Evaluation

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

My short film ‘The Golden Apple’ develops and challenges the forms and conventions of real media products through creating my ancillary task and the production of the short movie. The short movie is 3-5 minutes and within the ancillary task I created a poster and double page spread for the short movie. The short film is based on a Greek myth which my group adapted to a modern day version with young characters. Using young characters for a Greek classic challenges the forms and conventions of a real media product because young characters represent a younger generation so this being an old classic the use of the young cast allows the focus to be extended to younger viewers and older audience members attracted to the storyline. The short film develops forms and conventions through transitions because when I was editing instead of allowing the cuts to go straight to the next scene I used several different transitions to help the movie flow.

As the genre was ‘Parody’ to assist me I looked at a real media product the movie “Meet the Spartans” which was released in 2008. I used this to help me to develop the forms and conventions because the dialogue in our short film helped represent the Parody side to the original movie to keep in line with the genre as ‘Meet the Spartans’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac5pQ26BzNE - Meet the Spartans trailer), but I also challenge the forms and conventions of real media products because instead of representing our characters in Greek overalls we decided instead to keep the young and modern flow throughout the short movie with just a twist of dialogue. On the editing side when editing the film some of the was told in the past tense, to show the difference throughout the movie the flash back scenes were edited to ‘Black & White’ to express that a story was being told.

The poster I created challenges and develops the real media products because while researching for posters I create across the ‘Meet the Spartans’ poster and at the top was a tagline for the movie so when creating the poster I added a tagline also at the top of the poster to develop the product to make it stand out to the audience.

(Image of both taglines My Poster and Meet the Spartans)

Tagline from Meet The Spartans Poster

Tagline on my Poster for Golden Apple

Fonts and colour combination were developed from the poster ‘Meet the Spartans’ the colours they use are consistent within each other helping the poster stand out and the font use is effective. On my poster I used colours that effectively work together such as ‘Gold’ which also represents the Greek era. Also the font I used was ‘Bodoni’ I used this because relates back to Greek classics to represent the construct of the movie.

But I also challenged the forms and conventions because on the two posters I researched which were Parody movies, ‘Meet the Spartans & Disaster Movie’ both of these posters used an image which consisted of all the characters to show and express the comedy within the movie. Whereas my poster I used one main image which was a golden apple faded into a black background. I have done this to go against the forms and conventions to express the importance of the apple within the movie to make it a serious point even though the short movie is a Parody. (Image of Poster)

The double page spread I produced also develops and challenges real forms and conventions of media products because of how I produced the layout according to the real media projects I searched like the ‘Spider Man’ double page spread. While researching I look for main features of a double page spread like how text is placed, photographs used and taglines. Following the conventions of a real media product all the text I inserted was consistent with each other either being the same text colour or having the same font with everything being in order. Also during research I saw that one of the double page spreads had a ‘Film Details’ section so to help me develop my product I added a ‘Film Details’ box at the top of my page to give an insight into the movie.

I challenged the forms and conventions also because when double page spreads are created they normally make the main image be a scene from the film but I decided not to follow this convention and make the main image a Photograph that I took of people grabbing the golden apple and edited in Photoshop to ‘Grayscale’ then placed the image in the background. Also to keep in line with the conventions I did add a small image from the scene within the short film.

Image of the photoshop picture I edited for the background on the poster.

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

My ancillary texts are effective and efficient to my main product (Short movie) this is because the movie is based on the Greek classics so to keep everything as one I used a certain font on the ancillary texts which related to Greek times. Also the movie is based on a Golden Apple so to keep everything consistent the main colours were Gold on the posters and the double page spread to link back to the movie.

While filming the short movie within my group we met some technical hitches on the way due to actors, timing and settings. As time was running out of film we had to use what we had and adapt to the facilities around us so the ancillary texts were useful because this allowed me to create two pieces of products that could get the message across efficiently if wasn’t put across properly within the short movie. This allowed a useful combination because the ancillary texts back up the main storyline behind the short movie so the audience can understand.

Also when creating the double page spread I incorporated images from the movie to add onto the spread this is effective because it allows the audience to have a insight to the movie by reading the text and also seeing an image from the short movie so they know what to expect when watching it.

This is my poster and you can see the gold colour
links to double page spread as the colours are
consistently used

This is the double page spread helps keeps the combination
because all the same font is used and images from
the movie was added to the double spread

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

 The feedback I received from my chosen audience has been very useful which has made me learn and understand what could have been better and what I could have done to make the short film better. I received good and bad feedback on the movie, the audience stated the actors used were very good as their lines were clear and they felt that the actors understood the concept of the short movie and they knew what they were doing while acting. Also the audience stated there was a fluent consistency between the actors and the scenes which helped with the transitions used in the editing to keep everything flowing. The editing of film the audience stated they also liked the use of different transitions which were used when they were needed also the music that slowly faded in at the beginning and at the end scene how the music faded.

