Evaluation Question One

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
For our project we had to create a short film and ancillary products, a promotional poster and review page. Below I am going to explain how I was effected by real media texts in the creation of these products and how they helped me to shape my final film and ancillary texts.

'Flight' Short Film
The first task we were set was to create a short film. We firstly decided that we needed to decide on a genre, we brainstormed lots of ideas and finally decided on the social realist genre. We decided on this genre because we wanted to challenge ourselves and create a product which would effect audiences, we wanted to make audiences aware of important issues which effect many young adults.

Fish Tank
For the next part of this project we decided to do some research into the genre and watch a number of social realist films to gather inspiration for our own product, the first film we watched was Fish Tank by Andrea Arnold. I found Fish Tank really inspiring and we took inspiration from many aspects of the film.

Narrative and Themes

In regards to narrative we really liked the way Fish Tank had a strong female lead who had a passion for dance, this influenced our narrative as we decided that we wanted to portray the life of Sophie Everdeen, an average teenage girl who struggles to make it in the world of dance, much like the character of Mia in Fish Tank. We also have the theme of choices which runs throughout our film, however unlike in Fish Tank we decided to take our character down the wrong path to show audiences what many young adults do unfortunately turn to.

Another theme which both Fish Tank and Flight share is nature. Within our film we have included lots of landscape and nature shots within the second half of our film, we did this because we wanted audiences to recognize that Sophie was lonely and in a vulnerable state, we could represent Sophie's emptiness and confusion with large open landscape shots and long takes of her by the river. Having a mixture of natural landscape and urban settings also helps portray Sophie's split lifestyle.

Cinematography
I found many scenes within Fish Tank very visually appealing and I wanted to re-create them in my own product. Below are a few scenes which we used Fish Tank as inspiration for:

The first scene in Fish Tank which I really thought was really effective was the sequence where Mia is sitting by her window watching the world go by. I really enjoyed this sequence as we get to see the characters venerability for the first time. The shot is peaceful, with Mia gazing out the window wondering about her life. I wanted to try and recreate this scene within Flight as I thought it would be a good way of representing our characters venerability and confusion about which path to take and what choice to make.

The next shot I took inspiration from was the medium shot of Mia's window, the light creates a sun flare which streams through the window onto the characters face, shots like this are typically used within social realist films. This shot draws in the theme of nature and I felt that this scene overall was very visually appealing and effective. We recreated this shot in the bedroom scene and I am very pleased with the result, the shot looks very effective and many audience members have commented on this result during feedback, saying how they thought it was very visually pleasing.

The final scene I took inspiration from was the long hand-held take of Mia walking down the road. The sense of realism within this shot was very effective, it felt like we were following Mia on the other side of the road, walking with her. We recreated this shot within Flight by filming a long take of Sophie walking by the river, this was done with the hand-held effect to try and capture the sense of realism which Fish Tank so cleverly did. We filmed this sequence to try and symbolize Sophie's current sense of confusion.

Editing

One thing I noticed with Fish Tank in regards to editing was that Andrea Arnold uses lots of long unedited takes, this helps to capture realism and makes the audience feel like they are right there amongst the action. I also decided to use some long takes within the walking sequence of our film as I wanted to draw audiences into this crucial part of our film and make them feel like they were actually there. I also took Fish Tank into consideration when deciding on the colours to use within our film. The bedroom sequence of our film was a lot of different colours due to the constant change in lighting while filming (see this post). This meant that I, as editor of our film, had to decide which colour footage I thought would be more effective to use in this sequence. While watching Fish Tank I noticed that Andrea Arnold used a lot of warm tones (see below) and this influenced me to also use the warmer toned footage which we had filmed. I felt that the warm colours connoted safety and security and this is what we wanted Sophie's bedroom to feel like, we wanted audiences to know that Sophie's bedroom was the one place she felt safe and happy in. 

Ed Sheeran - A Team
Whilst browsing for inspiration on Youtube I came across  Ed Sheeran's 'A Team' music video, although not a film of the social realist genre I found the music video very visually inspiring. The music video tells the story of a young woman who appears to be homeless and sells her body in order to get enough money for drugs. As our short film also involves the theme of drug use we found this music video very helpful and inspiring when deciding on what shots to use within our film.

Cinematography
As you can see from the screen shots below we took lots of inspiration from the shots which appeared within the music video.

I really liked this medium tracking shot of the characters legs in Ed Sheeran's A Team, we follow the character as she walks down the road, this gives the video a strong sense of realism as the audience feels as though they are walking behind the character. I feel that this shot helps to engage the audience and draw them into the action which is why we chose to also feature this shot within our production. 

