EVALUATION QUESTION 3 SPIDERSCRIBE

EVALUATION QUESTION 3

For us to progress any further, we needed to gain feedback from our audience in order to gain an idea of where we was at and where we needed to be in order to make our 3 products work effectively as a package. The first feedback we received was when we first pitched our short film ideas to the audience (which the link can be found on my blog). This was very helpful to us because we was thinking of embedding an African culture with our short film however as we gathered from the feedback, there were many issues concerning this. Firstly there was the issue of timing whether we can input all of these cultures and themes in the required time limit; secondly there was the issue of the audience comprehending all these stereotypes in one go, and lastly the difficulty of exploring an Asian and African culture cohabiting in the nature of our short film was proven to be harder than we actually thought. There was also much positive feedback to our film pitch as the audience really liked our ideas for example the love scene that we described to them followed by the comedy aspect we wanted to convey. We explored Asian culture through the use of music as we used an Indian soundtrack within the day dream scene. Also, the English stereotype was also explored through the use of the main characters costume being smart however we slightly tweaked this in order for it to relate back to the humour aspect of our film for example the fact that the main characters trousers are tucked into his socks. Others in in the audience feedback exercise found our ideas confusing however I think that this is because I felt that we didn’t really express our ideas clearly enough to them whereas other people found it easier to understand thus gave them an insight from our point of view. Soon during the exercise, another issue began to emerge with regards to the locations we wanted to us as the audience found it confusing of how the characters going to get to these locations and also how it’s going to work within our short film For example the airport scene where the main character arrives and the park where the daydream scene will take place. In my opinion I think it was effective for some people in the audience feedback exercise to find our ideas slightly confusing and to question our ideas because it made us think that maybe our ideas might have been too difficult for our audience to understand so it helped us to combat this issue as we thought of ways to simplify our ideas in our short film. The second audience feedback exercise for the ideas of our print products was also very helpful to us as it helped us to identify our strengths and expose our weaknesses. This was shown in the draft that we had produced of one of our print products as it gave the audience a very good idea of how we wanted our film poster to look like. We gained positive feedback from our draft poster as they thought it looked really good and thought it worked well with our main theme of comedy. The also thought it was a good idea to the use aspects from the ‘East is East’ and ‘West is West’ case studies that we have looked at for example the splash effect that shows certain images of some funny scenes that occur within the film which again sells the film for what it actually is which grabs the audience’s attention. There was also some negative feedback that we received which was the use of the tagline ‘Same Monty, Different Country’. The audience thought it was simple and straight to the point as the main character is from another country as comes to London for a daytrip however some crack were exposed in this for example, this tagline sort of gives away what happens in the film but the main concern of all was that if we used this tagline it would suggest that we have made previous films with this same character which would have made things more complicated than what they actually were. It was difficult for us to think of a new tagline for our film poster however in the end we just decided to keep it simple and go with ‘Are You Ready London? It’s’ which we as group thought worked well with the title of the film ‘Monty’s day out’. We then revisited the ‘Mr Bean’ case study that we did and thought that we could use some features that worked really well there in our poster for example a funny still of Mr Bean himself in the middle of the picture. We used this idea on the film poster and the audience thought it worked really well with the combination of the splash effects. We was told that it shows a “crazy’ day out with all sorts happening in a funny way” which we accepted as a compliment because it was what we was trying to portray. With regards to the film review, it wasn’t really completed by the time we had to present the pitch to the audience. We presented what we had at that time and explained to the best we could of what we wanted to do with the film review. The film review script itself wasn’t an issue for me to do however the issue was the stills. We had to be very critical of this as we trialled a few still images and presented it to our audience on a separate occasion for example a still of the day dream scene when the main character and the girl are holding hands portrayed a love theme which was totally irrelevant to us because our 3 products must work as a comedy package. This was helpful to us because it was the audience that suggested a suitable scene for us where the main character is eating the biscuit and its falling out of his mouth because it was one of the funniest scenes in the film and somewhat iconic. The post production feedback that we received was through the use of an online survey which basically was an online questionnaire. This was very easy to produce and was very effective because it’s straight and to the point. We generally received good feedback from this which was a success in our minds.

