Critically Evaluating Video Production ( By Kasey Swift)

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

For our production we decided to create a short 5 minute film. We chose to do a drama which contained conventions of the drama genre as well as incorporating different things from influences which we had. The film follows the down fall of the main character Stacey Leigh, a teenage girl. The film follows her as she makes bad choices and mistakes which cause her life to spiral out of control. Our film shows conventions of a drama as we have realistic characters who have to deal with emotions and clash with themselves and other character and deal with dramatic themes like alcoholism and drug taking in our own film ‘Uncherished’.


I believe that we followed such conventions as good continuity and editing as our film shows a lot of passing of time so we wanted to represent this in a way that our audience could understand, we found it quite hard to fit a large amount of time into just 5 minutes this caused massive changes with the whole filming process. At first we placed a shot were Stacey Leigh speaks directly to camera like a sort of video diary, but when we played the film it did not flow properly. We thought that the easiest way was just to use fade out and fade in transitions between different scenes to show that time has passed.
I think that this worked quite well as well as a change in setting and costume as it distinguished the different scenes but also allowed the film to flow. For one of our main scenes in the film is the drug taking scene, we wanted this scene to show the change in Stacey Leigh due to taking drugs and we decided to do this by using jump cuts. it makes the scene look unusual for an audience as these cuts between different shots .
A jump cut is an editing technique where two shots of the same subject are taken but the frame changes slightly and emphases the editing. They are often used in horror films to make an audience feel uneasy as it disturbs the continuity of shots.

An example of an other film using Jump cuts is Trainspotting -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koP4O6QAzx4&feature=related . It has Jump cuts to represent the fast paced opening scene where people are being chased down the street.


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



We have produced two different products to advertise our film. The first is a poster. We wanted to focus on the main character as she is the one who’s life the audience are following and the film presents Stacey as a loner, so we wanted the same with the poster. We incorporate ideas from the film like the streamed window which is seen in the scene in the car.

We used a dark colour scheme with little colour in it as we wanted it to convey the atmosphere of the film through the poster so we thought that this would fit best to show the rollercoaster of emotions which Stacey Leigh experiences. In the film a shadow of the Main character is off centre to draw more attention to it and to give the effect that she is alone. Altogether I think the poster does attract people to it as it quite striking as well as looking quite depressing, it also makes it look quite mysterious. The second product was the radio trailer, we wanted this to fit well with both the actual film and the poster. Effects like echoes were used to create the effect of loneliness the voice over uses a cold tone, we used quotes directly from the film and music too. I think that both of our ancillary texts work well together to attract an audience, therefore selling our product. We looked at other successful films for influences for our own products. This helped us to see a different range of target audiences and how the products were actually targeted these audiences.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

For our film we carried out some research to get information about our target audience and what they wanted to see in a short film. One way we got information for our audience was through a questionnaire, we did this to gather information on what they did and didn’t like in films and what attracts them to a film to help us with our own film. We displayed our findings in graphs to make it was easier to use the information. I think we used our audience feedback well to create a short film that we knew would appeal to our target audience. We decided that we would get a bigger audience if the film was shown on TV rather than in a cinema. Things like music and what shots and angles we used were also influenced by our audience feed back.

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

We found that using a variety of technology was helpful during all stages of production, and allowed us to get things done a lot quicker and easier. In our research and planning stages we used the internet to research other film and used things like youtube to watch other films and help plan our own film.

We used a Sony HD 100 Camera to film our actual film production and stored all footage on tapes. The camera helped us produce good quality shots, but at times we found the camera way too bulky when experimenting with different shots. Some of our audio like voiceovers and backing sound had to be recorded on a H4 Zoom Recorder to create a better sound quality.

For our editing we used Mac’s and used editing software called iMovie. We used this software as we thought it was a lot simpler to use and we also had past experience using it, although it wasn’t the most professional software and wasn’t as good as other options therefore limiting what we could do with our footage. Other software which we used was GarageBand which we used to put our radio trailer together. We also used Photoshop Elements to create our film posters.