The next shot I really liked within Ed Sheeran's A Team video was this shot of the character sitting with her back to the camera. In this shot we can see the character gazing ahead, this shot makes the audience wonder what the character is thinking about and we guess that the character must be contemplating an important decision of some kind.  

The last sequence I took inspiration from was this shot of the character staring at herself within the mirror. I really liked this shot as it allows the audience to recognized that the character is contemplating an important decision and would help us to develop our narrative. We used this shot twice within our production, once at the beginning of the dance studio sequence and once at the end at the climatic point of Flight, using this shot twice allows audiences to draw parallels between the beginning and end of our production and ties our film nicely together.

Location
Ed Sheeran's music video also helped us with the choosing of our locations, I really liked the outside location shots within the music video and thought that they were very effective.

I really liked the way Ed Sheeran's Music Video had used dark outside locations which were lit up by bright blurred lights from cars and street lamps. I also noticed that these type of scenes a convention commonly used within social realist films. We feature many scenes within Flight which consist of bright street lamps and car headlights lighting up dark locations, I felt these types of shot were very visually appealing and typical of the social realism genre which is why we chose to include them.

Like Fish Tank the theme of nature is also suggested within Ed Sheeran's music video as the beginning of the video starts with the character sitting on a bench within a location surrounded by large trees. We took inspiration from this location and decided to also position our character on a bench also surrounded by trees, this shot makes our character look very small in comparison to the landscape, suggesting that she is becoming overwhelmed by the pressure of society and losing who she really is.

Narrative and Themes

One of the major things which Ed Sheeran's music video helped us to do was decide on whether or not to have an open or closed ending, we were not sure whether to show the character taking drugs or to leave it open to audience interpretation. Within Ed Sheeran's video we see the character taking drugs whereas in our film the audience simply see the character contemplating the drugs and then shutting the toilet door, the reason we left our film ending ambiguous was because we felt that the taking of the drugs in Ed Sheeran's music video was quite an intense moment which we didn't want to portray within our film due to it only being rated at a 15.

Black Swan

For the next part of research we decided to watch the award winning film Black Swan, as Black Swan is a film which contains the theme of dance and a sub theme of drug culture we decided that it would be a beneficial film to watch. Black Swan's dance sequence particularly inspired us when it came down to producing our own product.

Location

Within Black Swan they have lots of dance sequences, these take place in large dance studios with large mirrors. This inspired us to use a similar location as we thought it would be very suitable place for our character to practice her dance in, hopefully allowing the audience to understand that our character is an aspiring dancer. We decided to used the dance studio at Sandwich Technology School as it has a large mirror which we could use for various shots. 

Cinematography and Editing

While watching Black Swan I noticed that they often used close-ups of the characters feet during the dance sequences, we liked how this shot and wanted to use a similar type of shot within our production, however we decided that instead of cutting back to various close-ups of the character dancing (like Black Swan did) we were just going to focus on the characters feet. We decided that we were going show our character practicing one dance move over and over as would show the dedication our character has and how frustrated she is that she can't get the move right. 

In regards to editing I noticed that Black Swan used a series of fast cuts, this technique is used to condense a period of time to keep the audience interested. This what I tried to do within Flight's dance sequence, I edited together the footage using quick cuts to try and show that our character had been practicing her dance routine for a long time and was becoming frustrated with the fact she couldn't do it. Using quick cuts was a much better and more interesting way to show Sophie's dance routine as just filming a long unedited dance sequence would become boring and audiences would soon lose interest.

Film Poster

After creating our short film we started on our ancillary texts. The first one we created was our film poster, shown below on the right.

To gather inspiration for our film poster I firstly did a lot of research into the conventions of drama posters (see here). On conducting my research I found that a common convention was to have the main character of the film staring blankly head on, this was a reoccurring theme which I found many drama film posters to have. When it came down to producing our poster however we decided that we wanted to challenge this drama convention, we wanted to create a unique film poster which would intrigue audiences and get them wanting to watch our film. On deciding this we then had to decide on which shot we were going to use from our film on our poster, one of the media products which helped me come up with a decision on this was the Muriel film poster (see above). During my research into film posters I had come across the Muriel film poster and I really liked the use of the silhouetted image on the front, I thought that this was very effective as it made me curious as to what the film was about and made me want to find out more, because of these reasons we also decide to include the silhouetted image of our main character on the front of our poster. Another aspect of the Muriel poster which I wanted to take inspiration from was the colour, I really liked the dark hues of this poster and the contrasting colour of the film name, this is what we took into account when creating our film poster, we made our film name the contrasting colour of white to ensure that it stood out against the rest of the poster allowing audiences to easily see the name of our film. Overall I really like our finished product, challenging the conventions of drama posters was defiantly worth it as we have created a film poster which I am very proud of, I feel that our poster still connotes the drama genre even though we challenged conventions and I feel our film poster will interest and attract audiences, influencing them to watch our short film.

