Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation - Question 2

Evaluation - Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is the key to producing a successful and credible media product. As the audience is what brings in revenue, without making sure your product is going to fully satisfy your audience, you will be taking a huge risk. In addition to that, asking selected audiences to view your product before it is officially released, can spark an interest in your work, making it popular and word may spread. Amongst other goals for your media product, the main one is always going to be to please your audience, and without audience feedback, you will not know whether you have achieved this and met the audience's needs. Audience feedback can also be useful as it can make you aware of adjustments and improvements that need to be made before distributing it to the public, as well as things that they enjoyed and worked well.  

An example of this can be seen with the film “The Dark Knight Rises”. After a small selected audience had previewed the film, a number of the members of the audience complained about not being able to understand what Bane, the main villain, was saying due to the mask over his mouth. Erik Davis commented on twitter: “A fantastic action sequence hurt by the fact you cannot understand the villain at all.” Warner Brothers took this criticism on board, however, Christopher Nolan refused to completely rework the audio, and only adjusted the sound slightly. If the film had been released without receiving audience feedback, they may have distributed a media product that would not meet its goal as a film; to tell a story.    

 A further example of how audience feedback is greatly important when creating media products is in the film “Thelma and Louise”. After the first run of previews, many members of the audience commented on how they disliked the ending to film, with the two main characters driving off a cliff, and then on the way down crashing multiple times into various obstacles to their death. The audience disliked the way they had been on this journey with these two women, and then they died of such a graphic and brutal death. The filmmakers responded to this audience feedback by cutting the film just as the back tires leave the edge of the cliff. Although it still implies that the two characters die, it does not show the full sequence of their death, which pleased audiences, and allowed them to consider if their "journey" had really ended.

For all three of our media products I used a variety of ways to retain audience feedback.   First of all, I uploaded the short film onto youtube.

I consequently posted the link onto social networking sites such as: 

Twitter

Facebook

And Tumblr.

I asked friends of the intended target audience to give a general evaluation of the film. 

Additionally, I held a screening of the short film to a few friends of the selected target audience for the film .After they had watched it, I filmed their views of the film. I was able to collect a lot of feedback for the short film.

 

Overall, the main criticism of the film was that not enough tension had been built up by the ending of the film. Many suggest a more dramatic score, but one twitter user suggested to add a heartbeat towards the end of the film, and then when the main character dies, the heartbeat will suddenly stopped. 

As a group, we really like that idea and decided to use it as it would make the sad, tragic ending much clearer. 

One twitter user recommended to add a nursery rhyme score to our short film. 

We decided against this idea as we were going down the route of a fairytale theme, rather than a nursery rhyme. Although both fairy tales and nursery rhymes are closely linked, we didn’t want our short film to get even more complicated or to confuse the audience. We also felt that a nursery rhyme score would not have been appropriate considering our target audience is teens, we feel they might have taken our educational short film less seriously if we had added that.   

Another Twitter user pointed out that not enough time was given to read the beginning quote. 

In response to this comment, we lengthened the time the first quote ran for. It was a really small and easy adjustment to make, however it made a massive difference to our film. 

It would have been confusing for the audience if they were unable to read the beginning quote as they may not have gotten the right mood and feel for the film.

For our poster and magazine article, in order to receive audience feedback we again posted it on social networking sites such as Twitter.

I asked my friends and followers to comment on what they thought worked well, and if they felt anything needed changing. Whilst at the screening for the short film, we also showed our audience the poster and article, and just like we did for the short film, we recorded their views. 

We were pleased to hear that some had noticed the poster took on a thriller look to it, as this was the look we were going for. 

The audience feedback from the article was overall mainly positive.

However they said it seemed like a very serious piece of text, and maybe to make it more colloquial and relevant to target audience. 

We listened to this feedback and made suitable amendments, however, we did believe some of the technical termonolgy should remain in the review if we wanted to be taken seriously by some higher level media students. Some readers also commented on some of the grammar, we took that criticism on board and fixed all the spelling and grammar.

In addition to this audience feedback, I also constructed a questionnaire for the article and poster. I used non technical terminology so the questions I asked were understandable. I also made sure that the questionnaire was not too long as I planned to hand them out during break and lunch time along with copies of the poster and article. I got a lot of feedback from this, mainly positive.

Again, it was clear that our audiences were picking up on the thriller aspect of our poster, which most said they thought was a good way of getting a wider audience, as they would never have guessed it was an educational film from the poster. Similar to the previous feedback for the article, most people just commented on the grammatical errors, but apart from that said after reading the article, they would go and see the short film.

Evaluation - Question 4

During the research, construction and evaluation of our short film, film poster, and magazine review different technologies aided us to make them of the best quality we could which would not have been decades before when these new technologies were to available or as easily accessible to students.

Firstly, research and planning of the three products used three different technologies. The Internet to begin with was used to collect research on aspect such as genres, conventions of short film, film poster and magazine articles. With the Internet this was able to be done within the school premises as well as our homes making it much more accessible and used on a wider basis. . Before the Internet was introduced to society, or even students, the only way to collect research would have been to go to a library and find a book which is time consuming, limited with information and opening and closing times of the library. Also, the Internet allowed us to take images from the Internet and embed them into our blog posts in order to give examples of the research found or add a visual aspect to the blog making it more aesthetically pleasing.

