Final Film

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Evaluation question 4

Media eva 4

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Evaluation question 3

Audience feedback

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Evaluation question 2

A2 media evaluation question 2

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At the top is our media product with our two ancillary products below which are a radio trailer and an advertisement poster, as you can see I have kept our main product not linked to our ancillary products shown above, this is because I feel that the effectiveness of our ancillary products combined with our main product is only partially effective. This is because our product “Two Steps Behind” is a suspense film about someone who is feeling fear as they are being followed. I believe that our ancillary products only work well with the plot of our film, because they show some elements of suspense. For example in the radio trailer footsteps are played in the background, so it gives the audience a sense that someone is being followed by foot, also on the poster we deliberately used an over the shoulder shot, as most of our film uses these shots and emphasises someone being watched.

However our ancillary products are not effective with our main product, because when you look at our poster and hear our radio trailer portrays the film as a dark, scary and threatening; however our product is not like this as it is filmed in broad daylight. We discussed this in our “behind the scenes” post explaining that we do not have the effects and abilities major camera crews have, because we tried to film in the dark but it was difficult for us to see. As our film genre is suspense it does not necessarily mean that our film had to be dark, because the whole point of suspense is creating feelings of uncertainty and anxiety, which we did by creating a stalker film. However our ancillary products made it seem, that our film was a horror instead of suspense. This is because our poster is dark and menacing so when we asked people they thought our film would be shot in the dark and was surprised that it was filmed in the daytime. Our radio trailer also made people expect our film to be different to how it was portrayed as the background music is scarier then suspenseful.

Evaluation question 1

I do believe that my media product develop the codes and conventions of short films, as when I have researched short films the codes and conventions are:

Short films usually only have one or two main characters: My product only has two main actors through out the whole film, we kept this convention as we felt wanted to keep our film simple so our audience would be able to understand it.

Short films usually last 1-5 minutes: My media product 4 minutes 23 seconds, so we do not challenge, We found it a struggle to gain the extra seconds as we are so new and inexpereienced with creating our own short film.

Short films always have a twist in the end: My product shows that it meets the codes and conventions, as when our main actor opens the wallet he discovers that it is empty which the audience was not expecting, we did this as we wanted to leave the audience wanting to know more.

Not much dialogue in short films: We kept this convention, as when we were planning our film our teachers emphasised the importance of minimsing dialogue, as we are being assessed on our range of camera skills, not the actual plot in our film.

Voice overs are highly used in short films: My media product challenged this convention, as we wanted to make it seem urban that it why we used urban background music, however a voice over could have been used in our product.

Editing 3

We showed our teachers how far we have gotten on our film and them seemed quite impressed that we have almost finished and didnt let our disruptions hold us back. They said that they wanted us to make our film more longer and to try and experiment with the music, for example speeding it up or slowing it down. We were also told that our walking scenes when on for too long and we need to add more cuts to increase suspense.

So today we were just looking at our left over footage and seeing if we could put more time and suspense in our film. We used slow motion in our film to show that our main actor dropped his wallet previously in the film, this helped us gain some extra length.

We also asked some people to watch our film and they replied with the following:

Taneshia: It's really good, I love the ending, it was really funny.
Daniel: The music at the beginning makes it seem like the film is going to be humorous
Asher: The change of music midway works really well because it makes the film seem casual at first, but as the tension builds and the other music kicks in, it makes you wonder what is going to happen next creating suspense.

When I look at my film I agree that my film does have some comedic value to it, but as I've been researching some suspense films, I've seen that they also incorporate some comedy, typically towards the end when the twist is revealed, so I don't feel to bad that people may find my film as funny, here are some examples below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALGA6UclVd

"@ReinspiredFilms Hahahahaha Hilarious... nice camera, definitley been looking into purchasing this camera... is it easy to operate?
OnyxCMB 6 months ago

ahahahahhaha i was super confused at first but this was really funny!! and the guy that stole the bag is hot!! (:
KelseaTee 6 months ago"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxGWvhqvWpk
'hahahaha that was legit :) your hilarious'

Progression from AS to A2

There is a major difference between the technology used from AS to A2, this year I have found the technology more complex and requires more planning then when I needed in AS, This is because in AS I did a music magazine so the main equipment needed was a digital camera and a school computer, which had Adobe indesign, also I was working individually so I did not need to have production meetings, audience research was very important.

However in A2 I am creating a short film this was more time consuming as I had to plan when I wanted to shoot, the weather played an important part of our film, because I had to film on multiple occasion where as with AS I only needed to take pictures which were done inside so the weather was not important.

