A2 Media Evaluation.
1.In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Here is our video commentary.
Here is our final video.
Here is our radio advertisement.
Screen Shots from ‘The Breakfast Club’ which we used as visual stimuli for our project. As you can see the breakfast club uses many group shots, we have followed a similar style, by doing lots of shots of the group together.
The close-ups of the groups and individuals established character and showed emotion, shock and elation for example. The lower level shot of the boys running down the corridor slightly subverted conventions of tracking, instead of following the character we let them run into the distance. The back tracking shot of the girls with someone running behind is a typical angle used within many of the teen comedy films we sampled, the character usually brings news. One unique shot we used was the motion freezing on the group as a picture was taken with camera audio and a flash to signify the photograph. This effect has been used within teen film before and may be classed as a typical convention.
Here is a comparison of our Poster and The Breakfast club's poser. As you can see they differ greatly as ours is very bright and shows the characters separately whereas the other poster is on a plain background with a group shot as the main focal. I would say that our poster is not typical of normal Teen Comedy Posters as it has a lot of detail and brings in the title of the film, ‘The Yearbook’ as the background for our poser.
Here is our 'Beauty'. The typical look for a beauty in Teen comedies are slutty,short skirts and big boobs. However we haven't followed this typical look, instead we went for a more sutler look. We felt this was more typical of college students in England, compared to America. We choose long heeled boots as we felt that this was typical of stylish people, matched with a stylish winters outfit to tie in with the theme of a beauty.
Here is our Weirdo, as you can see we have gone for quiet unusual clothes, like big black boots and long white skirt. We wanted to come across as slightly Gothic. The picture below it, is off the film mean girls, the 'weirdo' in that film is the girl in black, who comes across as Gothic, and we wanted to portray a similar look for our character.
The ‘Varsity’ font choice and eclectic fonts taken from these various teen comedy films helped us to create the stylized ‘college scribble’ like font we used throughout.
Much of our inspiration came from the ‘Brat pack’ films of the 80’s, many of John Hughes’ works. The soundtrack and format, editing and transitions gave our film a modern and contemporary twist we needed to appeal to our target teen market.
Our short film follows a similar storyline to the 1985 film ‘The Breakfast club’ which features 5 students in School on half term due to detention. The social opposites spend their day getting into mischief and ultimately forming a close bond. However in our film, although we are also social opposites, this wasn’t always the case, as in our storyline we use to be best friends until college. Despite having the extreme stereotypical ‘high school’ hierarchical characters, a convention of many ‘Hollywood’ films, we maintained a moral, the code of friendship which overcame any difference. In a sense we conformed to the perfect closed narrative ending, with good and friendship prevailing. Also we used the Yearbook idea, as a platform and central key to the episodes and narrative that unfold, a feature found in many short films, a story that evolves from a single item or event.
As a short film, marketing and publicity are readily available in the digital media. There are competitions dedicated to the exhibition of short films and often channels, such as Film four/4OD, showcase upcoming talent and creative pieces. With this in mind we chose modern mediums, a website and a featured quote from an established film magazine Empire. This gives the short film marketing and stylistic credentials, a convention of any film exhibited.
Our demographic allowed us to conform too many teen stereotypes, often ‘Hollywood’ formula that aim to entertain the audience.
The introduction to our video converged with the codes of many teen films; we adjusted speed of various clips throughout, speed gain. The double time affect on the video creates a contemporary edge and introduces each character in ample time. There is a risk of the introduction overrunning; we had our timing deadline in mind.
We collectively decided to edit each scene as it was captured, enabling a more thorough finish, evidently our master edit would come toward the ending of our project to erase any flaws. Transitions and effects gave a professional look to our piece.
An example of fast motion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEUJAh9KoN4
Here is a shot from the film Mean Girls which is set in an American School.
