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

The internet gave access to a full range of short films that are not produced in the mainstream media. This was thanks to websites such as You Tube and i-player. This provided us with the unique opportunity to draw inspiration from numerous sources and a wide range of short films - without the internet this would have been technically impossible. The amount of short films on You Tube is immense and they vary hugely, meaning that we were never short of inspiration if we needed it.  We could gain a lot of information from researching things like the genres and themes among others. Going to libraries and buying magazines and then analysing them for the required info would be unpractical due to time and financial constraints. The internet was especially useful in terms of researching our poster as we had access to a large amount of examples that could be easily found and used.

The blog was really helpful to us as we could document every stage of our research and planning and whenever we needed to, we could go back to it. In addition we could add in different multimedia such as videos and pictures in order to enhance our research and planning. This is also useful as it helps in organising and presenting research in a form that helps in gaining feedback from my partner in the group.

DV cameras had a very grainy image and although this was very effective for the urban/ block scenes, we might have used a more glossy, bright and happy image for the romantic scenes but with the cameras that we had this was impossible to achieve. When we were producing our film we had quite considerable limitations, especially in terms of equipment and low quality. Its main advantage was that it was very affordable. In terms of sound recording, we had to rely on voice-overs as it was unpractical to record sound on open set when we had insufficient equipment.

The digital camera provided us with pictures of good quality which was important as the picture is the focal point of the poster. We didn't have to rely on the digital camera too much as we only needed pictures for our poster as our magazine only utilised screenshots from our short film. An advantage of using the cameras was that we had instant access to photos and we could put it on the computer quickly. While we were taking the photos we had the ability to see whether their quality was sufficient as they were displayed on the digital screen. These is considerably superior to film cameras that would be unpractical to use, when creating the poster.

Using the software 'i-movie HD' to edit our film provided us with numerous advantages. The fact that it is a non-linear editing software allowed us to experiment with ideas easily and it meant that if we made a mistake, it was easy to fix it. As it is free and made for amateur filmmakers it was really easy to use as we didn't have problems with our time and financial constraints. However, we were constrained by the lack of features on i-movie, especially in terms of things like titles, "split screen" etc.

To produce our poster we used Photoshop CS4, an industry standard program. This proved to be both an advantage and a nuisance, due to the fact it was time consuming because of its in-depth features but advantageous because of the choice that we were provided with, which in turn allowed us to experiment with different ideas. Photoshop also allowed laying of images and image manipulation, which was really helpful in making our poster a good one. 

Pages is a desktop publisher that is not of industry standard but that's an advantage as it is really easy to use and there weren't any missing features that we needed to finish our magazine. This meant that Pages was sufficient for our needs and we managed to produce an effective magazine.

Internet was useful in the post-production stage as we were able to get copyright free music which would otherwise be near to impossible to achieve.  Sound effects were easy to get as when we needed them we simply went to a website that had copyright free music on it.

When creating our blogging evaluation, the internet was really helpful as we could compile all our data in one place, we could place a large number of different multimedia in order to enrich our evaluation. We were able to get feedback through things like Facebook. We were able to get images from the internet that proved to be useful in all parts of our evaluation.

We were able to upload our movie on You Tube which gave us quite a lot of audience feedback. Additionally uploading our pod-cast, director's commentary and practice shoot would have been impossible without You Tube. This allowed us to reach a wider audience which then gave us a bigger amount of feedback.

I-movie was helpful in our evaluation as without it we would have been unable to include so many different types of images and footage. We could play with the sound and make it coherent due to the fact that I-movie is a non-linear editing software.

Audience feedback on our 3 finished products

I recieved audience feedback for my short film, poster and magazine through numerous means. For our short film we posted our movie on You Tube ans linked it to Facebook so that we would be able to get our target audience to judge its suitability. They could comment on all the elements of the movie, this would provide us with important information that could help us improve our movie in the later stages of post-production.

We made my poster and magazine available for feedback by posting it on Facebook. We additionally printed a number of physical copies and stuck them on walls around my school with a caption; 'write on poster to comment.' This turned out to be really popular among other students and a large number of comments were made available to us.  

Our intent in getting audience feedback was to be able to improve our movie and make it more suitable to our target audience which is the group that's providing us with feedback. Jamie Coates (24) replied to us with; 'Themes, score and mise en scene are the best parts of the movie.' Doris Crow (17) thought that; 'the subject matter of the movie is really interesting but some of the production sadly brings the quality of the movie down.' The second comment had a strong effect on us and it led to us going back to improve some of our editing. In general the comments show that our movie reaches and is relevant to our intended audience of 16-25 year olds. The narrative has to be clear and easily accessible to my whole target audience and thus audience feedback was key in providing me with this. Michael Fonzie (23) after seeing our movie said this; 'story is quite clear and I like how all the main elements; the London sequence, the urban real life scene and the park scenes were clearly outlined.' Jared Flux (25) loved; 'how the voice over and the score really enhanced the themes that the movie was trying to put across. Additionally, watching the movie became more enjoyable.' Some people had problems with hearing all the voiceovers because the sound was at times too loud. This made us go back to editing the movie and we re-adjusted voice levels in all parts of the movie so that the audience could hear everything without any problems. This is an example of how important feedback is as without this small addition, watching the movie might not have been as enjoyable an experience as we wanted it to be. Jamie Coates made a second comment concerning our editing; 'the final scene seems to progress too fast and should be slowed down.' We decided not to do anything about this comment as we didn't want the scene to be drawn out too long as we wanted a short and sweet happy resolution to our narrative. 