Behind the scenes

Editing 2

Today we left school at 6:30, as our dealine is comming soon so we are trying to finish off our film. We have got all the footage we need, we just spent most of the time trying to put our footage in order, and croping. Our film looks ok at the moment, however it is a bit short as it is only 3 minutes and 40 seconds long, so we need to play around with more clips and to try and drag the film out. We have already planned to put in some effects such as slow motion putting more cuts in our film, I think this will help us make our film longer as well as creating more suspense.

Editing is probably the most difficult part for whilst producing this coursework, but the more I am on the macs the more familiar I feel I am with final cut.

Changes made due to audience

As you've seen from my recent posts my group has been given a lot of good advice of how to improve our film, how to make it longer and add more suspense into our film, and we have decided to use these suggestions. I feel like todays been productive as we've done a few changes, such as editing the colour settings on our flashback scene to black and white, so now when you watch our film its shown in a sophisticated way that the time settings are different.

Today we went back to our main location to film close up shots of our actors feet as they were walking and running, and we asked them to deliberatly make loud footsteps so we could capture the sound on our camera, which we will use in our film.

After this we filmed we tried to film some close up shots, and more fast pace quick camera movements. We tried to run with the camera, however it was not what we expected. We thought we could simply run with the camera and get the shots we needed, but the footage was really shaky or aim was wrong. We were thinking about giving up however we found a little trolley what you use to lift boxes in our group members house, so we decided that I should get on that and someone should reel me around while I'm filming on a flip camera.

Improvising for close ups and fast pace

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Class watching our first draft

Teacher's constructive criticism

More filming and editing

Filming in our new location

New actors

This is an image of the new guy that is going to replace Jevan so he will be our main actor "Scott" who is getting followed, he's called Daniel. We have chosen him as you can see that his hair will not change like Jevan's since it is short.


This is sam, he will be playing the youth that is following Scott to return his wallet, we are using him because he was willing to help out and he's reassured us that he will keep his image the same for our filming.

New location pictures

Group discussion

On the left is a picture of our main actors hairstyle during the filming and on the right is our main actors new hairstyle that has changed the continuity in our film, which is caused us to change our actor:

Editing and filming in the park

We attempted to edit some of the film in our media lesson, its going good so far. We are excited editing our footage. because its something we have created ourselves. We have selected the clips of Jevan walking down the road using different angles and putting cuts and transitions. This footage has come up to about 40 seconds.

After we finished editing the footage we had, the next lesson we decided to go to the park near our school and was supervised with a member of staff, we started to film our actors entering the park entrance using different ranges of shots, as we got further through the park we shot the scene of when our main actor Scott walks past a random person and receives a menacing look, this triggers of the flash back which we will join together when we go back to editing. Below are images of our park location.

Filming around the side gate

Our group decided to change the location of where our film was set, in the treatment it says our film would be filmed around Sydenham. However, because the cameras delayed comming, the teachers say that we could only film outside the school premise with a member of staff, due to the risk of the cameras being damaged or robbed. This is why we decided to film right near our school, this would make it a lot easier for us as we would be able to film during our free periods and media lessons.

We was able to schedule our actor, Jevan, in for a few days in the next two weeks. Our other actor is a member of the group so we didn't need to schedule him into our filming schedule. We got a camera from school and went to the sidegate of our school, to the bus stop with our actors. We wasn't able to borrow a tripod today as they was all taken, so we practiced our steady hand skills before filming. We filmed about 10 mins footage. although we only intended for this scene to take up about a minute and half of the actual film. This scene involved Jevan walking down towards the park, and Ainsley picking up the wallet he dropped. We didn't have as much time today as our actor was busy so that's all we got done.

We filmed the flashback scene on a different day. We filmed this close to the front gate of our school. This scene involved Jevan being robbed, at a different time to when the actual film is set. We made use of over the shoulder shots, close ups and mid shots in this scene. This scene will only last about 15-30 seconds in the actual film.



We went back to the side gate, later on the same day as the flashback scene filming. We started filming the rest of that scene that we did finish. This part involved Jevan into the park and getting quite far until the part where he actually notices he is being followed. We made use of the environment to get some interesting shots, such as high angle shots, and shots in between trees which made the scenes seem much more suspense fitting.

Learning how to edit

In lesson Mr sleeth came and taught us how to use final cut express on the macs, this is the software we will be using to edit our film. We took us through the basics of how to open a file, we put up some sports day clips that were already saved onto the macs and started editing, we got taught the different command keys, how to cut and delete parts of the clip. We also looked at the timeline on the screen and went through all of the transitions to give us rough ideas what we would like to use in our film