Monday 12 March 2012

Evaluation plans

For our evaluation, we are going to do all the questions as a team as there are only two of us, meaning there is little point dividing up the questions.




How does your media product represent particular social groups?

To answer this question, we are planning to take screen shots of a conversation on Facebook about the representation of groups in our film. This relates directly to the question as it is a social networking site and form of social media, while it also reflects the main group that was represented in our film – young people, who are also the demographic due to the genre of horror, Western and comedy combined.



What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

We will film ourselves writing the answer on various pieces of paper and then speed the video up. We can also draw pictures to make the answers we give more visual and engaging, which will help us to get across our answers.



Who would be the audience for your media product?

For this question we will film ourselves presenting our answer (maybe a fake audience using sound effects to relate to the question). This will allows us to clearly give our answer and explanation using the planning stages of our project and who it was originally intended for.



How did you attract / address your audience?

We will create posters with an explanation of methods used in the making of our film opening to attract the attention of a teenage audience, especially in relation to the genres we chose to work with. We will then film ourselves stapling the posters to walls in various places, to reflect the engagement of the audience in the question.



What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

We will make a Prezi presentation online explaining our answer. Prezi is an example of one of the kinds of social media that we used in making and developing our film opening, making this answer like some sort of Prezi based Inception. Prezinception, if you will. I won’t.



Looking back at your Preliminary Task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Similarly to the genre convention question, we explain our answer in a voice over of a video. However, instead of film clips we will edit together clips of our preliminary task and our actual film opening so we can clearly display which areas we improved on and how the preliminary task helped us to develop our skills and ideas.

Sunday 11 March 2012

New draft of film opening



This is the new draft of our film opening, combining old footage and new footage as influenced by our stop motion practice.

More filming and editing

Though it was not ideal filming and editing so close to the deadline, on Friday 2nd March we gathered at the house of one of our new actors to film the new half of our storyline that we planned to incorporate into the old footage saved from Youtube, as her younger brother had agreed to be a part in the film.
After setting up the Lego, including a small house and the tiny posters we had made for the previous stop motion experiments to enhance the mise-en-scene, we finished filming successfully.

On Sunday 4th March we edited the footage. This was difficult to do, as we had to download the first draft from Youtube and integrate it with the new footage, meaning we had to mute the original audio track as it was split up to fit in new footage and audio. This involved recreating the soundtrack we had made out of a mixture of music from scores of other films, dialogue from our film opening and sound effects (both downloaded from the internet and created by us).

The stop motion experimentation had definitely been useful in helping us to film the Lego Bro plays with in an interesting way. We tried to film the stop motion material in a similar way to how we would film the same events in live action, in a cinematic manner, a method which we transferred to the new filming. The Lego mise-en-scene we previously created for the stop motion was also useful, especially due to the limited time we were working with.

New storyboard

For the new version of our film opening, we created a new storyboard. We developed it from the storyboard used for our first opening but also incorporated the new aspects of the story (the boy's game of Lego reflecting the original story).

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Another update

We have decided not to continue with the Lego stop motion idea. Instead, we will return to live action filming but incorporate a child playing with Lego to foreshadow the films eventual outcome. We chose to abandon the stopmotion technique because the result was not of the quality we had hoped for and it was taking a long time to complete.

However, we liked the idea of incorporating an aspect of childlike media into our film opening as it can be juxtaposed greatly with the horror and zombie theme. From this we developed our idea of playing out the original story with Lego, to a child's game of Lego reflecting the 'reality' of the live action elements of our first draft.

We are trying to find a child to play the part, and we plan to film on Friday 2nd and edit on Sunday 4th.