Final evaluation.

1. In what way does media produce use, development or challenge forms and conventions of media products?

Our film Genre was one of the hardest things to define, this was due to the amount of ideas and things we thought we could do or include into our 2 minutes. However after spending time mapping out what we would of liked to do and than what would be practical and realistic we finally came up with our films specific genre - action crime. To begin with we planned on having ninja's and for a ring to be stolen yet the more we looked at this the more un-realistic and harder to film we found this would actually be not only that we found we may limit our self to a smaller target audience. After a second look we decided that we could have 2 amateur burglars instead of our original idea of ninja's this ensuring our genre was shown correctly, the use of iconography such as laser pens and dark clothing helped us also portray this accurately. Having done character profiles our actresses were able to successfully fill their role, we used the internet along side other films to help us find what we needed to put into our film to ensure we fitted into the genre we originally thought. 

We used inspiration from films such as St Trinnian's, various James Bond films, Oceans 11 and the Thomas crown affair. This is because they all have story lines that can be seen in a similar light to ours. For example, the main feature of our film was an idea taken from the St Trinnian's movie where they break in to get some answers to help them cheat, although this is only a minor part in their film the idea takes the main part in ours. The title sequence is also important as the style it is shown in can also give information about the genre of the film and set the scene giving all the basic information, as a way of showing what is to come we used the theme of passports to show the people in our film this is as they will be travelling the world to find the information they need.

This is the break in scene in the film St Trinnian's 

This is the main part of the break in scene in our film showing what is happening and what is being stolen. 

2. How does your media product represent a particular social group?

In our film we have very different characters, at first glance or from a conversation you would think Annabelle was a very normal uni student, who has a part time job to help fund her fee's and living costs. It is not until you find that her part time job is as an amateur thief that you realise she does not fit the stereo type for either a normal uni student or your expected burglar. We did this to show that people are not always as you expect at first glance and that people do what they need to do at the time, hence the name of our film 'the needs'.

   Sasha who also has a large part in the film is far from fitting the stereo type, you can tell from her appearance that she cares about how she looks, you can also tell from the fact she says she is doing this job to get some new hair extensions that she is very much what society would see as a 'girly girl'. The fact she has blonde hair also immediately means people will view her as the 'dumb blonde' character and in part she plays up to this role walking straight through the laser. 

Here is a screen shot from our film showing that Sasha has just walked straight through the laser this raising the alarms however as she is such a rush and panic she is not aware she has done this, and it is this costly accident that will cause them a long journey to get the information back she has just downloaded. 

Sam our other character looks very much like you would expect a 'boss' of a small theft business would. He can have a very demanding tone of voice and his appearance also reflects this.  The way we portray the characters has a large effect on the film, through costume, make-up, accent and tone of voice the personality we see can see on screen can change drastically.

The use of camera angles also shows power, or lack of power. In our film we did not vary our shots very much, this is something we would of re-done if we had time. Ideally we should have filmed Sam with the camera at a slightly raised angle however we have tried to use different editing techniques to show his power. 

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

The majority of British films generally don't have a large budget, therefore when looking into possible distributors for out film I focused my research on companies that specify on small budget British films. I created a power point showing all of the companies I looked into 

which can be found on our blog or through this link : http://bcasmedia2012group8.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/research-into-possible-distributors.html

We decided that we would go with Guerilla Films, we chose this company as it has produced many small British films which have been successful such as One Man and His Dog , Zero (which was rates 6.4/10 by the IMDb)  and Two Men Went to War (rated 6.6 by the IMDb) these ratings are ones that are quite high for small British films. They also have direct links with the Odeon cinema that ensures our film will be able to be seen in many cinemas across the country not just the few cinemas which struggle to justify spending so much money on film rolls. We also feel as this company can help with small amounts of funding there is a high possibility of creating a blanket strategy release helping our film become well known before its release date. This building tension within our target audience and creating buzz words around our film title. As well as this company having a specific section for distribution it also also specifies in areas other than distribution but still in the filming industry.   

Here is the Guerilla Film logo which features at the start of our own film : 

Original Logo :

 Logo when shown in our film :

4. Who would be the audience for your media product? 

5.How did you attract/address your audience? 

Our target audience is both males and females over the age of 12. The films rating is a 12 A this is due to the nature of the film and some of the language that may be used. Our film is targeted at all people who enjoy an easy watching action, adventure films featuring mild crime. We have pretty  much used social networking sites and word of mouth to get people to know about our film so after distributing our film on YouTube I then put a link to it on both my Facebook and my Twitter asking people for their feed back on how they thought our final product had turned out. 

