OUR FINAL FILM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4u5kikw5Bw

Here is the link to the final our final film opening on youtube!

Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge form and conventions of real media product?
As part of researching real media product that’s excising at the moment we looked at many different horrors film openings to understand the conventions that are used at the moment. We found that the most common occurrence in horror film openings are the girl plays the victim as women are more venerable to men, we incorporated this into our horror film by having the victims played by two young girls, who are also younger in age than the “baddie” which makes the audience feel more on edge as your feel the need to help the victims in the film. We also found the use of blood and dark scenes were commonly used throughout real media horror films, this kind of convention makes the audience feel on edge as many people find being left in the dark uncomfortable and the slight of blood represents danger and crime, so we developed this aspect of horror conventions by filming our film mainly in a dark areas with no windows which we also developed as there is no way out making the victims seem more venerable, so our choice of setting was developed from watching other horror films set in dark secluded areas. We also used a bloody knife after Gwen went missing but this added mystery to our film as the audience do not know what happened to Gwen therefore from this start to think up different scenarios in their heads adding to the tension. An added convention we used that is most horror films was a grave yard we thought this would be a nice added touch to add to the film as it makes the audience feel uneasy as grave yards are a scary place. So by looking at different horror films we used aspects of these films to develop our film to make it as scary as the real media films.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Like I said in the first question we found that a particular aspect used in horror films would be the women are used as the victims and the male is mostly shown to be the criminal, so we used this in our film to represent this kind of convention as we wanted to make our film as scary as possible making the victims looking as venerable as can be and the baddie in control. To develop this aspect we used two young girls (rosy and Gwen) we made sure that we used girls that were younger than the criminal as this makes the victims seem more venerable, we also wanted to have two victims as this makes the criminal seem more powerful as he is able to have control of two people by himself. We made the characterisation of the two girls different, rosy was the more confident girl who wasn’t afraid, usually in horror films this person is able to make it to the end and we wanted to include this in our film so the audience feel like the story will go on, and Gwen was the more venerable girl which usually gets killed off early, but then the audience create an attachment as feel sorry for them.

What kind of media institution might distribute to your media product and why?
The kind of media institute that I think would be interested in our film would be hammer film products, this kind of Film Company would be interested in our film as they specialise in horror films. By having a company like hammer films producing our film there would be many adverting opportunities as they have many years’ experience therefore they will have many contacts in the media to get public relations, hammer films also have been able to build a large audience as they are a specialised film company that produce horror films so horror film lovers will be looking at their up and coming films. We made our own film institute to go at the being of our film opening to make it look more professional but we also made our film institute specialised horror naming it fearsome films.
I also looked at Pixar on my journey to creating our final movie opening, this kind of company would not be relevant too our movie as they are an animation company that aim their films a younger children and this would not be suitable to our film at all.

Who would the audience be for your media product?
We decided to aim our film at teenagers ages 15- 25 (ABC1), we decided this age would be best suitable for our film as we have included younger people, this age group in the film. Being teenagers ourselves we understand what we would be attracted to in a horror film, so understanding this we would be able to reach this target audience better meeting their wants and needs as we have the same needs as they would do being teenagers. from a financial side of things we realised that this would be the best age group to aim our film at as this is the age group that mostly go to the cinema, during the revision many people do not have the money to spend on entertainment, and we considered this when choosing our age group, but knowing ourselves that we go to the cinema on a regular basis that the best money to be had and the age group likely to go to the cinema more often would be the 15-25 age group. I believe that during our film we did reach audiences as I have explained in the evaluation of the feedback I got from teenagers in this age group.

What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Throughout this whole process I personally have gone through a lot of ups and downs with the technological processes we have come across.
Starting off with our preliminary task, we used a flip camera that was very useful and straight forward to use, but when we came to the editing process, we found it quite hard to understand this new kind of technology that we had never used before(final cut express), so we resorted to using the windows movie maker, I put together all the clips and created different effects in between the clips to make the film look smooth and effective, although this came out good and I was pleased with the outcome I know that using the final cut express would have created a better preliminary task for us, but I am glad that I done this cause then i had experience with two different editing processes to decided what one was the best for me. Another technical difficulty i came across was when I was filming the original begging part with tom and his daughter and wife, the clips came up really dark as I couldn’t provide enough lighting so we ended up not using the clips, but this turned out for the best as our end result/idea I was happy with.

