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.

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.

Storyboard comparison

We came up with this idea to compare our storyboard to our final trailer. This will help when we evaluate our trailer, so we can see how our original developed over time. It was interesting to compare our initial ideas to the trailer after a long time.

Magazine Development and Final

After researching magazine covers from Empire and Total Film, it was time to create our magazine cover. 

We started with the pictures that we had taken for our poster, and decided to use different ones from last time. This was the one we went with, after cutting out the background.

We decided to use a similar effect as the poster, with Luke in the foreground and Max in the background and more transparent. We gave both an outer glow, Luke's was white to show that he was the good character in the film, and Max's was black to suggest that he would be a villain. 

We originally went with the working title, HYDC Magazine, but we were advised that it might be weird that our production company was the same as our magazine.

We gave the title a black stroke and put the word magazine into HYDC.

We decided to change the name to Focus, originally because the featured film would be 'focused' on, but we also realised that focus could also apply to filming techniques such as focus pulls, so it is ambiguous. 

We also put a texture on the gradient and gave the title a cyan outer glow instead.

The next step was to add the name of the film, which we did with the same style as the masthead. We also added a tagline and a 'world exclusive' stamp.

We also noticed that some of our magazine influences had other articles on the front, so we added a small sample on the right hand side of the cover and at the bottom, as well as a banner along the top which shows another article.

This is our final magazine.

Trailer Feedback Survey

Magazine Research

We have been looking at Magazine covers from Empire and Total Film to get some inspiration for our own magazine cover, we believe we will make a Total Film magazine cover, mainly because we prefer the title and the type of cover they make.

Here are some examples of posters we want to replicate;

These magazine covers are from Empire and Total Film. We want to create our own magazine and name so we don't have to fit into a certain style, yet uses features of these ones.

Trailer Feedback

Upon finishing our trailer, Jake and I were eager to get the word out about our trailer, as it is something we have put a lot of time and effort in to, and are very proud of it.

Facebook
On Facebook, Jake and I both posted it, on Jake's post, we got the following reactions (apologies for any profanities)



From this, it seems our friends liked it, with 19 "likes" and comments expressing their liking of it, although it was perceived as humorous to some, we believe this is due to the fact they know us in person, and due to the fact it looks quite stereotypical.

I posted it on Facebook twice, and got a total of 11 different likes, but no comments on it, but it further shows people expressing their liking for it (Including people I might not talk to anymore)

Reddit
I also went to post it on to the popular forum "Reddit", Reddit has hundreds of "Subreddits" of specific discussions, I posted the trailer in the "Teenagers" Reddit, and the response was really great.

"Chicarito:

haha brilliant

Trickboss:

Hah awesome, is the heli-crash from an iOS app?

Hylax_Big:

Dat special effect!

Interestingly_Enough:

This is really well-made. I particularly liked the ending with the bit of comedy; it made it feel like a professional trailer.
Is Media Studies a class at your school? I ask because, in my school system (US), there is a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) academy, and I take Mass Communications there, which is basically a course of all types of media and communications. It's very interesting, and I'm glad to see someone interested in it as well!

markshire:

That was awesome

blusteryeel:

this is actually really funny

Vaetir:

Nice, And a pro tip the noise / sound you can hear from 1;00 could be overlapped by soft classical music, not much work but much professional."

As you can see, the feedback was generally positive, some asked questions, and there was some ways to improve. I felt posting on here was great because it gave us feedback from a different audience who didn't know us, which I felt removed any possible bias we were getting. The only way I feel this could have been more solid feedback was if we got it from a variety of ages groups, but all of these people are Teenagers, but I posted it specifically to them because I felt that if I posted it somewhere else, it might be misunderstood as to what it's supposed to be. Although, along with the positive feedback we once again had someone finding our trailer funny, which we would put back to the fact that it looks like quite a stereotypical trailer.

Along with the feedback we got on Reddit, there is also an upvote/downvote system in which you vote if you like what you see,

As you can see, the results were positive, with 20 upvotes, and only 2 downvotes, showing that even those that did not comment enjoyed it.

