In terms of content, our genre was a drama, which I think we created successfully. The ideas behind the characters were quite simple: The main female lead, Rachael, was written to be the suspicious and jealous type, the one who would instantly jump to conclusions. With the male lead, we tried to keep him secretive, so that the audience would not know what he was doing. He wasn't included a great deal, only from a distance, which was important as it allowed the main character, Rachael, to form her opinions and judgments of him as well as the audience's. Leanne, the private investigator, was written to be quite controlling, almost manipulative. We tried to portray an air of confidence with this character, when she says "I've seen this all too many times before; good girls who deserve better. Don't worry, we're going to get to the bottom of this".
With it being a drama, we tried to make it as realistic looking as possible. We used 'normal' clothing, nothing two specific (apart from the business-like blazers that Leanne wears) and the make up of each of the actors was as they would normally have it, nothing too fake or heavy. There were no surreal locations as this was not a horror or a thriller, we kept them simple and "local", so that the viewer could relate to the film.
We aimed to create a 5 minute film aimed at teens, mainly towards girls. I think that this was successful because the plot can be related to by girls of that age. The fact that the female lead in the film hires a private investigator would be pleasurable to watch for females, as it seems that the females are in control of the situation and think they know what's going on. The twist in the tale should also be a factor that pleases, as it doesn't end quite how the audience think. We have left the film on a slight cliff hanger, so it is up for the audience to decide what happen next - this was intentional to create a thirst for more of the film, which is important when producing films in Hollywood, as it generates interest.
The conventions of continuity were really important to get right. Continuity is the key to making a film or programme look convincing, and to making it flow smoothly from shot to shot. Personally, I find I notice continuity errors easily, and I was very keen on getting it right in our film. The most important thing about getting the continuity right was the planning: that was key to getting everything right. By making shot plan, even though they weren't to scale, meant that we could do each of the scenes quickly and effectively, and time was spent getting the acting right rather than messing about positioning the camera. Because we used cars in our film, we encountered traffic, which, at times, could be a problem. The scene outside the second house, where Ben and Savannah are spotted coming out of wasn't too bad, because each of the cars were stationary, but the scene where both of the cars are driving into the pub was especially difficult as we had to set the camera up outside a bust fish and chip shop, and the traffic was quite constant. This is a link to our shooting script. http://welovea2media.blogspot.com/2010/10/shooting-script.html
We encountered a problem with some of the editing with the car scene outside the house; we had to choose shots that over lapped well for when there were different cuts, so the sound would seem continuous. Ideally, we would have used a separate sound recording equipment, but this kind of equipment was not available for us. At one point, there was an error with the sound as two different voices from the same shot, just from different angles overlapped. This meant that there was too much sound on one part, which was something we corrected in the second final edit. Here is a screen grab of that scene from Final Cut Express:
Another convention we observed was the 180 degree rule. Here is a video from www.youtube.com that explains the rule and why it should be observed, and when it can be broken.
A good example of this in our film is the final scene in Rachael's house. At no point does the camera cross over the "line" so the audience does not see the wall behind where the camera is on the shots. If it did, it could quite easily confuse the viewer because they might think that the scene has changed, because of the different view point. It would also make editing quite difficult, and would make it much harder to create a smoother scene. Here are screen grabs from each of the shots in the final scene that shows our observations of the 180 degree rule:
How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary text?
In the main production, we were trying to achieve a dramatic story in which the audience are made to side with Rachael, the female lead who believes her boyfriend is cheating on her. In was important to convey this idea through the film poster and the radio trailer. When we wrote the script for the radio trailer, we decided to use extracts from the film to give a basic idea of the story. The voice over was nothing complex, just the film tag line and the date it would be released. We thought it would be better it was short and to the point, because long winded trailers lose attention and voice overs that are too long detract from the film itself. Voice overs can sometimes confuse listeners as they may think that the voice is actually a narrator for the film, which would be decieving and misleading if they came to watch it. Unfortunately it was extremely difficult for me to find examples of radio trailers, so I had to use film trailers, which were not always so easy to develop ideas from as there are two separate forms of media. The video trailers have the advantage of graphics and so voice overs weren't used as frequently, and silent pauses could be filled with shots tension building shots from the film. Here is a link the the film trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EC2tmFVNNE This is an example of how voice overs aren't needed as there are visual images that allow the audience to understand what is going on. The difficulty of a radio trailer is trying to convey an image without the pictures, yet trying not to give the whole story away.