EVALUATION QUESTION 4 PREZI

EVALUATION QUESTION 4:

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

·        Technology was used from the beginning of the Media studies course through the use of ‘blogger’. This allowed us to keep track of our Media studies journey through ‘blogs’ from work that we can upload directly to the internet; It was almost like keeping an online diary. 

·        To do research, we used Google and YouTube to find any established films and case studies that have already been made for example we instantly thought of ‘Mr Bean’. I’ve been using these websites for years so navigating through them wasn’t very difficult. This gave us an idea of the kinds of location we can use followed by props.

 

·        We also used Google images to locate our case studies which were posters. And this gave us notions of how we could make our poster.

 

·        We used our college’s VLE ‘Moodle’ to download film schedules and permission slips which can be accessed virtually anywhere with internet.

 

·        We used a Panasonic C-HS900, a HD camera, to record our film. This gave the film clips a high quality resolution and made it much more professional rather than using standard cameras. Along with this we used the tripod in order to get steady shots without any camera shakes. This was difficult because some of our moving scenes had to be free hand so we had to re film certain scenes a number of times with minimal camera shake.

 

·        Once we had our raw footage from the video camera, we used an Apple iMac in order to edit our short film with a program called ‘Final Cut Pro’. We all had our input using this program with much difficulty but after the use of the help document on ‘Moodle’ we gained a grasp of and was able to understand the tools and could break up video, cut and shorten the length of certain clips to make sure it was in the length of 5 minutes, add sound effects and music, slow down certain scenes for example the day dream scene and the use of transition effects which we thought worked well in a number of scenes.

 

·        We used still images from our short video to use in our poster because it sells the film itself for what it actually is which rather than having a still from photo shoot which could mislead the audience.

·        Photoshop was used to make our film poster. There were many tools in Photoshop we utilized such as the magic wand tool to erase the background. We used the gradient tool to blend the images with the background. We also the blur tool to soften the edges of the images on the poster so they stick out more. This was quite alien to me and my team mates were more experienced in this sector so we decided split up the tasks. I also suggested that we use YouTube to look up some tutorial which came in quite handy to us.

·        To make our film review look very professional we utilized InDesign. This was the first time I had used this program and found it fairly straight forward. However, I soon found it difficult to align all my text boxes with the rulers and took me a whole lesson to figure out as it meant that I had to play with the length of text in each text box and continuously change the size of them.

·        When doing presentations to pitch our ideas and some planning, we also used technology through an online program from www.prezi.com. This is a free online application which allowed us to present our pitch in a quick and easy to understand manner to our audience which looked very professional at the same time.

 

 

Completed Print product Poster

Short Video that we have procuced

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t812XSUgAqE

4th February 2013

At the start of the lesson, we started with what we should have and what we are going to do in terms of coursework and in terms of task10 final audience feedback.

This is an overview of what he have done as a class and what he have yet to do. We have also established that we have to make a survey for task 10 and we came to the conclusion of making an online survey on 'Survey Monkey' which refers to strengths and weaknesses - sound, mise en scene e.t.c. There must be roughly 8 open questions which refer to the print products and video moreover how it works as a package.

Here i have gone  to the survey monkey website in order to begin the survey. To use this website, it says i have to sign up for free.

After signing up to the website, i am going to click on 'Create Survey' in order to begin.

Here i have decided that 'Website Feedback' is kind of relevant to the feedback of our complete package.

 Here is the template of the 'Webside Feedback'. I will begin changing the questions to ones that are more relevant to our package.

 

Here is an example of a question that i have put into the survey. I have added a comment box instead of a multiple choice action because i feel that this will tell us more.

 

Here is the final survey i have done today. i will continue to work on the questions at home with regards to comments that the teacher has made.