Evaluation - Question 3 - Luke

as a group we was asked to do a low budget thriller as a independent British film production company.
film distribution: securing the placement of the film on an exhibitors screen and for home viewing. this means getting the film to the audience.
The film distributor get film from the production company on to exhibition screens.
we know that films are made by film production company. the most common film production companies are one of the Hollywood studios or shooting on location. however for our own thriller film we had to create our own production company and we done this by creating a logo. these was placed in the title sequence as part of our opening to the thriller film.

Alalogue age and digital age.

Home viewing has changed dramatically in recent years as a result of the digital revelation. As a group we wanted to hit the digital age and not the Alalogue age. The reason for this is that in the digital age there is more smart phones and tablets. There are also new suppliers of film like Sky and Netflix and You Tube. Our target audience would also benefit from our film being on the consoles like the Ps4 and the new Xbox1. This is also another reason why digital age is better because the consumer has more choice to watch film or to play games.   This would work well as our audience would watch us on YouTube. However with a small budget and small investment in advertisement it would be very difficult to get on to the cinema and the TV.
what is also a disadvantage for the Alalogue age is that renting film has now died. The reason for this a that digital is so advance and we have the likes of the consoles and the consoles already have a loyalty fan base and this makes it very easy to promote a film or a game because they already have a target audience. The likes of sky demand as well and box office allows you to rent moves without leaving your home.

Film distribution companies
1) Lovefilm
2) Icon
3) Focus Features
4) Pathe
5) Momentum
These all distribute low budget British films and this is what we as a group have been looking at to see if we can do the same.

useful site for distribution and other information.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/filmmaking/guide/distribution/links-exhibition-and-distribution-shorts

When marketing the film we had to make sure that we don't spend massive amounts of money. Companies like Blockbuster will spend huge amounts of money. comparing as a small independent disubution company we would need poster, social networking and festival. However a large disubution company would use cineworld as there main and loads of printouts, independent art house vs Mainstream and finally Duke of Yorks in Brighton.

As a group we did not decide or bother dealing with a distribution company so we made our own one. However we also could of gone it alone.
If our group done this we would of used You Tube.



YouTube

Global audience
Anyone can watch
Free costing's
revenue= more advertisement = more sales/more views=more money.

Snow ball effect
when a snowball is going down the hill more popular the bigger the snowball your going to have.

Evaluation - Question 2 - Luke

Nikki Hastings (Played by Kayla)

Female

Age 32

Disability - Mental illness.

As Nikki has a mental illness, we decided that a shot distance/ close ups would be better. The reason for this is that we want to see what's making Nikki feeling depressed. We can find this is by looking at her facial expression and body language. As a group we are trying to get across that she has a disability without her knowing herself, this was unrestricted narration.

Also we have been using the editing pace to be fast. this creates mystery for the audience because if suddenly the camera pace goes slow then soon as it lands on Nikki it speeds up in every direction remembering the 180 degree line. we want the audience to try and understand Nikki and to be in her mind.

This was a group decision to make Nikki the main character because we felt that the actor who played Nikki (Kayla) would fit the part. Also as our audience are mostly male, we tried to create empathy with the audience. However we still wanted to indicate that she has something wrong with her.

(pictures from the thriller opening are not showing up)

Evaluation - Question 1 - Luke

Are opening is a thriller because in a thriller its really important not to give much information right at the start of the film. this then creates enigma for the audience.

for ideas I researched the film "Cabin in the Woods" for ideas about camera, setting, mise en scene and sound.
 this is is the image we as a group want to create. by looking at this we don't see any clues however the audience is straight away instred and this creates the power of enigma.

this is a hyperlink and this will show you the titles and the company who has sponsored the film as well. we wanted to do something in our thriller like this.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyiYJhAsOeYown

the difference between the cabin in the woods and our own thriller is that the audience is restricted by the narration. however towards the end of both thrillers the audience would finally find out. we have done the same with editing for the cabin in the woods. we have used editing as a emotion for the film because there isn't much dialogue. this is why the pace of the editing is fast.
Cabin in the woods setting was in a forest. we have chosen our setting to be in a park area. the reason for this is that the park doesn't age and this is why I think they have done the same thing for cabin in the woods. the forest doesn't age.
what we have used are close ups and medium shots to also describe what our character is feeling without using to much dialogue. by doing this we can get a good picture of Kayla's facial expression and body language. with our character having a mental illness we needed to get that across without giving to much away to the audience.
finally the most important one is sound we have used non diegetic sound. however its quite but frightening. the soundtrack adds mystery to the thriller opening. in the cabin in the woods has the same.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyiYJhAsOeYown

Overall I think I have demonstrated that I have understood the convention of a thriller. I have illustrated my answer using pictures and hyperlinks to explain my answer. I have used the technical codes to help me answer this as well.