This shot is typical of Teen Comedies set in schools. It shows the Lunch room, with the trays and tables. In these films the tables are all set of for specific groups. This is a typical scene in most teen movies, however we opted to stay away from such scenes as we didn’t want to follow to many conventions, we wanted to make our film individual to some extent.
Here are two examples of locations we used for our film. We used the corridor and Stairway. These are quiet typical of school films, as they are central locations in a school, however the content in these locations is not typical of normal Teen Comedies.
2.How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
We inter-linked our ancillary and main product through sustaining the stylized fonts. King Cool KC, Autograph and Love d by the King-we chose them because of their freehand feel, they looked like writing which linked directly to our college theme.
We tried to link all of our products together; this is why we have combined the main song in our video with the radio. The opening song for our film is the song, ‘Hounds of Love’ by the Futureheads; this is also the backing song in our 30 second radio advertisement. We also added sound clips from the film in appropriate slots. We also wanted to link our poster to the film, this is why our poster has individual pictures of our main characters with their supposed title such as ‘The Beauty’
We had these images arranged on a scrap book, to give it a ‘yearbook’ feel. In order to appeal to our target market of peers and young adults we featured modern highlights from adding a website to the poster and interlining our ancillary products to our main feature through the most appropriate choice of exhibitionist.
We chose Channel four, with 4OD as a sister company to promote our products as they have a pre-existing standing with new British film and development. They hold seasons dedicated to short films and would be the most realistic promoter for our piece. Channel four also has a wide demographic; with a large focus being young people aged 12-28, making them an ample medium for our contemporary short.
There are hundreds of exhibitions world-wide dedicated to short films, to launch the film campaign we could upload our video to any competition or exhibitor, particularly those online. With submissions and competitions any short film production can be aired/shown worldwide. The Toronto film festival boasts a section devoted to shorts as does the well known Cannes film festival. Dedicated art houses like ‘Royal Academy of Arts’ screen short films and projects, and being based in England make them more accessible. They are synonymous with independent work from channel four-which we feel would be the most apt distributor of our short. There are even comprehensive festival directories in relation to film and the arts-national and regional short film exhibitors.
http://www.cornerhouse.org/ = A local and well established art house that may exhibit our film
http://futureshorts.com/index.php?site=3
http://www.bitesizecinema.com/
The short could be shown pre-watershed, ideal access to our market, the content is edited and focused around teen comedy as entertainment so we centered our writing and content around this aim.
Photo shoot
We decided to photograph the background for our poster as using existing images of open books gave a 3D element and curve we could not put the text on without looking strange. So we took a bird’s eye-view angle of a sketchbook:
The quality of lighting affected our photographs and so we modified the angle to achieve a brighter picture, we opted for the third image the clearer and crisp of all taken; we wanted the colours to pop for our poster.
Our radio trailer followed many codes and conventions of pre-existing radio advertisements.
The radio advertisement for our film features the song ‘The Hounds of Love, by ‘The Futureheads’ throughout. It is used as we feel it is a modern, well known song that people hearing the advert will recognise and we believe that our target audience, which consists mainly of teenagers, is highly motivated and influenced by music. The song is also used to underscore several quotations which are taken directly from the film. These quotes are used to emphasise the emotional aspects of the events which are described by the radio announcer, typical code of radio, and we also felt that building some small sense of familiarity between the listener and the characters would encourage them to go and watch the film. We wanted the style in which the announcer presented the main body of the descriptive speech to reflect that of announcers on Hollywood film trailers before becoming more relaxed as the genre of the film becomes evident through the use of our comical quotes. We felt that this reflected the serious undertones of the film concerning the problems that teens can have making and keeping friends while also referring to the more audience friendly comedic elements of the production. We made sure also that that the announcer’s script informed the audience of both the films merits and its release dates and where they will be able to see the film, in this case film4 as we believe this is the kind of channel which would show small independent films such as ours.
We used ‘Adobe Premier Pro’ to edit the sound clips together.
