Advanced Portfolio Evaluation - Alea

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

Use of genre conventions, Characterisation and Editing

For our film we chose to go with the genre of social realism. This is because the conventions of this genre does allow for creating the film more easily as we would have realistic characters and setting as well as a plot that can be based on real life events. Also whilst we were researching short films we discovered that most of the films that we liked fell under the social realist genre which also influenced our choice of what were were going to do our film on. One of the films that all members of the group enjoyed was a short called 'Colourbleed'.  

It did have conventions of a social realist film but also had an unrealistic and sort of artistic element to it with the main character unintentionaly gaining the ability to bleed paint which is something that brings her to destruction. This unusual element was something we decided we wanted to incorporate in our film and much like in 'Colourbleed' it is something that our story revolves around so it does challenge the conventions of social realism on one way as what we have done with the timers is something that is obviously not something that exists in the real world, however we did endevour to make it look realistic.

In other ways we also used the conventions of a social realist piece as editing between shots were kept simple with stright cuts to transition between shots, even though for the scene after the protaganist witnesses the suicide we did want to have a fade to show the passage of time, but to get all the timers and the video itself to fade in at the same time actually proved to be quite difficult. The camera work itself was also kept quite simple in order to conform to the conventions of social realism and as there were no real action scenes with most of the shots being focused on the protaganist to convey the emotion of the scene as there is no dialogue, camera work had to remain quite fluid.

Editing of the special effects was something that took up the majority of our time and these special effects do go against social realim conventions as usualy what you see on the screen is something that exists in real life with real life situations but we decided we wanted a more unusal element in our film to make it more interesting. As we were filming in the center of Croydon so many members of the public were visible in the background on most of the shots. I was lead editor on putting all these shots together and animating as many timers onto characters and members on the public as possible in the amount of time that was given over to the editing process. Each timer had to be animated frame by frame on each person that was quite prominant in the frame and others were added to more people further away in the background when we had more time. We did anticipate that the editing would take us a long time so we would need to start putting it together as soon as possible and I spent all my free time working on the timers for the most part untill they were finished. However we did overrun by one day as we didnt account for the fact that when you add all the keyframes and create separate timelines in order to make the numbers appear as if they are counting down it takes a long time for the computer to render. But overall I am happy with how they look.

 We also used realistic mise en scene with real urban settings as we filmed all of it on location in Croydon (except for the one special effects shot that required one of us to act against a green screen) which is a convention of social realsim and was used in nearly all of the research films and with us being a low budget fimmaking group it was the easiest setting to work with so immediately we decided to follow this convention. The characters themselvs also conform to the conventions they are real people that are effected by real themes and issues which our film brings up, ones of bullying, violence and suicide. Costume also conveys the feeling that this character is an outsider as the colour of thier costume is qute dark and dull and the hood covers thier face for most of the film. Only when the character is alone on the train does she take it off so the hood does represent her isolation and also form of protection from other people because of her being bullied and the fact she has now gained this abnormal power. There may be the unrealistic element of the timers surrounding them but thier emotions and actions were scripted to be realistic so we have suspension of disbelief that what is happening to the protagonsit could be real.

Lighting also helps to convey some emotion of the scene as we used natural lighting when filming on location as we discovered the portable lights did not work effectively for us and when we were filming the majority of scenes the weather was quite overcast so does give our film a dark, washed out look so the weather actually became pathetic fallacy as the more darker scenes of our film was accompanied by darker weather.

Narrative Organisation

The organisation of the narrative is also something that follows the social realist genre conventions as we have a linear narrative unlike what my group did in AS media where we had the climax of the film at the beginning which follwed the thriller film conventions. However our story does require audeince to figure out what is happening as at the beginning we join the main character in a point of view shot after we hear punching sounds during the start of the titles which for the most part is just a black screen. Also our narrative is left open ended with a cliffhanger so is no real resolution. This was something we found wasn't used when researching, most of the social realist films had narratives with a clear resolution and do usually follow the three stage narrative structure. 'Amelia and Michael' is a prime example as at the end of the narrative we are brought back full circle with a scene that is simmilar to the one that started off the film and the spectator does feel they have reached a definite ending. When planning we though it would be good to challenge not having a full conclusion in our film, however, our desision to have a cliff hanger did recieve critisim from some audeince members as with the way it was shot they said it was not clear if the protagonist was actually saving the antagonist or forcing them into the road. This does present us with the issue that one of the main points of our film was not made clear, "would you save your enemy?", and if we had the chance to do this piece again, would definately be something we would have to improve upon.