Another new technology that aided the research and planning of our products is YouTube. Through the use of YouTube we were able to find, watch and analyse existing short films such as "Virus" and "Gravity", in order to note short film conventions and be able to have ideas for our own short film. Before the introduction of YouTube these short films would probably seize to exist or if they did would only be accessible via film festivals or independent cinemas.

Finally, the blog itself is a new technology which was used for the research and planning pieces for the three products without the chance of accidentally misplacing or losing them. By having the blog we were able to keep all content in one place, and even edit it and update information posted regularly.

The production of the short film, film poster, and magazine review used two types of new technology one of which being SD cameras compared to the DV cameras previously used for AS. These SD cameras were much more reliable to use as when using the DV cameras sometimes footage over ran one another or the tape used would make the footage more grainy at some parts than others. With the SD cameras all footage was stored safely on a card that hard a large memory capacity. Also the footage filmed, though not the highest quality was better quality than the DV cameras.
(put footage of both cameras)

Yet this did not affect our group since the grainy footage added to the serious, hard hitting genre we had which follows the conventions of British films as they are usually quite dark and grainy to convey realism.

(footage from our short film)

orange hue created by using
flash on a digital camera

the use of photoshop CS5
to take away the orange hue
and make it look more professional

Next, digital cameras were used for the photography for our film poster which helped as the photos came out with a fairly glossy look making them look much more professional. 

However, one problem that arose what that the flash would have been helpful to use in order to have brighter, clearer images, but they added an orange hue to the photos which would have been difficult to edit therefore the flash could not be used limiting the amount of photos we had to choose from (trial and error). Nevertheless, these were later edited by the photo manipulating software 'Photoshop' in order to create the desired look.

Imovie 11

Imovie HD6

Moving onto the post-production process, a variety of new technology was used by our group in order to edit and create our final products. To begin with, I-movie 11 was used for A2 compared to I-movie HD6 which was used for AS. When using this non-linear editing software, it gave us more freedom to begin editing when we did not have all the footage which saved us time, to move certain footage around and change where they were placed, make changes to all footage without the original being destroyed in case we wanted to make more changes or go back to the original footage which was done on numerous occasions. Also, compared to I-movie HD6, there were more text effects and transitions which gave us more variety in choosing the desire look for our short film. 

However, a problem that we found was that certain effects that could have enhanced our short film were no longer available on the newer version of I-movie such as 'ghosting'.

Next, for the film poster, we used Photoshop CS5. This was extremely effective as it allowed us to use diverse effects and colour changes to develop the photography used and make the poster look professional as if it was from the industry itself. The use of Photoshop CS5 had successful effects as it gave us the chance to create an aesthetically pleasing poster, using colours which immediately portrayed the themes and mood of the film as well as gave us the tools to make it look rather dark without affecting the image which conveyed the realistic, dark conventions of British film. 

For the magazine review, the software used was pages. Though fairly complicated to use, after practice, we were able to design and create our own layout for the magazine review in an accurate manner as it aided to create the layout with precision to make it look more professional.

A problem we found was trying to fill the white spaces in order to follow the conventions of magazine film reviews but the software made it easy to change font sizes, add breakout boxes and images to fill the space. 

Finally, the internet was used for the post-production of the short film as it provided our film with copy-right free music. When the internet was not available, any production of film had to record the scores and sound effects themselves and manually add them to the film which would waste time and be costly.

Furthermore, new technologies were used by our group for the evaluation of all three products. The internet was used once more used for this process of the work. It gave us the opportunity to get images to make our blog posts and podcasts come to life as well as to blog the evaluation to the blog site making it easy to store and upload from any location.

YouTube was also used again however this time rather than using it for existing short films, it was used to upload our own short film to distribute it to our target audience for free but also to collect audience feedback in order to improve our short film to make it even more suited for the audience. For individual producers such as ourselves, the internet was beneficial for distribution. We do not have the funds to play our film at independent cinemas or to allow people to view them on major sites as the BBC. Also, the internet allows us to distribute our short film to a larger amount of our audience, even those who were not initially our target audience. Many independent producers use the internet for cheap distribution in the hope to be recognised by mainstream directors. 

Finally, I-movie 11 was used to create the podcasts to evaluate all products in a unique and interesting manner rather than merely having text to read however was a time consuming process.

Over all, without the new technologies available to us our short film, film poster and magazine review would not have been completed with such freedom, easy access to information and allowed us to enhance them with new equipment and soft wares. Also, without the internet distribution for our film would have been problematic rather than the free distribution we were able to use due to the internet. 

Final Short Film - Happily Ever After?

This is our final short film, portraying the life of a young girl growing up in modern day British society.

Final Magazine Article

This is our final magazine article review of our short film "Happily Ever After?" We hope to have given  an informative and balanced judgement of our film. We intended to not only highlight the positives our film, but also mention the downsides to it. We hope that after reading the film review, the reader would consequently want to watch the film.

Final Poster

This is our final poster for our short film "Happily Ever After?" The poster features the main character at two stages of her life. It clearly informs the viewer of the title of the film, as well as the date it is to be released and the rating. We hope if people were to see this poster, they would consequently want to see the short film.