Having recorded our announcer, the song and the quotes from the film on ‘Audacity’ we feel as though the radio project as a whole was a success as it appeals to our target audience as we have discovered from feedback from our peers, however we did realise mid-production that some of the sound-clip recordings were a little distorted, so we remedied this by re-recording the quotes which would be inserted into the clip. There are also some minor points we would have liked to improve on the radio advertisement had we had enough time, such as the abrupt ending, which despite using a exponential fade, we would have liked to lengthen in order for the clip to sound more flowing, and a couple of cuts between the quotes and the music track could have been slightly less obvious, however on the whole we feel the advert has a raw hard hitting feel to it which reflects the style and nature of our film.
Some of the equipment we used in the making of our radio clip, was Microphones, sound board, and audacity.
We also used similar equipment for the voice over we used for our blog.
3.What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Video of Jack giving us his opinion of our short film.
This is a video of Joel watching our video and then giving us his opinion and feedback of the video. The video of him watching our film is speak up to cute the time by 2/3 but then at the end there is a clip of him talking about the film.
The still of the colour balance editing
We continually collected audience and general peer feedback throughout various stages of our production in order to aid editing and development of ideas. With our audience feedback we often had to go back and re-edit parts of our film that other people didn’t think worked. There where primary factors found such as the severe change in lighting which we edited through enhancing the colour balance and audio background noise which was dipped using Adobe premier. Generally the cuts and transitions were the biggest flaw within our piece which we immediately rendered. Our piece had a positive response to the narrative sequence and choice of character, this allowed us to adapt the finer details such as timing and placement of shots, safe in the knowledge our layout and plot worked.
A still picture of Joel watching our video on the blog.
4.How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In making out film we used the new version of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, with using this we had a wide range of editing techniques and effects. We were able to edit out film easily as well as add effects and transitions.
Initially our research was developed from new media technologies, with access to DVD’s and internet research into the genre of our piece and pre-existing pieces that helped us to form our ideas and approaches. In terms of the shooting of our film we used a video camera (martin will give us the name) to capture our scene ideas, often using a ‘steady-cam’ approach with one member of the group having the hand-held camera to track the action. This format is the most used practice in the British film industry; independent film-makers have camera technology available and shoot accessible location.
In order to edit our film we captured the footage onto the computer, using the editing programme Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. The new version of this software made the editing stage much more efficient, allowing us access to a range of editing and transition techniques. We were able to edit and render our sound and audio within Premiere Pro too, just by un-linking the sound and visual we separately edited each aspect of our film. This new media technology aided our creative ideas, particularly during the final scenes with the ‘Photograph still’; we envisioned a camera blinking transition and with Adobe created a flicker and fade transition accompanied with camera audio. In terms of marketing our film work in the new digital media, the use of the internet-the website reference in our ancillary product- enabled us to collect live feedback from our target market. Social networking as a media platform allowed us to contact the band’s music we used to check for any copyright issues. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, permitted exporting the video easily to any other media technology available, formatting the film to disc is achievable and uploading to sites such as YouTube and Blogger.
A Screen shot from our editing process, we wanted a professional finish for the poster, in promotion of our film so we trialed and tested various layouts and colours of images. Experimenting with the layer options.
A still from Adobe Premier Pro CS4, the file creating and saving process
The group kept in touch via e-mail and outside of college through social networks such as Facebook. This enabled us to arrange and organise times of availability and pre-plan set, props, costume and converge our creative ideas further.
We used Facebook to keep in touch with each other during filming, if we had filming to do, Chris, Jade and I would email each other on facebook to arrange dates, and to make sure we all remember to show up, and to bring the right costumes, and props.
We used Youtube to watch other short films and to generate ideas. We looked at clips of the breakfast club and other teen comedies such as American Pie and Mean Girls.
We used Myspace to look up music. We researched bands and listened out for music that we could use in our short film. We also used Myspace to Contact the bands to ask for permission to use their music in our film.
We used google to find pictures of posters and pictures of films, we also used it for researching directors and pre-existing short films.
