Audience Feedback

30.03.2015

Audience Feedback

In one of our lesson two of out classes joined together in order to give feedback on each other's videos.  Below is the different feedback that we got from our video, a lot of it was very helpful into seeing where we could have gone better, or what people thought was effective.

I got the impression that people really liked the use of slow-motion shots on the black background, something which as a group we were also really proud of. 

One of the criticisms that we got was that they didn't really understand the storyline that much, that it wasn't that clear to the people watching.  However, most people managed to guess in the right direction on what it may be about.

Another criticism was the necessity of the first part of the video, in that it didn't really need to be there. I sort of agree with that however, if it wasn't included then it would have been a lot harder to try and understand what the storyline was as a lot of people noticed how it was all going on inside of her hear due to the contrast of the two settings.

Final Opening Title Sequence

22.03.2015

This is Our Final Product

            

Evalutation Task 7

20.03.2015

                

Evalutation Task 6

20.03.2015

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

               

We added annotations to our final title sequence to show why we chose to put specific things within out title sequence and what we thought it added overall.

Evaluation Task 5

18.02.2015

How did you Attract/Address your Audience?

                    

Evaluation Task 4

20.03.2015

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Evaluation Task 3

5.02.2015

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

We decided that if we were to create the entire film we would want our film to be a mid-budget psychological thriller. We would film it within the UK, using a British cast but would want our final film to be distributed with an American company as we believe that this would enable the film to have a wider audience over seas as well as at home.

We looked into a few potential companies to distribute our film but found that many of them didn't fit the type of company that we wanted to be our distributors.  We then decided that the company that fit our criteria best was Sony Pictures Classics an "independent" film division of Sony Pictures Entertainment. When looking into other films that it has produced such we noticed that they are all more based around a story line and the people within it rather then trying to distributed high-budget, tent-pole movies that other American companies such as Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox are used to producing.

We also noticed that for movies which it has recently distributed such as Blue Jasmine and Magic in the Moonlight, they both have relatively high budgets, $18 million and $16.8 million.  So for our film, which we would base the budget around the same budget that it took to produce The Black Swan, $13 million, then we are in the right price range for the types of films that they distribute.

When distributing our film we would hope to make profits from the cinema, but not within the opening weekend because we realise that it wouldn't be a tent-pole movie that would have thousands of people coming to watch it in its first weekend. 

Evaluation Task 2

 13.02.2015

How does your product represent particular social groups?

 In our opening title sequence we only had one character, who  positive portrayal of a 17 year old teenage girl.  We hoped that our sequence would be able to illustrate the idea that, although our character may look fit and healthy, she posses psychological issues that only she knows about. We hoped that a teenage female audience would be able to relate to our character psychological problems. 

By putting our character in a GB tracksuit during her warmup and then in the team GB leotard visually conveyed to the audience that she performs her sport to a very high level. When our movie went to cinemas we would hope that this positive portrayal would  attract other teenagers, and our character would be a role model for other them.  

The amount of training that our gymnast would have to endure to get to the level that our gymnast is performing is mentally challenging and brings with it a lot of stress. This could lead to both physical and mental problems which we hope to portray through our character in our finished piece.

Evaluation task 1

19.03.2015

Evaluation Task:1

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

Make it or Break it: 

Although not a thriller, the gymnastics-base American TV program ‘Make It or Break It’ had elements that the gymnasts used that our group thought would look good in our thriller.

The clip on the top is the one from the TV program and the one on the bottom is from our thriller.  As shown they are both the same element, known as illusion.  We decided to make our gymnast do this in the sequence because we thought that it would show off the true extent of the talents of our gymnast.

Stick It

Again, 'Stick It' isn't a thriller but rather an American movie about aspiring gymnasts.  There is one main scene within the movie that our group liked the difference camera angles and traditions that they used to create the short sequence.

As shown above, they used birds-eye view shots within their sequence which we also ended up using within our final sequence. At one stage in our planning, after watching some clips from 'Stick It', we were thinking of perhaps using the same effects that they used such as the kaleidoscope, but when we were editing we thought that it wouldn't work in the context of our film.

Another idea that I really liked within our thriller was the slow-motion of the gymnasts hands cutting together, once watching 'Stick It' I thought that it would really work within our sequence.

Although the original clip that we got our idea from was not in slow motion, we thought that the addition of the slow-mo on the second clap creates more suspense and therefor builds up the tension. This also helps to allude to the idea that our film is a thriller because up to this point it had been very simple editing and shots all at a normal pace, therefore making it able to be mistaken for any genre of film.

Editing our Final Sequence

Editing Our Opening Title Sequence

In the edit suite we started off by looking back over our footage from the shoot day, in total we had over 100 shots that we needed to condense into two minutes of film.  Once we had filed through and looked at all the shots we found that a lot of them were blurry, or not as well executed as we had hoped so we got rid of those ones straight away.

Due to the little time that we had in order to put everything together we dragged all the clips that we wanted to use onto the timeline, and then sorted those into difference sections to make the editing fast and efficient.  We put  ours into two main groups; warming up in the gym and then the shots in the dark.  Once we had done that, we continued to break them down into each different element as we had about four different shots for each element. We then made a duplicate of the timeline so that we could edit on one and always had a back up in case something went wrong and we needed to revert to the original.

After we had done all this we started editing all the clips together, we didn't worry too much about the timing of it to start we just needed to put something together and put it into the order that we wanted to final film to be in.  To start with our initial cut was around 5 minutes long so we needed to cut three minutes off of that but we had the shots in the order that we wanted so ti wouldn't take too long to cut it down. 

We found that to start with our initial cut had too many shots of our actress warming up in the gym so we decided to cut about a minute and a half of that out, also with the help of Matt, he also helped us to cut the the entire thing to two minters, as by having an outsider look at it they could tell us what he thought wasn't necessary within the sequence. 

After we had got the film down to two minutes we then began to add in titles, we decided to go with a minimalist font as to not distract what was going on in the sequence. We also decided to only start putting in the titles when the sequence goes into the black room because the white font would stand out more also because we decided that we wanted all the shots in the dark room to be in slow motion it gave us more time to place the titles in different areas on the screen and leave them for the necessary amount of time for the audience to be able to read them.