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REVENGE - SHORT FILM

Above is the link to the short film that me and Harry have made. I am extremely proud of this work as I think that it has quite a professional look to it and also I had a lot of fun doing it.

FILM MAGAZINE

FILM POSTER

 

Evaluation Question 4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

For this evaluation question I have made a short video about all of the different technologies that I have used to construct, research and plan my short film. This video is now below for you too view.

Evaluation Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

It was really good getting feedback from our peers as we received some really positive stuff from them. Also we received some feedback on what they thought we could do to actually improve our short film which is brilliant because i am really keen to make our short film as good and as watchable for the audience. One improvement that was suggested by Matt and Charlie was that we should have a sound when Harry's character first hits Glen's character. I think this was a very good suggestion as i always thought that this hot was missing something. So to do this we got the sound from the original melon smash and put this over top. I think that this makes it look and sound more realistic than it did in the last one that we had. I have learned from this feedback because i now know that the audience will be more attracted and drawn into this part of the film if we did have a sound effect  Below is a screen shot of when we were putting the sound of the melon over top of the hit.

Also another piece of audience feedback that we had from Jon and Nikki was the fact that during our short film when we have music along with the parts when we are talking the vocal volume is actually a lot lower than it should be so they suggested that we should either turn the music down or to turn the vocal volume up. The steps that we took to learn and improve from this feedback is in the pictures below.

The above picture shows the first 2 steps that i took towards fixing the sound issue that Jon and Nikki pointed out to us as feedback. The first was bringing the music volume level down even further than we had already done so and then the second step was using the auto sound level adjuster to make the dialogue a lot louder. So we have learnt from the feedback because now the shot looks and sounds a lot better than it did. The third step was changing the  equalizer to voice enhance. This obviously enhances the vocals that we have on the film which will then be a lot louder with a better quality sound. This is now pictured below.

There is a lot of difference between the feedback that i got from my peers and the feedback that i got from my professional audience. This is because i think that the professional feedback that we received looked into more detail and gave us more technical feedback that we could work on to improve our work so much more than the feedback from our peers. This is a good thing because then we know what people think of our product and what they think would help us get a better grade. 

I also went out and asked my peers again to give me some feedback on what they thought of our ancillary tasks so i could then work on that which would also improve my grade. Here is the feedback that i received.

The above picture is of feedback that i got from Luke in my media class. i think that he has made some good points when it comes to the credits at the bottom of the film poster because we were really happy with that part. We had it on there so that we could make it look as authentic as possible. He also said about the star ratings at the top of the poster. I would agree with this because we ten researched into short film posters and they aren't normally included on there. So by Luke giving us this feedback we then went and took them off of our poster and it made then look a lot better. However Luke's second point about having the black background i would have to disagree with. This is because i think that the thriller genre is normally quite dark so we thought we should carry that dark convention on through to the ancillary tasks that we did.

Evaluation Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary texts?

We wanted to make a very clear combination and connection with our film, poster and reveiw so we wanted to have the same logo that we had come onto the screen at the end of the film on our ancillary tasks as well. We thought if we did this, our audience would be able to make a very clear link between them all. So we had the logo on the film come up at the end of the film, we had the logo at the bottom of the poster underneath the characters and we had the logo on the magazine right at the bottom. It is only very small but this is still enough for the audience to make the connection. These are all pictured below.

Another link that i could mention would be the link of using the same characters through out the film, poster and magazine. We thought this would be the best thing to do because if we had completely different people on the poster and magazine the audience would then get confused and not be able to make the link between the 3 products. I think this also makes a good link because the characters are wearing the same costumes as they are in the original images that we have on all of our products.

Another clear link that the audience will be able to make between all 3 of my products would be the use of the original images in all of them. I think this makes an effective combination because again we have used the same characters, settings and costumes in the original images as we did in our film. These are pictured below.

Another one that there is would be the colour theme that is on all of them. Harry has the blue tie on, the logo that we have used is blue and the film magazine review has the blue theme all over with the writing, Harry's tie, the prize box and the star ratings. This isn't a very strong link but people would still be able to relate. It is also good because i think that if we had completely different colors on each of the products that we have made then it would look quite untidy and it wouldn't stick to one of the main conventions of a magazine review which is having some sort of theme on it. For example this film magazine review for the spider man movie has the theme of the blue and red title and writing so that it matches spider mans outfit. this would be the link that they are trying to make.

