MiraJax Best Be Believing Music Video

MiraJax Best Be Believing Music Video:

MiraJax- Best Be Believing

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Wednesday 30 March 2016

Evaluation Post 1: In what was does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media projects?

Our film, titled 'Follow' is about an 18 year old girl called Grace who is stalking another 18 year old girl called Ella. Grace finds out at the beginning that Ella has recently started dating Grace's ex boyfriend and therefore becomes obsessed with Ella. Throughout the movie she stalks Ella and attempts several times to kill her before eventually Ella fights back and Grace does not succeed.

The main genre we chose for our film opening sequence was Psychological Thriller, with the secondary genres being Horror and teen Drama.


Narrative Theory


An example of a movie which also follows Todorov's narrative theory is 'Single White Female'. 
  • Equilibrium- Protagonist Allie is looking for a new room mate and decides on a girl called Hedy
  • Disruption- When Allie decides to get back with her ex-boyfriend Hedy become extremely jealous and starts doing weird things in order to prevent them from getting back together. Hedy also changes her appearance to look exactly like Allie. She eventually murders Allies boyfriend
  • Resolution- After a fight between the two girls Allie wins and kills Hedy.
  • New Equilibrium- Allie continues her life without Hedy. 
Claude Levi-Strauss looked at narrative structure in terms of binary opposites. This theory helped us when making our character choices. 

  • Grace- Stalker 
  • Ella- Stalkee
Our two characters follow the typical Good and Evil characters and are therefore binary opposites.

A theory that we decided to include a lot in our opening sequence was Roland Barthes five codes, specifically the Enigma Code:
Enigma codes pose questions to the audience which are then answered shortly after or later on in the film. For example, who is she? Where is she going? Why is she doing that? They're questions enabling the audience to get intrigued with the film and wanting to find out the answers to these questions, therefore watching more of it.

  • Our first enigma code occurs when Grace rejects her friends offer to meet up that day, this makes the audience ask why she doesn't want to see her friends.


  • Questions are also raised in the audiences mind when Grace scribbles out a photo of Ella's face as they wonder why she is angry. 

  • The main enigma code featured in our opening sequence is the knife. This raises lots of questions in the audience's mind about what Grace is going to do with the knife and these questions will be answered later on in the film. 



One of the main ways a film connotes its genre is through its choices in style, this includes
  • titles
  • editing style
  • choices in the framing of shots
For our titles we decided to use a digital clock-style font and have the titles appear as if they are being typed on the screen. We did this to connote the social media and online theme that is a main theme in our movie. We got inspiration for this from the titles for the movie 'Unfriended' as it is a horror/thriller movie that also has social media as a main theme. Our titles follow the conventions of psychological thrillers as they help to connote the genre well. 


The titles from 'Unfriended':


An example of our titles:













A convention of psychological thrillers that I found, was that they generally start of with slow paced editing which means the storyline also begins quite slowly with nothing too dramatic happening within the first few minutes of the movie.
This is seen in the opening of the movie 'The Gift' where little of what to come in the rest of the movie is given away and the editing style is also slow.
We challenged this convention by having quite a dramatic opening sequence with a fast editing pace to reflect the fact that Grace is rushing to get ready.
For example we cut this shot up several times to create a fast paced, choppy style which conveys to the audience the fact that Grace is in a rush to get ready.



Tuesday 29 March 2016

Evaluation Post 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

As our opening sequence only featured in total three characters, the only social group we represented in our opening sequence was female teenagers. We represented female teenagers through our main character Grace who follows some typical stereotypes of female teenagers but also challenges some of the conventions the audience would expect.




Monday 28 March 2016

Evaluation Post 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media project and why?

Please navigate through the mind map I have created below about our production company. Use the zoom tools in the top left to zoom in and out.
We got inspiration for our production company from a similar company called White Lantern Films:

  • Independent British production company
  • Based in Bournemouth
  • Have produced several small budget Horror/Thriller films. 

Please watch the video I have created below about our distribution company. 


We used the film 'Unfriended's marketing campaign as a reference as it has a similar target audience to our film. They Unfriended marketing campaign focussed heavily on the use of social media:

  • 43.6k followers on twitter
  • 1.8m likes on Facebook

Sunday 27 March 2016

Evaluation Post 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Please see the Prezi I have created below all about the target audience we selected for our movie.