I think that our ancillary texts present and sell our production well; from the final poster it's clear to see that there is an element of spying in, and that there is one 'team' against another. This was achieved by trying to split them up, similarly to the 'Obsessed' film poster that I have previously looked at. I also liked the poster for the film 'Last Night', how it splits the two couples up with a title in the middle.
Here are the three posters.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
With the audience in mind, we decided that our idea of creating a drama with elements of romance in would be successful. We carried a questionnaire for our audience research and carried it out in two separate ways: firstly we gave out hard copies of the questionnaires to our prospective target audience, which is teenage girls, and asked them what they thought.
We also carried out a much more general questionnaire in the style of an interview, which we recorded on the zoom microphone and composed on Final Cut.
In filming and editing, certain cuts were important in creating effect. Firstly, we established that the narrator of the story would be Rachael, as the whole production if based around her viewpoint of the situation. The actor who played Rachael felt it was important to convey the stress that the character was going through, so concentrated a lot on her part of the script. The actor ho played Leanne was confident, and she expressed this through her acting. Leanne was a character that was in the background, but one that was obviously controlling the situation, we showed this by making sure that it was Leanne who always had an answer for everything that Rachael asked. We made sure that there was a bitter edge to the script, that teenage girls are more than likely able to relate with; the idea of hiring a private investigator to spy on a boyfriend who looks like he's cheating would make the female audience side with Rachael, and could also be a kind of escapism from there own situation, if they had one similar to it. Getting the audience on Rachael's side was key to the ending effect of the film. The idea is to prove the audience wrong, and to create a false impression for them.
From the audience feedback, I learned several things.
I created video feedback, that can be seen here http://welovea2media.blogspot.com/2011/04/audience-feedback-soph.html I found creating a video was useful, because the responses were filmed directly after they watched the film, so the initial reactions were picked up quickly.
Laura used the same questions but used Facebook, a social networking site, to gain feedback. Rhiannon also used the internet to get her feedback, however she used private email. Both of these are useful because the information needed can be obtained quickly and effectively, however I think private e-mails allow people's opinions to be secure and uninfluenced by others.
The main points that people brought up here were the music and the bar scene. The music was too short at the beginning of the film , and didn't last long enough to build up the right amount of tension.
From this we built the sound up more, and used effects such as fades to subtly stop the music.
The audience said that they didn't quite understand what the pub scene meant, as it wasn't clear it was a hidden camera scene. We improved this by adding a viewfinder effect to the pub scene.
There aren't really any different interpretations depending on culture, I think it is a subject that is quite general and not specific to any race or sexuality. We aimed it at girls, but that doesn't mean men would not find the film any less appealing.
How did you use new media technology in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the planning and research stages of our production, the Internet was an extremely important tool. The browsers that I used were Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. Firefox was the main browser I used on the Apple Mac's, which was quick and was compatible with all websites. Chrome was much the same, and is my choice of browser on my laptop at home. IE tends to be slower than the other two, and is the only browser on the college library's computers. It worked fine, however on a couple of websites I found that certain styles on HTML didn't work, a problem neither of the other two browsers had, so it made research a little bit harder. The internet allowed us to set up a blog in which we have recorded all our research and planning.
The next stage of our research process was to create a questionnaire to see what audiences would expect from a film like ours. Here is the link to our Audience Questionnaire:
At first we used a Sony video camera to film the responses of our target audience. Unfortunately the tape broke while in someones bag, so it could not be used. Instead we used a zoom microphone to record peoples responses. This, in a lot of ways was much more convenient
for initial responses, because it allowed people to feel more natural rather than stare down a camera.
With it being a drama, we tried to make it as realistic looking as possible. We used 'normal' clothing, nothing two specific (apart from the business-like blazers that Leanne wears) and the make up of each of the actors was as they would normally have it, nothing too fake or heavy. There were no surreal locations as this was not a horror or a thriller, we kept them simple and "local", so that the viewer could relate to the film.
