Evaluation Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

This is my answer to question 3 which has been done in the style of a voiceover with supporting visuals 

Evaluation Question 4: Who were the audience for your media product?

This is my answer to question 4, which involves both a vlog and my take on vox populi's

Evaluation Question 5: How did you attract/adress your audience?

This is my answer to Question 5, which I used a Prezi Presentation to answer 

Evaluation Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from this process of constructing the product?

This is my answer to Question 6 and has been answered using a PowerPoint Presentation

Evaluation Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

This is my answer to Question 7. I got back together with my production group and answered the question in the style of a podcast.

Evaluation Questions

Now that we are coming to an end of our main production, the attention is turning to working on our evaluation. Our evaluation will be done by answering seven different questions about our production piece. We have to use a variety of methods to present our questions. The questions which need to be awnsered are:

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

With this question, I am being asked to show my understanding of the different sorts of techniques and conventions that are presented within film and whether or not what I have used lives up to the standard of those used in the professional environment. As well as this, I will also need to show how I presented this in my production. To do this, I can go look back at my research and see how that affected the final piece. After thought I think that the best way I could present this is through a directors commentary. This would consist of recording a voice-over on top of the finished main piece and in this voice-over I can talk about the certain conventions and media techniques that I used within my piece.

Here is an example of a directors commentary from the film American Psycho:

2.How does your media product represent particular social groups?

To answer this question, we need to show how our media piece represented a particular social group using the character within the film. To do this, I will set up a mock interview with the cast member (me) and then have the interviewer ask questions which all together with answer the main question.

For an example of this, I have found an interview with Martin Freeman for 'The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug.' What I have in mind is similar to this but will be more relevant to the question:

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

For this question, I need to talk about distribution within the media industry and the types of institutions there are. As well as this I need to decide on what media institution would be best to distribute my production as some institutions are known for distributing certain genres, such as ITV1 focus on the general public while ITV2 is more focused on the young. To answer this question, I will be using a voice-over which will then have supporting visuals on screen.


4.Who would be the audience for your media product?

This question is simply asking what sort of audience my production was intended for, such as a specific social or society group. To answer this question I will use two methods. The first method I will use is vlogging so that I can talk about the audience and why the media product was aimed at them, and then secondly I will go on to use a vox populi method where I ask the intended audience to watch the piece and then give their overall opinion of it.

I want to something similar to this for my vox pops:

5.How did you attract/address your audience?

For this question, I need to explain how professional companies manage to attract and address their audiences and I also need to show how I am going to do the same. The best way to do this is by making a poster using Photoshop and then explain how this would be effective.  

Here are a few famous examples of film posters:


6.What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

In this question, I am being asked how much about media technologies I have learnt throughout the pre-production, production and post production. The best way to answer this question would be through a presentation. I will be using PowerPoint as my presentation software. In this presentation I will show all the hardware and software I used throughout the process and talk about the pros and cons of each thing.

7.Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full production? 

For this question, I have to decide on how I have progressed in media from when we filmed the preliminary task, all the way through the main production and up to now. This will include mentioning everything I feel I have learnt since the preliminary task and how this has benefited me. To answer this question, I am going to get back together with the group I worked with in the main production and have a discussion about this, in the form of a podcast.

Final Editing Process

Yesterday, I spent the majority of my day doing the final process of edting for my main task. The main thing I had to do was add the opening titles to the video so that it fitted the conventions of an opening sequence. However, this is not all I did as there were a few things that needed to be corrected. As I was doing this editing at home, I had some new programs available to me. These were Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects.

Adobe Premiere Pro
After the initial edit, we figured that our production was at a high enough standard. However when I watched it home, I realised that some of the diegetic sound was either poor quality or was not syncronised with the action on screen. Therefore I decided to edit the sound, mainly the footsteps as they were way too loud and not in sync. I also added some extra diegetic sound such as creaking and birds in the background to try and make it more realistic. There were also some visual tweaks that needed to be made, such as slightly lengthening and shortening clips, and in some places the video had glitched and needed to be replaced. As well as this I added some of the titles that would appear in the finished piece which was made very simple by Premiere Pro. Adobe Premiere Pro as a video editing software is fantastic! The ease of use was great and the video editing options were vast.

