Group Navigation of Evaluation, Final opening and Preliminary task.

Evaluation

Becki Ashby

-Evaluation 1

-Evaluation 2

-Evaluation 3

-Evaluation 6

Abbi Potter

-Evaluation 1

-Evaluation 2

-Evaluation 3

-Evaluation 6

Group

-Initial Audience research
-Target Audience
-Audience research
-Evaluation 7
-Overall evaluation, other half of Evaluation 7

Final Opening

-Our final opening and evaluation.

Preliminary task

-Our preliminary task and evaluation

Storyboard

-Our storyboard

Group - Final Piece + Overall Evaluation

Final Opening Sequence

Our brief for the final task was to create a 2 minute film opening that was typical to that of a genre that we could choose between a choice of thriller, horror and teen drama. Our chosen genre was a psychological thriller.

Similarly to our preliminary task, the genre, costume and props were key parts in producing a creative response. Seeing as we chose psychological thriller as our genre for our opening we had a lot of scope to try interesting shot compositions, costumes and props.

Restrictions?

When filming our footage for our final opening we had very little restrictions, we were allowed to take the camera  equipment anywhere we needed to. However, originally we wanted to film the crowd shot at Tunbridge Wells station as there would be a guarantee of lots of people. Unfortunately we were not given permission to shoot there and decided to use the high street instead with a result of:

We filmed over a period of 4-5 minutes and using Premiere compressed the footage so that the people walking past were sped up. This represented one of our themes of isolation.

Compared to our preliminary task where we cut between different images and effects...

... our final piece was more advanced in the editing techniques that we used.

Planning

• When in the beginning stages of this project we had to firstly research ALL of the genres that we had an option in using to get an idea of the typical conventions for those genres and how a film opening might look. 

• After having completed this thorough background research we decided to choose our main genre as a thriller.

• At this point we already had a few ideas of what our plot might be and what kind of shots and compositions we might wish to use. Watching The Bourne Supremacy opening and the Seven opening we gained inspiration for doing a postmodern and almost a hallucinogenic style of opening.
• Click here to see our research on The Bourne Supremacy

• Once having decided on our storyline we then had to consider what locations we would want to use for our opening to fully communicate our genre. Therefore, we had to go on location recces to places such as High Brooms station (where our murder scene is shot).

Challenges of this project

The main challenges that we faced were that we struggled to find music that would anchor our narrative and some of our footage was insufficient. In addition to this we spent too much time experimenting with effects rather than editing the footage into a final order This proved to be one of the biggest challenges that we faced as it played havoc with the amount of time we spent trying to complete it. However, we are extremely pleased with our final outcome.

Strengths

• Interesting shot sizes and the framing of those shots e.g. 



• The use of blank black shots to help create tension.
• The layering of different tracks of music
• The effects that we used e.g.

• The titles e.g.

Weaknesses

• Some of the sound doesn't anchor the narrative as well as it could
• The cutting rate could also do with improvement to help to create a bigger build up of tension

Group - Evaluation 7 - Preliminary Task: What We've Learnt.

Preliminary task-

The brief for our preliminary task was...

-The use of continuity editing needed to be incorporated into out footage, this means the illusion of a continuous line of action.

-The use of a short conversation was part of the brief, for this we chose to have two separate sets of dialogue as a conversation did not fit the conventions of our style of opening.

-Opening a door was another part of our brief, this was an example of continuity editing used in our task. Here is an example of this from our task...

-Experimenting with different camera angles and techniques was also part of our brief, this includes shots such as CU, LS, MS, Canted angles, Tracking shots and effects used within editing. Here is an example of this...



Choosing the genre, costume and props were key parts in producing a creative response to the brief. The genre we chose was psychological thriller which matched the genre we were planning to do for our opening. There were some limitations of this...

-As we were in school we did not have the access to any other locations other than on the school grounds, we tried to overcome this by using places which look as if they are not in a school such as the road and zebra crossing outside the school.

-The costume was also restricted by the fact we were in school as we were in our school uniform thus could not show character exposition through costume.

-We faced the same problems with props which is why we decided to use effect's when editing our task in order to make a creative response. Here is an example of this...

The planning we used for our preliminary task was...

-Looking over previous filming experiences such as the Wilderness wood reccie and identifying shots and specific features which we thought worked well and planned to use in our preliminary task.

-Thinking about the narrative of our preliminary task, for example writing a script, although there is not a lot of dialogue in ours.

-Finding a location to film our task, we chose to use the road outside the school as well as the stairs and corridor. Here is an example of this

-We then done some practice shots around the school so that we were fully prepared for when we actually filmed our task, from this we could identify what worked well and what we were going to re create in our real thing.

The narrative of our task follows the storyline of a girl being confused and conflicted by her own mind, this is shown by the use of effects that we added during the editing such as blurs and colour washes. The filming also anchors our narrative as we have used a variety of shots in order to create the sense of confusion.

Challenges and difficulties that we faced when doing our preliminary task were...

-Finding a suitable location as we were limited being at school, to overcome this problem we decided to try and find areas of the school which looked least like a school environment such as the road outside of school and the stairs.

-Another problem was the costume, again as we were in a school environment we were restricted as to what we could use, in order to overcome this we ensured that costume would not be a big part of our narrative therefore making it irrelevant.

-Another problem we faced was the continuity editing of our piece, neither of us had previous experience in editing therefore found this hard, in order to overcome this we ensured that we left our selves enough time to edit ensuring that we could overcome any problems we faced.

An evaluation of the piece overall...

