Media A2 Analysis - Short Film

7
A2 Media Studies Robert Gough Evaluation

Transcript of Media A2 Analysis - Short Film

Page 1: Media A2 Analysis - Short Film

A2 Media Studies

Robert Gough

Evaluation

Page 2: Media A2 Analysis - Short Film

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge

forms and conventions of real media products?

In the film the use of fast jump cuts allow the appearance on the mystical being B.A.S.E. to appear to be

moving around the scene to aid or scare the other characters.

When shooting the office scene we used a multi camera set-up, allow us to both give a sense of

conversation as well as a wider shot of the speaker, this challenges many films in the genre as this type of

conversation would use reverse shots in mainstream films.

When cutting to dream/remembering sequences an electronic fuzz sound was used to emphasise the cut

and make it sound more aggressive, this is a trope of the industry and seen on many feature length and

short films.

The film was shown in black and white this conforms to industry conventions, in terms of a horror film.

Using a red, black and white filter has connotations of the ‘spooky’ theme. Therefore the filters that we

used in our film follows the forms and conventions of a horror genre film.

The music used in the film tension building as used in nearly all films in the horror/thriller genre. The

music used is almost a trope of the movie soundtrack arena for horror/thrillers it has a quiet, building,

bassy tones with quick changing elements of sound .

My poster challenges conventions of the genre of horror movie poster, having both protagonist and

antagonist together as the main features of the poster.

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How effective is the combination of your main and ancillary texts?

My ancillary text was a poster, I had originally hoped to take forward a

dual poster campaign similar to the dark knight system of original and the

joker edited versions of the posters. My posters were reversals of each

other highlighting the differences between the good and the evil in the

characters, despite this I took considered feedback and reduced the

posters to a single venture (The final piece is on the top, alternative piece

is the lower left picture)

I have taken inspiration for my poster from other thrillers such as the

recent Star Trek films (lower right). This is however, challenging horror

film tropes.

The primary colours used on the poster is black and red the same at the

film its self, I have also incorporated the same font for the title as it is in

the film itself.

I have the main characters in costume they wear in the film. I have

B.A.S.E. stood behind Brian looking over his shoulder very much how he

is presented in the film, this combined with the phrase on the poster

‘Haunting You On 25.3.14’. These two factor tell the audience that it is a

horror, thriller or something tied to those genres

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For my double page spread I have taken conventions

from Empire’s magazine article for the film ‘Duplicity’.

There are numerous concepts I have taken from this

piece to form to the conventions of modern articles

Firstly the top and bottom banners, although only on

the top in duplicity have have done them on both sides

of the page as I feel I holds the viewers eyes into the

main article

I have both of the main characters in the side of the

article in duplicity they are spilt whereas in my article

they are together, similar to my poster to add cohesion

between the ancillary pieces

Also, I have the multiple images around the page of

behind the scenes with captions added, in a similar

format to duplicity.

Some features I have included the were not inspired

duplicity and example of this is the little fact file

containing, Running time, Cast and Certificate. I have

however, seen this in other peer work were it appears

to be effective

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What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Using quantified data, I was able to deduce where the weak parts of the film were and that gave us stimulus

and a direction to go onto address them.

We can see that the sound on our rough cut was the weakest, with many pinning the blame on the office

scene which we went on to balance the voice levels. As many people found the Professors voice was a

substantially higher volume than Brian's

When conducting this research I decided to use a questionnaire format opposed to video interviews, as

the data is more useable and can help my team go further.

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How did you use media technologies in the construction

and research, planning and evaluation stages For the planning stages such as storyboarding, I used the 500 year old media technology the pencil, as it

allows me to easy show my ideas for set design and character direction, although there are computerised

drawing technologies such as Google Sketch up and 2D Design, none of them allow the user to be as

creatively boundless as pencil and paper.

When filming we used digital Camcorders For the filming as they have the features we require such as large

removable storage and a large zoom. We used different cameras for different shooting days, we gained

footage in different qualities , file formats and frame rates for instance we have got 576p 25 FPS in .MOD

format along side 1080p 25 FPS in .MTS. This results in not only obvious differences in film quality and

aspect ratio, but also issues with editing where we had to convert the file formats to .mp4 to suite our

editing software which took up swathes of our time.

For editing we used the Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 which very successfully handled our video once we had

converted it.

The first time we shot the office scene we used a boom microphone and external recorders, to edit the

sound we used Audacity a audio editing software with a wide range of features. We re-shot the scene in the

end without the boom and recorders due to issues with the sound on the first attempt and it didn’t seem to

have that many advantages in terms of sound quality over the built in recorders in the cameras.

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How did you use media technologies in the construction

and research, planning and evaluation stages continued

For the posters I made initial drawings on paper for the same reasons as I did the storyboards on paper.

I shoot stills on my Canon Powershot SX160 compact camera as it has a high enough resolution and enough

zoom for the distance I was looking to have my subjects away.

I used mainly two programs being Adobe Photoshop CS3 & CS6 and Microsoft Paint. Photoshop for its

ability to manipulate photographs, in terms of cutting and colour editing. I used paint as a canvas to move

and place images before doing advanced editing in Photoshop.

For my double page spread I wrote the article on Microsoft Word and then transferred the text in Adobe

InDesign CS6 & CC to arrange the images, text and titles.

I have also used imgur.com to host my pictures and youtube.com to host my video

(For album of pictures and screenshots: http://imgur.com/gallery/SsPsP/new)