Magazine Review

After our film poster we set about researching and creating our review page. Our final review page is shown below on the right and a typical Sight & Sound magazine review is shown on the left.

Before we created our review page we firstly had to decide what magazine it would feature in, as our production is of the social realist genre we decided that the Sight & Sound magazine would be the most suitable choice. Once we had decided on Sight & Sound magazine I then set about researching conventions of their typical reviews so that I could produce a review page which would comply with their conventions. Within my group I was in charge of putting the review page together so it was down to me to research the conventions of Sight & Sound and find out how they typically laid out their reviews. Within my initial research (see here) I found that Sight & Sound reviews were very text heavy, often with just one photograph of the film at the top of the page and then an in depth review and credits, occasionally Sight & Sound magazine would also include a quotation which would be in among the review. As you can see from our film poster (see above) I tried to stick to the conventions of Sight & Sound reviews as best I could, I ensured that the review was laid out appropriately and included a list credits and a quotation from the text, I also made sure that our review had an appropriate photography of our film in the top right hand side. The photograph we decided to use for our review is of our character at one of the pivotal points in our film and on reviewing photographs which other reviews use I found that they also often include the main character/s within a climatic point of the film, this is to attract the audience to the review and get them excited about the film in question. One thing about our review which is different from Sight & Sound is the size of our film name, when creating the review I decided that I wanted the film name to be bigger so that audiences could easily see what the film name is from a glance, I felt that it would be beneficial for our review if I were to make the film name larger. Overall I am very happy with the review page I created and feel that it does conform to Sight & Sound review conventions, the extensive research I had done into the magazine beforehand defiantly helped me out when putting our review page together. I am very proud of the finished outcome and feel that our review page would fit seamlessly into the Sight & Sound magazine.

Evaluation Question Two

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

When creating our ancillary texts I felt it very important that they were relatable to our main product. I tried to ensure that our main product and both the poster and review page all followed the same genre conventions and had a similar house-style so that audiences could recognize that the product and texts were all interconnected. As well as ensuring that all the product suited as a group it was also important to make sure that each product worked individually also.

Colour

When watching our film is was apparent that the majority of colour within our production was a deep purple so I thought it was very important that we chose photographs for our ancillary texts which included the dominant colour of our production, this would help our ancillary texts and main production to interlink and also help audiences to acknowledge that the poster and review page are both promoting our short film, Flight. The purple colour also hints at our film narrative and genre, when I asked audiences what feelings they thought out poster connoted they replied that our poster gave off the impression that our character was lonely and confused. These two themes do occur throughout our production and therefore I feel we have done a good job exhibiting the themes of our film within our ancillary products.

Mise-en-scene

As you can see from the first image all of our products include a mysterious photograph of our main character in silhouette form, this helps link all of our products together and makes them recognizable as a group. The reason why we chose to use these types of photographs for all of our products is because its the key moment of the film where the protagonist has to make her choice, we wanted to hint to the audience the themes (loneliness, confusion, choices) which run through out film and also wanted to capture the message of the film. We decided to use photographs which didn't give away our characters identity, this will hopefully entice audiences into watching the film to find out all about our character and her situation. The photographs are also all of Sophie within an outside location, the key sequence of our film takes place outside which is why we wanted to use landscape photographs to let the audience know that they should look out for this sequence as it is the moment where everything changes for Sophie.

Font

One thing which I think we could have done to make our products more effective as a group is to have had the same fonts within our products. As you can see from the image above all of our products used different fonts, although each font works for each different product to further strengthen the collectivity of the three products I would make sure that each font type was corresponding.

Design

I tried to make sure that both the poster and review page shared the same eye-catching yet simple house style design, to allow audiences to recognize that both ancillary texts are associated with the short film Flight. I also chose to use a similar deep purple colour within the house style which would compliment the photographs I chose to use on each product, as you can see the house style colours of the products are black, white and purple. Using the same colours within each product helps tie all three together and makes them look good collectively.
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As well as making sure that all our products shared similar conventions we also had to make sure that individually they followed the dominant conventions of their typical products. I feel that I managed to achieve this which was helped by the extensive research I did beforehand on the conventions of drama genre films, different film posters and Sight & Sound review pages. I ensured that each of the products would be suitable as individual products for audiences to view as well as successful when viewed as a group.