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

 Above are the conventions, characters and settings. I think that we have stuck to the characters convention because we really only have 2 main characters which are mine and Harry's characters. These are the ones who make the short film work and who the story is based around. We also have Glen's character. I would really class his character as a main one but he is very important for the story to flow throughout. This is because he is the one who causes the disruption in the first place by going off with Harry's wife so this would make him very important. We have done this because we wanted to keep it simple and easy to follow. We definitely haven't followed the settings convention in our short film because we had a lot more than just two as you can see in the photo next to this. However i dont think this is a bad thing because i think by using more locations we have given it more variety in our film and it actually keeps it more interesting and gives it a lot more depth to it.

I think that we have stuck to the budget convention very well. This is because we also don't have anyone who can give us enough money to make a massive production much like a lot of other short films that have been made. We managed to get enough money to pay for petrol to drive us around, a few melons to do the melon smash and a couple pieces of equipment that we used to get some different shots. We didn't really have much choice in the matter as we both only have part time jobs so we had to follow this whether we liked it or not. I think we have kept to the length convention very well because our short film lasted for 5 minutes. We thought this was a good length because then we weren't dragging out the story to much and we can pack a lot of stuff into it so that the audience is constantly interested. As you can see in the picture to the left we have kept to the convention.

Another convention that i think i could use would be having a twist in the film. We have definitely followed this convention because all the way through it the audience is lead to believe that it was Harry's character who committed the murder and framed my character. However right at the end it shows the audience Harry's character recounting his version of events which swaps the whole story around so it looks like my character did it. This then leaves the audience to decide for themselves what actually happened. i think it is really important for the film to involve a twist as it gives the audience something to think about afterwards and it makes it a lot more exciting than making it so that Harry's character just gets arrested. However this has also sometimes not really worked in films and some people say that it has ruined the end because of all the build up to what they thought was actually going to happen.

A theory for films that is used a lot would be Todorovs theory which i also think could be turned into a convention of film. Todorovs theory follows 5 different steps and he believes that the majority of films can relate to this with the story it is telling. I think that there are parts of our short film that we could relate to todorovs theory, for example at the start of our film when Harry is walking out of work everything is in order and is quite peaceful. Another part of it that we could relate to would be the recognition of the disruption. This part would be when my character finds the dead body and realizes that the person who has been driving him is actually a killer. However this would change depending on what you think happens at the end because of the twist that we have applied to our film. The one main part that we really couldn't apply would be the end which is called the repair in todorovs theory. This is because in the end of it all Glen is now dead, Harry has lost his girlfriend and my character, depending on what you believe, was arrested for committing the murder.



Above is a graph that i have created to show you how other people have thought about what codes and conventions i have either followed or i have challenged. I got mixed results back which is brilliant as it gives me more ways to perhaps improve my short film.

i think that sticking to the conventions of a short film has improved our own product dramatically because if we went off and did our own thing and basically broke the rules or guidelines of what a thriller films normally should be like i don't thing that our film would have been as successful as it was. It would have lead to the audience getting bored if we didn't have a twist. However i also thing that by breaking some of the conventions, for example the settings, it has made it better because it gives it more variety and something different for the audience to see.

Profesional Audience Feedback

The two pictures below are the proffessional feedback sheets that I got from John Howe and his friend Nikki Williams. Jon is an ex student at Tavistock and has been working in America making music videos for bands and Nikki also has experience in the media. I think its brilliant getting feedback from them because then somebody who has genuine experience and someone who has been through what we are going through now is actually giving us some really good feedback which we can the learn from and improve our music video.

 

As you can see from the picture above John has been very kind with his evaluation of our work which is amazing. He has said that our intro was great and that the tracking shots we included in it were good as well which I was very happy with as this is something that we really wanted in our short film. He also said that he liked Harry's car at the end which was cool. There was one thing that John suggested that we should do which was sort out the sound levels of the dialouge when the two characters are talking in the car. This advice was very useful because then after we had read this we went staright on to the footage that John had said about and we sorted out the sound levels so now it sounds 10 times better than it did before hand. This was actually part of the film we had gone out to film about 4 times because we either didnt frame the shot right or the microphones in the car werent working so you couldnt hear anything.