We aimed to create a 5 minute film aimed at teens, mainly towards girls. I think that this was successful because the plot can be related to by girls of that age. The fact that the female lead in the film hires a private investigator would be pleasurable to watch for females, as it seems that the females are in control of the situation and think they know what's going on. The twist in the tale should also be a factor that pleases, as it doesn't end quite how the audience think. We have left the film on a slight cliff hanger, so it is up for the audience to decide what happen next - this was intentional to create a thirst for more of the film, which is important when producing films in Hollywood, as it generates interest.
The conventions of continuity were really important to get right. Continuity is the key to making a film or programme look convincing, and to making it flow smoothly from shot to shot. Personally, I find I notice continuity errors easily, and I was very keen on getting it right in our film. The most important thing about getting the continuity right was the planning: that was key to getting everything right. By making shot plan, even though they weren't to scale, meant that we could do each of the scenes quickly and effectively, and time was spent getting the acting right rather than messing about positioning the camera. Because we used cars in our film, we encountered traffic, which, at times, could be a problem. The scene outside the second house, where Ben and Savannah are spotted coming out of wasn't too bad, because each of the cars were stationary, but the scene where both of the cars are driving into the pub was especially difficult as we had to set the camera up outside a bust fish and chip shop, and the traffic was quite constant. This is a link to our shooting script. http://welovea2media.blogspot.com/2010/10/shooting-script.html
We encountered a problem with some of the editing with the car scene outside the house; we had to choose shots that over lapped well for when there were different cuts, so the sound would seem continuous. Ideally, we would have used a separate sound recording equipment, but this kind of equipment was not available for us. At one point, there was an error with the sound as two different voices from the same shot, just from different angles overlapped. This meant that there was too much sound on one part, which was something we corrected in the second final edit. Here is a screen grab of that scene from Final Cut Express:
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| The blue boxes is the visual footage and the green is the sound. The video and the sound footage aren't the same all the way through, which is how you can tell that a lot of cropping and overlapping has been done. This was the most difficult scene to get right in terms of continuity, and I think the end result is good. Click this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYCnqmkkDxE and watch from 3 minutes 40 seconds to see this part of the film. |
Another convention we observed was the 180 degree rule. Here is a video from www.youtube.com that explains the rule and why it should be observed, and when it can be broken.
A good example of this in our film is the final scene in Rachael's house. At no point does the camera cross over the "line" so the audience does not see the wall behind where the camera is on the shots. If it did, it could quite easily confuse the viewer because they might think that the scene has changed, because of the different view point. It would also make editing quite difficult, and would make it much harder to create a smoother scene. Here are screen grabs from each of the shots in the final scene that shows our observations of the 180 degree rule:
How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary text?
In the main production, we were trying to achieve a dramatic story in which the audience are made to side with Rachael, the female lead who believes her boyfriend is cheating on her. In was important to convey this idea through the film poster and the radio trailer. When we wrote the script for the radio trailer, we decided to use extracts from the film to give a basic idea of the story. The voice over was nothing complex, just the film tag line and the date it would be released. We thought it would be better it was short and to the point, because long winded trailers lose attention and voice overs that are too long detract from the film itself. Voice overs can sometimes confuse listeners as they may think that the voice is actually a narrator for the film, which would be decieving and misleading if they came to watch it. Unfortunately it was extremely difficult for me to find examples of radio trailers, so I had to use film trailers, which were not always so easy to develop ideas from as there are two separate forms of media. The video trailers have the advantage of graphics and so voice overs weren't used as frequently, and silent pauses could be filled with shots tension building shots from the film. Here is a link the the film trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EC2tmFVNNE This is an example of how voice overs aren't needed as there are visual images that allow the audience to understand what is going on. The difficulty of a radio trailer is trying to convey an image without the pictures, yet trying not to give the whole story away.
I think that our ancillary texts present and sell our production well; from the final poster it's clear to see that there is an element of spying in, and that there is one 'team' against another. This was achieved by trying to split them up, similarly to the 'Obsessed' film poster that I have previously looked at. I also liked the poster for the film 'Last Night', how it splits the two couples up with a title in the middle.
Here are the three posters.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
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| An example of the questionnaire, conducted by Laura. |
We also carried out a much more general questionnaire in the style of an interview, which we recorded on the zoom microphone and composed on Final Cut.
