Danielle's Evaluation

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
To trigger our ideas when planning the story, plot and specific thriller conventions for our film,
we studied a couple of real media products for inspiration. A certain scene from Rock n Rolla involves sound bridges, that link together inside the club with outside the club throughout the whole scene. The diegetic sound of the Subways band playing live inside the club muffles when we see shots of outside, to hold the realism of different action taking place in the same setting. Having lots going on so close also links together the characters in the film, as they always seem to have some sort of relation. The sound in the film becomes non-diegetic to the characters outside, as it gets louder and becomes parallel sound, reflecting the action. In the editing process of our own film, we involved these particlar sound techniques. (Click the link to view the Rock n Rolla clip)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20DN9wDhbAo

Our film is in non-chronological order, as we began it with the ending or a scene close to the ending. We didn't watch beginnings of real media products as a group to get this idea, but it is a popular convention used in thriller movies. When i think of a film in non chronological order, i tend to see Inception and i think personally think it's a very good example of this. It creates a lot of enigma and shows the main character in a bad situation by the way he is presented. Our film opens with the main character in a bad situation and it's very energetic and tense (with the fast running and obvious panic). This creates high levels of enigma for the audience much like the opening of Inception. (Click the link to view the Inception clip)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VXkUzf1et4     

The 'Nine Frame Sequence' below shows shots from the opening of our film. Examples of the few conventions i have spoken about and a variety of others are labelled against the shots and shown in relation to the film.

                              

< This image is an example where the sound inside the venue becomes quite and muffles, so the audience know the character is outside this same venue.  

                                                   

< This is shown as the opening clip but will actually be a clip from the end of the film when we come to make the whole movie, as it is in non-chronological order.

< This image represents how we created the titles, using a subtle font and colour to blend in and the space to show how weak the main character is in relation to his environment.

< The natural sound becomes pretty much silence when the main character becomes unconscious. This creates a nice contrast when the actual beginning of the story comes in with loud, live music.

< This close up inside the crowd holds an energetic, youth vibe. After what's just happened in the chase scene, it continues the uneasy mood and atmosphere.

< The close up and zoom in on the bottle, represents it's power and danger against the main character. It has set about dangerous business.

< The shot reverse shot allows the audience to capture both characters facial expressions and emotions. There's no key expressions that stand out but this is the point, as the waitress creates lots of enigma and causes the audience not to trust her. 

< Continuity of costume is really important in our film to stress the title '4 Days'.  The action and dangerous business that the character gets into all happens in 4 days.

< The spinning in the trees and grey sky, shows an unconscious, point of view shot of the main character. It adds to the intense, disorientated feelings of the audience.

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The opening of our thriller introduces our main character as a young adult, who is middle class. He represents a modern day youth by the clothes he wears; blue jeans, trainers and a hodded black coat. Through the use of camerawork, with a variety of long and close up shots, our main character depicts quite a mordern, sporty look that a lot of male teenagers wear these days. As this film is partly aimed at a young adult audience, ranging from about fifteen to thirty, they can relate to these modern ideas of representation and style. Representation of youth is presented even more, by the chase scene at the beginning and the band/crowd scenes halfway through. Our thriller has a very enegetic pace, with the chase that flows into an energetic crowd jumping with excitment. The fast cuts at different angles helps to create the energy and tension in the scene and the camera being so close in the middle of the crowd, allows the audience to connect more with the scene.



The three images show the main character, the boy in the band and the female waitress. They're all representing middle class jobs and a middle class lifestyle. How they act in the film and how they are presented, shows their modern, young lifestyle.




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

As a group, we decided that Soda Pictures will be the distributor of our film.  Their website shows evidence of success with both independent and world cinema; it introduces the team to you, with pictures and information about them which helps you feel quickly familiar and at ease with taking on work with this company.

 http://www.sodapictures.com/

We have chosen a regional release for our film at the Duke of yorks Art House in Brighton. It would be to expensive to go for a national release, due to printing, advertisment and transportation but Brighton is a popular city and Duke of Yorks is an old attraction, so we would hopefully still manage a successful distribution this way. 

Our film will also be avaliable on Sky Movies as this will also be great distribution. Sky Movies is particularly for movies, unlike normal channels which don't guarantee films all the time, so people go to this particular,   popular channel looking for good movies to watch.  

