Welcome To My Blog

This is Alex Jowett's blog for his A2 Media Production:

I (Alex Jowett) Have decided to create this blog to keep all my research, planning and footage in one place that can be easily viewed. It is a much more productive and advanced way of showing what I have done, and is a much better idea than just handing in hundreds of word documents to the examiner. On this blog I will be posting all of my research and planning as well as keeping you up to date wile my production is in progress. I will cover these areas:

• Short Film Research
• Codes and Conventions of Short Film
• Genre Research
• Target Audience Research
• Initial Ideas and Audience Feedback
• Final Narrative
• Software and Hardware
• British Cinema Research
• Teaser Poster
• Locations/Casting/Props/Set Design 
• Soundtrack
• Initial Research
• Test Footage/Editing Notes
• Storyboard/Screenplay
• Ancillary Texts
• Evaluation of Product
• Final Cut! 

Meet the Production Team:
I decided that working on this film alone might not create as good results as if I worked with someone to share our knowledge of media together. I am going to be working with Conor Pott's for this production, we will be carrying out our own research and each making our own proposals which will be pull together to make a final narrative.

Alex Jowett (me) is better at the IT style of the production. I will be doing the majority of editing and camera work, as I take IT at A Level, I am a little more advanced than Conor at this part. My creative mind should come into use in our production, but where I lack in cinematographer, Conor is excellent at it.

Conor Pott's makes a great director and cinematographer. He knows the kind of shots that work well with the narrative and has an extremely creative mind which fires out some great ideas. This will be extremely helpful during filming and drawing up a narrative. 
 

Creative Arts Evening- Audience Feedback

Gathering Audience Feedback

I was lucky enough to get my film finished in time to show it at the Creative Arts evening at school which was a perfect opportunity for me to get audience feedback from a range of audiences, mostly from my target audience. Even though the evening was not a perfect opportunity for viewing due to sound issues making the levels of sound available to the audience not perfect, I still picked up some great feedback.

Changes I Made!

The changes that I was able to make to the film after the feedback was that I adjusted sound levels to work better, this was the first time I had played my film in full quality, and I did identify the problem with the sound levels being too varied.

Its Time To Evaluate!

Below I have added the points raised about my film that would need to be improved, if I had the time to do so, unfortunately me and Conor do not have time now so we will need to add these points to our evaluation and consider a re-submition depending on my mark, if it is lower than I require I will re-submit and make these changes.

Here are the points which were raised:

• Sound levels are vary varied and hard to follow.
• The running scenes have obviously been sped up and looks unnatural.
• The voice over is more funny, than scary!
• There is no clear anchorage the central protagonist is innocent.
• The shot of central protagonist turning on the radio is unnatural.

Me and Conor will mention these points in our evaluation and start thinking about how we can re-shoot these if we do decide to re-submit!

Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Looking into the codes and conventions of a short-film was the first task which I completed in my project, because the significance of knowing the codes and conventions so that I could ever follow them or challenge them constructively would determine a good film idea from a bad. The codes and conventions of a short film vary depending on the genre I found, so it was important that I fully understood the codes and conventions of a horror short film.

To gather the codes and conventions of short-films, I used YouTube as my main source, where I was able to find a very useful channel 'Future Shorts' which contains various amounts of short films from all genres. The company Future Shorts is a well known distributor of short films, they are not in the production industry bust instead see their main aim to advance the short-film industry, more information on Future Shorts can be found on my earlier post.

Obviously there were some short films which I watched after collecting my version of the codes and conventions, but here is my initial collection of codes and conventions of a short film, below is one short film which I watched to help me with the codes and conventions write up:

• There are usually only about one or two characters in a short film.
• Mainly the narrative is centered around a central protagonist.
• The central protagonist will always remain center screen when possible.
• Short films always have a twist to them, by having a immediate narrative change at the end to shock the audience.
• A lot of short films simply show real life with one change that is then betrayed as normal.
• There are lots of camera angles used, a popular camera angle choice is point of view.
•  The point of view angle shows the world from the central protagonists view.
•  Voice overs are a popular method of sound in short films.
• There is not much dialogue in short films. 
• Short Films usually las bout 1-5 minutes.
• Usually short films use the cheap option of black background and white font for titles.
• Short Films tend to have a very low budget.