  

 

Again as you can see from the picture above is the feedback that Nikki gave us on our short film. Again the praise that she has given us is amazing and really encouraging. She said similar things to John about how all of our shorts are really well framed and that they are all at a high quality which is brilliant. However she has put another thing on the parts that we can improve which is when Harry first hits Glen with the sledgehammer she thinks that there needs to be a soun effect there so that it actually looks and sounds like Harry did actually hit him. So for this we went onto the sound effects that are already on the programe iMovie and found a really good sound effect so that we could use the advide given and make our short film better. Again we really appreciated this advice as I think it does improve the whole shot. Again I think this advice is actually really important because the murder scene is the main focus of our movie so if this part had anything wrong or didnt look right then it could have affected it quite a lot and maybe not looked as could as it could have. The picture that is within this text is a screen grab from our film at the part where Harry hits Glen with the hammer.



The Murder

Our whole short film is based around the murder scene near the end of the film. We wanted to make this really good because it was so importnt to the story line. After a while of thinkning of different ways pf doing it and then trying to figure out how we would do it we found a video on YouTube by this channel calle FilmRiot. The video basically showed us a way that we were able to smash somebodys head with a baseball bat and a melon and make it look realistic with the skull and blood splattering eveywhere. We thought about this idea and thought that the idea would still work if we used a sledgehammer. The video below is the tutorial video that FilmRiot put up so that we could learn to use it.



On this tutorial video it says after you have got all of the footage then you need to know how to use the Adobe software called After Effects. We would need to know how to use this because this is how you make it look like the head is exploding by using the meon footage and masking it so tht the explosion matches the reaction of the actor. We researched after effects and also had a very quick look on our school computers and reaslied that the whole process was going to take a lot of our time nd it was going to take a lot of failed attempts to actually master this effect. So before we actually went out to give the idea a go we thought we should do a trial run of the melon smash.

We then went out and bought a melon. We took it back to Harry's house and chopped the top of it so that we could pull out all of the inside of the melon as the Film Riot video says and filled it with some fake blood. Chopping the top of it off was easy and so was taking out all of the insides but when we wanted to take the melon out to go and film the top needed to be taped on because all of the fake blood inside was then running out of the edges so we needed to tape it up some how. The picture underneath shows us taking out the insides. Also for this part as I said you need to fill the melon with fake blood. Neither of us had any fake blood at home and we didnt really have time or we didnt want to have to go out and buy any so in the end we made some using cornflour, red food colouring and just some warm watter. I think that this came out really and we and looked really effecive with the melon smash.

So for the trial run we didnt see the need in going all the way up to the murder scene as we were not going to use this footage in our actual film. Instead we just went up onto a part of the moors which was very open to do it on. Below is the actual footage that we got after we had filmed it all and tried to use after effects on it. As you can see this isnt the best effect but I think from a first effort it was good progress towards when we do it for real.

Ancillary Tasks - Drafts

Before we actually started to make our ancillary tasks we were given a work sheet to draw the idea that we had which would then help us when we came to the real thing. On the work sheet we had a big box that we could use to draw in and around the outside of that it had the marking criteria. I think having this there helped because then we knew what goals we had to reach to get a higher grade which we wanted to do. Below are our ideas for the magazine and poster.

Above is the idea we had for the poster. Because we are doing 2 different tasks me and Harry decided to work seperately and do 1 each so I drew the idea for the poster. I chose to use an original photograph that we had taken when we were at one of our locations. I thought I would use this because then it gives the audience an idea of where the film is set. I put the title and slogan in big bold writing because i wanted to make sure that if this was a real media product then this would grab the audiences eye and would possibly make them want to find out more about it and then watch the film. Also when i make the acutaly poster i want to put lots of reveiws on there from people who have watched our product. I think this helps because then it would give the audience an idea of what other people think of the film so then it wouold help them decide if they want to go and watch it or not. Overall i think that i have stuck to the main conventions of a film poster as i have shown the main character right in the middle of it so it is making him the most important part and i also by using big bold lettering for the title and the slogan.

Above is the film magazine cover that Harry has created. Again Harry has chosen to use an original photograph that we took when we were filming because it then shows the audience where the film is set. He has put the title of the film over top of the image and he has also put a reveiw in the bottom corner with a star rating on it. I think this gives it a very proffesional look and would therefore attract more audience. Underneath the photo he has a big article about the film and within that there are lots more reveiws. Also in the corner there is some film info so it is basically a quick run down of what ghappens in the film and about the characters. Again i think this gives it a very proffesional look which is more appealing to everyone.