Saturday 26 March 2016

Evaluation Post 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

In order to attract our target audience we used the Uses and Gratifications theory. This approach focuses on why people use particular media rather than on content. The uses and gratifications theory states that people consume media for the four following reasons:

  1. Diversion/ Entertainment- escape from everyday problems, an emotional release.
  2. Personal Relationships/ Social Interaction
  3. Personal Identity
  4. Education
Please look at the mind map I have created below showing how we used the uses and gratifications theory:


Uses and Gratifications Theory in Our Opening Sequence by prudence carter phillips

We also aimed to attract our target audience of fans of Psychological thrillers by sticking to the conventions of the genre:

  • Props such as the knife which build suspense and questions in the audience's mind
  • Grace is the typical strange character who evidently has bad intentions
  • Atmospheric music which helps to build suspense
We also used continuity editing throughout our opening sequence such as match on actions between shots which increased the realism and plausibility in our film, this is attractive for the audience.

Audience Feedback
 During the production of our opening sequence we gathered feedback from a sample group of 8 people from within our target audience in order to find our if we were succesfully attracting our audience, and if not what we could do to improve this.
Our sample group included an equal number from both genders and a range of ages from within our 15-24 target audience age group. 
We asked our target audience to fill our a survey of feedback at two points in our production process:
  1. after our rough cut/test shoot
  2. after our final edit.
Below is a chart of the feedback results we received from the reaction to our rough edit:
This feedback was extremely useful to our group at this early stage in the process and allowed us to take a step back from the project and realise some big changed that needed to be made:
  • Improve our characterization, which we knew would be possible as we would be using our real, extremely talented, actor for the real shoot which would help with this problem a lot.
  • Get across the overall plot of the sequence more clearly, as from an outsiders perspective the plot was not as clear as we ourselves believed it to be. We planned to improve this by using a better location and we went back to our story boards and changed/added in new shots to make the plot clearer.
Our second set of feedback we received after our final edit was much more positive:
Looking at the difference between the two charts, we can clearly see that we managed to improve our sequence to eventually attract our target audience extremely well. The overall feedback after our final edit was 100% positive with every member of our sample group saying they would watch the whole film.




Friday 25 March 2016

Evaluation Post 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During the course of the project I have learn a lot about the use of technologies. At the beginning of the project I did not know how to use any of the technologies that we used to create our final product but by the end I was able to use them quickly and correctly.

Hardware
The hardware technology we used:

  • Cannon Legria HF G30
  • Tripod
  • iMac
Please see the table below all about my use of hardware technology throughout the project

Software
The software technology we used was:
  • Premiere Pro CS5.5
  • LiveType
Please see the table I have created below all about how I used the software technology:



Overall I found the biggest challenge to be able to use the editing software to create precise and accurate continuity edits, however after practicing this through the prelim task and the rough cut I feel that I am now confidently able to use Premiere Pro to create a continuity sequence. 










Tuesday 15 March 2016

Evaluation Post 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you fell you have learnt in the progression from it to the full project?

The preliminary task that we carried out at the beginning of the project helped me to develop my skills in creating a continuity sequence. I learn a lot from this process and this is the sequence my group created:

The Preliminary Task Brief
"Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule."
The Production Task Brief"To produce a 2 minute opening sequence for a fiction film. All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music and audio effects from a copyright-free source. It should be clear from your sequence who he target audience is."


There were some major differences between the two briefs which affected how long we spent on certain aspects of each task:

  • you are given much more detail in the preliminary task brief as to what your sequence should contain, which allows you to be a lot less creative than in the film brief which gives you lots of creative freedom. 
  •  you are given specific techniques to include in the prelim brief but not in the film brief.
  • the film brief focuses on audience whereas the preliminary brief does not
Our initial approach to the prelim task was that we were very focused on producing a technically perfect sequence and were concentrating a lot on our continuity editing and camera skills. We went into the film task, however, focusing a lot more on the creative side to the production and thinking more about our audience and the style of film we wanted to create. We were only able to do this, however, as we had already improved our technical skills in the preliminary task. 