I collected these short films codes and conventions from various short films I watched, and managed to pick up on codes and conventions by looking at regular techniques used over various short films. I will explain these films and how they influenced us at the bottom of this question.

Here is how I used the Codes and Conventions in my film:

• There are usually only about one or two characters in a short film- In my short film, I only had 4 characters in the entire film, 2 of which where dead bodies so only extras in the film. By applying to this convention of a short film, I enabled my short film to be much more understandable as there were only 2 characters that the audience needed to follow.
• Mainly the narrative is centered around a central protagonist- My short film is based around one of the main characters and even has the name of the central protagonist in the title. I tried to keep the central protagonist center screen at all times to connote to the audience the importance of this character in each shot.
• The central protagonist will always remain center screen when possible- Our central protagonist remains center screen when possible at all times. This helps signify to the audience the significance of this character to the narrative.
• Short films always have a twist to them, by having a immediate narrative change at the end to shock the audience- In my short film the whole storyline is based around the twist. To start off with a connote the central protagonists innocence by showing him finding dead bodies, and looking relatively scared. This makes the audience feel scared for the character, and as soon as he enters his house, a house being a place which is denoted as being a safe place, and the audience calm down, the narrative changes at a sudden impact as the girl is shown tied up. From here the character immediately changes, he changes his clothes and his attitude to connote the narrative change, hence the twist!
• A lot of short films simply show real life with one change that is then betrayed as normal- This is one code and convention which I decided to challenge, I did not believe for my narrative that the world should be seen as any different, by using the news reports signifying the significance and impact on the country the deaths have made, this shows real life situations, which I believe work better in my short film than making the world seem any different to how the audience would expect it to be.
• There are lots of camera angles used, a popular camera angle choice is point of view- I used the point of view angle in some shots , but it was mainly show the movement of the central protagonist by showing his feet. I did not use it to the extent that I had seen it used in some short films. However I did use one inter-textual reference to Halloween by having a point of view shot as the central protagonist walked up to the house.
• Voice overs are a popular method of sound in short films- I used voice overs in the form of radio news reporters in my film. The voice overs were put in place as a digetic sound which was from the future, the voice overs are used to mis-interpret the audiences view on this man, and to anchor the preferred reading that he is innocent, and the one in danger.
• There is not much dialogue in short films-  In my film there is only one line of dialogue, I decided to follow this code and convention because any dialogue may have given away too much about the central protagonist and ruined the twist, and created an oppositional reading.
• Short Films usually las bout 1-5 minutes- My short film lasts just a bit over this, this is not me trying to challenge the codes and conventions, it just simply worked out that my short film needed a bit more timing to build up to the twist, although from audience feedback, it may be the I shorten the film if I decide to re-submit my coursework.
• Usually short films use the cheap option of black background and white font for titles- I used Live Type a software provided by Final Cut Express to try advanced my titles, but they are still clearly very low budget. I did not however want to follow the conventional black background and white font, this would not be very creative.
• Short Films tend to have a very low budget- I had a very small budget for my film, all equipment was borrowed from school and I spent no money on buying copyrighted material, I simply jut did not use it. The only items I spent money on was the males costume that he puts on at the end of the film, this cost about £10 from a local hardware store. 

A Short Film That Inspired Me: 
An inspiring short film that me and Conor found was 'The Unwanted'. I liked the idea of quick flashes showing the victims of the killer before he had killed someone, we decided to use this idea by flashing up our victim as the central protagonist runs through the woods.

Notice also in this video shown above that it shows bloopers and the making of in the end, which shows that it was a low budget independent production. This inspired me as it showed that you do not need lots of money and experience to create a good short film.

