HL/MS: Screening & Audience Research/ Film Opening

• On the 22nd of April we had our Screening of our film opening, we screened our film opening to a sample of students and peers all of which were within the age of our target audience
• The main outcomes of the screening for us was to recieve feedback from our sample target audience and to also give us a chance to see the film opening from a different perspective and see if there were any bits that we would change to the film
• The feedback that we recieved was on the whole very positive, a majority of the feedback that we recieved was praising how we created tension in our film opening
• However with one of our questionnaire questions related to how clear the narrative was, it was clear that many students didnt understand the film opening fully, for example the montage clip at the end
• However we corrected this by adding the scene in the clip with the victim's eyes opening showing that she isnt dead and that the montage is simply a flashback

Here is our full edited clip (Retribution, Lukwayi, 2013)

Strengths:

• The strong points of our film opening was that we were pleased with the variety of different and creative shots that we shot, especially in the way that this enabled us to build tension
• Furthermore we are pleased with how the editing process in post-production went, we had long enough clips to edit with out a problem which meant that we had the required length of footage after cutting scenes

Weaknesses:

• If we could improve the film opening we would do this by making sure that the narrative is constructed in a clear way so that audiences can understand what is going on clearer
• We could have used the features of the camera we filmed our film opening in to its potential, by choosing to film in 1080p rather than 720p thus giving it a higher definition look and professional look
• We could have done more in post production such as colour correcting scenes such as the first one where it is quite bright, therefore giving is a more natural look
  





HL: Question 1

http://prezi.com/hdbcwunj5pew/untitled-prezi/

HL:Question 2

·In our film opening there are multiple social groups that have been represented, our first social group that we represented in our film opening was a black male and the second one is a young innocent Caucasian girl
·The black male in our film opening plays the antagonist and as the stereotypes for members that belong to this group is often related to crime and often play antagonist roles in local UK independent films such as Kidulthood (Huda, 2006) this added verisimilitude to our film opening
·This is further re-enforced by his mise en scene in our film opening as he has hood up to show that he doesn’t want to be seen, this has a symbolic code in modern society often associated with crime and gangs and he produces a bludgeon out of the boot of his car which further re-enforces his relation to crime

·The young innocent girl in our film opening is shown as pale with a petit figure juxtaposed to that of the antagonist who is of a muscular build and dressed, she is dressed in overall bright colours that help to connote that she is young and innocent juxtaposed to the antagonist who is dressed in dark navy colours. In the scene when the victim is in the bathroom doing her hair this represents the social group of many teen groups as the stereotype in society is that they take excessive pride in their appearance
·In our film opening our narrative conveys certain ideological discourses of a conventional thriller film and also of small groups in society, for instance in our film opening the antagonist is shown to be powerful, this is achieved by the difference in age and also in the way he walks with authority juxtaposed to the victim who looks vulnerable and walks in a timid way, this is further reinforced by the scene when the girl is seen running away in the woods in panic but the antagonist still catches her- showing dominance
·Another social group that is represented in our film opening is the religious group, during the scene when the protagonist goes through the antagonists belongings she finds symbolic items such as a prayer book and rosary. This is juxtaposed ideological discourse of religious groups is that they embrace peace and abide the law.
·Also ideologies such as good vs evil, this is shown by the variation of what the two characters are doing during the course of the first scene. The protagonist is living a normal life doing her hair juxtaposed to the antagonist who lives a dark life and is seen acting in a peculiar way
·Also it could be argued that our film opening represents negative groups in the media such as Child abusers and men that attack women, this is due to the antagonist in our film opening being of a much older age compared to the girl who is a young teen and defenceless, in society people, this isn’t an aspect that would often be shown in a conventional horror
·However in our film opening it could be argued that some stereotypes are challenged for example the scene with the antagonist when you see him walking to the shed in a wary way. We encoded a polysemy text in that the audience could decode a lot of readings at this point. It could be concluded that the antagonist has killed or injured someone however because you don’t actually see any violence nothing can be concluded in that scene, this enigmatic tension for our film opening as the audience want to know the significance of the weapon.
·Due to there being no dialogue in our film the audience has to rely on other factors such as mise en scene and the characters body language meaning that our clip is more open to interpretation and the negotiated readings can vary
·However the characterisation of our characters has been developed in such a way that the narrative should seem clear to the audience
 
 
 
 

        

HL:Question 6

• During the whole production and development process of our film opening we used a blog called http://www.blogger.com and the benefits of Web 2.0 were very clear
• We found that with its easy to use interface we could post up research and comment on each others posts easily, we also found the blog very useful for uploading any videos from ‘YouTube’ that we found from research straight onto the blog in an efficient way
• Also with its auto-save feature we never had any real worry about our work being lost as the blog would auto-save a post frequently
• When shooting our wilderness woods footage and final production we used a Canon 550D, this gave us the choice between filming in 1080p at 24fps or 25fps or 720p at 50fps or 25fps as opposed to the school video recorder that we used during our preliminary task
• We opted to film in 720p at 25fps and used a manual focus, this enabled us to change the aperture levels allowing us to turn the aperture down when a scene looked bright, also to manually adjust push and pull focuses that you see in our clip for example the last scene with the victim is lying down on the ground 
• We used wilderness woods as a test run to see how effective some of the shots would look in conveying our thriller/horror
• We liked the idea of how we could manually use pull focus to bring shots into focus and used this as one of our A grade shots in our final production

