Our Final Product - Broken Memories

Evaluation Question 7;Looking back at your preliminary task, What do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the product ?

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

Our preliminary task and final product have some similar and some different elements. For example in our final product we reduced dialogue to a minimum because of the preliminary task where in didn't work too well. In the preliminary task the dialogue scenes needed re-filming several times and the dialogue was strangled and didn't sound natural. But we did adopt the long shots of the character walking from our preliminary task into our final product. We did this because we liked the creation of suspense but we did develop on it with the titles between shots to break it up which worked well. 

Shots

 The shots in our final product were a lot steadier than in our  preliminary task. The tilt in our preliminary task (1:58) was shaky and not very smooth. 





We can compare it to with the pan (0:53) or zoom (0:12) in the final product where the camera was very smooth and controlled giving a better effect than that in our preliminary task.

Image
We did change our ways from the preliminary task to the final product. In the preliminary task we did not think about lighting and we didn't pay enough attention to what was in the frame. The lighting form our preliminary task made it difficult to see the action and what was happening. 
 Although this sometimes works in movies, in our task it looked like we hadn't payed attention to lighting and it didn't  look like a conscious choice. 


So in our preliminary task we changes this so every thing was much brighter and visible which worked really well. 

 In these shots the light has increased the view of what is happening. The light falls very well not the important parts such as the glass smashing and the glass in the sink. This works a lot better than the shadowy action from the preliminary task.

Sound
The sound in the two projects differs greatly. The sound we used in our preliminary task was very jovial and experimental which coupled with the sense of humour element worked well but we knew for our final product we had to be serious. I believe the serious music worked much better than the music from the preliminary task because it flowed better and really created the atmosphere. Also the music editing improved a lot, rather than small periods of silence where the music cut away too quickly we had music that flowed between tracks and promoted the feeling of the piece. In our final product we also paid more attention to the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. We enhanced the diegetic sound of the glass so it is more shocking, in our preliminary task we didn't think about diegetic sound and only paid atention to non-diegetic. 

Continuity and Continuity Editing
Our continuity and continuity editing in our preliminary task wasn't bad but it wasn't as good as in our final project. The preliminary task had unrealistic continuity editing with the eye line match where the watch was too still and the continuity was slightly off with the costume not remaining the same throughout. This was definitely improved in our final project with the costume being the same everyday of filming and the props kept the same, even the sugar glass where we bought 3 identical glasses. 

 Here we can see the continuity going wrong. The character we see has his jacket open and his hair styled but in the next shot the jacket is done up and his hair is flat. This comes from filming on a few different days  and he couldn't keep the same clothes and forgot to style his hair. In the final product we made sure that we eliminated this kind of continuity error






Conclusion
Overall I believe that our final product was better because of the lighting, shot, shot length and the the camera positioning.These elements really added to the final product something that wasn't there in the preliminary task but the preliminary task was more adventurous with the graphic match which we would have been good to include in our final product. 

Evaluation Question 6; What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing the product?

Over this course I have learned an extensive number of skills ranging from camera work to editing work. The   amount of things I have learnt have allowed me to successfully progress through the course and create a video of a good quality.

Evaluation Question 5;How did you attract/address your audience?

How did you attract/address your audience?

Our thriller opening set out to leave the audience asking questions and wanting more information on what they have just witnessed. I  created a viewing session and a survey for people who had watched out thriller to take to find out what the audience felt about it.

This survey showed what the audience liked and was a good judge to see whether we achieved what we set out to. By asking these questions it gave us an overall view of what the audience wants and how well we have executed the different devices of suspense, red herrings and cliffhangers. 

The audience seemed to like our opening with over 87% saying they would carry on watching the film which is successful for us because we have achieved our goal or intriguing our audience.

The techniques we employed in our thriller appear to have worked in the way we had hoped. Our slow build up helped to draw out the suspense and our target audience seemed to enjoy it however we had one complaint that it was to slow but we understand that we cant please everyone. Also people seemed enticed by the fact that the focus switches and by how little we know about the character, this seemed to draw them into the film world and really want to follow the character through the story. The last comment we had also brought to our attention the idea of an unknown force which we had not initially thought about but by the viewer making this assumption we have already got them mulling it over in their mind to try to explain it, which is exactly the effect that we wanted.

The main attraction of our opening appears to be the violence with 5 of our viewers mentioning it as one of the better moments. We expected this to happen as action is a main attraction in most films but the other answers are also very interesting. The element of surprise was highlighted to us by one viewer  and when we did the screening this did make people jump even if it was slight, this emotional response is forcing the spectator to engage in our film either in a positive or negative way.

Overall our thriller was an engaging experience for all our viewers which was what we wanted because we thought that this would attract more of an audience. For example if we were marketing the film we could organise a bigger screening based on this smaller screening to attract a wider audience. We believe we achieved what we set out to in our opening because of the good feedback and because the viewers highlighted some of the points which we thought were stronger in our film such as the violence, the suspense and the surprise element. 