When we was filming the clips for the final video we found that the clips also came up dark and this became as massive issue as when we put them together quite a lot of the scene was dark and it wasn’t clear to the audience what was going on, so we had to reshoot the the clips down in the basement, this time we put on a light from another room in the basement which gave us the right amount of light and the clips looked better when put together with the rest of the shoot. When editing the final piece we found ourselves using lots of techniques that we beneficially to the final product which I am pleased with, we used sound in a really effective way and inputting this into the editing process proved to be difficult and actually choosing the right sounds was hard but we managed it and I think the sound is a huge strength to our film. Overall I am most proud of how we overcome problems and sorted them out efficiently and quickly, along with the sound we chose and in what parts we put this into the film, we spent a lot of time making sure the sound entered and exited at the right time and I am most pleased with our efforts of this.

Looking back at your preliminary task what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
looking back at the preliminary task I believe that we have learnt a tremendous amount and we have come on so much from then, especially if you look back on our final cut edit of the preliminary task to the final cut edit of the final film. We actually didn’t use anything from the preliminary task apart from some of the camera angles as camera angles like the 180 degree rule were important, and tracking shots were essential in our final film. Our preliminary task was really basic with no props no real costumes and using a basic non HD camera, so the quality was different and also we didn’t use any kinds of music in the preliminary as at that point we didn’t know how to do so. So then when you look at the final film I believe we have come on so much as we have learned so many new thing different techniques, we have also learned how to organise a film opening, so organising where to shot it, making sure the site is available and clear, making sure everyone was available at the time and day when the shooting was going to take place and also decided on any props, these were all essential things that I think we managed to do very well in the final film. I am please at how we all worked very hard as a team together all bringing our different strengths to the project to bring out the best of our media product, I am really happy with the end product, and pleased with how I personally have come along in this task from editing in windows movie maker and shooting in school to organising a better venue and editing in final cut.

evaluation of my feedback

questions asked:

did you find the opening of the horror film effective if yes why?
which features of the horror film did you find most effective?
which parts do you think could be improved and why?
did the opening make you want you to watch the rest of the film?
did you find the opening of the film scary?

i chose to ask these questions as i thought these would give me the best answers to understanding if our horror film opening would be a success or not, and if not why!

from listening what they had to say i am very happy with the feedback, nearly everybody said that the music was really effective and one of the strongest part of our part film and was the most effective part giving off scary vibes, which we was trying to create.
i asked them what they thought could be improved, i think this was the most important question as then we would have a better idea of what to do if we were to do this project again, people said that some of the sound cuts could have been better and that we should have used shorter clips, i agree with this as then it would have created a feel of urgency, one person also said one of the shots where Gwen disappeared. to improve for next time i think spending more time on the editing on the less crucial parts will be better and improve the film.
overall i am really happy from the feed back as everyone said the opening made them want to carry on watching the film, so we must have done a good job!





editing day 4

                                              

we chose this as our final logo for our film opening, by looking at many different logos that are in the film making industry at the moment we noticed the most popular style is a basic bold look that will capture they viewers eye.

we chose this as our final logo as we think it meets the criteria of a good logo, it looks professional and classy but goes with the genre of horror and the name we thought was highly appropriate the genre as well.

so we adds this to the beginning of our film.

effects

we then went on to edit the effects using final cut express.

we decided that to create the best effects for our film using sound it would be appropriate to have the music dissolve into each other instead of straight cut music that would look messy, by dissolving the music into each other and having the music so it slowly gets quiet or slowly gets more intense this would make the editing of the sound more professional, and nicer to listen to.

when adding this effect into our film we did this -
For example we used it right at the beginning of the film opening between the change of music from the church bells to the music box this worked well as it softened the music change up so it was unnoticeable.