          

4) Who would be the audience for your media product?
Film classification is a very important consideration that must be taken, before the film opens. The bbfc is a good example of a professional classification company that lead by strict rules and regulations. They have to consider many elements when deciding how to classify the film; not only language, violence, drugs, sex and nudity but also context, tone, how it makes the audience feel and release format. We feel our film would be released as a 15, as it contains violence, drugs and possible strong language. It builds quite a lot of tension and is suitable for a mature mind.   http://www.bbfc.co.uk/
Although our film is suitable for anyone 15 or above, we always intended to aim at a young adult audience. Most of the characters involved are all different and of completely different occupations but they are all young adults of around 20 years old. This is partly because it looks more realistic for us to play younger adults. Also a young audience, particularly male, enjoy the thrill and enigma created in thrillers and would enjoy the energy and pace of our film; with the mysterious chase scene, following threw to a lively band and crowd. Both male and female can enjoy our film, however it is more expected and assumed that males prefer films with violent action. Nevertheless our film does not consist of any sex discrimination, there is of course a female character (the waitress) who represents an antagonist, involved in bad business.

5) How did you attract/address your audeince?

We have created our opening to our thriller film, with lots of details that capture our audiences attention and allow them to enjoy it.
Titles
The titles are introduced with the opening scene and blend in to the dull, grey sky and open environment. This is effective as it emphasises the isolated space surrounding these two men (antagonist and protagonist) and heightens the danger felt for the protagonist and the tension in the mood of the scene.

These images are examples of the subtle but emphasising titles, that show the isolation and weakness of character in relation to his environment.








Camerawork

The different viewpoints that are created during the chase scene and the pace of it creates enigma, as many questions are raised about why this chase is happening. The crowd shot is also interesting for the audience as it's shot closely in the middle of the crowd, which makes you feel like you are actually there. (The video is of the crowd shots from before our editing and sound process was complete)

Structure 

We have created the opening in non-chronological order, as this is a very popular and effective thriler convention. It allows the audience to get more involved with the film, as they can make sense of it and act like detectives throughout the movie. This can make the film more gripping and entertaining.

Mise en Scene

The fact that the film is called 4 Days and the character is wearing the same clothes at the beginning and end allows the audience to gather that the main character must go through some strange experience within '4 Days'. Obviously because it's the opening we can't reveal to much about what takes place within the rest of the film but the zoom in on the bottle at the end, symbolizes that it has caused the character harm and sets up this bad and strange experience.

These images show a close-up of the bottle and an extreme close-up after we have zoomed in. This shifts all focus onto the bottle and sybolises danger. The final image of the bottle you see is so close it distorts a lot and gives the feelings of uneasiness and disorientation.


Editing and Sound 

The diegetic sound of the band and audience, creates a sound bridge as it starts playing when the title of the film hits the screen. This creates a nice variation in sound and contrast between the two scenes; the chase scene is more or less silent in places, besides the natural diegetic sound effects. Also the muffling of the sound, helps to create the realism that the main character is actually outside of where the band are playing. Much like in the scene i have mentioned before from Rock n Rolla, the sound is diegetic and realistic outside of the club and doesn't disturb our attention from the action.

In the editing process we created a white fade, on the clip of the grey sky between the trees, spinning. This not only emphasises to the audience, a cut off between what will be the ending and the very beginning of the story but also acts as a point of view shot, showing the main character losing concsiousness. 

Theme/Issues 

When the main character is given a drink on the house, from a stranger, for no apparent reason, it raises suspicion from an audience poin t of view. It's quite clear something bad is going to follow as the drink affects the health of the character. This addresses the audience, warning them about situations like these as the audience can witness the bigger picture of the situation.  

6) What have your learnt about technologies for the process of constructing the product?

7) Looking back at your Preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

I felt i learnt more about the technology we used during the time between the Preliminary and final product. I would always have a go at using the equipment during the Preliminary but i didn't feel particularly confident with it. For the final product i dealt with the equipment a lot more independently; i filmed the audience shots on my own without the others, which i felt went quite successfully.



At Jack's gig, we didn't have a lot of time to try filming the audience as we were focusing on getting band shots. Also the height and position of the stage would have made it difficult to get good audience shots. Instead i went to a friend's gig in Brighton that had a very popular band playing and a realistic, large crowd.


There were certain things that we didn't do particularly well for the Preliminary; we are told not to break the 180 degree rule and at the final showings we were told we didn't break it but very nearly did. We were therefore aware that we had to consider this and be much more careful with following the rule for the final product. I don't think we dealt with time very well in the Preliminary task; the lighting, continuity and cuts were a bit dodgy at times. A few of our shots were quite yellow, due to the room we were using where the sun streamed in and caused the white balance to keep changing. However we didn't have time to re-shoot and had no choice in using them. This issue with lighting also effected the continuity, as we would sometimes have the room white in a shot and that same room yellow following it. Some of the shots for the chase scene in the final product were much to dark, due to the sun setting whilst filming. This time we did have enough time to re-shot the whole chase scene to improve our shots. 