1.In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Here is our video commentary.
Here is our final video.
Here is our radio advertisement.
Screen Shots from ‘The Breakfast Club’ which we used as visual stimuli for our project. As you can see the breakfast club uses many group shots, we have followed a similar style, by doing lots of shots of the group together.
The close-ups of the groups and individuals established character and showed emotion, shock and elation for example. The lower level shot of the boys running down the corridor slightly subverted conventions of tracking, instead of following the character we let them run into the distance. The back tracking shot of the girls with someone running behind is a typical angle used within many of the teen comedy films we sampled, the character usually brings news. One unique shot we used was the motion freezing on the group as a picture was taken with camera audio and a flash to signify the photograph. This effect has been used within teen film before and may be classed as a typical convention.
Here is a comparison of our Poster and The Breakfast club's poser. As you can see they differ greatly as ours is very bright and shows the characters separately whereas the other poster is on a plain background with a group shot as the main focal. I would say that our poster is not typical of normal Teen Comedy Posters as it has a lot of detail and brings in the title of the film, ‘The Yearbook’ as the background for our poser.
Here is our 'Beauty'. The typical look for a beauty in Teen comedies are slutty,short skirts and big boobs. However we haven't followed this typical look, instead we went for a more sutler look. We felt this was more typical of college students in England, compared to America. We choose long heeled boots as we felt that this was typical of stylish people, matched with a stylish winters outfit to tie in with the theme of a beauty.
Here is our Weirdo, as you can see we have gone for quiet unusual clothes, like big black boots and long white skirt. We wanted to come across as slightly Gothic. The picture below it, is off the film mean girls, the 'weirdo' in that film is the girl in black, who comes across as Gothic, and we wanted to portray a similar look for our character.
The ‘Varsity’ font choice and eclectic fonts taken from these various teen comedy films helped us to create the stylized ‘college scribble’ like font we used throughout.
Much of our inspiration came from the ‘Brat pack’ films of the 80’s, many of John Hughes’ works. The soundtrack and format, editing and transitions gave our film a modern and contemporary twist we needed to appeal to our target teen market.
Our short film follows a similar storyline to the 1985 film ‘The Breakfast club’ which features 5 students in School on half term due to detention. The social opposites spend their day getting into mischief and ultimately forming a close bond. However in our film, although we are also social opposites, this wasn’t always the case, as in our storyline we use to be best friends until college. Despite having the extreme stereotypical ‘high school’ hierarchical characters, a convention of many ‘Hollywood’ films, we maintained a moral, the code of friendship which overcame any difference. In a sense we conformed to the perfect closed narrative ending, with good and friendship prevailing. Also we used the Yearbook idea, as a platform and central key to the episodes and narrative that unfold, a feature found in many short films, a story that evolves from a single item or event.
As a short film, marketing and publicity are readily available in the digital media. There are competitions dedicated to the exhibition of short films and often channels, such as Film four/4OD, showcase upcoming talent and creative pieces. With this in mind we chose modern mediums, a website and a featured quote from an established film magazine Empire. This gives the short film marketing and stylistic credentials, a convention of any film exhibited.
Our demographic allowed us to conform too many teen stereotypes, often ‘Hollywood’ formula that aim to entertain the audience.
The introduction to our video converged with the codes of many teen films; we adjusted speed of various clips throughout, speed gain. The double time affect on the video creates a contemporary edge and introduces each character in ample time. There is a risk of the introduction overrunning; we had our timing deadline in mind.
We collectively decided to edit each scene as it was captured, enabling a more thorough finish, evidently our master edit would come toward the ending of our project to erase any flaws. Transitions and effects gave a professional look to our piece.
An example of fast motion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEUJAh9KoN4
Here is a shot from the film Mean Girls which is set in an American School.
This shot is typical of Teen Comedies set in schools. It shows the Lunch room, with the trays and tables. In these films the tables are all set of for specific groups. This is a typical scene in most teen movies, however we opted to stay away from such scenes as we didn’t want to follow to many conventions, we wanted to make our film individual to some extent.