(fade out dissolve effect)

Another effect we used was the slow down or speed up tool

this was effective as this type of effect adds to the tension of the scene and we thought it would be useful to add into our film opening as we wanted to create as much tension as possible.
we simply did this by changing the amount of time the clip is shown by, increasing or decreasing the number already given.

we used this quite a lot throughout put movie opening, but the most effective part was when tom was walking towards the building and he turned his head back towards the grave yard, we slowed this but back down as it created tension and built up the atmosphere of the scene.

also an effect that was important to our movie opening was adding text. we did this by clicking on the text tool and simply adding the text, we changed the font and the colour of the text appropriate to the clip on the screen at the time so it stood out to the audience.

WE HAVE FINISHED OUR EDITING

editing day 3

editing

today we started to add captions at the point in the movie opening where tom is walking down from the grave yard to the building, we decided to add the here as it is the first part of the film opening where there is no dialogue and where the chilling music box music is being played.

we used our own names at the beginning of the film and put the roles we played in the making of the film

"Filmed by mia goodley"

"Staring gwen caple
rosy vega
tom white"

music/ sound

today we also started to add sound into our film opening.

i believe that in a horror film sound is extremely crucial as this build the tension and gets people on the edge of their seats, if i am getting to scared watching a horror film i will turn the sound off to make the scene less scary, so from my personal experiences i believe that sound has a huge role to play in the horror film genre to get the audience really scared.

so we started adding the music in the parts we wanted to come across most scary, we used strong eerie music that is clear but chilling at the same time and we also chose to use a music box at the beginning of the film, again i believe that also having music related to children creates a better and more scary atmosphere, also as our film is about a man whose lost his child this was really relevant to our film and we decided that we would use it as an iconic piece throughout our film, starting by using it as he is walking away from his child grave.

we found our sounds from a website called free sounds  http://www.freesounds.org/ . 

refilming our movie opening

we decided after our last editing session and from looking over all of the clips that we defiantly needed to re film some more video clips, to make sure that it was viewable to the audience and they could see everything that was going on, we also changed the idea of our film to make it make more sense at the end and to give it a more gripping story that the audience that will make them want to carry on watching.


our final idea - we have kept all of the begging bit of our film all the same: tom at the grave yard, rosy and Gwen talking then knocking on the door for what they have known to be a experiment where they will be taking part in a medical experiment for what they think is £1000 (but you wouldn't find this out until later in the film) we have kept rosy and Gwen walking down the stairs and tom locking the door all the same, then this is where it changes, we have changed it to when tom turns off the lights and gwen and rosy are in the darkness, gwen disappears and rosy is left alone, the lights come back on and rosy then realises gwen is not there tom comes down the stairs and informs rosy that gwen is having her interview rosy believes him and goes upstairs, the next shot is of rosy finding a knife with blood on and she throws it down she then discovers photos of her mother and hr sister and herself, she finds this weird and she is confused to why he has pictures of her and her family, tom then asks rosy if she is ready for her interview, she reply then goes back down stairs, the next shot is of rosy discovering Gwen tied up which we had filmed previously, rosy screams and continues to cry, we then decided this is where the name of the film will come up and that is the end of our film opening.




for the filming today i filmed the clips using the flip cam and rosy gwen and tom stared in the film.
so today when filming we filmed:

• the lights turning off then back to when rosy realises that gwen is no longer next to her in the basement
• tom asking rosy to wait upstairs while gwen is being interviewed
• rosy finding the pictures of her mother and sister along with a knife with blood on
• rosy walking down the stairs waiting for her interview
• rosy finding gwen

shots used during the filming today

• over the shoulder
• point of view
• pan out
• close up
• extreme close up

props used fr the filming today

The coat Tom wears

The knife Rosy finds

The photos Rosy finds of herself,
Mum and sister.

The fake blood we used on the knife..







editing day 2

During this editing time we put the first part of our film opening together, we decided we would defiantly use our back up plan which was of tom looking at two grave stones and walking through the graveyard to the place where the story was going to be set (the basement).

we all contributed in starting to re understand how to use the final cut express program, and we are happy with the result we have come out with, now we have had some practise on the software we found it easier to edit the clips together into one, using the crop tool mainly to get the sections of the clips that we wanted.

we are happy with the result and the moment and we hope to continue with the same understand and learning things along the way while editing and putting together our horror film opening.