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| Zoom Microphone kit and Headphones |
In filming and editing, certain cuts were important in creating effect. Firstly, we established that the narrator of the story would be Rachael, as the whole production if based around her viewpoint of the situation. The actor who played Rachael felt it was important to convey the stress that the character was going through, so concentrated a lot on her part of the script. The actor ho played Leanne was confident, and she expressed this through her acting. Leanne was a character that was in the background, but one that was obviously controlling the situation, we showed this by making sure that it was Leanne who always had an answer for everything that Rachael asked. We made sure that there was a bitter edge to the script, that teenage girls are more than likely able to relate with; the idea of hiring a private investigator to spy on a boyfriend who looks like he's cheating would make the female audience side with Rachael, and could also be a kind of escapism from there own situation, if they had one similar to it. Getting the audience on Rachael's side was key to the ending effect of the film. The idea is to prove the audience wrong, and to create a false impression for them.
From the audience feedback, I learned several things.
 |
| Laura's feedback via Facebook |
Laura used the same questions but used Facebook, a social networking site, to gain feedback. Rhiannon also used the internet to get her feedback, however she used private email. Both of these are useful because the information needed can be obtained quickly and effectively, however I think private e-mails allow people's opinions to be secure and uninfluenced by others.
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| Rhiannon's feedback via Hotmail. |
The main points that people brought up here were the music and the bar scene. The music was too short at the beginning of the film , and didn't last long enough to build up the right amount of tension.
From this we built the sound up more, and used effects such as fades to subtly stop the music.
The audience said that they didn't quite understand what the pub scene meant, as it wasn't clear it was a hidden camera scene. We improved this by adding a viewfinder effect to the pub scene.
There aren't really any different interpretations depending on culture, I think it is a subject that is quite general and not specific to any race or sexuality. We aimed it at girls, but that doesn't mean men would not find the film any less appealing.
 |
| Browsers: Firefox, IE and Chrome |
In the planning and research stages of our production, the Internet was an extremely important tool. The browsers that I used were Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. Firefox was the main browser I used on the Apple Mac's, which was quick and was compatible with all websites. Chrome was much the same, and is my choice of browser on my laptop at home. IE tends to be slower than the other two, and is the only browser on the college library's computers. It worked fine, however on a couple of websites I found that certain styles on HTML didn't work, a problem neither of the other two browsers had, so it made research a little bit harder. The internet allowed us to set up a blog in which we have recorded all our research and planning.
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| Screen shot from www.blogger.com The 'dashboard' from which the rest of the blog is controlled. Administrators of the blog are the only ones who can create, edit and publish posts. These posts are then added to the blog, with a date, time and label, so it is easy to show which member of the group has publish which posts. |
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| Screen shot from www.welovea2media.blogspot.com This is what is viewed by everyone else, and is how our information is presented. When a post is published it shows up on the blog, which can be accessed by anyone who knows the URL (above). When we first created the blog, I edited the colour scheme and the background to look more professional and more fitting with the subject. |
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| http://answers.yahoo.com/ A useful website for finding first hand experiences with 'jealousy'. |
Not only did the internet allow us to present our information, it allowed us obtain information quickly so we could begin to flesh out our ideas about the theme of our film. If we didn't have the internet, finding out information on things such as private investigators, we wouldn't have been able to find out much, as it would have been extremely difficult to access this kind of information if we were relying on things such as books and leaflets from actual companies. This basic research into looking at what private investigators do gave us a platform to work on, as we discovered that a private detectives main reason why they are usually hired to spy on someone's partner who believes that they are being unfaithful to them. From this, I thought it might be useful to research into the emotion 'jealousy', and websites such as 'Wikipiedia' (http://www.wikipedia.org/) gave me definitions and other related emotions, where as other sites like 'Yahoo Answers' showed personal responses to questions about dealing with jealousy. The Internet usefully allowed me to look at something from two different view points, meaning that after the research I felt well enough informed to create a convincing film. When searching for these, I used the search engine Google, as I find this to be the most effective and efficient. To narrow down the searches, I quote marks around words, for example, "honey traps". This specifically searches the phrase, not each individual word.