This linear form of narrative, as previously mentioned, was something that was in all films that I researched so we decided that we would follow the same structure but still try to create enigma with the use of sounds at the begining as a form of restricted narration which was a technique that was used in the short film 'Amelia and Micheal' as at the beginning of the narrative we are presented with an extreme close up of someones eye intercut with the films titles so it does allow the audience to also think about what is happening in the bigger picture if you were to zoom out. We decided to use it because it is effective in creating mystery at the start of the narrative but also ment we did not have to film any violent scenes showing the protagonist being beaten up so it is easier for the actors and it wouldn't have a negative effect of the certificate rating in any way as we want to keep it at a fairly low age rating in order to broaden our audience.

Use of sound

Sound in our film is also something that follows the conventions of social realism and uses techniques from the research short films. Diagetic and ambient sound is used in the majority of our film with the sountrack being used only at certain momnets in the narrativewhere we felt ambient sound was just to plain or when there is a certain emoition in a scene that the soundtrack could reinforce. A good example of that being the scene where the protagonist is on the train after witnessing the suicide of another character, she feels anxios and upset about what is happening to her. When looking at the short film research I found that having little dialouge in the films a convention that continued across most of the films that we looked at with the noteable exeption being 'Two Cars, One Night' which was the opposite as it contained alot of dialouge and no soundtrack. Thr ones without dialouge, to me, seemed more interesting and effective beacuse the majority of what is happening is determined on a visual level with the soundtrack only used for reinforcement. The music that is used in the other films refelect the emotions that are going on in the scene and we did try to replicate that in our work. Unfortunately for the scenes in which we used music we couldnt find anything that we thought fitted perfectly so the soundtrack we eventually used we feel doesnt carry the same emotion as the other films that were looked at but still it is appropriate and works well with the visuals.

Ancilliary tasks

Conventions in terms of our ancilliary task were followed quite closely especially with our film poster. The posters I looked at are posters for films that have genre conventions of social realism and one thing that stood out most was the main character of the film is most prominant in the design of the poster as in a social realist film the narratives are usually character driven so the posters reflect this. When it came to designing the poster we all came up with the same basic idea so based our final product on that with the protagansit taking up the majority of the white space with an urban setting in the background showing what genre that the film falls under along with the central theme of our film which is the timers. The research posters I looked at do not really show representations of gender with the characters but thier styles mainly show genre, audeince as well as social class, especially 'Fish Tank' with the background being part of an urban area of a city so it shows the film is set in a real life environment. The character herself is representative of a "chav" stereotype with the use of costume with the hoodie, heavy makeup and hoop earings as well as the realtion to the setting as it is an urban estate so can be seen as working class which is different to character in the poster for  'Submarine' as his costume puts him more in middle class. As previously mentioned, in the research posters the characters take up most of the white space along with the title so we kept that in mind for when were were on location taking the background pictures for our poster. We also used the colour of the setting to our advantage as the background colours are quite vibrant which provides a great sontrast to the protagonist as her costume is quite dark as she is wearing dull colours and the hood also covers part of her face creating the feeling she is quite separate from the world around her and seems rather dark so helps to create enigma about the character which would interest people. Also we used the necessary parts of poster design like the production block, actors names, and funding which is justified around the main character but still allows people to see whats in the background as the fact that you can see people with timers on thier head is the main and important part of the narrative. Having these timers visible does draw more attention to the poster as it is unusual to see something like that in a realistic setting so people may be interested to see it because of that. As well, we decided to add awards onto our film in order to interest people more as with awards people would think that it is worth taking thier time to go and see and as the feedback on the narrative on our film shows it was not the strongest facotr of our film we decided to go with editing as the visuals for our film was something we feel worked really well and we are proud of.

With the review we used the structure and the house style of the reviews  in the independant magazine 'Little White Lies', a bi-monthly creative film magazine that doesn't just focus on big film releases but also reviews lesser known short films so is useful to us in order to exhibit a review or our film. In addition to this, the age group of consumers who would buy this magazine are at the highest end of our target audience with 51% of the magazine readers being 25-35 and 34% being 18-24 which is within our target audience so the review can directly target them and together they do make up the largest percentage of the readership for the magazine. To actually create the look of the review we followed the dimensions of the review page so we could position the text, titles and picture in the correct place and also tried to match the font style as best we could and rounded the corners of the picture so it looked like it really did come from the magazine. Something else we added was a litle symbol next to the page number at the bottom. In each copy of 'Little White Lies' there is always a small picture by the page number that relates to the style of the magazine for that month which is dictated by the main film that they review so every magazine is unique. We had a look on IMDB for film releases later this year and tried to decide what film we thought a future issue of the magazine would focus on so we chose 'The Hunger Games' and used the hunger games logo next to the page number. Also we did try to replicate the writing style of the reviewers but I don't think we achieved this well. To decide upon the overall look and colour scheme for our review, we looked at an issue of 'Little White Lies' that had a fairly dark theme to it which was the 'Apcalypse Now' issue. The background colour for the reviews were quite dark in order to fit with the style and as we thought that a future issue may focus on' The Hunger Games' which does have a dark story to it, they same style would be apporopriate to use. The picture that we used is the unedited version of the poster picture so is easily relateable to the other ancilliary work, In the beginning we were planning on using a certain screenshot for our film but we had problems with getting pictures with a good enough reslolution so had to use our poster background.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancilliary tasks