Evaluation - Question 7 - Claire

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

Here you need to explain how you think you have progressed from the preliminary task to the main task. You should discuss your development of technical skills – the use of camera, sound editing, vision editing, your use of continuity editing and your construction of character and story. Again, use screen grabs and make cross refs to earlier blog entries).

From looking back at my preliminary task, I have realised how much more work we had to do just to create an extra minute of filming. The importance of titling, non-diegetic and diegetic sound for the continuity.  The editing process to keep the continuity was defiantly more difficult, due to issues with our story line we had to make a lot of it up as we went along which was really unprofessional, but because of this we didn’t have planned sections which meant each time we filmed Kayla was in a different position which made putting clips together very difficult.

Although we had many issues, we did come very far in all aspects of the editing and filming process.

Camera work – I tried to keep the camera constantly straight and not on an angle unless it was supposed to be to keep the professionalism.  I was framing more, so we didn’t have to crop or have loads of background scenery that we didn’t want. We played around with the depth of field this time to give our footage a bit more contrast and importance for clips. We used a variety of different shot sizes again, but this time we didn’t put them all face front on the actor. 

We also took the advice of our teacher Andrew Man to make our Shot reverse shot sequence longer than in our prelim so we did.

we learned how important lighting is and how to do it well. As you can see from our prelim task we didn't use a lot of lighting and because of this it was hard to see all of Kayla's facial expressions, where as in our final piece we lite up the room and our actors more.

We also kept the 180 degree rule.  I think our continuity in our preliminary because we had less movement on equipment. For example in our prelim Kayla stayed in one place and her movements where the same each time and the clip of me walking was the same clip used and cut again and again. However we experimented more with kayla’s movements in our Thriller opening so it was harder to get the same movements. Especially while on the swing and seasaw, it was difficult to get the same angles and exactly timing of when she went up, or moved forward on the swing in the same way with the same body language. This is one of our biggest problems and we realised how hard it is to film with one camera.

For the sound, I realised how important ambient sound actually is, we didn’t have any ambient sound in our prelim because of the non-diegetic soundtrack, the ambient sound we recorded on our sound recorder was muffled, you could hear footsteps, breathing and giggling from people. This affected the process because I had to find sound from the original footage that I could use that didn’t have talking over it or that was muffled. This is a very important part of the opening because of the setting and scenery. Also the timing for when Kayla and Alisa spoke was difficult to match up as it was recorded separately to the filming.

The editing process time was in some ways taken for granted, although we used all lesson time, except for the deadline week no one went back to carry on editing and for the footage editing to be done quicker which meant a lot of work was rushed in the end process. I think the time management needed improving so that we could all be more pleased with the final outcome than we were.  

We had many issues with our story line and characters and you will see in various blog posts. We over thought our story line and what we would realistically be able to do with our time and £0 budget. We had trouble getting actors and a place to film. This put us behind and intern meant we didn’t get to do a full character build, we made the personality of the character and what they are like but due to not having enough time because of those problems the character wasn’t as good as it could have been. This is something for us to improve on in the future.

Evaluation - Question 6 - Claire

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

Here you need to consider all of the technology you used for this main task. You could include images of you using some of the equipment. What have you learnt about the camera (methods, procedures etc), and what have you learnt about using the editing software (image, sound & titling).  Be honest and discuss difficulties that you had and how you overcame these.  Again illustrate with imagery.  Don’t forget to evaluate.

I have learn that a lot of the technology isn’t always very reliable. We had a lot of problems with software from camera and recorders to Final cut pro on the macs.

We used Kayla’s camera for a lot of the filming, it’s an amazing camera with fantastic quality for the imagery. However the software on the macs didn’t accept the quality of the camera and we had to convert a lot of the videos over so we could use it because our system constantly crashed and it made keep the continuity hard when both software’s we’re compatible together. It slowed down the process of editing as well because we had to replace filming with the converted videos. You are highly recommend to use the same Mac every time you edit because moving the sequence over networks can jeopardize the quality, and we had a lot of problems with this as our mac was always being used when we went to edit, we had to move 3 times which meant we had to render our work a lot and move it about to get it to flow again.

we also learned Final Cut  Pro on the Macs can be very tedious and frustrating while we were trying to put together our match on action, although you can zoom in on the sequence to see exactly what you have, you can't zoom in on the original clip so cutting it down is very difficult to make the continuity to a high standard.

