictures of the storyboard to make them clearer. The storyboard is now complete after adding some different shots and writing on the credits in the correct order for the title sequence. The animatic has been loaded up and the music is being added. We've now completed all the tasks we needed to complete before shooting so that is our next aim. We have also set up the dates we will be filming and editing.

Sony Pictures

In our group meeting today we decided to use Sony Pictures for our film because they are a very well known film company, though while being well known they offer the chance to make lower budget films that still make a lot of money. They have produced films of a similar genre such as the girl with the dragon tattoo (a thriller that also involves the police to a certain extent and is also about a missing child and a mystery). We feel that Sony Pictures will offer us the chance to make an excellent thriller that will draw in a large audience and make a lot of money.

Journal

Today we focused mainly on the storyboard and animatic. We took all the necessary pictures for our animatic and developed our storyboard even further, we began putting our animatic together and made some important decisions considering what type of music we wanted to use, we had some examples and will most likely be using these to add to the animatic next lesson.

Storyboard

The shots we're using for our storyboard:

1. POV of sex offender - we see forest (partly blacked out to create an enigma) the date january 2010 appears on screen
2. Cuts to walking through forest POV shot still - hand of the man in POV moving branches out of the way - heavy breathing - music becomes more tense. Picking up pace of walking, studio name appears
3. Church flashes up in black and white, not as long as the other shots so the audience feels slightly disorientated and confused about the purpose of religion in this film
4. Back to man walking through a forest - heavy breathing again more tense, picking up pace.
5. Flash of the inside of the church -  camera shaky as if it is in POV again - walking down isle and showing actors names across the screen
6. Back to character, heavy breathing increases, actors name appears
7. Back to church - cross is becoming nearer as if the man is walking towards it unsteadily - film name appears between the cross having the cross as the 'i' in 'Enigma'
8. Back to character walking through forest, changing direction quickly as if he is running or hiding from something. Audience in the POV would create a tense, scared mood at this point - another enigma
9. Close up of cross, still in POV - camera pans to a poster of 'Missing Child
10. Camera tracks in to the poster so close we only see the paper, when it tracks out we're outside and looking at the same sign on a lampost (we see a man walk out from the forest, wearing the same distinctive shoes as the one throughout the sequence, he walks past the sign)
11. Cuts to character walking in church (producers name appears, we do not see his face)
12. Cuts to character bowing at the cross (crying?) name of director appears
13. Title sequence completely rewinds to opening shot after camera has tracked backwards, an earlier date than the original one appears on the screen. It has been made apparent that the title sequence is set later in the film

Journal

While coming up with the idea for fonts and general ideas to use in the title sequence we started to plan the beginning of the storyboard. I wrote up every shot so that we could assign someone to draw them up while we could all use the hour to do something productive instead of all working on the pictures of storyboard. We all used this hour very effectively and found some copyright free music that we are now considering and testing.

New Film Idea

Enigma

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'Emigma' is our new and final film pitch/idea. We came up with this idea after realising our previous one was not original enough, so we felt this genre and idea would help us to come up with a brand new idea that was more suited to our groups abilities as it has so many different things you can do with it.
We also felt we would be able to make a very original title sequence to this genre and that we would be able to really make the audience feel the police thriller genre with the shots and music we would be using.
'Enigma' was took a couple of lessons to make enough developments on to have a solid idea but we were each given one target to achieve by the end of the lesson to make this idea as good as we possibly could.