Films That Inspired Me: 
As me and Conor developed our ideas, we found a lot of different codes and conventions from the horror genre which where added into our film. The horror films which inspired our film, most of them have been used as an inter-textual reference in our film, this is explained in full in my previous post on 'Genre Links and Inter-textual References' Below however are the two main inter-textual references in our film that were not found in short film:

Me and Conor were inspired by the film 'The Crow' which shows a crow as a symbol of death. A crow is black and hangs around graveyards, so me and Conor think to have the crow symolising death would be a  fantastic inter-textual reference.

Another inter-textual reference me and Conor used was to the film 'Psycho' one of the most influential slasher films ever made. The inter-textual was to the character Norman, who just like our central protagonist is secretly a killer in the film. He is seen as innocent throughout the film until the twist at the end shows him as the actual killer. We referenced Norman in our film title and based our central protagonist around him.

The Teaser Poster
For my film I created a teaser poster, featured below, this teaser poster is there to advertise my film wile it is in production and about to come out into cinemas.

However most British Films do not come out on DVD, and will go straight into DVD production.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? 
In order to complete a set of media products that link to our production, me and Conor thought it was best suited that we create a film poster and a review page on the production. These two ancillary tasks were done in sync with our production to help link them together better. The three products all link into each other, and me and Conor tried to keep our narrative enigma in all off the texts. Obviously in the real world of media the magazine review and the production would not be directly linked as they would not be produced by the same company, unless they were in the same conglomerate, for example Twentieth Century Fox.

We created the film poster with the central protagonist in the center of the poster, this is to connote the significance of this character upon the film, he is the center of our production. Our film poster's main job is to promote our film and attract our target audience to watch the production, this in itself links it to our film. It means that we have the same target audience for the film poster as we do the production, and the two have a very similar style so that the film poster connotes the genre of the film. The scary image of a male standing over a dead body helps appeal to our target audience and makes them want to watch our film. In the film poster we have created an inter-textual reference to Friday 13th, another horror movie which inspired our production as well. This is relevant to our production because it shows the character as being very mysterious with a mask on!

Our magazine does not so much appeal to our target audience, although we would expect our target audience to read the article and be drawn into watching the film, as the magazine gives the film a good review, we think that the magazine also appeals to separate audiences to watch our film. If we published our film in cinema, this would mean we would see a higher revenue as there would be a much larger audience appeal.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback? 
Audience feedback was crucial to me in creating my final cut, as it is in any film production. We gathered audience feedback at all levels of our production process starting from the initial ideas, right up to what I believe was our Final Cut, which was changed because of a viewing at a creative arts evening in school. Here is a stage-by stage analysis of how our audience feedback influenced our film.

Target Audience
My target audience is for a youth male audience, who are fans of horror movies. A more specific idea of my target audience can be found on this post 

Initial Ideas
My initial idea can be seen on this post. Me and Conor thought it would be best at this stage to create separate ideas, and see which gathered a better audience feedback, which we would then develop further. It turns out that Conor's idea gathered a better audience feedback, but some of the ideas put forward in my production could be incorporated into Conor's.

We both created a Anamatic for our ideas, mine is shown above, we showed this to the class and they gave us feedback on the idea. At this point I did not have a developed target audience so any feedback was relevant. Here are the comments they made about my initial idea:

• Base my film around one central protagonist 
• Create a twist that can be explained towards the end of the film
• Enter into the horror genre, create some scary scenarios in your idea
• Do not use school kids, have the central protagonist a little older.

From this audience feedback, and the audience feedback gathered by Conor, we went on to create our 2nd idea, and gathered more audience feedback from this. After many hours really working on our idea using this audience feedback, me and Conor came up with our final idea, which we had also by the time we came to collecting audience feedback on it, had a target audience.

Final Idea
Because we know had a target audience, me and Conor showed our final idea only to people who lied in this target audience so that we could really fine tune any specific problems with it, and ask them more personally about what changes could be made to our film. Here is the feedback they gave us:

• Narrative- In our narrative, we had planned to have a male lying dead on the floor and the central protagonist was going to try help him up but wile doing so, pull off his arm. It was suggested that this was not relative to the narrative, suggestions explained that we take this footage out of our final production.
• Our target audience thought that the central protagonist should spend more time exploring through the campsite, this would establish his innocence. They also thought there should be a dead body in one of the tents to signify to the audience better that this was a sight of a murder, the thought we should have a hand lying out of the tent, but the central protagonist will not notice this dead body.
• Our target audience also thought that we should use the sound of the crow to attract the central protagonists attention to the house as he is at the campsite, this should be when he looks up at the house and notices the smoke rising from the house and head up towards the house.