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The target audeince for our piece is 16-24 because of the themes, issues and the characters involved. To gain audeince feeback we shared our work on social network sites so we could easily get feeback from those in the target audience. We did gain a mixture of different opinions of our film, some people liked it, some people were more critical. One thing that seems to be a main issue with our work, and is something that we picked up on as possibly being a problem whilst we were actually editing, is that for some, the narrative was not clear to them and they didn't understand the entirety of what is going on in certain scenes. This led some people to interpret the plot as being something entirely different than the preffered reading as shown in this feedback from youtube:

People were also confused about the bully character, showing that we didn't convey one of our central issues very well. This is understandable as at the beginning it is hard to see who the person is that is running away which is something that should have been focused on more as it makes it look like the protaganist is trying to save a random person in the street so this also added to the overall confusion with the narrative.

Also from these comments you can see that people didnt feel that we built up enough tension towards the end of the narrative which is something I do agree with as we had already struggled to find appropriate music to go with the rest of the film so at the end we made the decision to keep the diagetic sound in the scene with some added sound effects to replace some of the background noise that was not appropriate for the scene and the action itself is not entirely clear. In addition to this there was confusion about the action that was happening at the beginning of the film as we tried to make it seem like the protaganist was being punched through use of sound, however some people thought that the protaganist was actually shot.

Even with an unclear narrative we still got some good feedback from people that enjoyed the film commenting that our camera work was effective with good movement and a variety of shots. Others commented that the soundtrack that we had included worked well with it to create the emotion in the scene as we had decided not to use dialouge so let the actions on the screen as well as camera work and aspects mise en scene show the emotion and in certain scenes we used the soundtrack to reinforce the emotion.

Another compliment we recived was on editing when it came to the special effects which is pleasing as that is the element of our film that took the longest of time to put together and it is a key part of our film and has also been reflected on our poster design as we have an award logo for best editing. I also think they are the best part of the film however it still seems we could have improved upon them with making thier reason for being in the plot clearer.

For our ancilliary tasks we got some good mixed feedback from people on the poster and the review. Starting of with the poster people thought that the main background image was well used with the focusing drawing attention to the main character and the emotions conveyed in the picture. With the character being more neutral in colour and the background being a more vibrant colour it gives it a nice contrast and shows the main character could be quite dark, creating engima on who she is and what is happening to her in the narrative and makes her stand out more. They also commented that being able to clearly see the timers in the background makes them more curious as to what this narrative is actually about so if they knew nothing else about it they would be interested enough to go and watch the film. Also with the inclusion of the awards on the poster people said that that would also give them an incentive to watch the film as if it has won awards it is worth thier time to watch it. The inclusion of the tagline was something we were not sure on but decided to include in the final poster and there are mixed opinions about it as people think the orientation of is is not good as its not very noticeable next to the large title but the actual wording is actually thought provking, makes you assume itasabout her trying to save someone who is hurting her so could be an interesting film.

There is more negative feedback on our review, as people didnt know we were following the house style of the 'Little White Lies' magazine but i do still agree with them on some points as the text is not clear with the background colour and the fact you cannot see the timers on the members of the public in the background of the picture detracts from what the review is actually saying as it does focus greatly on the visual elements.

but overall feedback left on the actual content of the review has been good with one person saying: "Review is honest and to the point and explains the concept of the film in an easy way so that you can understand what the film is trying to tell you. Based upon the review and the short film attached if you had right budget and right equipment the concept would make an extremely good film that would be interesting to watch in a visual as well as a though provoking way."

From the feedback we have gained I have learned that we have not really successfully created a piece that accurately targets the audeince and the narrative is the one crucial factor that has really let us down with the majority of elements being confusing and the actual moral of the story is lost in that confusion. There our people in the age group that have enjoyed this piece, felt that it was emotional, had a "British feel" and worked well as a short piece, however, more people found the narrative hard to follow and understand. If we had the chance to do it again, there would be more shots involved to try and better explain what is happening to the character as well as providing a little more variety with shot types to make it more visually interesting and not rellying so much on the timers. In addition to this after reading some of the feedback, more time would be spent trying to locate suitable soundtrack pieces, which is something we struggled with, in order to add more tension to scenes that were just diagetic sound even though there was a significant action happening (the scene with the suicide and the ending). In my opinion I think it could do with a lot of reworking but it is good to know that for some of the audience members that fall into the target audience age group it still works as a good short film.

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

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