Here are two examples of locations we used for our film. We used the corridor and Stairway. These are quiet typical of school films, as they are central locations in a school, however the content in these locations is not typical of normal Teen Comedies.
2.How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
We inter-linked our ancillary and main product through sustaining the stylized fonts. King Cool KC, Autograph and Love d by the King-we chose them because of their freehand feel, they looked like writing which linked directly to our college theme.
We tried to link all of our products together; this is why we have combined the main song in our video with the radio. The opening song for our film is the song, ‘Hounds of Love’ by the Futureheads; this is also the backing song in our 30 second radio advertisement. We also added sound clips from the film in appropriate slots. We also wanted to link our poster to the film, this is why our poster has individual pictures of our main characters with their supposed title such as ‘The Beauty’
We had these images arranged on a scrap book, to give it a ‘yearbook’ feel. In order to appeal to our target market of peers and young adults we featured modern highlights from adding a website to the poster and interlining our ancillary products to our main feature through the most appropriate choice of exhibitionist.
We chose Channel four, with 4OD as a sister company to promote our products as they have a pre-existing standing with new British film and development. They hold seasons dedicated to short films and would be the most realistic promoter for our piece. Channel four also has a wide demographic; with a large focus being young people aged 12-28, making them an ample medium for our contemporary short.
There are hundreds of exhibitions world-wide dedicated to short films, to launch the film campaign we could upload our video to any competition or exhibitor, particularly those online. With submissions and competitions any short film production can be aired/shown worldwide. The Toronto film festival boasts a section devoted to shorts as does the well known Cannes film festival. Dedicated art houses like ‘Royal Academy of Arts’ screen short films and projects, and being based in England make them more accessible. They are synonymous with independent work from channel four-which we feel would be the most apt distributor of our short. There are even comprehensive festival directories in relation to film and the arts-national and regional short film exhibitors.
http://www.cornerhouse.org/ = A local and well established art house that may exhibit our film
http://futureshorts.com/index.php?site=3
http://www.bitesizecinema.com/
The short could be shown pre-watershed, ideal access to our market, the content is edited and focused around teen comedy as entertainment so we centered our writing and content around this aim.
Photo shoot
We decided to photograph the background for our poster as using existing images of open books gave a 3D element and curve we could not put the text on without looking strange. So we took a bird’s eye-view angle of a sketchbook:
The quality of lighting affected our photographs and so we modified the angle to achieve a brighter picture, we opted for the third image the clearer and crisp of all taken; we wanted the colours to pop for our poster.
Our radio trailer followed many codes and conventions of pre-existing radio advertisements.
The radio advertisement for our film features the song ‘The Hounds of Love, by ‘The Futureheads’ throughout. It is used as we feel it is a modern, well known song that people hearing the advert will recognise and we believe that our target audience, which consists mainly of teenagers, is highly motivated and influenced by music. The song is also used to underscore several quotations which are taken directly from the film. These quotes are used to emphasise the emotional aspects of the events which are described by the radio announcer, typical code of radio, and we also felt that building some small sense of familiarity between the listener and the characters would encourage them to go and watch the film. We wanted the style in which the announcer presented the main body of the descriptive speech to reflect that of announcers on Hollywood film trailers before becoming more relaxed as the genre of the film becomes evident through the use of our comical quotes. We felt that this reflected the serious undertones of the film concerning the problems that teens can have making and keeping friends while also referring to the more audience friendly comedic elements of the production. We made sure also that that the announcer’s script informed the audience of both the films merits and its release dates and where they will be able to see the film, in this case film4 as we believe this is the kind of channel which would show small independent films such as ours.
We used ‘Adobe Premier Pro’ to edit the sound clips together.
