Evaluation - Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?



This is quick video showing some of the technology we used in our film. I recorded the prezi and padlet by using an online screenrecorder (http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/) and then sped them up. The video diary was also sped up and the screen recording of us editing was done on the Macs with Quicktime.

This is the Tagxedo featured in the video above. I created this to show the names of all of the technology I used.

1. Padlet: featured in the video above. Used for the analysis of Pulp Fiction (1994) and my evaluation question 3.
2. Prezi: featured in the video above. Used for the storyboard of shots filmed in Cafe Rouge and the Pros and Cons of our film titles.
3. Video Pad: a video editing software that I used to add some pictures to our first video diary.
4. Moviemaker: a video editing software that I used to add sound to the majority of the videos on my blog, and also to create the video above, evaluation question 1 and the storyboard.
5. Final Cut Express: the main video editing softerware that we used to edit our film. Cassia and I also used it to try out some effects on some clips.
6. Quicktime: featured in the video above. We created many videos of us editing or trying out effects using this.
7. Kizoa: online website to create slideshows. I used this to create a slideshow of some photos of our group filming in Hitchin. However, I didn't particularly like this website as I felt it looked quite unprofessional.
8. Photosnack: online website to create slideshows. I used this website when making a slideshow of my analysis of Detour. I wanted to use this one too when I was uploading the photos of us filming in Hitchin, however I forgot the URL.
9. Tagxedo: online 'cloud' generator. I used this both above to show the different technology I used, but also earlier on in this task when I made a cloud of words associated with film noir.
10. Photoshop: used to create both of my ancillary tasks, and also used to edit my poster onto an underground sign. I had never used this software before I created these tasks so initially I found them quite difficult, but I soon got the hang of it. However, I had some problems with adding shadows as I couldn't remember what button did that.
11. Slideshare: online powerpoint viewer. We uploaded quite a few powerpoints to this website to enable us to put them on our blog. Although I like how easy it is to use, I tried to use other means of doing this as well as I felt it looked a little dull.
12. Time Lapse: for some of our brainstorming sessions, we felt it would be a good idea to film ourselves writing on the whiteboard and then speed it up, creating a time lapse. I liked this and thought it was effective as it was a more interesting way of showing out ideas, rather than just uploading a photo.
13. Images on blog: at the start of this task, I didn't know many technologies apart from prezi and slideshare so therefore just uploaded photos straight onto my blog. I didn't really like this as I feel that after a while it gets very dull and tedious so I decided to find out about other alternate technologies I could use to add some variety into my blog.
14. Video Diaries: featured in the video above. I liked the idea of doing these as it enables people to see what got filmed each day and who was involved with that days filming process. It was hard to find a day when out entire group, and our actors were available at the same time so by doing these, it also let the other group members who were not there know what we had filmed.
15. Facebook: social networking site. We decided to create a Facebook group in order to contact each other easily. I felt as though this was a very good idea as it allowed us to discuss when we were able to film, what we were filming when, who would be at each filming session, what props would be needed etc. I feel that without this Facebook group, it would've been significantly harder to arrange all of this in an efficient manner.

I feel as though my knowledge and usage of different technologies has broadened widely from last year. Looking at my blog from AS (http://emilymerryweatherg321.blogspot.co.uk/), I can see that I mainly only used Prezi, Slideshare and uploading photos straight onto my blog. I feel as though the use of technologies I used this year are substantially more effective and generally look a lot better.

Evaluation - Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Created with Padlet

Evaluation - Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? 

Link to poster: http://emilymerryweathera2media.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/film-poster-ancillary-task.html

Link to review: http://emilymerryweathera2media.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/film-review-ancillary-task.html


Link to main product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95BLfl8OSBM

Evaluation Q2 from emeyelee

Evaluation - Question 1

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

(Music: Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High by Arctic Monkeys vs Miley Cyrus).

Class Feedback On Our Final Film

In today's lesson, Mrs Scales proposed we each showed out final films to the class in order to get feedback. I felt that this was very useful to us as it enabled us to see what features worked well, what didn't, etc.

Final Film- 'The Crush'

'The Crush' Draft and Feedback

We had a few finishing touches to make our film, however we couldn't decide what to do. Therefore we decided to make a 'draft' copy of our final film and show it to some other media students to get their feedback. This video shows the copy we showed them and we asked them their opinions on it so we could work out what to change before we published the final finished product.