On the other hand the audience felt there was also many things wrong with the short film, the feedback they gave me was suitable and I could use this to my advantage so I can this feedback which I have received for next time. One of main problems I received from the feedback was that the short movie was confusing, the audience said they did not understand the storyline due to the fact the main scenes from the movie was missing because the party scene was missing. The audience felt that it the movie was clearer they could understand more and get a better feeling from the movie if they understood the concept. Also were the scenes were filmed the audience said everything was too separated and looked disorganised, these two reason shows me that next time our group needs to find at least two settings so we everything looks organised which will help the storyline flow more. Also while watching the short film the audience also stated that all the actors looked separated within the short film from this I can learn that my group could have made the scenes look up to standard meeting having more scenes together and not just scenes of different actors all over the place. From all the feedback I have gained positive feedback in all rounds because for the next time my group can put more time and effort into the creation of another short film, also the feedback allowed me to see the short movie from a different view which helped me understand that the concept of the storyline was good but final touches as the scenes and actors was not up to standard so for the next time this will allow me to use my time more efficiently and wisely to film a short movie to a better standard. 

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

Within this whole process a range of media technologies have been used in the construction, research, planning and evaluation platforms to produce my media products. Before the footage for ‘The Golden Apple’ was recorded we had to plan the way we wanted shots to be taken from different ways so instead of going along with while we filmed we took pictures using Genesis camera to construct a ‘Storyboard’. This then allowed us to follow the steps of the storyboard so the film could run efficiently. We then borrowed camera from the media department within the college to capture the footage we also had to borrow a tripod for the camera to stand on.  

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The camera used while filming.

Once all the footage was captured, as the editor I had to then upload everything onto the ‘Final Cut Pro’ software which I was engaging with for the first time on a ‘Mac Pro’ computer. Final Cut Pro allowed me to influence the film to our standards meaning I was able to change the pace of some of the scenes also lower the sound some of the shots as they were louder than the rest. Also I was able to change the effect on some of the scene to help the movie flow and I was also able to add music to the film and add text at the start and end of the short film.

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Final Cut Pro software used to edit the short film

At AS Level, I was introduced to the two software’s ‘Adobe Photoshop & Adobe InDesign’ where I had to create media projects. When I first interacted with these two programs I was a beginner but since then I have gained more experience, I was able to use this to my advantage by using features in Photoshop to manipulate images then transfer then to InDesign like on my double page spread the images I used. On Photoshop I designed the whole poster which I felt relaxed doing as it was easy and the double page spread was a mixture of InDesign and Photoshop mostly InDesign where I construct the whole page and added text and colour but edited the images in Photoshop then later transferred them to the double page spread.

Also I was able to use online technologies which were efficient because I was able to use these programs while I was constructing the project step by step. Blogger and Slideshare were the online technologies that were used, Blogger was very useful because this allowed me to upload post for all the work I completed while I constructing the whole project this is useful as I am able to go back and look back all the post I have posted and use them for the evaluation of the whole process. Slideshare has also been useful because it’s allowed me to create slides which stand out so the blog isn’t seen as boring and Slideshare was fairly easy to use as I just had to upload the slides then copy the HTML and paste on Blogger which then produced the slides.  

Image of slideshare which allowed me to create my presentations and add them to blogger.

Blogger were I was able to update my work regularly and keep everything in line

Double Page Spread

Production Log (Creating Double Page Spread) Session 14

Poster

Production Log (Creating Poster) Session 12

Session 11: Ancillary Research (Posters)

Ancillary research (posters) sessions 11 from Rubenm2

Session 10: Editing Film

As the editor I started editing the film once the majority of our short film. The software that I am using is called ‘Final Cut Pro’ and this will be the first time I’ll be using this software to edit the current film. The first thing I had to do was to upload all the footage recorded on the camera and this was done by using the ‘Import’ section.

As I was set the editing role, I worked on the editing part alone with some suggestions from members of groups when needed. First I started by putting all the shots we captured into order and then chose the best and most suitable shots recorded to use in the actual short film. Once I chose the footage I dragged this into the bottom ‘Timeline’ and put everything in order then I was able to play over all the footage that was on the ‘Timeline’. 

Before dropping the shots into the timeline they were in the section where they had been imported from the camera under different dates to separate what had been filmed on what day and this was useful as I was able to see what scenes had been filmed together and they could then be dropped onto the timeline together.

(As you can see this is the timeline feature which was used where I dragged and dropped the recorded shots and I was then able to rearrange them into the order I wanted. Once the shots were in order I was then able to play it back and look over it.) 

(This is an image of part of the short film that was recorded and underneath you can see the ‘Play, pause, rewind and fast forwards’ buttons) – 

As I was playing back some of the recorded shots, I notice that some of the scenes needed to be shorten because they were dragged on for long periods and also because it’s a five minute short film. To fix this problem I simply dragged the shot to a certain amount of time I felt was needed or where the scene needed to end.

As some parts of the short film was being told in the past tense me and my group decided to separate the present from the past  we came up with the idea to make the scenes ‘Black & White’ so the audience could feel the effect of the story being told in the past by the actors.

(To make this work I used the ‘Effects’ tool to change the colour of the scenes and make it black and white instead of being coloured.)

Due to some complications with the filming some scenes were louder than the other so to sort this out I had to use the ‘Audio detach’ feature which allowed me to fiddle with the sound settings and I was able to choose the volume levels and have it the same level throughout the short film clip.

The last of the editing was adding in the transitions to the recorded shots to display the change of the scenes throughout the short film. I used different transitions but wasn’t used throughout the short film only when needed and as you can in the images below I inserted transitions where needed and I had a bunch of choices to choose from when I was using the program Final Cut Pro.

I also used the title feature of adding in the logo of our company to show the audience who produced the film and also to add the credits at the end of movie.