Here are images of my posts on Facebook and Twitter: 

By doing this we were given some feed back from a range of people with various interests, here is a screen shot of some of the comments and replies from Bethany's post on Facebook :

All of these comments are positive ones, this is encouraging as it shows that our film is of a good quality. Although action films are usually seen as a male pick the majority of the comments on this post are those of females which shows that we have successfully reached our target audience and not limited our selves too much in anyway. Although all of these comments are positive and encouraging ( e.g. 'Well done' , 'It's awesome :D' , 'really good' ) we as the film makers know that there are some parts that given more time we would of liked to improve and hope that these people are giving us their honest opinion on our work. If we had more time I would like to find more ways to broadcast this and get feed back from people anonymously as this would mean that people didn't feel pressured to give us good feed back if that was not their honest opinion.

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


I think that personally I have learnt a lot of information on the technology that is around currently, but not only have I learnt about it I have also been lucky enough to experience using it. At the start of AS Media I had little experience when using a camera and no experience of using editing software let alone final cut express. After completion of the preliminary task I still has no further experience filming however I could confidently set up the camera and I began to learn how to do basic edits. Throughout this final task I have filmed a section of our film using a HD hard drive camera this giving me an opportunity to experience using this equipment ready for A2 where I hope to use the camera's even more and gain further experience. I am now also happy to use final cut express independently and feel as the editing process has gone on I have needed less help and guidance from our tutors. In our film I have successfully applied various edits, inserted music and images into our film and dimmed the music down gradually when there is speech in the film by my self. When filming we did have some issues with focusing the camera, as we were filming in a dark room to begin with me had our camera on auto focus after filming we found that the majority of our film was out of focus and had to re-film this on manual setting. Yet again at some points the camera struggled to focus and we did end up with some more out of focus shots however we have broken down these shots and the out of focus parts have been edited out. You can see this in the 'download' stage of our film. 

 Above is a shot of final cut express with out film open, you can see from the amount of boxes on the screen that there are many different shots used with layered sound and various edits

Here is a screen shot from our film this is where you can see that the laser is pointing at the wall however sadly it did not show up on camera even with deodorant sprayed on it.


Here are 2 images one of a laser pointer and one of a HD camera that are very similar looking to the ones we used in our film. 








      








7. Looking back at your preliminary task what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? 


Since completion of the preliminary task I have realised the importance of planning ahead. In our preliminary task we didn't plan enough and talk about which shots we were going to do and ended up having to patch up our film, this was due to the fact we were new to filming and acting and broke the 180 degree rule. This meant we had to find ways of editing our film to try and cut this out, although this mistake meant our film wasn't completely correct it did do us some favours as it meant we went into our final task having slightly more experience in editing than the others in our group and we could get down to linking all our shots together quickly and effectively without needing to wait for assistance.
Here is a link showing our preliminary task : http://bcasmedia2012group8.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/preliminary-task.html


Here is a video of the shots we edited together to create a starting point for our film.


  This time we had planned a lot more and it meant that we had taken a range of shots meaning we could choose from the best ones. Sadly on our best shot someone walked into the room we were filming meaning this shot then become unusable and we have had to use one of the not so good ones. Other than this and the fact the laser we planned on using doesn't show up on camera we have had a pretty stress free filming experience. 
Here are some screen shots of the pre-production things we did:

Thanks to the preparation we did it has lead to a much higher quality film, we have managed to create much more time for editing and meant that we are more than pleased with our final result on this piece where as before on our preliminary task we were only satisfied with our final product. The best part is seeing our peers and tutors making positive comments on our film telling us how great it looks and how every time they see it they see more improvements. I am looking forward to posting this on social networking sites for all of the people who completed our questionnaire and helped us create the film we did to see our final result.

I am also pleased with our blog and think that the information on it is all related to our film and even though the work has mostly been completed by my self and Beth some of it had to be done at last minute it is still up to a good standard and I am pleased all the time and effort we have put into this film has finally paid off in the final result. 

Here are some comparative shots from our preliminary task and final film to show how we have improved over the time with camera skills and editing skills. 

This was meant to be an 'eye line match' shot on our preliminary task, at the time we thought we had done it well however looking back the poor quality of this shot is obvious. 

Here is an eye line match from our final film which is far better than the one we filmed and edited in our preliminary task. 

This is still not a prefect eye line match however it is much better than the one we filmed in our preliminary task. I am extremely pleased with the improvement from preliminary task to final film, I am also proud of our overall product and think the time and effort gone in to it has paid off.