Me and Conor followed there ideas exactly, because even though we did not agree with some of them, it was our target audience we wanted to appeal to so it was crucial that we gave them what they would expect so that they could understand the film better and not take a prefered reading. We now had to make a rough cut that we could get some more audience feedback from.

Rough Cut
It was at the stage of making our rough cut that me and conor picked up our most effective audience feedback, by showing our film to various people, including our of our target audience we were able to find faults in our film, and additions that could be made. Here is what me and Conor learnt:

• The audience could not understand why the central protagonist wanted to go to the house- We added a clip of a crow, and an audio sound effect of a crow to show to the audience why the central protagonist made a sudden movement towards the house, his eye movement now signified he was following the crow.
• Why does the character run away from the house?- It was clear our target audience did not understand that he saw something, so we had to add a noise of dog barking and a farmer asking the dogs 'Where is he boy'. This enabled the target audience to understand why he ran away. They then took the preferred reading the central protagonist was being chased.
• The preferred reading (he is innocent)is not anchored enough- Still to this point we have not been able to sort out this problem, although now we know what the solution is. When the central protagonist is running, he does not look scared enough and is not clearly signifying he is scared. This means that the audience takes an oppositional reading that he is not innocent. However we were able to anchor this a bit better with the addition of radio voice overs explaining to the audience how there had been a mass murder who had been killing people on the moor, with this voice over being from the future, and the audience thinking it was current, it would make it seem that he is not the killer, hence taking our preferred reading, the central protagonist is innocent.
• The scenes of the male running have clearly been sped up- Unfortunately me and Conor could not find the time to re-shoot these, but we will if we re-submit in June.
• The voice over created a sense of humor rather than scaring the audience- Unfortunately me and Conor could not find the time to re-record this, but we will if we re-submit in June.
• The dead character in the tent looks more funny than scary- Unfortunately me and Conor could not find the time to re-shoot this, but we will if we re-submit in June.

As you can see from this we have collected a lot of audience feedback, and although me and Conor were not able to fix all of the problems, we are now going to re-submit our coursework in June, so that we have tome to alter these problems and improve our movie to the best of it's ability. We are going to re-shoot the scenes of the central protagonist running through the moor, and making him look more scared, helping to anchor the preferred reading. We are also going to re-edit the ending scenes so that they are less timing and more dramatic.

Creative Arts Evening
I picked up some final audience feedback on my film at the creative arts evening in school. I had just completed the final cut, and showed it to a few people using a laptop. Here is what they said, although my post has a better explanation 'Creative Arts Evening':

• Sound levels are vary varied and hard to follow.
• The shot of central protagonist turning on the radio is unnatural. 

Unfortunately just as some of the audience feedback from my rough cut, I did not have time to make any changes to the comments made here, but because I had already decided I was going to re-submit in June, I thought that I would make these changes for then.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
I used a lot of new media products during my production and my planning and research stages. I found the use of new media products to be very successful and useful, by using new media products my production was much more efficient and less time consuming, it also meant I could take work home and work on it from my PC and Mac at home.

Here is a list of the new media technologies I used, with notes on each product:

Blogger

I used ' Blogger' the most out of all of the other new media technologies because I used it throughout my production and research/planning stages. In fact I am using it right now to create this evaluation! Blogger is a very useful website which allowed me to create a free blog where I could store all my work electronically so they could be accessed by any computer for me to edit, and finally be able to hand it into my media teacher electronically without using 100s of pieces of paper. I also received quite a bit of audience feedback from my blog which was very useful.

By having all my media products in one electronic place, I lost the risk of loosing or damaging my work and it also meant I was able to upload multimedia products onto my blog, for example for my final cut (.mov) and for my podcasts (.mp3).