Overall I am very happy with our main product and ancillary texts and I think that they do effectively combine. I also feel that our main product and ancillary texts work really well as separate creations as well as collectively.

Evaluation Question Three

What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

Throughout the entire course of this project I have sought feedback from potential audience members, most of the time through the social networking sites Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube and Facebook but I also constantly asked my media teachers and classmates for their opinions too. I have felt this very important to do as audience feedback allowed us to receive peoples opinions, both good and bad, about our production. Receiving suggestions about improvements helped us to constantly better our product and receiving compliments let us know that the audience were liking what we were doing and that we were on the right track.

Twitter 
I used Twitter right from the start to share progress with my followers. I kept them updated about what we had done and shared photographs and available film footage with them. I also asked a variety of questions to my followers to gather feedback and answers to help us develop of film and ancillary products. The good thing about using the social networking site Twitter was that because audiences could choose to follow the account and film updates I knew I would be able to receive good sensible answers and suggestions from people who were genuinely interested and willing to help improve our film and products. For this reason I often referred to Twitter when needing advice or opinions.  

Above is a screen shot of one of the questions I asked my followers on Twitter and one of the responses I received.

I asked a number of questions on Twitter, the first one being what audiences thought of our potential Flight poster design, from reading all of the responses I learnt that they did like the initial design and layout however they thought that we could improve by adding in more key information about the film as at the moment it looked very bare and lacked important details, such as the film release date and who the actors were. I was quick to correct this issue as so many audience responses indicated that including key information would be a huge improvement to the poster. By receiving responses like these I can sort out problems which I would not have necessarily seen or thought about myself. Also using Twitter I asked audiences what they thought of our first Flight film draft, the majority of responses were positive and we especially received lots of praise on our narrative and bedroom sequence shots, audiences said that the shots were very effective, visually appealing and drew them into the story, this feedback let us know that the bedroom sequence was one of the films strongest scenes. As well as receiving complimentary tweets many of my followers also gave us things to improve on, on reviewing the feedback the main criticism received was that audiences thought the end sequence, using the stop motion technique, was shaky and could be improved on, perhaps by re-shooting or by getting rid of the stop motion completely. From this Twitter feedback we decided to get rid of the stop motion effect completely as we also felt that this was one of the weaknesses of our first draft, the stop motion effect looked out of place as the rest of our film was filmed normally, receiving the audience feedback confirmed to us that removing the stop motion effect was beneficial and would help to improve our film. 


Tumblr
I used Tumblr when conducting audience interviews to get opinions of what people expected from our social realist film and when asking for peoples opinions of our first draft. The main reason we used Tumblr for this part of research was that audiences could leave responses anonymously. I found that people were more likely to leave criticism if they could do it anonymously and this allowed us to find out what people really thought of our film.
 
The screen shot above shows the questions I posted on Tumblr regarding peoples expectations. 

The first question I posted to my Tumblr blog was what expectations people had of our social realist film, from the responses received I found that many audience members had very stereotypical options of what they expected, for example, all of the responses expected that the locations within our film would be very urban and that our main character would be a rebellious teenager. I conducted this feedback as I felt it would help me to stick to social realism film conventions and help our film to live up to audiences expectations, which I feel our film did. Another reason I conducted this research was so that I could also challenge peoples ideology and surprise them, the majority of responses received expected our film ending to be not be ambiguous, for this reason we decided to leave our ending open to interpretation and allow audiences to make their own minds up about our character. The other question I asked my followers on Tumblr was for opinions on our first draft. I felt that the responses we received on Tumblr for this question were more critical than the ones I received on Twitter with many people strongly sharing their opinions on what they didn't like about our first draft, this was perhaps because of the anonymity Tumblr provides. Even though some of the responses we received on Tumblr were very cutting they gave us a good idea about what we needed to improve on and we did also receive many comments which complimented our narrative. The main criticism which came up, was the stop motion effect, as this had also been commented on within our Twitter feedback we definitely decided to rethink our approach to the films ending. 

Youtube

We primarily used Youtube to upload our music and film footage to share onto our blogs and social networking sites but I found that we received a couple of comments on our videos from people who happened to stumble upon them. The responses received on Youtube where perhaps the most helpful to us as we hadn't asked for them, this meant that people gave us their honest opinions of our product as they didn't feel pressured to give us praise which is what I feel many of my Twitter followers felt compelled to do.

