Contract

Media Contract Sheet

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With making the contract we wanted to bring to everyones attention all of the rules and regulations of our team. Also wanted for all of the group members to apply and sign the contract, this would signal their commitment to the group. I believe this would help us work better as a team, and make our bonds stronger together. It would also give us a platform in getting rid of a member of the team who does not follow the rules.

Audition Sheet

Media Audition Sheet

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Above is a copy of our Audtion Sheet, each member of our group created a version. Here is mine.
I wanted to make my sheet stand out, and catch everyones eyes as they walk past. This is why i made the writing red and bold, it was very bright when hanging on the walls and doors.
I believe this gave us higher number of people turn up to the auditions, because they noticed our sheet.
Likewise we added a bit of comical aspect into the poster, with the 'We need you' picture. Everyone who came to our audition noticed this and pointed it out to us, they said it was a very good touch.

Evaluation Question 4

Q4:

How did you use new technologies in the research, construction and planning stages?

We had access to new technologies throughout every stage of the production process. With the Cannon cameras, and the Adobe Premier Pro. We were lucky to have these technologies available to us, this allowed to conduct research to help construct our film together. Then ultimately market it in a presentable manner. The internet was the biggest technology we came across, this allows you to instantly search anywhere in the world, for ANYTHING! This was vital in our pre research about the different comedy genres, we used the internet for everything in our pre production, as well as different editing transitions and phases we could use in the post production. We used ‘Youtube’ in our research for short films, and editing, searching at Charlie Chaplin and his style.
Instead of having to read through books or magazines, I used ‘Google’ for researching famous short film makers, or short films, I found the information I was looking for straight away, and even other pieces of information which was also relevant. Search engines like Google have meant we can research saving time and money. We also got some of our soundtracks from the internet from ‘London Grid’, this gave me thousands of free songs to choose from. This saved me a lot of time, and hassle.
Our blogs were another example of technology we used during our production process. We have been using the blogs since the beginning of year 12. We were given different dealines throughout the production process. Our blogs were how we kept up with these, understanding and doing our work on here. Our blogs are there to show our development over time, in each of our different phases. It helped us stay organised with the work, keeping them in all the same place.
Again, like with year 12, we used to same filming equipment. It took a while to get use to all of these different sections again, however once it came to filming day we were very confident in controlling and creating our filming.
Our equipment was light and very easy to set up and move around our sets, having such good equipment to work with made our film even easier to work, it allowed us to move the camera around freely due to its lightweight frame, and also finding new angles were very easy because of this.
The software we used for editing was very professional, we used Adobe Premier Pro this helped our film come along leaps and bounds during the post production. Using this software allowed use to incorporate several transitions and fades into our film. Like in our opening sequence we spited our screen, this was to show she similarities and differences between our two characters. We also speeded up our sequence during the Scooby Doo scene, this was to make the characters look like their were going faster. We used the Lacie Drive while editing. The Lacie Drive is a portable hard drive which allowed you to store our film onto it. With this being potatble we were not restricted to one computer, so if someone was editing on the same computer this would cause problems, however due to this new technology this was never the case. Overall, the new technology we used, was the difference in the quality of our films compared to previous projects.

Evaluation Question 3

Q3:

What have you learnt for your audience feedback?