Pre-Production

The pre-production and planning process for each of the two tasks had both similarities and differences. In a way the planning we carried out for the preliminary task was the same as the planning for the real film task but just to a much smaller scale. Please see the table below of all the documents we created during pre production for each tast:
As you can see we planned a lot more during the film task. We created a lot more documents that we didn't for the preliminary task and these documents were much more detailed and useful to us when moving onto production. We learn from planning the preliminary task the importance of detailed and careful planning which can make a production task a lot more easy and successful. We therefore planned our real task with the correct level of precision and detail we needed for it to run smoothly.

Production
The production process for each task was quite different. In the preliminary task we:
  • had limited location space as we had to shoot in school
  • could only use actors within our group
  • had one lesson to complete the shoot
In the film task we:
  • could use any appropriate location to shoot off of the school site
  • could bring in any actors we required
  • had long weekend shoot sessions to shoot our sequence
We used the preliminary task as an opportunity to really perfect our continuity filming skills and therefore this allowed us to focus a lot more on our actors and creating the style of shots we wanted when carrying out our real shoot, as we already had the technical skills from carrying out the preliminary task.

Post Production
There were a few differences in the editing process between the two tasks as I have outlined below:

After the editing of the preliminary task we had learnt all the skills and techniques involved in continuity editing. We were then able to carry these skills over when editing our real sequence which made the task a lot easier.

Conclusion
Overall the preliminary task was a learning curve for me as it taught me things in all aspects of creating a media project:
  • pre production
  • production
  • post production
  • working as a team
  • evaluating
I believe it was the key to our success as a group in the production of our film task and helped us a lot to produce our end film opening sequence which we are all extremely proud of. 




Construction post 10: Looking back- reflections on our final outcome

Here is our finished opening sequence 

Overall I am very pleased with the final outcome of our film opening sequence. During the earlier stages of our project, around the test shoot, we encountered a lot of problems with our films story and found the test shoot and edit to be difficult, but we managed to work together as a team to turn our project around and have a very successful main shoot, back up shoot and final edit.

I think that our final product meets the terms of the brief and also successful connotes the thriller genre that we planned while also sticking to the conventions of a British low-budget movie. Our choice of location, props and our actress also all contributed to the overall success of our opening sequence.

Looking back, I would have spent more time developing our story line at the beginning of the project to prevent the problems that occurred after our test shoot and edit. By doing this I feel we could have spent more time focusing on shooting all of our shots to an extremely high standard and therefore make our end product look more professional. However I am overall very happy with our film opening sequence.

Construction Post 9: My technical learning curve

At the beginning of the project I feel that I did not realise the amount of planning that goes into a shoot. During the project I learnt how organised you need to be in order for a shoot to run smoothly, for example planning the shooting sessions extremely specifically by creating a call list:
During shooting sessions I learnt the importance of factoring in any potential continuity issues that may occur and making sure the framing of every shot was exactly as we had planned.

However I think that I have learnt the most during the editing sessions. Before the project I was able to do basic editing of shots in Premiere Pro but I now know how to do more advanced editing such as creating a split screen using key frames and using tools such as the razor tool. 

Construction Post 8: My personal contribution to the edit sessions

I personally contributed to editing by giving up almost all of my free time during the two edit weeks, this included free periods and after school and lunchtime sessions. Me and Ella edited together at all times as we wanted to agree on all of the editing decisions we were making. However to speed up the process we split the tasks and each completed some of the tasks that we were best at. For example I focused on editing the music to fit the sequence and editing the split screen using key frames, whereas Ella focused on creating the specific titles using the Mac and grading the shots on Premiere Pro. I think that I personally put in a lot of work towards the final edit and contributed to the overall success of our finished product.

Construction post 7: My personal contribution to the shoot sessions

As a group during shoot sessions we divided up the work load equally. Therefore I personally played a role in both directing the shots and actors and using the camera and framing shots. By doing this I was able to develop both my technical skills using the camera and my leadership skills by directing the shots.

Construction post 6: Reflections on edit week 2

Edit week two was more successful due to the decision we made to edit our sequence in pairs. Me and Ella worked well together and managed to meet the deadline and finish our final edit. We both focused on our individual skills during editing, for example Ella focused on grading while I focused on editing together the split screen at the beginning of our sequence.