This video shows Flynn and Max's feedback to our film, which them helped us to be able to make the final decisions on our film.

Advertising My Poster

These are some quick photos to show how my poster could be used to advertise our film.

This one was created on an online sign generator.

This one was created on PhotoShop. I got a photo of a billboard at Euston underground station and then distorted my image to make it fit and give it depth and perception.
I feel as though this would be a good place to advertise our film as a lot of people use the underground on a daily basis and it enables us to attract a large amount of people. Also, Euston is a very widely used station so it will have a lot more people passing through there daily than somewhere more on the edge of London, such as Pimlico.
I feel that although it's got a monochrome colour scheme, it stands out very well, making it more eye-catching to any passing visitors.
Also, the poster next to it is for 'The Conjuring', a horror film aimed at a similar age as our film. This therefore shows that it's an ideal place to advertise it.

Film Review (Ancillary Task)

For my film review, I decided to make it look like a review from Rotten Tomatoes.

To do this I:

1. Went onto http://www.rottentomatoes.com/

2. Loaded up a review for Rio 2 (as that's currently showing and I wanted to make it look like a more recent film.

3. Print-screened this review.

4. Opened it up in PhotoShop.

5. Cut out the bits I didn't want. (Film name, title, review, movie info etc).

6. Added in the relevant fields for my own film.

I did this to ensure that I kept all of the bits that online film reviews have, in order to make it look more professional.

Film Poster (Ancillary Task)

Trying Out Effects

Today Cassia and I decided to experiment with a number of different effects to see how they would look if we had decided to use them in our film. We decided to take a screen recording of this using Quicktime so that we could show how we added effects to both this and our actual film.
By this point, we had already added the desired effect (colour tint- 80%) to our film however we felt that it could be useful to experiment with alternative effects in order to see how they would've looked, had we decided to use them instead.

(Music: The Look by Metronomy)



This is a video that I began to make with Cassia, which she then finished, showing some of the effects we tried out.

(Music: Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey)

Refilming Part Of Our Film

As we were editing our film, we realised that we were missing part of the footage which we then could not find. This video explains how we had to refilm it with just over a week until the deadline.
Although it was annoying to lose some of the footage, it wasn't too bad as we refilmed it in the photography studio where we had access to light boxes which allowed us to experiment with different lights and shadows. We found this useful as it allowed us to illuminate only part of Hollie's face, showing that despite beginning innocent, Scarlett has corrupted her and she has devloped a bad side to her.
Whilst this scene got re-shot, I was editing the colour on our clips in the mac room in order to make them have the effect we desired.

Editing - Tweaking Our Footage

At this point, all clips had been cut and had the filter applied so it was just a case of sorting out the transitions and the sound levels. This video shows a screen recording I took when Beth, Cassia and myself were sorting out some of the footage. 

(Music: Transatlanticism by Death Cab For Cutie).

Music For Our Film

After we found out our music in our film had to be copyright free, we decided to look on some free music websites to see if there was any on there we could use. However, none of the music on these websites really sounded appropriate for our film as a lot of them sounded too old fashioned and traditional film noir. As our film is a neo-noir, we wanted to use modern music to give to the right effect.

We then thought about using original songs by unsigned artists as there would be a higher chance of them allowing us to use their songs for our film. Cassia proposed the idea of using Tom Bem's music in our film, as she knows him through Twitter. After listening to a couple of his songs, we decided that his music would be very good for our film so we sent him a message on Twitter asking if we could have an email address to ask him on. This is what the messages between Cassia and Tom said:

Cassia and Tom's DMs via Twitter

Cassia and Tom's emails.

These are the two songs we used by him in our film.

Consume, Be Silent, Die


Captain (unfortunately I could not find a link to the correct version, so this is an acoustic of the same song instead).

Choosing Music For Our Film

When we were looking into music to use in our film, we found many that we wanted to use, however couldn't as they weren't copyright free. These are some that we were considering using:

Tessellate by Alt-J

(All Along The)Watchtower by Devlin ft Ed Sheeran (Instrumental)

Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey (Instrumental)



Young and Beautiful by Lana Del Rey (Instrumental Remix)

Editing

We had some problems with editing our footage so we decided to start it again as we now have a lot more footage to put together. We spent today's lesson beginning putting the clips in the right order so that we could get the story line right, and then afterwards we can cut the clips down to ensure it flows properly with no continuity errors. 