No matter what film you are making, weather it’s an independent film to a blockbuster audience feedback is a massive part of the filmmaking. The feed back we gain is used on the film to improve where it was needed, in order to create the better film, and consequently earn a better grade. We used our audience feedback in the Pre and Post production process of our films, this helped us gain a wider knowledge from the public, and fellow media students.
The first piece of feedback we received was from out pitch. We presented our pitch to our fellow classmates, the aims of our pitch was to get our story idea across, and what we wanted to do throughout the production process. In our pitch we wanted to be creative, to show our intent through our film, we also wanted to engage our audience. Because pitching to people who are disinterested and bored with the pitch and the idea would be a waste of our time, and theirs. Thinking of clever creative ways to include our classmates into our pitch was to have them take part in a ‘fake’ lottery game, we would give them each a lottery ticket with numbers already filled out with them, and playing a video on our pitch, the winner of the lottery won some sweets. This was a quick and fun way to start our pitch, engaging our audience quickly having their attention, and also involving them in the KEY theme of our film. So the lottery game was not irrelevant and off topic of the pitch. Likewise Josh from our group also studies Drama Studies, and was telling us about his lesson the week before, where their teacher got them to do role plays of certain characters from famous films and TV shows. This gave our group the idea of having our characters do role plays of our characters. This again made our audience laugh and relax while watching our pitch.
After our pitch was finished we had a question and answer section, this is where our fellow media students could point out the points they felt we missed, or what they never understood. We most common question we got asked was ‘What was the meaning behind our idea?’ or ‘What the main idea was?’. This showed us that next time we pitched we needed to make sure our idea and narrative was clearly broadcasted through our pitch so our audience understood. The positive feedback was how they all enjoyed getting involved and playing the lottery game, most of all the winner, and how they liked the role plays it made them feel as though they were witnessing the film idea 3D and in real life, this gave them an idea of what we wanted our characters to come across, this was a good thing to add to the pitch instead of reading and boring our audience with the character profiles.
As well as the role plays our audience suggested having a hot seat section with them being able to ask them questions, because their was many of things they wanted to know, but couldn’t ask. This was vital feedback from the audience, because after hearing this view we instantly felt it was a good idea that could work, and only improve our production. We included this into our 2nd pitch to the audience, they asked them questions about their lives, like asking where they worked, weather they went to school, background information which could give them an insight into the film. The hot seating was very comical, linking in with our genre, the characters were being rude, and lippy to the audience, making them laugh and join in joking around with them, this was making everyone in the room laugh, which is always our main aim in creating a comedy. It also allowed the audience to ‘guess’ what our genre was, this is important because it showed we met our aims and objectives of the pitch of them knowing the story, characters and the genre. These are the three main points of pitching to the audience for feedback.
We also used our fellow students for the feedback during the editing process. Throughout the editing process we showed them our film at different parts, this benefited us because they brought to our attention shots that never worked, and also shots that worked well. This was useful because we had not distributed the film and was still in the process of editing. Showing them our cowboy and chase (Scooby Doo) scenes, we wanted this music to be a variety, having 3 or 4 musical soundtracks changing throughout the film, brought our many themes in the film. Adding to the comical aspect of the film, with the changing of the songs, each adding their own background reason and comical to the film.

Evaluation Question 2

Q2:

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

We followed the normal procedure for any film production process going into the blockbuster market. By following this we created several different posters and a film review. The posters would be the first media text the public would see promoting our film; they would be on local billboards, and on the side of buses. This would allow the public to notice a film, the majority of the audience would see a bus every day, and the likelihood of that bus having the film poster on would be very high. Likewise if the public target audience did not see the actual film poster, someone they know would have seen it, and therefore spoken about it to them, this is the second way the public would hear about the film, ‘word of mouth’.

The aims of the posters are to create awareness for our short film. The film review would then follow, giving the audience the inside review on the film, persuading them with ratings and brief explanations on the film. We had to create three posters; we wanted the posters to show out film in a very unique way, we did this by adding the genre into our film posters. So that the target audience can instantly know what our genre is. In order to create our film posters, we had to analyse several real life film posters from the same genre. I came across ‘Due Date’. The film shared our genre, and its am was to make the target audience laugh, which indeed it did for me. They genre of the film is comedy; like ours, the designers of the posters have tried to get the comedy aspect into the posters. The comedy aspects have defiantly came across in their poster when the main character portrayed by ‘Zach Galifianakis’ is lifting half of his shirt up, into the other main characters face played by ‘Robert Downey Jr’. The poster has managed to make the audience laugh before the film is even released, this makes the target audience eagerly await the arrival of the film. When creating my film posters I felt it was important to keep the normal codes and conventions of a comedy genre, because we changed many of the codes and conventions throughout the film, and I felt to many changes would disrupt the film together, like the famous saying ‘if its not broke, don’t fix it’. Likewise I wanted to use images from the film so the shots used on the film posters would look real and not fake like many film posters in the industry at this time. It would also give the audience an insight into some of the scenes that will be in our film. We felt the link between the film and the posters was vital. There has to be the links there so that the audience can relate to the poster, and inevitably relate to the film. We had to create 3 posters, as a team we decided on creating one with both of the characters in, with the main theme being about the lottery ticket, then with the other two basing them on the characters individually, showing how the film is about them, and how we based the film around their personalities. The posters would contain the humours shots we used during the film, making our target audience in the public to see the main scenes and shots in our film. After the film posters we would need to create the film review, for independent films makers like ourselves its hard to get review by a top critique. A film review could be the final persuasion for the target audience to come and watch our film. Because of this we were creating the review ourselves, therefore it would be a positive review, not wanting to lose customers before the film being aired. We creativity made the review, making it aesthetically pleasing for our audience, stringing them to come see the film. We did this film review for empire magazine, meaning we could market our film to a wider audience than was expected, which would cause our film to gain more views than expected.
Both of these two marketing techniques helped promote our media film to a wider audience than expected, because of this it was a success, receiving over 80 views on ‘Youtube’ the highest in the class.

