The forms and conventions of a short film, as well as a film poster and film review have been stated earlier on in the research. But to clarify each of these; here I will explain how each piece of my coursework conformed their usual expectations.
The film poster which accompanied my short film also had forms and conventions that it had to adhere to as best as possible. Film posters are used to publicise the film, to inform the films targeted audience as well as converging to the needs of the audience and persuading them to go and watch the film. The layout, design decisions and placement of everything in a poster aims to have atleast one effect on the reader. My film poster includes the name of the film in a clear large sized text as well as the name of the featured band in a bigger sized text; doing this is a way of telling the audience that the name of the actual film is slightly irrelevant compared to the name of the band, which throughout the film is the main focus point. Other features of the poster such as the rough outline around the picture help to give the effect that short films are on low budgets and cannot afford to get every detail perfectly right, but equally allowing the poster to look to the best it can.
A film review has the similar purpose to a poster, they are there to inform readers about the magazine as well as the reviewer giving an honest opinion of the film. Sometimes the rating system changes depending on where the review is from, rating systems can vary from using stars, buckets of popcorn or for the less favoured ones, theres always the use of tomatoes. For my review I decided to go with the traditional star rating, and I decided to write a positive review for my film. To ensure the review looked genuine I added a few extra elements onto the document to give it the look that it had come out of a magazine. These additional parts included things like a page number, the name of the magazine at the centre of the page and a website that the readers can go to, to read reviews of other films, games etc that may not have been included in that issue of the magazine.
The audience feedback which I received throughout the completion of the coursework, confirmed thoughts that I had already thought of and therefore was relying on other peoples opinion to agree with mine resulting in me adapting the recieved information and putting it to use allowing my work to look that much better. An example of this is the drafts I have of my film poster, audience feedback from a numbe of people agreed with my original opinion of the colour of certain pieces of text, this allowed me to confidently change the colour of my text without it effecting the quality of the whole poster.
I gained audience feedback from my main Short Film also, some of the comments included the quality of the acting. While editing the film at Sixth Form, a few people had asked to see the progress I had made so far; after they had watched it they had suggested to include some music over the top of some of the visuals, they explained if I was to do this then it would be more successful in trying to fulfill the effect that i wanted - the proposed effect was that time was travelling by with the band working together to try and get their band known in their local town and to increase the chances of them getting themselves a local gig, which they hoped would then lead onto a lot bigger things.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
I am pleased with how the end result of my A2 Media Studies coursework has turned out. To film my coursework I used a Sony camera, which I then uploaded to an iMac and edited the footage on a piece of software called FInal CUt Pro. Final Cut Pro is an easy to use program with very simplistic ways of creating accurate inputs and outputs allowing me, the user, to put all the clips together to create the final product.
Throughout the time I was filming and editing my footage I was also uploading parts of the written side of the work onto this blogging website linked to Google called 'Blogger'. The blogging site contained work including research and planning which was done to help accurately plan and decide what the final coursework product was going to be. The work contributing to the planning side of the course included a list of iniial ideas as well as an overall synopsis of the chosen idea, storyboards of our chosen idea also had to be created. The work which contributed to the research side of the course required us to research examples of our chosen form of coursework and analysing the examples giving the main forms and conventions which contribute to the example. Researching also required us to research the two ancillary tasks that were also part of our coursework, these ancillary tasks also had to be analysed to find the main forms and conventions of each of these to help us include the normal features in our finished products.
To begin with, adding stuff to my Blogger page proved to be difficult as I had no internet connection at home and continued to not have internet connection throughout the duration of the coursework. This resulted in me having to use computers at Sixth Form to upload the required work onto my blog. At first, this also proved to be difficult as the website Blogger didnt work due to it being blocked by the school. My teacher contacted the school's ICT technicians and requested for the website to be accessed by a limited amount of students. After waiting for a large period of time the website got unblocked but we were unable to add or edit any of the work that was on there, limiting us to not being able to do anything on the site. My teacher then went back to the ICT technicians and asked them to allow us full access to the whole website; fortunately they allowed this but out access was still slightly restriced as we were still unable to upload pictures which proved the last stages of the coursework to be difficult for me to get onto Blogger, as I needed to upload images of film posters I had researched as well as images of my own ancillary tasks and due to not being able to upload pictures at Sixth Form and with no internet connection at home, it was very difficult for me to do so.
After the main practical piece of coursework was complete I began work on my ancillary tasks. For my option of short film, my ancillary tasks were a film poster as well as a film review. Before I began to create my ancillary tasks I had to do some more research into both film posters and reviews to get an idea f what the main conventinos of each were. To do this I used internet access at Sixth Form and soon began creating my ancillary tasks.
For the evaluation, I used Microsoft Word to initially plan what I was going to write. Instead of doing the whole evaluation as a pure written text, I decided to divide it up between the questions as well as using Bloggers features to insert pictures to help back up my points as well as to help split up the large amount of text.
To answer Question 2, I created a power point. By using a power point it is a lot easier to layout where text goes in comparison to where the pictures can go. Before uploading it onto Blogger I had to find a way of converting the document into a video file. To do this, I used an online website which specifically converts powerpoint documents into video files ready to upload to youtube for then further use on various other sites; such as Blogger.
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