For each task I completed, I would add another post onto Blogger, I used white and red font with a black background to make the blog look attractive.  (Click here to access my blog)

Final Cut Express 4

Final Cut Express is where I did the majority of my editing for my film. Final Cut Express is a much more advanced piece of software than previous software I have used (iMovie HD) and comes with many in-built effects which are very useful. Unlike iMovie, Final Cut Express has 99 video tracks which means that numerous amounts of video can be played at the samt time, I used this when I added in titles from the in-built software Live Type.

The one key piece of editing techniques that can be controlled in Final Cut Express 4, is the availability of changing the color levels, brightness/contrast and the overall image presented on screen. I found this piece of editing crucial because some of the shots I took where not the best of lighting so I was able to adjust them in Final Cut Express, I also added blue tint into the house shots to create a cold atmosphere.

However Final Cut Express did not come without it's problems, me and Conor came across two main problems during our editing. The first one was that we were not able to upload from a DV tape into FInal Cut Express so we had to first import the footage into iMovie HD and then save this footage as a .mov file. This then meant cutting up the movie in Final Cut Express to create separate clips again, this was very time consuming and if I would have researched a little more I would have probably found a less time consuming method.

The second problem we came across was that one of the Macs in our Media room had a more up-to-date piece Final Cut Express on it, and once you had saved on this mac, you could not open the file on any other mac. There was another A2 Media student using this mac which meant that during the last few days of editing, we had to share out time on the Mac.

DV Camcorders and Tripods
To film our footage, I used a 'Cannon Widescreen MV 920' which were provided by school. They were very basic cameras compared to some later versions on the market, but they got the job done, although not in the best quality. I carried out a lot of research over the internet into how to use the features to the best of their ability which made recording the footage a lot easier and more efficient. Find out more information on these on my 'Hardware' post.

Mac Computers
I used Mac computers that were provided by school, and I also have a more update version of the iMac at home which I used to upload the footage onto iMovie and convert to a .mov file. Most of my blogging was not done on the macs because I needed the time on them to work on the software that is only available on the macs, for instance Final Cut Express, I also did not have this on my mac at home. With the use of macs, we could not edit our film so they were obviously very useful and another major new media technology that I used. The Macs also provided us with internet for our research, although I did do most of this on my PC at home. Here is a more detailed specification of the mac I used at Home.

Social Networking Sites (Facebook)
I used my own facebook page a lot for advertising my film, and any help needed with it. It was over facebook that I found my actress when there was no response from posters put up in school, this shows how new media is much more effective.

 (This picture shows a status on facebook I made asking for props)

By using facebook we simply posted our footage onto facebook and gathered audience feedback from this, although we did not gather anywhere near as much as we would have liked, and the feedback was not that constructive, the main way facebook was helpful was for advertising when help was needed.

Photoshop Elements 6
We used this program to create our teaser poster and film poster. It is a very easy piece of software to use, and because I take IT at A Level, I have learnt some very efficient skills in the software and I am quite advanced with it. This program enabled me to add text and images to create the posters, which were made of multiple images. It also enabled editing of the images by changing levels, however the editing is not that advanced. One problem with Photoshop is it's very small range of fonts, meaning we did not have a great deal to choose from.

Pages 09
I used this program to create the magazine article. It is a very useful piece of software as it handles image placement and text very well. The software also comes with various templates, but unfortunately none of these are magazine based, but I just simply edited a newsletter template to fit in with our magazine appearance. By using this software and not Microsoft Publisher, we were able to create a better looking document which was less time consuming.

Scanner
After Conor had made the storyboard, we used the scanner to scan this into the mac, and then save it as a JPEG so that it could be imported onto the blog. The scanner is very easy to use but only very basic, it was only when we had completed scanning that the media department bought a better quality scanner. Without the scanner I would of had to complete the storyboard on the computer, which would have been impossible.