The tasks we completed during the second edit week were:

  • Finishing the split screen edit with our new shots from the back up shoot
  • Adding in any new shots we had taken during the back up shoot
  • Adding in our final music and voice over
  • Created our final titles on LiveType and edited these in
  • Graded all of our shots
Throughout the final edit week we showed our sequence to members of our target audience who gave us feedback on some of our editing decisions in the titles. They said that they did not like the style of the original titles and so this lead us to change the style until we received positive feedback from our target audience group. 


Monday 14 March 2016

Construction post 5: The back-up shoot

After our first edit week, we reviewed our rough edit and made a list of shots that we needed to re-shoot in order to improve our sequence. We also planned a few new shots to improve the story line in our sequence. This shot list helped our back up shoot run smoothly.
Overall our back up shoot was extremely succesful despite some initial problems. The first problem we encountered was that we didn't have one of the bags that had features in a few shots in the main shoot, and this would have broken the continuity in our sequence. However we resolved this problem by finding a similar bag and using that. After this we managed to film the rest of our shots quickly and successfully.

Construction post 4: Reflections on edit Week 1

The first thing we did before beginning editing was to make an edit schedule. We agreed as a group to dedicate any free time we had to editing our project in order to finish creating a rough cut by the end of the week, this meant setting aside most of our free periods and several lunch time and after school sessions. We aimed to all be at as many of the sessions as possible so that we could make decisions as a group.

The things that we did during our edit week were:
  • organising and re-naming our shots
  • choosing the best takes for each shot
  • Editing the shots and putting them together on the timeline
  • editing our first split screen sequence
  • Selecting a new music track and adding this to the edit. We also had to edit the music slightly to fit our sequence better
  • Recording the voice over track and editing this into the sequence
  • Creating basic temporary titles
During the first editing week we found it quite difficult to work together as a group, as we found that we had opposing ideas when it came to how we should edit our sequence. However rather than let this cause problems within our group and make editing a hard task, we made the decision to split our group and create two separate edits of our sequence, one by me and Ella and one by Josh and Gabriel. This decision meant that we could get on with editing and the process became a lot quicker. Despite creating two separate edits, we still worked together as a team at points to select music and helped each other edit some scenes. 

At the end of edit week one we showed our sequence so far to our target audience who gave us some important feedback. They said that Grace's personality and the fact that she was extremely angry did not come across as much as it could have, and so this lead us to plan a new shot of Grace scribbling out a picture of Ella with more force that we will shoot during the backup shoot. 

Construction Post 3: Reflections on our Main Shoot Session

Our main shoot session was extremely successful, and following our less successful test shoot we came out of it feeling positive as a group. We worked much better as a team during the day and the new location made shooting a lot more successful. We were able to finish all of our shoot in a good time frame and without any major problems. Our actor was also extremely good and helped to make shooting quick and make our shots successful and come out the way we had imagined them during planning.

When reviewing our footage after our main shoot we found little problems with our shots, except a few minor continuity issues such as our actor wearing shoes in one shot and not in the next. We showed our footage to our teachers who helped us spot some of the continuity errors, and we also showed our shots to members of our target audience who all gave positive feedback about the shots so far. However these were all issues that we were able to easily resolve in our back up shoot the following week.


This is a picture of me filming during our main shoot.

Construction post 2: Our post production kit

When we began editing our footage during post-production we were allocated an edit suite at school with a dual-monitored computer with Adobe Premiere Pro set up on it. We also had access to a smaller room where we could record our voice over audio using a microphone. We also used a Macbook and LiveType to create the titles for out film. 

The specific kit we used for editing was:
  • Adobe Premiere Pro
  • LiveType (for creating titles)
  • Blue Yeti Microphone
  • Audacity (for recording non-diagetic sound)

This is a screenshot of our computer screen showing our Premiere Pro project as we were editing it. 

Construction Post 1: Our production kit

The kit that we used for our production consisted of:
  • Canon Legria HF G30 Camera
  •  Headphones
  • Tripod
  • Shotgun Microphone
  • Clapper board
Gabriel was left in charge of transporting the equipment as his house was our main location for filming. Before we were allowed to take any kit away with us we had to have out kit contracts signed and secondly have our shoot  authorised by our media teacher, Mrs. Blackborrow.
This is our equipment release form which ensured that we were safely transporting and using all of our equipment during our shoot sessions.