Final Primary and Ancillary Tasks

Final Trailer:

Final Poster:

Final Magazine:

Evaluation Question 4 - How did you use new media technologies to in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

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

All of this was not readily available to us had we made it 10, 20 years ago, where a lot of things were made with simply a camera, for example the Star Wars opening crawl was printed and filmed very slowly with a camera at an angle.

Now, there are built in effects to do this kind of thing, everything is a lot more simple, and there has been a lot of technological convergence and now everything is available on one machine, you could even create an entire film from scratch with an iMac as it has a camera and editing software in one.

We found frustrations in some of the video editing, for one, we initially couldn't figure out why our videos were exporting out in such a low quality, which we did figure out fairly fast, it was simply a matter of creating a new project but with higher settings. We also found it was complicated to import on to iMovie HD, as we had to first import it to iMovie, before importing it again to iMovie HD, there was no work around to this but now there is Final Cut Pro in which we would happily edit and import on. There was also some editing restrictions with iMovie, for example we wanted to add a muzzle flash to the shotgun but there was no way to do it with what we had (although once again it's easy to do in Final Cut Pro).

Generally though, we found the editing software quite forgiving, we worked well with it and got out what we needed to in the end.

Evaluation Question 3 - What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

From all this Feedback, we have learnt a number of things to aid us in future projects.

From the positive feedback we have learnt that people really liked the special effects, although that could just be because it was quite different and exciting, but it went down really well so it's something we would do if we were to do it again.

The camera work was also successful in terms of feedback, it was quite nicely framed  and the varied use of camera shots was also very good, so we'd definitely pay attention to the camera work again because people clearly enjoyed it, and we were also told by a peer we had good shots.

People also found it very  funny, so we've learnt that we should continue to incorporate comedy into our films more, perhaps even making another  comedy film, although to make it more serious next time I think we would need to not use our friends and generally film more seriously, things that I believe affected how comedic it was, although clearly the comedy went down well, so we'll take it positively and move on.

From the negative feedback we've learnt that our mis-en-scene lacked a bit, although the negative part we got was about the guns looking unrealistic, which we would have liked to improve but on our budget we could only afford what we had, although we have taken it in and next time we could perhaps pay more attention to the spray painting of the guns as an orange part of the shotgun is still visible at a time, also we could ask around to see if anyone could lend us something better.

Another bit of feedback we got was the lack of variety in the characters, as most of our friends are male, and they were all readily available when we needed them, plus, we hadn't really written in any girls into our trailer by accident, although if we were to make a feature film there would most likely be females in it.

The big negative feedback we received concerned sound, and that some people couldn't hear some of the actors talking, and there was some strange static sound when Max has his line, and these both could have been easily improved and did slip by us, we had initially tried to balance the sound so we felt it was ok, and that you could always hear the characters but evidently people did not feel the same, we did try to make sure it was as good as possible by carefully balancing the sound, but next time we would just be a bit more careful. The strange static noise could have been fixed if we had Final Cut Pro, which allows you to remove background noise with ease, but there was no real way for us to easily remove it with iMovie.

Overall, this has helped us and we know where to improve next time.

Evaluation Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your primary and ancillary tasks?

How effective is the combination of your primary and ancillary tasks?

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

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

We didn't necessarily challenge any forms, there was only one or two incidents where we felt that we could improve on what professional trailers were using. For example, we believed that we could use rock music slightly more effective then that used in Crank 2.

In terms of challenging conventions, most of the conventions we used were very stereotypical. For example, Luke's mise-en-scene is arguably very stereotypical. We also included the funny extract at the end, which is another typical convention of action trailers. If we were to challenge this aspect, we could've had a shocking or scary moment, but we believed that comedic endings are typical conventions so we used this.

Obviously, we used a lot of the ideas we formed from looking at trailers. We didn't necessarily copy certain ideas, but took influences from them. For example, we noted down the timings in one Dark Knight Rises, and we used these to influence our ideas of what our timings should be.

Generally, we took a lot of influence from trailers we looked at.

Poster influences

This simply shows where we got influence for different parts of our own poster but made it our own.

Mise-en-scene in our trailer

In our trailer, we used Mise-en-scene to work with our film, we improvised where we could to keep it as cheap as possible without making it look bad. We used both clothes, setting, and props to aid us and to make the world we created as real as possible.

Clothes:

We gave Luke a simple hoodie with backpack to show he's different from his "family". His adopted father, Stephen, was wearing a sweater but it was hard to see with the lighting, but that was to show how he was more caring and posh.

Max is clearly from some kind of wealth or part of an organisation with his suit.

Max's henchmen also have suits to show they're part of the organisation.

Setting

This was the warehouse we used for filming, we felt it would add some diversity to our filming and it is relevant to our film.

This was inside the warehouse, it was very crowded but we used it to our advantage to get some real shot variety.

This was simply my car hole, it looked quite gloomy and fit the setting we wanted.

Props

These were cheap toy guns that we spray painted black to save money, but it still looked Ok in the end.