• One of the features we found useful with the Canon 550D was that we could adjust the aperture and control the levels of light that we wanted to let into the lens of the camera, however unfortunately when certain scenes in our final production the sky became very bright and even turning the aperture right down didn’t make much of a difference
• During one of our shoots we also experimented with a fish eye lens which made our footage look visually distorted and gave a wider depth of the area being shot, although we liked the look of this particular footage with the fish eye lens, when editing in post-production we made the decision that it wasn’t appropriate for our genre
• We were able to use effects on Premiere Elements 9.0 to adjust color levels and exposure using
• We had to be cautious with the contrast and exposure levels as too much would make the footage look tacky and distorted, however we were able to prevent this from happening and accomplished similar levels of light to create continuity between different scenes
• Due to limitations of track & dolly equipment for some of our shots this was vital to ensure a smooth shot
• Therefore we had to improvise by creating our own track & dolly, we did this by using a rectangular plank of wood at about 1.5 meters and a skateboard, the plank allowed the skateboard to track across smoothly preventing any bumps that would have been caused by the ground

 

• This type of improvising occurs even in the real film world for example (Monsters, Edwards, 2010) used cushions and pillows as a tripod in the car to steady shots
• We tried to use visual effects on adobe premier elements like strobe light, brightness and contrast, we made a series of separate titles and moved them around by playing with the motion scale and position of the titles to create active titles that moved around the screen like (Se7en, Fincher, 1995)
• Our production process could compare to some real life productions in the fact that many of our shots took many takes and trial and error to execute, we considered locations carefully and mise en scene and costume to add verisimilitude and we also thought very carefully about the correct soundtrack and characters to play individual roles in our film opening
• I have learnt a lot about how effective technology is as a whole and also film productions dependence on it.
• For our post-production we used Premiere Elements to combine together all of our footage, from this we were able to edit and cut clips that were not neccessary, we found the interface user-friendly in that we could edit singular frames and cut precisely where we wanted which made our editing work much more efficient
• Uploading particular soundtracks that we found on (www.freesound.org) that we wanted onto Adoe Premiere Elements
  
  
  wasn't a problem with the ease of the interface, an advantage of using adobe premiere elements for our soundtrack was that we could incorporate multiple soundtracks and alter sound levels by simply dragging down the sound level of the particular soundtrack, this enabled us to have our primary soundtrack whilst layering other soundtracks on top but with a lower sound level, allowing us to create a soundtrack that fitted the genre of our film opening
• We also used Adobe Premiere Elements to export our clip, we exported our clip using a custom setting thus preventing the quality of our film opening being changing, the format we used to export was 720p at 59.9 fps in an MPEG format
• I have learnt how to edit clips on Adobe Premiere Elements 9.0 and how to use the same clip twice but put on in reverse so that to the audience they look like to separate clips
• I have learned about the effectiveness of primary research when developing a treatment or when wanting to receive feedback on ideas using surveys such as ‘surveymonkey’ to get constructive feedback from fellow friends,
• Also have experienced its ease of use to get the survey out to its audience and how it collects back the data in a simplistic way
• For a real film production its circumstances would differ, firstly they would have a much bigger budget, therefore being able to utilise professional post-production software such as Adobe CS 5.5 Production Premium, which allows editors to use software such as photoshop on clips
• Also for a real film production you would expect there to be a much larger team involving actors and other teams such as props and costume, furthermore due to the difference in feature length between our film and an actual film opening there would be different time scales for filming and in post production

HL:Question 3

• In the film industry there are two types of institutions, Industrial and Independent

• Industrial institutions mainly distribute tent pole films that are produced on ultra high budgets and target the audience of four quadrants, whereas independent films are produced on low budget with very little SFX and usually target a niche audience, our film is more suitable for the independent institution model

• Our core target audience would be males aged 15-24 as the genre for our film is horror/thriller
• I believe that our film would be more suitable to be distributed by an independent institution, this is due to the fact that our film opening is made on low budget and our core audience doesn’t target the four quadrants unlike most tent pole films
• It could be assumed that having our film distributed by an independent institution will mean that the success of our film will be limited due to lack of subsidiaries and partnerships that industrial institutions have the advantage of. However having said that films such as the SAW series are distributed by Lions Gate Entertainment a north American entertainment company have still managed to be successful enough to form a franchise
• In conclusion I have decided that our film would be suited to Lions Gate Entertainment distributing films such as (The Cabin in the Woods, Goddard, 2012)
• Our film would screen at multiplex cinemas as it is a conventional thriller/horror and would expect it to reach its target audience in the same way that the SAW series did and the likes of The Cabin in the Woods

• Due to our target audience being between aged 15-24 this age group are positive technological determinists and therefore we would expect our film to be marketed through viral marketing campaigns such a 'Facebook'. This would also be the most cost effective way for an independent institution to market a film whilst ensuring that the film reaches its target audience
• As our film is being distributed by an independent US institution we would expect our film to be exhibited at a film festival such as Sundance, Sundance is one of the largest film festivals in the US for independent films and it takes place annually
• With this we would expect our film to get exposure to its market and attract more audiences to go to the cinema and watch our film

MS: Production feedback

In today's lesson we received feedback from our exported roung cuts from our teacher. We had 2 hours to make changes to our productions that we had previously exported to allow our teacher to Analise them and provide us with constructive feed back on how we could improve our productions.