YouTube



The reaction on YouTube has also been great, with 342 views currently, with 14 likes to 1 dislike, and 3 comments. Of the 3 comments we did have another person (who we know) call it funny, and we know one of the other people who commented, but the other commenter (who called it amazing) we didn't actually know, so it's all more good feedback.

Overall, the feedback was great, we were given an area to improve (a sound issue) and lots of people have told us it was good, so we are ecstatic with the plethora of comments we received. 

Special effects in the trailer

In our trailer we had two main special effects, we had a petrol station explode and a helicopter crash.

The first was the explosion, I knew I had to use Sony Vegas (which I have at home) to create it the way I wanted to, and I knew I had to find the moment in which our character is off camera.

I then got the earliest frame I could so I could maximise how long I could get the explosion to last, once I had done this, I knew I had to find a green screen explosion and downloaded it from YouTube.

This video provided a lot of explosions so I had quite a choice, I chose one and cut it out and imported it to Sony Vegas (with the video clip).

It then started getting complicated, I added the explosion to the layer above the video clip, and chose the effect FX "Sony Chroma Keyer" this is the Sony Vegas equivalent of a green screen effect.

Once this was done I knew I had to cut out the bridge from the explosion layer, and being fairly inexperienced with Sony Vegas I knew how I wanted to do it, but not how to do it precisely, but I had to use to crop tool (which is more advanced than the iMovie crop tool, and allowed me to crop specific areas) and I knew it would work because it was on a tripod and still.

So to crop it, I had to crop along the explosion, and give an educated guess as to where the bridge would be in relation to the explosion, looking back I realised I could have cropped out the bridge layer and saved the cropping shape, so it took several attempts to get something I liked, and was accurate.

The helicopter was easier to produce, first we had to film the field, with an idea of the height we had to film it at to look accurate, although we knew it would look fine regardless.

Once we had the field, we also had to download a helicopter green screen, one we had seen earlier whilst browsing YouTube casually, and we thought it would be good in our film for a short action clip.

Then all we had to do was import the two clips into iMovie (Not HD) and drag the green screen clip on to the field clip, and select Green Screen and it produced the final product:

Our finished trailer

This is the final version of our trailer, uploaded to YouTube.

We plan to post the link to websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to receive feedback from a wide source.

Progress Report v4

We have finished a marathon session of editing, and believe that what we have now is worthy to hand in. Tomorrow we will do adjustments to sound and make fine tuning to the timing and length of clips.

Here is a summary of our day;

- Jake filmed for an hour and a half with Nathan and Pip. This was mostly for the action sequences but also included a few retakes. Sean later joined in and was involved in a few shots.

- We both went to Media at 10.50 to start importing, which took until 13.00.

- We managed to edit for about 20 minutes before Jake had another lesson, but Joe stayed and put everything in the time line, so we had a framework for the next few hours.

- At 14.10, we had a Media lesson and started by adjusting a lot of the timing and adding the soundtrack.

- In the end, we stayed behind editing until about 18.00. In this time; we sorted out the sound, syncing the clips and the soundtrack, creating our final title and adjusting audio levels.

Progress Report v3

Today, we filmed the remainder of our footage, which included action shots, dialogue and retakes. Importing took over 2 hours, but all of our clips are ready to start editing now. We plan to stay after school for a few hours so we don't have to panic on deadline day.

Progress Report v2

Over the past weekend, we managed to film all of our footage from the warehouse. We feel like the shots are good, and will start editing promptly.

Progress Report v1

Recently, we have been quite busy with filming and editing. We have around half of the trailer edited to a rough standard, and we are also still doing some more sound research as we have found we don't like one of the songs we had originally chosen. We also have some more to filming to do, we should have all our main filming done by Tuesday, with some time to film anything else we feel we may need.

Auditions

Before we started filming, we auditioned 4 of our potential actors, here's how it went:

We decided on the following actors parts:
Pip - Luke Pine
Tommy - Stephen Morgan
Joe - Max Pine

We decided we didn't need Jake, and he will be working the camera for the majority of the time.

Animated Storyboard

This is our animated storyboard, along with the self-titled soundtrack we plan to use.

Schedule

Schedule

This is our schedule for how, when and where we plan to film our trailer. We don't plan to film this all in one day, rather over a period of 2/3 weeks.