These are shots of the white balance issue we had from our Preliminary. We did check our white balance but not enough, as the sun kept shinning in and out of the room. We have learnt from these mistakes since though and don't have any yellow, white balance issues in our final thriller opening. 

Some of the cuts in the Preliminary towards the end of the video were a bit to quick and jumpy and didn't look very natural or realistic. When we finished editing our Preliminary it was much to long so we had to cut it down quite a bit. It didn't look as good as before but we didn't have a lot of choice as we couldn't re-film any of our shots. For the final product we managed to get all the filming done and leave quite a lot of time for editing. This meant we could experiment a bit more and develop more creative ideas. For example introducing the titles over the top of the opening chase scene, the font, position of the title, fades and the sound bridge. 

Our title appears with the letters spread apart and slowly and eerily moves in so the letters are close together. This attracts the audience's attention more as it's more striking and creepy and gives them time to take in the possible meanings of the title.

As i do Music i was quite used to the audio software programmes, but i wasn't used to garage band when i started Media and since the Preliminary i have had more practice at using it. However as Jack was performing the music he would usually offer to take charge over it. We all had a lot of input about how the sound should be and the techniques we would use for the film.


Overall i do feel like i have learnt a lot since the Preliminary task, we did make some mistake and didn't manage time particularly well in the Preliminary but i definately think we picked up on all these mistakes and have improved since then. We all worked very well together and shared good technical and creative skills in this project.

Evaluation - Dominic Graham

1) In what ways does your media product  use,develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
 In our media product we had to make sure that we included key conventions of a thrillers. Some key conventions of a thriller are raising questions towards the audience, creating an enigma code and the building up of suspense and tension. In our opening I think that we used a few of these conventions to good effect. For example we have attempted to raise questions by choosing to present our opening in non-chronological order by having the end of the film at the start, this means that we have left the audience asking questions such as; How does the main character get into this situation? Presenting the film in non-chronological order also allowed us to use restricted narration, meaning that we did not give away the plot. 

As we chose to include a chase scene at the start we needed to make sure that it built up tension and suspense. This meant that we had to make our opening gripping and intense so that the audience would carry on watching it. We did this by using two different heavy breathing sound effects to simulate two different characters running, the breathing of the protagonist is faster than the breathing of the antagonist, this gives the audience the impression that the protagonist is struggling. Also to increase the intensity of the chase scene we made our cuts faster by cutting off unnecessary shot endings.




This is the title of our film which we selected a font for on http://www.dafont.com/

  

 2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?
In our thriller opening we used some examples of representation of gender. For example we used a stereotypical view which was that girls are usually waitresses. However we show that the waitress (Dani) has dominance over Jake's character as she is looking down on him, she then becomes the antagonist in this part of the scene as it appears that drink she has served is drugged.

 Another example of representation of gender we have used is that in the chase scene we have two men running in the forest, this ties in with a traditional stereotypical view of gender which is "men are more athletic than women".


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






  As a group we have decided that "Soda Pictures" will be the main distributors of our film. They are a good distributor of small independent films like ours. We intend to show it at the Duke of York Art house in Brighton. This is because we intend to release our product regionally, it would be too expensive to release our film nationally due to costs of transporting the prints. Our films target is to be available on Sky movies, which would be a great way of distributing our film.
 Our film will be rated 15 as it contains violence,drugs and possibly some strong language. This does cut down our audience down but it was our intention that this film would appeal to a more mature audience.


 4) Who would be the audience for your media product?
 I would say that the main target audience of our product would be men aged 15-30. Our product is a very male orientated film as it associates with themes that would appeal more to a male audience such as violence, crime and drugs. However some women also appreciate these themes and therefore women are also part of our target audience.

Our product is similar to Rock'N'Rolla which has a similar target audience to our film which consists of mainly men. As our product is quite confusing it would be harder for a person of 12 years of age to work out the plots and understand the film than it would be for a person of 15-30 years of age to understand.


 5) How did you attract/address your audience?
 In an attempt to address our audience we interviewed some people in our age group to find out what they thought about our idea. Feedback generally good therefore we knew that our idea would attract our target audience. Most people thought that arranging the product in non-chronological order was a good idea as it allowed questions to be raised. However, some people were confused by our idea but they said they would like to watch it to get a better understanding of our idea.

The start of our film which is actually the outcome of the whole film.

The actual start of the film and the events that build up to the ending.

