Evaluation - Question 1 - Jennifer Tate

Evaulation Question 1

Evaluation activity seven - by Jessica Towler

From the preliminary task I have learnt a lot about camera work and the programs we used to edit the filming, the preliminary task was quite rushed and only took about 5 minutes to film as we used a small room and so this made it was easy to get the shots we wanted, whereas in the main filming for our movie opening, we also used quite a tight space for the beginning of the opening, but this made it a little bit harder to get the shots we wanted because it was a narrow alley way so some of the shots like a long shot of Jenny sitting down was not possible as I could not possibly get the camera that far away from her, I did the best I possibly could and got an angled long shot of Jenny sitting down on the curb in the alley.

I have also learnt a lot about editing because in the preliminary task there was only so much editing we could do, but in the movie opening there was much more of a variety of things we could do with the filming, we decided to add music, text and different volumes and effects in the filming, for example we used the split screen for the phone conversation, this is a good thing to have in our movie because it is originally from a music video type thing, and this could help our movie link to our target audience of 15-21 year old's because they are the age group that tend to watch music videos the most. 

Evaluation activity six - by Jess & Jenny

The photo on the left is of me setting up the camera and tripod for Jess as she was going to film the inside shots of me and Hayley in the end scene. However I do know how to camera as did all the filming in the preliminary task we did. This involved me making sure that there was enough memory on the camera so we could film everything we needed, making sure we have enough battery for the time we were filming, and generally just checking that the camera and tripod were in good working order. I do some filming outside when we used another person to do the other end of the phone conversation but we didn't use this as it looked too rushed. 

The photo to the right is me using 'Final Cut Pro' this is the software we used to edit all of our film. The edited took a long time and consisted of a few days possibly 2 weeks as we had to edit in sound, pictures, video clips. I imported the clips, and photos onto 'Final cut Pro' and then edited them in the correct order, once the film was edited correctly, I then added in the two sets of music we used. The reason that editing took so long was because we had photos to import but the first set didn't come out well, so we had to redo them, which lost us 7 days of editing the photos.

This is a photo of me using the camera and the tripod filming
the inside shots, i have used these before on the preliminary task, but i didn't film a lot for it, so using the camera as much as i did was interesting and helped me learn a lot about technology, i  filmed the majority of the opening of our movie so got a lot of use out of it.
The shots outside worked quite well i thought because we got them filmed quicker than i thought we would, as we got all of it filmed within 10 minutes, even though we got about 3 shots of most things this helped us get on and edit, helping us on timing to get everything done on time.





This photo shows me using soundtrack pro, the screen grab below is also soundtrack pro and i used this program on the mac to make the sounds for the ident, i put the sounds that i wanted together, altered the speed of the typing sounds and imported it into final cut pro.


 

This is a screen grab of Final Cut Pro, we used this to make the whole media product, we added the music and the sounds from Soundtrack Pro into Final Cut Pro and edited it all in that one place, this made it easy as everything was in one document and so it was easy to locate and work from throughout the project.

Evaluation activity five - by Jess and Jenny.

Initially attracting and addressing the audience-
When we came up with our initial idea we quite quickly came up with an idea about our target audience, we did research into previous teen films and the conventions of teen movies, like whats included and whats not included just so we knew what we needed our movie to be like and how we wanted it to fit in with the genre. We quite quickly came up with two hypothetical people that fit in with our target audience, they were: 

Mischa: She is a 17 year old college student of black British ethnicity, that lives with her Dad in Bristol, that enjoying going to concerts, hanging out with her friends, going to parties, going to town, drinking and following fashion. At parties and in her spare time she tends to listen to music that is in the charts, dubstep and drum and bass. She generally watches e4 as it appeals to her age group, some of the shows that are shown are; Skins, The Inbetweeners, The Big Bang Therory, Shipwrecked, Misfits etc, this all falls under the 'Teen' genre. 

Aaron: He is a 16 year old school drop out of white British ethnicity, who is unemployed and lives with his parents in Liverpool. In his spare time he likes to go down the skatepark with his friends, he also likes to play xbox and occasionally smokes cannabis. He listens to alternative rock and indie music. He doesn't tend to watch much t.v except for Skins and the occasional episode of Friends, but he mainly watches films such as Kidulthood and other 'Teen' films. 

We used these two people as a constant reference when we were planning our movie, and took them into consideration when we were making crucial decisions, this made sure that we were making decisions in the right way and that we were always taking our audience into consideration. 