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| MS Word 2007 (PC Version) |
When we were writing the script itself, we used Microsoft Word, which allowed us to set our script out in the correct standard layout. It meant we could alter margins and fonts, and use typographic methods such as bold, italics and underlining to represent stage directions and emphasis. We then used printers for hard copies of the script, which allowed the actors to learn their lines in preparation for filming. Another important part of planning was storyboarding. I drew the story board by hand, as I found this was the easiest way for me to get ideas down, and it would also allow me to add annotation as I went along. The storyboards for our film can be found on the following link: http://welovea2media.blogspot.com/2010/10/storyboards.html
Once complete, I used a scanner so I could upload the storyboards onto our blog. The scanner allowed me to create a digital version of my hand drawn storyboards.The next stage of our research process was to create a questionnaire to see what audiences would expect from a film like ours. Here is the link to our Audience Questionnaire:
At first we used a Sony video camera to film the responses of our target audience. Unfortunately the tape broke while in someones bag, so it could not be used. Instead we used a zoom microphone to record peoples responses. This, in a lot of ways was much more convenient
for initial responses, because it allowed people to feel more natural rather than stare down a camera.
 |
| Sony HDV Camera and Tripod |
In the filming process, we used a Sony HDV camera. HDV stands for high definition video, which records onto DV tapes. The camera allowed us to shoot in wide-screen format, and also allowed us to make adjustments to the white balance, which meant that we could get a professionally natural look, even if the actual lighting was not the best. The quality of the film was in high definition, which meant that the recording was clear and crisp; much better than basic camcorders that I had previously used. The only thing I felt that let the filming down was the sound: the Sony HDV had a decent microphone, however because it was attached to the camera itself, it meant that the volume didn't match up well if there was a close up and a medium long shot in the same scene. A separate piece of recording equipment, with a microphone on a boom would have improved the sound quality and the continuity much more.
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| A boom microphone such as this would have meant an even sound through out our film. |
When editing our production, Apple Macs were used for there speed and efficiency. Not only are they quicker than PCs, they have a much larger memory capacity, which is important when working with high definition footage. The part of the editing that frustrated me the most was the DV tape deck we used to get the footage onto the Mac with. The leads were not the best quality so they didn't always work and occasionally connection was lost.
The editing software we used was Final Cut Express. I found this a relatively easy software to use; the tools were not complicated and therefore easy to figure out and experiment with, and there was a huge variety of effects to choose from, such as fades etc.
To the right is a screen grab of the tool palette on Final Cut Express. The main tools I used were:
Selection: This tool was used when I needed to select a shot and shorten or lengthen it.
Razor Blade Tool: This tool allowed me to cut each of my shots where I wanted, so it created two separate shots to handle. This is the tool I used the most.
Zoom: I used this tool to zoom in so I could make cuts closer to where I wanted.
Garage Band was the software we used to create the radio trailer. It was similar to final cut in someways, like the way the tracks could be layered and how each of the imported sound files could be cut and cropped at any point. Below is an annotated screen grab of Garage Band that I took in the process of creating our radio trailer.
We used a Zoom microphone kit to record the voice over for the trailer, and used extracts from the film itself to advertise our trailer.The microphone was easy to use and allowed us to gather information quickly.
The editing software we used was Final Cut Express. I found this a relatively easy software to use; the tools were not complicated and therefore easy to figure out and experiment with, and there was a huge variety of effects to choose from, such as fades etc.
To the right is a screen grab of the tool palette on Final Cut Express. The main tools I used were:
Selection: This tool was used when I needed to select a shot and shorten or lengthen it.
Razor Blade Tool: This tool allowed me to cut each of my shots where I wanted, so it created two separate shots to handle. This is the tool I used the most.
Zoom: I used this tool to zoom in so I could make cuts closer to where I wanted.
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| This is a screen grab of the effects window, which was where we selected the viewfinder effect for the final version of our film. This became important after our audience feedback, as the scene in which we added the effect was not clear to the audience that it was a hidden camera. Below is a screen grab of the effect in place and the settings that we altered. |
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| This is a screen grab of how we altered the volume levels of the music on our film. |
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| This is a screen grab from Final Cut Express showing the use of effects in our film. These are cross fades, which can be used on both audio and visual tracks, that fade the shots in and out. |
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