Evaluation Question 1

Q1
In what ways does your media product USE, DEVELOP or CHALLENGE forms and conventions of real media products?
Our chosen genre was comedy, challenging and developing the codes and conventions for our genre vital for us to succeed in the making of our media product. We knew this would be hard, as the genre of comedy was very tricky to go for, however with the planning and research we did we were confident in succeeding. In choosing comedy as our genre, we had to choose which style of comedy to choose – weather this was aiming at younger children or adults with the two audiences having different perceptions on their range of comedy. For example, children would find funny pranks and silly characters funny; however adults being more mature tend to find actual jokes their humour.
Eventually after some intense research we decided on the age ranges of 12-21 year olds. We chose these as our target audience because we found creating our own unique mature jokes for a short film. With our target audience decided we carried out research into similar genres in order to gain an understanding into the comedy aspects used.
At first our film idea stemmed from a four character storyline, however given our restraints of the film being silent and the maximum characters allowed being two we had to change this] idea. Instead of scrapping the idea altogether we came up with our main characters being a comedy duo, with the whole film being around them and their relationship.
Most of our inspiration came from ourselves and the films we had seen before, we did not want to copy something that had been done before, and we wanted to be original. The main thing we all notice was that most if not all of the comic duos around were all males. For example, ‘Del-boy and Rodney from Only Fools and Horses’, ‘The Chuckle Brothers’ and ‘Cannon and Ball’. This would be the first idea we would explore to Challenge the codes and conventions of the comedy duo. Changing the main characters to women was a challenging experience however a very exciting opportunity. This was a gamble as comedy is normally associated with ‘male’ comics. We felt that because we would be making our short film with female actresses we would attract more people to watch our film, for the uniqueness. We watched ‘The Hangover’ and again us all as a group noticed that the film contained a ‘leader’ and ‘follower’, where one of the characters would be the main character with a second person closely following.

Again with our film being silent, we had to create our own style of comedy without using dialogue. The ideal person to focus this on was ‘Charlie Chaplin’ himself. Charlie Chaplin is known worldwide for his silent comedy, and he did this using soundtracks and editing. The soundtrack would almost always contain the piano playing, using this against the quick fast paced editing complemented the musical soundtrack brilliantly. After looking through many ‘Charlie Chaplin’ films, we decided that our film would work well if the soundtracks we picked complimented it well.
At the start we picked at 4 different soundtracks which we believed could go with our film, after careful consideration we cut this list down to one, being a drumming beat. This worked with our film better, the quickness of the music would help fasten the film up. With us keeping the same range and style of music we used the current codes and conventions of a comedy films around. We never wanted to shake up and change to many aspects of our film, this would take all of the codes and conventions away, and would make our film tacky and it wouldn’t work.




Again we looked at ‘Charlie Chaplin’ for his fast paced editing, aiming to do this to add another form of comedy into our film. Likewise how he makes the audience laugh without the use of diologe, this would be vital and important for us because we knew we had to make a silent short film. However we focused mainly on Scooby Doo. Where they fastened up the movie when the characters where running down corridors and through rooms.
We developed this code and convention in our seen of our characters running through the different doors. We sped this scene up to show the characters running for longer, and also to show how much our characters are willing to go through to be the holder of the ticket, we used the fastening up of our film to add another aspect of comedy to our film, and it worked.

Overall, I feel we used many of the codes and conventions of a current comedy blockbuster, for it to be classed as a comedy. However with the changing of some of the conventions we made our film something new and current. We kept the audience laughing, even by breaking some of the codes and conventions, and of course the MAIN aim of a ‘comedy’ film is to make the audience laugh. We succeeded in this when showing it to our family members and friends. They might not have expected our film at first, however comes the end of the film I’m sure the film was well received and most importantly gave our audience a laugh and a chuckle.

Editing Log

Above is our Editing Log from our post production process of our film. This allowed us to see who came and edited, at what time, and what they did to our film. This helped kept us organised within the editing phase. Allowing us to edit freely in our free periods, without having to waste time finding out what the other team members edited.