-Strengths: I think that the effects used in our preliminary task such as the colours flashing worked really well and gave us inspiration for our final piece. This helped to create the sense of confusion that we were aiming for. The music also worked well in order to create this effect.

-Weaknesses: I think that the main weakness of our piece is the continuity editing although this could be easily worked on it does let the task down as a whole.

Our preliminary task...

Group- Results from audience research- screening.

To collect our audience research we used a variety of questionnaires and video interviews. Here is an example of our questionnaire...

Results from questionnaire

Here's our video responses

Overview of responses...

-Overall the responses from our video responses were positive and followed the same criticism as the questionnaires. The main positive response to our opening was the variety of shots and special effects and the main negative response was the speed of our cuts, again this is because out opening is in the style of a montage thus needs to be fast pace. Although our audience felt that our was to fast pace and they were not given enough time to view some shots.

-Both video responses identified the correct lead character 'Abbi' showing that this was clearly shown within our opening.

-The use of a montage has proven to be successful as most audience members felt that it was different and interesting although the speed of our cuts did let the montage down.

-The genre of our opening was also correctly identified showing that we followed the conventions of our opening and were successful in creating a psychological thriller opening.

What worked best?

-Overall i would say that the questionnaires worked best as in the video responses people seemed to be more self conscious and less likely to give a truthful response. Although both forms of audience research worked well the questionnaire responses gave us a more detailed response as well as more people being willing to review the clip.

AP Evaluation 6 - Media Technologies

Evaluation 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of making your film opening?

• Because this task was a group task we needed to work somewhere where it was easy for us to work collaboratively and to have all our research and ideas in one place. By using http://www.blogger.com/ and 'blogging' we successfully managed to do so. Moreover by having a definitive place to record our progress etc we were able to focus on individual points and be more selective with our research because we could assign each other particular tasks.

• To actually film our opening sequence we used a 1080p High Definition Camcorder and a tripod. The high definition gives a clearer and more crisp picture and the tripod helps to keep the camera still in order to avoid shaky camera movement that spoils the atmosphere or tension that you try to create with smooth filming. However, shaky camera movement is necessary at times when trying to make the audience feel involved.

• Where lighting is concerned, we were very fortunate in that when we did the bulk of our filming the weather was exactly how we wanted it and therefore helped with the composition of our shots. For example, when we were out shooting in the park the sun was shining and so we placed the camera in different angles so that we could achieve different effects and see different shadows.

Problems when shooting

• We faced very little problems on our actual shoots, the weather was always how we needed it to be. However, some of our CUs of natural objects were unsteady and shaky because a tripod was not used. To creatively overcome this, we used our technique of montage editing so we incorporated our shaky shots to create disorientation.

The Edit

For our final piece we used a wide range of different effects. The use of these effects and filters helped to contribute to the enigma of a dream.

Here we used an effect that turned our 'normal' image into a black and white image. This helped to create a sense of disorientation, furthermore, we reversed this clip so that it went backwards.

For this blurry shot we overlayed two images and changed the opacity and scale of one of them to build a kind of ghostly blur without using a preset called 'Ghosting' that did this on moving shots, which would have been inappropriate for this shot as it isn't in motion.

• At first we spent a lot of time experimenting with different effects and colours to fully emphasise the fact that our montage was a dream, for example, using these effects for surrealism. When we had finished our 'experimenting' we ended up with a sequence that was more ambiguous than we wanted and too much was happening that you couldn't understand the plot of the opening.

• Furthermore, we decided to use a smaller range of effects to give a sense of continuity and flow to a piece that was not supposed to be continuous. This eventually worked really well and was easier to understand but at the same time also kept you active and open to different possibilities.

• To edit all of our footage and to finally create our opening sequence we had to use an editing software called Adobe Premiere Elements, upload our footage to the software and on to a timeline.

This is a screen shot of Premiere

This is a screen shot of the timeline

• Once we had all our footage uploaded and placed onto the timeline in a rough idea of where we wanted it we started to cut the footage down to our requirements. This proved to be a challenge. After having an overall 30minutes of footage we managed to cut it all down to 50 seconds. This was obviously not a great start.

• However, we managed to prioritise different shots and slightly change our timeline so that we met the required 2 minutes of film. From this we have now learnt to do as much filming as you can even if you don't think you need to, we also learnt that planning and storyboarding is extremely important.

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• Compared to real film production, our opening is different because we didn't actually need to make a whole film and so we didn't need to get bankable stars and think too seriously about finance and the final quality of our piece. We also didn't have the advanced equipment that professional filmmakers would have or the expert skills in editing. However, overall I am very pleased with our outcome and with our editing.

• In addition to this there was also the issue of the timescale we were given, which would be quite difficult to compare to a real film production.

AP Evaluation 3 - Media Institutions

Evaluation 3

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

When our film idea of 'Afflicted' gets greenlighted we would then need to consider a production company to help find a distributor for our film to be advertised successfully. The distributor is in charge of marketing the film before it's release and appealing to the targeted audience, which in our case is 15+, men and women of a middle class background.

Our film would need to be distributed to an essentially niche 'art-house' audience but with the recent success of 'Black Swan', of which 'Afflicted' is similar in genre, we feel that our film could also be distributed to a mainstream mass audience.

Distribution companies that I have researched include Fox Searchlight Pictures, Paramount Classics, Miramax and Optimum Releasing. For our particular film i would hope to use Optimum Releasing as it is a British based distribution company that focuses on independent films. They are one of the most prominent distributors in the UK concerning independent cinema.

Afflicted would most likely be screened in art-house cinemas such as Curzon in London, however seeing as we would also like to appeal to a wider audience we would have a national release in mainstream cinemas such as Odeon and Vue.