Search Engines and Information Sites
These two combined together to help me with most of my research, I would use a search engine to search for any topic I need information on, for eample 'top 10 horror movies' and the search engine would find a website with information on this topic by finding relative words. For all my searches I used Google because it is one of the most powerful search engines on the web. I also used IMDB for a lot of my research as it has very useful and professional information on every film ever professionally made.

Most of my genre research was done using web pages such as this one, which gave me vital information I needed to gather information together. I also used information web sites to find tutorials on all of the hardware and software I used so that I had a better understanding on how to use them. YouTube was a very useful web-page for looking up videos, and uploading them so I could embed these into my blog.

Document/Audio/Video Hosting Websites
These were crucial to adding multimedia products onto my blog. I needed to use Scribd to add all documents completed on Microsoft Office Word, I used archive.org to add the audio from my podcasts and I used YouTube and Photobucket to add video onto my blog.

From all of these websites you simply save the films from your hard drive onto the website and then embed them onto blogger. I used to use blogger to upload videos, but with the new editor, there is no way of adding video, so I had to result to using YouTube and Photobucket.

Potable Digital Audio Recorder
I used a digital audio recorder to record my podcasts and to add the voice-over into my movie. This is basically a microphone which converts the audio into mp3 and saves it onto an internal hard drive which can then be used as a memory stick to add onto the hard drive in the mac. Without this piece of equipment we would of had to use the in-built camera on the mac, which is a very low quality.

Final Cut

Ancillary Texts Final Product 2

Final Magazine Article:
Here is the final product of our magazine film review. The review pages is designed to look as though it is from inside of a film magazine, in a short-film review section, our short-film review is over a two page spread: (Please click on thumbnails to see full size)

Ancillary Texts Final Product 1

Initial Sample Screen and Audience Feedback

We showed our rough cut film to a few members from our class, and they gave us some good and useful feedback into how we could make our production better, although we asked them to mainly focus on editing changes rather than changes to the narrative, unless this was crucial.

Target Audience and Media Influence: 
We tried to mainly show it to members of our class that were creating horror films because they would have a better understanding of codes and conventions of horror films through their own personal research. However we also had to make sure that the people we asked for audience feedback off now fitted in with our target audience as at this stage it is crucial that not only does our film have good techniques of media, but also can attract our target audience. 


Here is what they had to say:


Let's Start With The Good News:
The majority of our feedback was very positive about the scenes that were shot on the moor, they said they liked our choice of different camera angles, and liked the idea to hide cameras behind objects to give the impression that our central protagonist was being watched. They also thought that we had chose some good settings for our film.
However the best news for us is that the majority of our audience followed the preferred reading and did not understand that the central protagonist was the one who had murdered the bodies until he was at his home and there was the women tied up.


I Think It's Time To Borrow That Camera Again?

Our audience did tell us that the scenes in the house were not a good enough quality and that our actors and actresses did not play a good enough role to make the situation believable. This was not the worst news to be received as me and Conor already knew this and were already planning to re-film theses scenes anyway. When we then asked them if the basic outline of the shots inside the house were good, they responded that they did like the shot types, especially the one used to introduce the victim to the scene by making the central protagonist bow his head and reveal her.
From this feedback me and Conor are going to re-shoot these scenes Wednesday 9th December with a new actress who can hopefully play a more believable role. The actress we have chosen to re-shot the films has a lot more experience in acting and takes A2 level drama. 


Editing
At this time our audience were not very useful at telling us some good editing techniques, however me and Conor have a lot of ideas about what we can do for editing and will put them all into our filming, these can be seen on the Editing and Production Notes post. When they are added to our film we will call back some more audience feedback, so we can make any necessary changes they suggest before handing in our final cut.

Rough Cuts

Rough Cut- No Editing

This is our first rough cut, notice that there is no effort done on this rough cut to make any kind of editing other than cutting down the scenes. We have already recieved some audience feedbacl, but any more would be appreciated, please leave a comment below. Me and Conor have decided to re-shoot the house scenes, this will be added to the post soon.

House Scenes- Update!!

These are the scenes that me and Conor have re-shoot, we believe they are of a much better quality than before with better camera angles, better actress and a much better mise en scene. We used much more props this time.