We remembered this time to do the white balance every time we filmed, we did have to re film a few parts due to the white balance being off, but it paid off in the end. While using the cameras and filming we realised the importance of ‘speed, camera, action’, it helps your actors get ready but most importantly it helps you decide if you like the shot size, angle and position. I found out the positioning of the camera is important, meaning it’s spacing and sizing of shots, zooming is never a good idea because it can distort the footage so getting CU, BCU and ECU can be very difficult to keep straight and steady. We didn’t use a lot of those shot we got because we didn’t feel like they were to a good standard.

In our work shop with Sophie where she taught us about titling I learnt a lot about how to add text into moving imagine, how to take away any unwanted backgrounds from images. This taught me the importance of where tilting is placed and how effect it can be to an audience when done right. However we didn’t spend a lot of time on the titling which is something I regret because I believe it could have been better.

I have become more comfortable and confident using the Macs and the software now I know what I am doing, this helped me to speed through a lot of the editing and sound production. Although we did have a big problem with our  Mac crashing while in the middle of editing, we lost some work which we had to redo which is how we learned that we should always back up our projects after every save and have more than one version saved. This helps to illuminate any problems like this happening again.

Evaluation - Question 5 - Claire

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Here you need to explain why your audience would enjoy your film. Select detail from your film to support your answer, including material on, for example, the story told through the narrative, the use of camera, the use of mise en scene, the use of character, the reference to certain themes or issues, and the use of sound.

Why do you think the characters help to target this audience Perhaps your representation fits in with standard stereotypes? If so, you will need to discuss why this is, and explain why you did this.

We know our target audience would enjoy our movie because everything we put in was opinion based from them. From the story line, to which many said they loved and gave us tips on how it could be more interesting, what they wanted to happen at the end and what the overall climax of the piece is. This helped us to create more enigma in the piece by not revealing any of the main plot in the opening and keeping the viewer’s intrigued and wanting to watch on. We asked opinions to which transitions portrayed the flash back effect more effectively and clearly, the plain dissolve, or the dissolve dip to colour/fade, to which dissolve dip to colour/fade was chosen. We spoke to them about sound and how they felt about the opening non-diegetic sound track, how long it should be, if it should be louder or quitter, fade out or stay in for the whole sequence, should we have a diegetic dialogue sequence, a non-diegetic voice over of someone thought tracking (on or off screen sound). We asked them about framing and positioning of our footage, if there was too much back ground, not enough, too many of the same shots or too much going on, and pulled the focus away from the main objective. We asked them about hair, costume and makeup, if it was suitable and practical for our character. We spoke about the setting and décor, if the room looked like an office type room, and if the park footage was good for the opening sequence, we asked the effect this gave off and if they would want to carry on watching from this. We explained to our demographic the problems we had with actors therefore meaning we couldn’t get our actor to fully grasp the character in time for the filming process so our characters were very underdeveloped with facial expressions and their general body language, or any lazzi’s. They were made full aware of this so they understood and gave creative criticism back for the future. We had minimal props, but the most important was the child’s bag, we asked the target audience the effect this gave and what it made them think of and the levels of enigma it created. We asked them about our lighting and whether it was bright enough, too bright and made the quality pixelated in either sections of filming. They also told us the camera quality made the colours of the surrounding very clear and realistic which helped engage them with the story more and make them forget they were watching a movie. We attracted our audience and addressed them by completely involving them 100% in everything we done, we ran questionnaires and held verbal conversations about our story, our process and all of our ideas, we then put everything we had been told and our idea’s together so our demographic was happy and were in the process so they could be happy knowing we are creating just what they want.

All of the talks and questionnaires will be on the blog.

Our character has a mental illness but you are not told this or understand what it is until later into the film, the character draws sympathy from the audience as they’ll see she’s just looking for her lost child, some people could empathise with her. We chose to have her with a mental illness because the more creative enigma based thrillers are physiological which usually has an effect on the audience, there are lots of ways it just depends on how your mind works which is why our character is so powerful.