Evaluation Question 4; Who would be the audience for your media product?

Evaluation Question 3; What kind of media institution might distribute your media product?

Evaluation Question 2; How does your media project represent particular social groups?

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

Broken Memories - Our Finished Product

Our Preliminary Task - The Delivery Guy

Making our ident

We created our ident using photoshop and we created a few ideas.

Our first idea was to decide on a title. We thought of a few impact words such as grenade or explosive studio but we also looked at words in another language. After some debate we settled on Sonunda, which means the end in Turkish. I thought this would be ironic because of the cyclical nature of our film which begins near the end.

Ideas

We had two ideas, one for explosive studios and one for Sonunda.

The explosive studios logo looked pretty good with the world made up as a grenade with a hand around it. From our analysis of idents I thought this showed how the company was taking the world in its hand and making it hitting it with a bang. This is a strong ident but we didn't feel that it fits with the more elegant style of our work.

I thought that Sonunda was a much more impressive logo. This time it included Atlas proudly holding up the world whilst standing among the clouds. This image can be likened to Lionsgate with the clouds and it gives the feeling of being on top of the world.

This is our final design that we used in our final product, it really goes well with the simple, elegant nature of our video but it also works well with the majestic soundtrack we laid it over giving it a great feeling of power.

Titles of Our Thriller

This is the order in which our titles will appear on our thriller opening. 

Format of TITLES for AS Thriller Coursework

After the IDENT use a FADE IN. The titles should then be in the following order:
(1) 'Your Production Company' Presents
(2) A Film by 'One name - usually the director'
(3) Starring or With
(4) Male star
(5) Female star or other way round
(6) Title of film - or could be at the end
(7) Also starring - 2/3/names - each on seperate title
(8) Then 3/4/5 of the following - you choose - each on seperate title
Editing
Music
Cinematography or Director of Photography
Casting
Set Designer
Costume Designer
Script
(9) Then Producer(s) - can be more than one
(10) Always finish with Director - one name, usually the same as A Film By ...
(11) Could put title here
Remember to use LiveType and try to make titles interesting. They can be either over black or superimposed over your film. Space them out over the two minutes of the film.Give the audience plenty of time to read the titles. 
(12) Finish with a fade out & fade music out

We created our titles using livetype. This was good for experimentation because we had access to many different fonts but also many ways of displaying them. We decided we wanted something anonymous for our titles but also something that caught the eye. We decided to intersperse our titles with our clips, putting a clip then a title then a clip so we could keep the audience interested in both the titles and the images. Our titles did come out quite anonymous which is the effect we wanted but to make them really catch the eye we differed the main title and had it come in with an epic sounding piece with would grab everyones attention. 

Analysis of Idents

Analysing Idents

Every company that makes or produces film has there own company ident wether they are a major company or an independent company.  Companies tend to use strong, recognisable, powerful symbols in their idents. 

For example Universal which uses the world as its ident which shows how big the companies is and how they are attempting to dominant the world by putting their stamp across it. This shows their dominance and power over the media of the world with their ties to NBC and the other company links through their distribution arm.  Universal are one of the biggest movie companies in the world and are one of the top six and has various subsiduries and comes under NBC Universal. It is the 4th oldest production company in world just ahead of Paramount but behind Pathe,  Nordisk and Gaumont. Some of Universals biggest hits are E.T., Jurrasic Park and Jaws. 

The ident for Lionsgate is simplistic in style but has a set of gears in a door working which adds to the effect and enormity that the company is trying to achieve. This door and gears symbol shows how the smaller things make the bigger things work even when we cannot see it. The gate opening and the light coming out revealing the clouds above is very similar to the idea of 'going towards the light' and heaven which sets Lionsgate on a different level to the rest of the companies that attempt to stamp their logo across the world, Lionsgate seem to do it effortlessly as if they have been there the whole time. Lionsgate is the most commercially successful independent film company and is the sixth most profitable movie studio.  Lionsgate is a relatively young company being founded in 1997 but it was only in 2000 when they had their first box office hit which was American Psycho. This led to a trend of films to controversial for Americas major studios. They have also produced film such as The Hunger Games, which was the highest grossing film of 2012, Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Expendables.  However Lionsgate also take on smaller projects because of the revenue of the bigger films for example Cabin in the Woods was produced around 2009 but could not be released until 2012 because Lionsgate needed the safety of The Hunger Games to take the risk of releasing Cabin in the Woods even though it stared Chris Hemsworth and Sigourney Weaver in it. Cabin in the Woods paid off and made $43,533.045 at box office.

Storyboard

This is the animative of our storyboard in which we created a moving storyboard with the drawn images split up by a description of what we want to happen. Our storyboard show the final idea we settled upon after our research and includes sections of our previous ideas with new pieces added where we need them.




This is an example of how the main titles could appear. This would show the painstaking amount of time put into the map by the main character and show his committed obsessive attitude, but we are unsure how to do it and how much time it would take.