Adobe After Effects
To do some of the titles for the final piece, we wanted to make some of them more dynamic and we thought the best way to do this was implementing the text into the enviroment. After research, I found the best program to use for this is Adobe After Effects. There were a variey of features available to me, however many of these effects were not possible as some features. An example is the feature known as rotoscoping. This feature puts an object from the video in a seperate layer so that you can insert things behind it while the video is in motion. Initially, this was a plan but as the rotoscoping is usually done with a still object and/or with a selection of colours in the picture. Due to the camera moving a lot and there being little difference in colour it could not pick up myself as a layer within the video and therefore did not work. However, there were some features that did work. The one I used was camera tracking. This feature is used to track all motion within a selcted clip and then find 'track points' which you can then link with text, for example. Therefore as the track point stays in place so does the text and moves along with the camera movement. I used this twice, once where it says 'Cinematography, Thomas Ewart.' and I attatched this to the ground and secondly when it says 'Starring, Abel Clarke' and this was made to look like it was written on the wall. This is fairly simple to do and is very effective. Overall, Adobe After Effects is a really good program when implementing video effects into a video. However, as I was a beginner to the program, I felt I was thrown very much in the deep end and it took me a good while to understand what I was doing.












After all this was done, the final piece is now complete. I will be putting it on my blog soon.  

    

Changes in the main task

After many hours of work and effort, me and my group have now finished our main task. Overall, I am impressed of what we have achieved. However the final product which was produced was nothing like I imagined and this was due to all the changes we made from the initial pitch. There were a variety of reasons for these changes and they were made in all three areas of production, pre-production, production and post production. In this post I will go through all the changes we made and why they were made. 

1. The Actor

Initially we had cast Daniel Cadoret, as mentioned earlier in my blog, to play the main character. We did go out filming once with Daniel and he did a good job at presesenting the character we wanted. However after this it became apparant that after this seesion he was unavialable for filming when we needed him due to what he had planned. Of course we respected this as he was only helping out through kindness so if he has other plans he should definetly do them rather than go out of his way to help us. Therefore we had to find another actor star in the opening sequence. As mentioned before on my blog, I was the other choice to be the actor so I took up the role. Overall this didn't affect the overall piece as the audience didn't know this and the only drawback was having to re-film three or four shots. 

   

2. The ending

When we first thought of the initial ending, there was going to be a lot more going on and was even going to involve another actor. However half way through the production process, we realised that there were two problems with this ending. Firstly, the ending would invovlve the character being shot, and if this were to happen it would of closed a lot of doors to who this character was. However the main reason we changed his is due to timing. With what he had already filmed, the piece was already two mintues long so adding an ending which would be just as long would mean our piece would be going gainst the brief of making at most, a two and a half minute opening sequence. Therefore we had to go back to the drawing board and rethink our ending. This took two attempts as the scond idea for an ending was also too ambitious for the little time we had left for it. What we producedin the end,  I feel was sufficent to work as the ending and honestly would've been better than the ending we had planned in the first place.



This is the initial ending in stroy board form, with the car pulling up and the driver then shooting
the main character.



3. A couple of shots

Our shotlist was something which, as time went by, we struggled to follow. This was for two reasons. Firstly the shots we had in mind may have been overly ambitious however the main reason was that once we were on set we realised that some shots we had planned would not be as effective as we first hoped. however the location also gave as a lot of inspiration for different shots and some of which wouldn't of worked without what we had available. A good example is there was part of the wall which had fallen away and we took advantage of this with one of the shots. This wouldn't of been possible to plan if we didn't know the wall was like this.



When we first did our storyboard, this is the shot we intended for when the
character hits the creature, and it was going to be a simple mid shot. However, when
we got round to filming we figured that a worms eye shot shot looking up at the character
would be better and have more of an effect.