Above is a screen shot of a comment I received on my Flight first draft video.
I learnt from Youtube feedback on our films first draft that the audience didn't like some of the shots used, as you can see from the comment above this particular user didn't like a few of the opening shots. After receiving this response I decided to re-think some of the shots I had chosen to use within our film, in the end I did decide to change the hallway shot to something more visually appealing which would develop our narrative and compliment our opening sequence. Thanks to this comment I also made our walking sequence slightly shorter as on reviewing our first draft myself I also felt that this sequence was too long and I found myself losing interest in our film. 

Facebook
Facebook was another social networking site which, as a group, we referred to for opinions all the way through the creation of Flight. Facebook was a good place to get feedback quickly and directly from our target audience as the majority of our Facebook friends are aged between 16 - 24, because of these reasons Facebook was the social networking site we referred to most often.

As you can see from the screenshot above I used a Facebook poll when asking for responses about our new Flight ending. I learnt from the Facebook feedback that the majority of our potential audience members preferred the new ending and I could clearly see this from the poll I conducted, this research influenced our decision when deciding between the two endings. Another question we asked on Facebook was what peoples opinions on our films name (Flight) were, we posted this question as a 'status' which allowed us to receive instant likes and comments. I was surprised at how quickly people got back to us on Facebook as from experience with Twitter and Tumblr I found that it took a while before we received any feedback, this was one major benefit of using Facebook. The feedback on our film name was all positive with people commenting on how they liked that it was simple yet managed to capture the theme of our film well. 

The only negative I found when using Facebook was that it was hard to get specific information from my friends, most of the comments I received were just complimentary of our work and not in any way constructive. To try and correct this issue I had to ask more specific questions to my friends over Facebook chat, this is what I did when seeking feedback for my film ending and review page (see screenshot above). When asking questions on chat I found that my friends still gave me compliments but a few also suggested minor things to improve on, as you can see from above. One suggestion to my review page was to include more features and colour which would make it look less wordy and more eye-catching, I didn't decide to implement this improvement as I felt our review page fitted in perfectly with other Sight & Sound magazine articles and adding lots of features and colour would just make our review page look out of place and defy Sight & Sound conventions.

Teacher Feedback

As well as using social networking sites I also constantly asked for opinions from my Media teachers. Advantages of this type of feedback was that I could get opinions quickly on the spot if I needed feedback fast and I could also see their facial expressions and body language, this was an advantage which we could not get on social networking sites. We implemented many suggestions which our media teachers had, such as adding a flash back sequence to our final film as they thought that our film structure was slightly confusing for audiences and the theme of drug use was only suggested within the last few seconds of our film, because of this feedback we decided to add in a flashback sequence to our film which would add a future events to come and help develop our narrative. However we didn't implement all improvements put forward such as the suggestion of making our film ending unambiguous, Mr Cunningham felt that by changing our film ending it would help to finalize our film and not leave our audiences with any unanswered questions, however from our initial research we found that many audiences liked the idea of having an open film ending so that they could make up their own minds about the film and for this research we decided not to change our film ending.

Conclusion
In conclusion seeking audience feedback has been very beneficial to our product, the feedback I received has help us shape our product and improve many aspects of our ancillary texts. As you can specifically by the differences in our first draft (see here) and final product we have made many changes in the development of our final film thanks to audience feedback. I have listed a few of the changes below:

• Added a flashback scene which our media teachers thought necessary for the development of our narrative. The added flashback scene also helps audiences to understand what our protagonist is thinking about and hints at the future events which may happen.
• Changed the dance sequence as it was not as smooth and polished as we liked, our media teachers commented on the stability of our dance footage and together we decided to re-shoot this sequence.
• Excluded shots and scenes which a lot of audience members thought took away from the intensity of our product. Shots which got excluded include, Sophie walking to the dance studio, the slightly blurry duck scene and many nature clips within the walking sequence.
• Shortened the walking sequence as many audience members felt it went on for a bit too long and caused them to lose interest.
• Perhaps the biggest change to our production, the ending. We spent a long time trying to decide what to do with the ending of our film, many alternative endings were made and audience feedback, particularly on Facebook, was a big help when deciding what to do.

Evaluation Question Four

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Below is a presentation I made on prezi.com explaining how and what media technologies I used within the creation of Flight and my ancillary texts.

Click the arrow to start the presentation, wait for it to load and then use the left and right arrow keys on screen to move around the presentation.

Final Film

Below is our final production.

Feedback

I wanted to know what our audience thought of our final film so I decided to link it on my Tumblr page for my followers to watch. The following screen shots show what our audience had to say: 

I also shared my film on my Facebook page and it received many likes, this let me know that my friends on Facebook enjoyed my final production.