Facebook was something that provided us with loads of feedback and really helped us in the final development stages of the film. We linked the movie on YouTube with our facebook accounts so that people could view our movie from facebook and comment on it, they said the following. Nora Jenkins (16) commented on our final titles which were originally over black and said that it would be better if we made them more interesting. We inserted more colourful and special titles on the newer version of imovie. Moses Wallis (18) noticed that there were some jumps at certain moments during our movie but we were unable to correct this as this was an issue that came from problems with our filming equipment that slightly broke down in the middle of one of our shoots.

Our movie was placed on You Tube which through linking with Facebook meant that we could get essential and really helpful feedback easily.
 

The feedback that we got for our poster from Harry Grump (19) was that; 'the poster captures your attention with its simplicity' This made us happy as initially we weren't sure whether this would work well. Another comment from Monica Kennedy (17) was that she thought that some background images might be helpful in placing the viewer in the setting of the movie. We decided against this as it might not work with the composition that we set out in the poster. Frank Junior (22) after seeing our poster for the first time immediately got the main themes that we were trying to put across to him; the Immigrant theme and a general feeling of comedy. This was really important for us as somebody within our target audience got from the poster exactly what we intended him t get from it. Matthew Kane (16) said that the billing block was different then the one usually found on movie posters, but we decided to leave it as it was, since we were making a poster for a short film so it was important that some differences were there. Carolina Zaza (19) said that she easily saw the romantic elements of our movie, thanks to the prevalence of red in our poster. This validates our poster as being quite successful since a female within our target audience saw the romantic elements of our movie and looking back to Frank Junior's comment, a male within our target audience saw the elements of comedy as well as the important themes. This means that our poster achieved its intended effect with both men and women in our target audience.

Finally we gave out our magazine to some of our friends so they could give us some feedback on its quality and suitability. Ingrid Tone (23) after reading the article said; 'it is an engaging read and makes me want to see your movie.' This was a good comment but we were disappointed that she didn't pick up on the analytical content of our article and we re-wrote so that it is now much clearer and easier to notice. Lloyd Games (20) had less positive comments about our layout as he said it was too muddled up and there were too many things on the page. This was quite important feedback as it led to a radical change in our design. We got rid of things that were irrelevant or weren't effective, thus making the page less crowded and then we grouped boxes/pictures that went together and our page became much clearer. After we made all the corrections based on the feedback we got we asked Kate Hunter (19) what she thought of the magazine and her positive response made us happy with the magazines final look.

              

To sum up audience feedback was really important for our film as it allowed us to introduce some modifications in the final stages of the film's post-production. When we did something wrong we corrected it until we got it perfect, and when we reached that point, we simply did more of it. Thanks to all the feedback that we got we are happy to release our film as we consider it to be as good as we can make it, and additionally as appropriate for our target audience.

Q2 How effective the combination of your main and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Q1 - In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Practice Shot

Final Magazine

Comment

This is the final version of our magazine. We produced this magazine on a program called Pages. This magazine is done in a serious form which is similar to 'Sight & Sound.' In our review we concentrate on giving our readers an analysis of our movie - we give special attention to the serious themes of immigration but we also mention the romantic and comedy elements present in Adam's Apples. We included a box which contains an interview with one of the directors of our movie - this seemed like a good idea as it gives the audience an inside look into the background of the movie. Additionally there is a box which lists all the movies that are similar to Adam's Apples and which the audience might enjoy watching. The layout that we adopted is quite simple and the page is not clogged up which makes the page easy to take it in. The red colour scheme keeps in line with the romantic themes in our film. The pictures show iconic images from the film which the reader should remember after watching our film. A final touch is given by the background image of the White eagle which is the coat of arms of Poland.

Film Poster

This is our final film poster; we done edited this all on Photoshop CS4. First of we had to take a picture of our main character and upload it to the computer. We used the lasso tool to cut around the image and take away the background so we were only left with main character. This was very long to do, however it was worth doing and we done it very well. The apple image we used was an image that we got from the Internet, we again used the lasso tool to cut round it which was much easier this time as the background was white. To give the apples a rain effect I had to make multiple copies which was very long as new layers had to made every time and when I wanted to find a specific apple to move, it was difficult because there was so many. The text was very easy to do, as Photoshop uses similar tools to other programmes, although it was simple the text looked very professional.