Having recorded our announcer, the song and the quotes from the film on ‘Audacity’ we feel as though the radio project as a whole was a success as it appeals to our target audience as we have discovered from feedback from our peers, however we did realise mid-production that some of the sound-clip recordings were a little distorted, so we remedied this by re-recording the quotes which would be inserted into the clip. There are also some minor points we would have liked to improve on the radio advertisement had we had enough time, such as the abrupt ending, which despite using a exponential fade, we would have liked to lengthen in order for the clip to sound more flowing, and a couple of cuts between the quotes and the music track could have been slightly less obvious, however on the whole we feel the advert has a raw hard hitting feel to it which reflects the style and nature of our film.
Some of the equipment we used in the making of our radio clip, was Microphones, sound board, and audacity.
We also used similar equipment for the voice over we used for our blog.
3.What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Video of Jack giving us his opinion of our short film.
This is a video of Joel watching our video and then giving us his opinion and feedback of the video. The video of him watching our film is speak up to cute the time by 2/3 but then at the end there is a clip of him talking about the film.
The still of the colour balance editing
We continually collected audience and general peer feedback throughout various stages of our production in order to aid editing and development of ideas. With our audience feedback we often had to go back and re-edit parts of our film that other people didn’t think worked. There where primary factors found such as the severe change in lighting which we edited through enhancing the colour balance and audio background noise which was dipped using Adobe premier. Generally the cuts and transitions were the biggest flaw within our piece which we immediately rendered. Our piece had a positive response to the narrative sequence and choice of character, this allowed us to adapt the finer details such as timing and placement of shots, safe in the knowledge our layout and plot worked.
A still picture of Joel watching our video on the blog.
4.How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In making out film we used the new version of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, with using this we had a wide range of editing techniques and effects. We were able to edit out film easily as well as add effects and transitions.
Initially our research was developed from new media technologies, with access to DVD’s and internet research into the genre of our piece and pre-existing pieces that helped us to form our ideas and approaches. In terms of the shooting of our film we used a video camera (martin will give us the name) to capture our scene ideas, often using a ‘steady-cam’ approach with one member of the group having the hand-held camera to track the action. This format is the most used practice in the British film industry; independent film-makers have camera technology available and shoot accessible location.
In order to edit our film we captured the footage onto the computer, using the editing programme Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. The new version of this software made the editing stage much more efficient, allowing us access to a range of editing and transition techniques. We were able to edit and render our sound and audio within Premiere Pro too, just by un-linking the sound and visual we separately edited each aspect of our film. This new media technology aided our creative ideas, particularly during the final scenes with the ‘Photograph still’; we envisioned a camera blinking transition and with Adobe created a flicker and fade transition accompanied with camera audio. In terms of marketing our film work in the new digital media, the use of the internet-the website reference in our ancillary product- enabled us to collect live feedback from our target market. Social networking as a media platform allowed us to contact the band’s music we used to check for any copyright issues. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, permitted exporting the video easily to any other media technology available, formatting the film to disc is achievable and uploading to sites such as YouTube and Blogger.
A Screen shot from our editing process, we wanted a professional finish for the poster, in promotion of our film so we trialed and tested various layouts and colours of images. Experimenting with the layer options.
A still from Adobe Premier Pro CS4, the file creating and saving process
The group kept in touch via e-mail and outside of college through social networks such as Facebook. This enabled us to arrange and organise times of availability and pre-plan set, props, costume and converge our creative ideas further.
We used Facebook to keep in touch with each other during filming, if we had filming to do, Chris, Jade and I would email each other on facebook to arrange dates, and to make sure we all remember to show up, and to bring the right costumes, and props.
We used Youtube to watch other short films and to generate ideas. We looked at clips of the breakfast club and other teen comedies such as American Pie and Mean Girls.
We used Myspace to look up music. We researched bands and listened out for music that we could use in our short film. We also used Myspace to Contact the bands to ask for permission to use their music in our film.
We used google to find pictures of posters and pictures of films, we also used it for researching directors and pre-existing short films.