After Rough Cut-
When our movie rough cut was shown to people in our target audience they said that they didn't really understand the plot very much and they couldn't tell that she was in fact going into college unless you knew the college and you went there, they said that we needed a hook to attract the audience to keep watching. They said that there were some glitches in the split screen and we knew there were, but it was difficult to make it perfect because we had to cut a bit of the talking out as there was a big pause, so we had to cut it out and try and match the split screens up as good as we possibly could, and they also said that the volume levels on the split screen were not matching because one person was a lot louder than the other. 





Using the feedback-
After having this feedback we decided to get straight on it and make the changes we needed to, to make our movie opening more appealing to our target audience, firstly we sorted out the sound levels on the split screen conversation and sorted out the glitches as much as we possibly could in the split screen. Then we moved onto the more difficult part of making it more obvious that the character is going into college, and there were many ways we could do this, one of them was to just show the college sign more obviously in the final shot, or to show her walking through the college doors, but we thought the most effective way to put across the fact that she is going into college was to actually show her walking into college, and so we had to film again, so we jus filmed her walking into college, getting changed into some more college appropriate clothes, and then walking into a class still looking a mess, showing she is actually going into college for a class and that the night before has a big effect on her college life and her education as a whole. 


Above is a film of a classmate watching the film and then giving us feedback. We asked him certain questions so he would give us the important feedback we needed, and we made the video as its more engaging and we get his instant thoughts on the film. As Jess has explained above we took on board all the feedback that we had gotten and edited out video. But we still wanted feedback of our finished film, to help us evaluate it better hence why we asked if a classmate wouldn't mind watching the final cut and giving us good and bad points about the film.





Above is the final cut of our video. 

Evaluation activity four - by Jessica Towler

Teenagism Evaluation activity four on Prezi

Evaluation activity three - by Jess and Jenny

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

We feel that our film is based around typical teenage life in the UK, so distributing anywhere other that the UK  wouldn't be a success because we feel that it would be hard to understand as it its based around english teenagers, therefore teenagers from for example the USA would find it difficult to understand, and might not be able to relate to the storyline. 

What does a production company do?

A production company has a big responsibility in the film industry, they handle the staff, the hiring of actors, budgeting, scheduling, scripting, the production itself, post production, distribution and marketing. The production company may be directly responsible for fundraising for the movie to be made, they may accomplish this from a parent company, a partner or maybe from a private investor. They can be mainstream independent or completely independent, production companies can also work together as a co-production on a movie. I think that an ideal production company for our movie would be Film4, i think they would be suitable to produce our film because they have a track record of producing small English films, as this is what our movie is, we may need input from other production companies aswell for funding etc, but they would be the main ones responsible for our movie. 


The idea of a distributor and who that might be and why?
A film distributor is a company or individual responsible for releasing films to the public either theatrically or for home viewing (DVD, Video-On-Demand, Download, Television programs through broadcast syndication etc.) I think that the most likely be Studio Canal, this is because it's distributed many films that have been produced by Film4, such as 'The Inbetweeners', 'Attack The Block', and many other others. Studio Canal would be the best because a lot of the films that they distribute relate to our genre that we've used. They're also known for distributing English films and that's exactly what would be best for our film, as then most people will understand and hopefully relate to it. 

Where the money might have come from for a movie such as ours? 

For our genre movie the funding would most likely come from a variety of production companies, and it might also need a money input from the British Film Institution for lottery money to go towards the making of the movie. 

A film that would relate to ours would be the film Submarine, this would be because the funding they had to make their film came from a range of production companies such as Film4, Warp Films, Media Agency Wales and they also had money from the UK Film Council which is now the British Film Institution that gave them lottery money to go towards the making of their movie. The contrast to films like these would be a movie like Harry Potter, they do not have to search around for production companies for funding because Warner Bros already has the money there ready to use. 


Why the various people are named in the titles - which jobs appear in titles and in what order and how have you reflected this? 
The order in which credits are billed generally follows their importance to the film, just not linearly. First is usually the motion picture company, followed by the producer, then the 'a film by' credit. So for example you have the lead cast, then the supporting cast, costume, make up and producer, writer and writers usually appear last. However we followed but broke these rules for a reason. We put the director at the very begging as this is usually done in English films, but we made sue that  the cast ran in order from the most important to the least important. E.g. Me, then Frankie and then Jack. The titles that then followed were editing, costume and make-up, music, screenplay and Producer etc. We reflected this by placing out titles on the opening of our film, so we displayed them on the photos we edited together, and placed them in different corners of the screen to make it more interesting.  