Filming (Day 7, Part 2)

These are some photos of us filming in Hitchin, which I then turned into a slideshow on a website called 'kizoa'.

Filming in Hitchin - Video Maker

Filming (Day 7, Part 1)

Applying Fake Blood

This video shows Beth and Lib applying fake blood to our victim, Richard, who has just been shot.

Filming (Day 6)

Here are some photos of Cassia and I filming today's footage.

Filming (Day 6)

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Filming (Day 5)

Our Logo

After we designed our logo, we showed our designs to Rhys and explained how we wanted it to be animated. He was kind enough to help us out and transform our drawings into an actual moving logo. We may slow it down slightly when we use it in our film, but apart from that we were all very happy with how it turned out.

Film Titles

We limited our decision of our title for our film down to these three, which Lib them made a prezi showing the advantages and disadvantages of each one.

Filming Arrangements (3rd March - 7th March)

Another Potential Film Title

After talking about our potential film titles, Mrs Scales came up with the idea of 'Entangled'. She got this idea from Marmion by Sir Walter Scott. The line "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." really stood out to us as Scarlett uses deception to pretend to love Charlie, so that she can get Charlie to kill her husband (Richard). Also, in a way Charlie is trapped in Scarlett's 'web'.

However, although we like this idea, we fear that it may sound too 'fairytale' as it sounds familiar to both the film 'Tangled' and 'Enchanted'.

Brainstorming Film Titles

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This is a mindmap to show some possible ideas for the title of our film, which Cassia then sped up and added music too.

Logo Designs

Our group decided on the name 'Clockwork Productions' for our film company. Cassia and Beth discussed some ideas for our logo, which Beth then went on to draw up.

The first design is a clock face with the words 'Clockwork Productions' written on it in place of the clock hands. We thought that we could possibly animate the hands to 'tick' round the clock. 

The other design is 'Clockwork Pictures' written in bold letters with cogs in the background. The cogs would be used to illustrate the inner mechanisms of a clock. We thought that we could possibly animate the cogs to rotate around in the background.

We decided on the second design as we feel it is more striking and it is easier to see our production companies name. Although we liked the first one, we thought that it may be too simple and that it may be more difficult to see the name of our company. 

Warner Bros Logo

We looked at a number of Warner Bros different logos and decided on this one. We chose it as it is quite dark, which reflects the nature of our film. Hoever, it is also still very recognisable as Warner Bros.

Discussing Institutions

Today our group discussed which institution we would like to use for our film noir, based on the research Beth and I did. Unfortunately I wasn't in this lesson, however I fully agree with my groups decision to go with Warner Bros. We chose Warner Bros as they have distributed a number of Neo-Noir films, so we thought they'd be perfect for ours as ours is also a Neo-Noir.

Institution Research

We researched a number of different institutions in order to decide which one we would like for our Film Noir.

Institutions Research from Cassia Lima

Trying Out LiveType

This is just a quick video Beth took of me trying out some different effects on LiveType.


(Music: Colours by Oliver Daldry)

Communication

In order to easily contact each other, Cassia created a Facebook group for our media group. Here we discussed what we were going to film, what we needed to bring etc. It is also where we uploaded a lot of the group work so that all members could get it to put on their blog. I feel as though it has been very useful. Here are some screenshots of examples of what gets posted:

Filming (Day 4)

These are some photos taken whilst filming. These scene shows Charlie writing in her diary, which is used as a voiceover.

Filming (Day 4)

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Filming (Day 2)

These are photos from today's filming.

Filming (Day 1)

We decided to record a video diary of what we did today and explained how we thought it went and what we recorded. I decided to add some photos from us filming in too to illustrate some of the shots we tried out for our film.

Filming (Day 1)

These are some photos we took on set of our first day of filming.

Post-filming madness!

Filming Schedule (3rd February - 7th February)

We decided to make a filming schedule illustrating who is available to film on which days and what we are going to film on each day. We decided that this will make the filming a lot easier as we will have a clearer idea of what scenes need to be shot when, what actors need to be there and what props we will need to bring.

Script

We decided to make a list of shot types we wanted to film and what what going to happen or be said in each scene. This was to ensure that filming runs quickly and efficiently.