Evaluation

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

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.

A Short Film normally lasts between 2 and 5 minutes; I had hoped that mine would last longer than it did, but it still fell in between these two boundaries. Within this allotted time, the main story of the film had to include a stating equilibirum, a disequilibirum followed by an ending equilibrium, these must be very clear to understand due to the lack of given time. Thankfully my film has ticked off all of these check points successfully. Looking back through the making of the short film, I could have added a few extra screens each one introducing an individual character, this would have helped the film to conform to another convention of short film.

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.

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

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
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.

To create my ancillary tasks I used a program which I have access to on my laptop called Serif PagePlus; the things which can be done with this programme are very similar to that avalable on Microsoft Publisher. Having used Serif PagePlus all through High School and in another lesson I do at Sixth Form I am confident with how to use the program and I really feel that my final version of my poster really emphasises just how confident I am with using the programme.

Serif PagePlus is also the proram which I used to create the poster which is featured in my short film.

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.

Main Coursework Piece; Short Film - Getting There

After a lot of time taken to research, plan, research more and finally editing; this is the finished product of my A2 Media Studies coursework.

Ancillary Task - Film Review

Like the film poster, I used PagePlus to create both the poster and the review. There isn’t much difference between the two drafts, except from the correct text being put in place. Like many reviews the review is written along with a picture of the band at the gig. I used an image of some stage lights and placed them at the top of the picture and also got an image of some hands from a crowd and placed them at the bottom of the image. I used this to create the effect of them playing a real gig.

The text used in this first draft was just placeholder text that I put in place, to allow me to design the rest of the poster and having no concerns about leaving enough room for an appropriate amount of text.

Also to give the effect of a real review, I included a page number as well as the normal details given in some magazines; where a lot of reviews are found. I continued using the rough paper edging to show continuity throughout all of the pieces as well as using the same logo as was used on the Film Poster for the title of the film.

Another main convention of a film review is some sort of rating; I went with the traditional way of rating and used stars. Reviews are used to give both positive and negative feedback; negative reviews are often rated by using ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ or something of a similar nature.

Ancillary Task - Film Poster

There isn’t much difference between Draft 1 and Draft 2. With the contrasting colours of the dark background with the white text, I questioned myself as to what colour the skull should be that appears behind ‘The Crypto Divulgence’. To help me get the best result, I decided to show both of the posters to 5 different people and I asked them which one they thought looked better; the lighter skull or the darker skull. All 5 of them said that they preferred the darker skull, and one went further to say that it then matched with the colour of the skull that is seen in the poster that is featured in the film. I thought that this was a good evaluative point that had been made and therefore applied it to my work.

The image that is put in place on Draft 1, 2 and 3 was just a placeholder image, to allow myself to be able to work with the remaining available space without having to then change it all around again once I had obtained the images that I was going to include. 

I decided to save Draft 3, as a way of checking what feedback I would receive as I had progressed a little bit further. Again the feedback which I received was positive, with the exception of someone made the comment about the text at the top; “From the creators of ‘Almost Famous’…”. This text was originally all black but I had previously had the idea of altering it so that the words “Almost Famous” were in white with the rest remaining in black, but I wasn’t 100% sure as to whether it would look alright so I left it. The comment made about this text was that they thought it would look better with “Almost Famous” written in white, so I changed it to give it a chance and ended up agreeing with the statement and left the writing in white.

Draft 4 of my Film Poster is the final draft. I had managed to replace the placeholder image with the images that I had planned on using. After I had left it and was then showing people the final product; the people who I had shown had mentioned about the visibility of the small text placed at the bottom of the poster. The text was black and was placed against dark parts of a few pictures, making it continuously hard to read, to test visibility levels and to see which looked better I then created Draft 5, and changed the colour of the text to white. This turned out to be a much better outcome and made the whole poster look a lot brighter and improved the quality of the poster.

Draft 5 after getting feedback all the way through as I progressed with the completion of the poster is the final and completed version. The images are all in the correct place, with the text in a colour which is easy to read as well as a few smaller images blended into the background.I am very pleased with the way that the poster turned out and I feel that it fits in with my other two coursework pieces very well.

Ancillary Task Research - Film Poster Research

Kate Hudson’s character is one of the only things that are seen on the film poster for Almost Famous. The close up view of her face suggests that she likes to have a close relationship with people and therefore she will be close to the characters involved in the main story line; similar to how she is very close to the camera and therefore automatically puts herself on a personal level with the audience.

In the picture Kate Hudson is wearing a pair of sunglasses; these can represent a number of things to the people who have seen the film but only a few to those who haven’t. To a person who hasn’t seen the film, the sunglasses can simply signify her character as being someone who is perceived as ‘cool’ by the rest of the characters in the film. But to someone who has seen the film and consequently knows the themes and events that occur in the film the sunglasses could represent either the style of fashion that she is categorised into, or it could represent the fact that she is hung-over from the previous night and as a result she is trying to use the big sunglasses to help cover a large amount of her face to reduce the chance of someone noticing that she is hung-over.

In the reflection of the sunglasses there is an image of a man playing a guitar in front of a large crowd, this would be to represent the music part of the film. The man’s reflection being in her sunglasses shows that she will be a part of the crowd that the man is playing in front of.

The bit of text; “from the writer/director of Jerry Maguire” is placed at the top of the poster written in a bold white text of the biggest size that is seen on the poster with the exception of the title text. With the film creators arranging it like this helps to suggest that the piece of text is supposed to stand out from the rest. This would be because having the text there in a high level of visibility allows the fans of Jerry Maguire to spot the poster and could persuade them to see the film.

Returning to an earlier comment about the picture of Kate Hudson used on the poster. If she wasn’t wearing the sunglasses then it would be more obvious that she is looking straight down the camera and consequently she is also looking at the reader. By the poster including this eye-contact helps to automatically attract the attention of the audience. Imagining she is still giving the direct eye-contact to the audience although she is still wearing the glasses, this could be to allow her character to try and build a relationship with the audience and inviting them to see what she can; which is the man playing guitar, seen in the reflection of her sunglasses.

Overall the poster could converge to the male audience members hence the use of a close up shot of Kate Hudson, a young actress who some men could deem to be quite attractive. On the other hand, using this picture could also help attract young female audience members to give them someone in the film who they can automatically link themselves to and someone who they could aspire to be like/look like.