What your film is similar to institutionally?
Movies that would be similar to ours would probably be other UK based teen films, this would be because American teen films would not be the same really because the stereotypes of English teens to American teens are totally different so American teens wouldn't be able to relate to our movies story lines as much. So movies similar to ours would be films like Angus, thongs and perfect snogging, The Inbetweeners movie, Bend it like Beckham and Kidulthood, these films would relate to ours because they are all English based and all revolve around telling the story of teenagers lives from different aspects. They all go about it in a different way but the basis of it is all the same. 
It is quite interesting however that English based teen films are not a success as a whole in America, but American teen films are a hit in England, this might be because life is so much different in America and we like to see the contrast of it, and teen films in America arn't so hard hitting as teen films in England, English teen films tend to be Teen Drama whereas American teen films tend to be Teen Comedy, they show the not so truthful side of teenage life. 

Evaluation activity two - by Jessica Towler

 I  would say that we initially had an idea about the social groups that our movie would appeal to as soon as we came up with the initial ideas. We thought of the smoking, drug taking 'chavs' that are quite badly portrayed in the media, and so they already have a bad name for under age drinking and drugs etc.

I think that our movie opening would represent their social group because Jenny is dressed up like she is older than what she is and you can obviously tell that she has had a rough night out either drinking or taking other substances. We have used the cigarettes in the movie opening to suggest that's a normal thing for her, smoking is a normal thing and so that's what she is used to, I wouldn't expect a 'posh' girl to just light up a fag in the middle of an alley, looking like she has had a rough night out, the morning after, on her way to college, the stereotype just doesn't suggest it, so we have tried our best to stick to the stereotypes and gone along with it in a big way as we have just suggested what everyone else in society thinks goes on. 

Evaluation activity one - by Jessica Towler

Activity One- Evaluation...

Construction - Final

Preliminary Task - Continuity Excercise by Jess Towler & Jack Mitchell.

Preliminary Task - Continuity Exercise.

Continuity Exercise

This was the continuity task that we were set to show our filming and editing skills. We wanted to show Elle coming through the door in a smooth motion to display our editing skills but I found editing this was quite difficult as we had to get timings perfect. To do this we took many shots of each frame so we could choose from the best ones, so that the film looked as professional as possible. One thing that I would do again would be filming the conversation from a different angle, as this would have made the speech a little clearer and you would have had a better view of both of the girls. However I'm happy with the final piece and think that we definitely stuck to the brief. 

Evaluation Preparation.

We decided to make sure that the examiner knew what we had individually done for the evaluation, so on the joint evaluation posts that we have the italic writing is Jessica Towler's, the writing in a different font is the work done by Jenny Tate and the writing in grey is the work that has been done together.

Making the Ident

I took an image of the eiffel tower off of google and imported it into final cut pro, I did this to make the Tower Productions Ident. I chose to use the name Tower Productions because it goes with the theme and also it goes with the image of the Eiffel Tower.

I then wanted to put text into the Ident, I went into the effects tab and chose to add some text, I chose typewriter and then went into controls and changed the text and the font and i also changed the colour to white. I then went into motion and changed the speed of the text, I did this so it would flow more and wouldn't waste time. 

Location Changes

Initially we planned to film down an alley way near to Priory Community School, we were going to film there as it looked like it fitted in with our theme of our movie opening, but the day we filmed it began to rain and so we had to get as much done as possible in a short amount of time without getting the camera wet.
When we then went to film the last bits of our movie opening, it was sunny and so the weather would not have matched that in the first part of filming, so we decided to change the location to closer to college, this allowed us to do all the filming at once and in lesson times, allowing us to work as a group and get it all done at once.
The filming for the split screen was done in one take by Jenny, but the other side to the conversation had to be filmed 3 or 4 times, this was down to timing and not knowing when to talk, otherwise the two characters would have been talking over each other and this would have been a disaster for us, as it would have ruined our film opening, so we decided to film it a further 3 times to make sure we got it right. 

Location Photos

For our movie opening we used an alley way near college, it is quite run down and has a lot of litter down it, we used it because we thought it would go well with the theme of our movie and it is close to college so it would be easy to do the filming from the alley way to the front of college. The alley way worked well as it gave us alot of options for shots even though it is narrow, and the litter in the alley made up of mainly old, used cigarette packets and old cider cans scattered around worked as a sort of mise-en-scene as it helped make the alley way look the way we wanted it too, we didnt need to do this as it was already there. These photos were taken after filming as we had to change location because of the weather.