 6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Whilst constructing this product I have learnt how to use a variety of equipment and software. I have learnt how to use a camcorder properly whereas before I started I only knew how to record and pause a camera. Being the main cameraman in constructing this product has allowed me to learn new techniques such as framing, using a zoom where appropriate and how to use a tripod to get a good shot. When filming we had to be aware of the 180 degree rule and that we did not break it otherwise it would confuse the audience. I now know that before every take that I must set the white balance otherwise the quality of the shots could be bad. I have also learned that when using two cameras I should remember to get two tapes as this was a problem in our filming process. However in the end we got the footage we needed with just the single camera.
 I have also learned how to apply lighting whilst filming this product, for our product we mainly used natural light but in some cases had to set up portable lighting to keep the shot visible.

Shot reverse shot, we had to make sure we didnt break the 180 degree rule.

During this process I have become familiar with using iMovieiMovie to get a rough cut of our final footage we moved onto Final Cut Pro which was a more complicated way to edit our product but was good for tidying up our rough cut. I found Final Cut Pro very complicated and slightly struggled to edit using it, however it was easier to insert text into the sequence using Final Cut Pro as there was more variety of effects and animations.


 I have now also learned how to add in sound effects and music using Garageband. For our music we used a song that Jack had created, adjusting the song to fit in with our product was quite easy, however we had to make sure that we could hear the dialogue between Jake's character and Dani's character but still had to establish that they were outside the gig. We did this by making the dialogue as loud as possible and lowered the volume of Jack's song so that we could just hear it. We added in effects such as birds in a forest, heavy breathing, a punch and Jack's music. In my opinion I think that the chase scene lacked a bit of music to increase the intensity of our product.




7) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?
Since the preliminary exercise I feel that I have improved in every aspect. I also think that our final product is of a much better quality than the preliminary exercise. We experienced problems in our preliminary with white balance as the natural light in the room we filmed in changed as the sun came through one window, this left us with an orange tint on a white wall. Another issue with our preliminary was that it had no sound effects or a soundtrack of any kind. I found that it lacked intensity and was quite slow. In the preliminary we were told not to break the 180 degree rules, we didn't break the rule but we did push to the limit of which we nearly broke it. We had to make sure that we did not make these mistakes in our final product this meant we checked our final product over and over to make sure that we did not make any big mistakes.


As a group we worked well together as we shared out tasks fairly and everyone did their jobs well. Our main weakness as a group is that we could not think of ideas straight away, this meant that we took too long thinking of an idea which left us with less time to plan. All in all I feel that we are all capable of different roles in the group as we all have a knowledge of how to use software and equipment to a high standard.

Evaluation- Jack Leonard-Tidy

Q1.) How does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Group?

 In this media production we display woman as equals in the sense that during the gig scene jack has a female drummer in the band, but also there is the traditional sense that the female is the waitress.
we could have made it more traditional, by having a male chase a female through the woods, but we did not do this as it did not fit with our story line.

Q2.) Why have you chosen to represent your characters in this way?

 We chose jake to be the protagonist, in our media production, of a thriller opening. in the synopsis, we describe him as an average guy being dragged down into a bad world of drugs and crime.

Q3.) What kind of media institution distributed your media?

 we are distributing this thriller opening by posting it on youtube and doing interviews with people explaining our film idea, which might encourage them to go watch it.

Our thriller would be distributed by 'Soda pictures' as this is an independent film and they are an independen t film studio. It is going to be shown at the 'Duke of York' Art house, as it shows independent film makers work.

once we released the movie we would try and also release it on tv, on a major tv company such as sky or virgin media, to start expanding on the amount of views.

Q4.) Target audience?

 Although there is no swearing, horrific blood scenes or murder shown in the opening i believe that this film openign should be a 15+ as the story line involves drugs and crime. Also it contained a mild fight between two people, which would not be suitable for a younger audience. We made a movie similar to rock'n'rolla as a source of inspiration with the gig scene, the crime, and the clever plot on how it all pulls together towards the end.

Q5.) How did you attract the audience?

 We kept the start of the movie fast paced, interesting and tried not to give away to much of the plot to keep the audience in suspense.

Also the fact that we started the film with a chase, and then cut to 4 days in the past, would keep the audience geussing how we even got from one place to another, which then hopefully would keep the audience attracted to the film and wanting more.

Q6.) What have you learnt about technology from the process of constructing?

I learnt how to change the levels of sound on garage band, by using different tracks and and using different eq levels so i could help the audience hear what they need to hear, rather them being confused and trying top hear over something else.

also i learnt how to use other editing software to make the groups final media piece,(final cut) and learnt how to cut scenes to keep them fast paced, and still understandable to the audience.

http://soundcloud.com/thecrows/ste-014

Q7.) Looking back what have you learned from your prelimanary tasks?

I have learnt how to use garage band more constructively and learned about how to use other editing software like final cut.