Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Final Film Opening

This is our final media opening. 

Our Actors

We used four actors for our film opening.

Eleanor Tar ( Genette Tate)















Millie Swales (teenage girl)
















Lissy Moore  (teenage girl)

















Matt Ross ( kidnapper)













We used Millie Lissy and Eleanor because they are about the same age as Genette and the teenage girls and are natural looking and we used Matt because although the kidnapper was a middle-aged man you don't see his face and so we thought that it would be ok to use a 16 year old. I feel like this may be a downfall in our filming but we had no other actors and using Matt helped us when it came to filming because when we needed him to film he was always available and we could all go after school to film.

How Our Film Is Different To Our Animatic

We made a few changes to our film from our original concept one of these being instead of doing a shot of Genette going past the White Horse directly we included it in the background of the shot where Genette picks up the newspapers at the bus stop. We changed this because of where the bus stop was and we didn't want our actress to cycle on the busy main road.

We also changed the last shot at the end which originally was supposed to be of a newspaper with an article of her on it to just a shot of the bike and newspapers with Genette nowhere insight. 

Audience Viewing Habits

I asked students at school what their favourite type of genre was out of the following.

Comedy
Thriller
Chick Flick
Horror
Action
Drama


Male
Comedy           3 people
Thriller             1 person
Rom Com        1 person
Horror              1 person
Action              1 person
Drama             
Sci Fi               1 person

Female
Comedy           2 people 
Thriller             1 person
Rom Com        2 people 
Horror              1 person
Action
Drama
Sci Fi

I also asked what they thought of films with the genre of Drama because are film is a Drama. This is what people said.

"I like them although the genre isn't my favourite I'd still go and watch it."

"They make me very emotional cause of the story lines"

"There are not many films in the category that have grabbed my attention"

"Pretty interesting"

"They are great"

"I enjoy watching it"

"Love it"

"Its good and intriguing"

"I enjoy watching drams if there are good characters you can connect with and lots of twists to the plot."

" I like the genre because its intense but also has good storytelling."

"I haven't seen that many but its looks good"

Our Distributor

We chose for our distributor to use Film4 because they are British digital television channel and we wanted a distributor from the United Kingdom. They have distributed films such as Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire and Four Weddings And A Funeral. All of these films have various genres to them but they all include the genre of drama and this is the genre of our film opening. 

Lighting Workshop

We had a lightning workshop at school that taught us how important lighting is in a film to convey a certain atmosphere or mood. Below is a some lighting techniques.

Low key lighting 
This type of lighting gives a shadowy effect to a scene in a film they are mostly used in horror and drama films. 

High key lighting 
This type of lighting is most commonly used in musicals and comedies emphasises happiness.

Back lighting 
This is the process of illuminating an object or character from behind, this creates a glowing effect. The lighting shown below gives a sense of intensity to the piece.

How To Edit Sound

I watched youtube videos about editing sound to help me when I tried to put sound in on our opening. I found it helpful as it showed me tips on how to edit sound on premier pro, before watching this video there was criticism over the sound in our piece so when I watched this I hoped it would help me when I came to try and fix those problems.

Below is an image of me finding sound for our piece.

Oscar Nomination

The Oscars took place on the 26th February 2017 it was the 89th Academy Awards.

I chose to do for my Oscar nomination the film La La Land. This film won

Best Actress (Emma Stone), 
Best director (Damien Chazelle)
Best original music score (Justin Hurwitz)
Best cinematography ( Linus Sandgren)
Best production design ( David Wasco) 

They were also nominated for many other awards 

Distributed 

Summit Entertainment which is owned by Lionsgate 

Production Companies 

Summit Entertainment 

Black label Media

TIK Films

Impostor Pictures 

Gilbert Films

Marc Platt Productions 

Critical response 

Critics praised its screenplay, direction, performances, musical score and musical score and musical numbers. The film when it was released attracted a lot of media coverage and attention because it was released after the film had won awards at the Golden Globes. 

Audience Research

We asked two of our friends to watch our film opening and to give back their opinions on what they thought of it.


Ella

The use of sound for the kidnapper parts fits well with what is happening.
Need to cut sections of footage out that doesn't flow with the rest.
Add some more transactions between shots 



Eddie

The camera work is good as it is not too shaky
Titles should be on there for longer
Music needs to be more fluid from scene to scene

2nd Rough Cut

This is our 2nd rough cut in this one we have added some titles added the scenes of the kidnapper and have changed the sound for the scenes with Genette in. We did this because of the feedback we got given.

Our Film Title

We wanted our film title to be short and give an element of mystery to what is happening in our film but for it to also clearly link to our film. Before deciding on the idea of Genette we came up with other ideas, these included

Missing
Gone
Vanished
Within Lane
Without a trace

We decided on Genette though after having asked some of our friends for help as to what they thought worked best and we also thought it perfectly suited our film. This is because it was short like we wanted it to be but also provided a bit of an insight into our film because are film is based on Genete Tate's disappearance. It also adds a bit of mystery though cause if you do not know the story of her disappearance you may be intrigued as to what the story is about.

Sound For Our Opening

I am in charge of sound for our opening and I had to download off free websites non diegetic sound for us to use.

We looked at various websites such as 

Freesound.org

www.bensound.com

www.purple-planet.com

We wanted for our film opening to use happier music for when Genette leaves the house this gives the impression that nothing bad will happen but we would then contradict this by putting a low horror sound for the clips of the kidnapper. 

We also needed to get the sound effect of a phone for the scene when it starts to ring. We decided to download it from a website called www.zedge.net

Rough Cut

This is our rough cut. At the moment we have edited all the footage we have filmed, the parts that our black are for clips of the kidnapper but we haven't filmed those scenes yet.

Audience Feedback

In our lesson we asked a few people to watch our opening and to give us feedback on what they thought. 

The strong points of our opening according to feedback was that the sound we added went really well with the scene taking place and that our ident looked really cool. However they did say that we should re film a part of it as our lighting was off compared to the rest and we knew this from having to use a phone when our camera lost charge. 

So after hearing this we know that we need to quicken up the pace of our filming as not everything is filmed yet and re do some filming again to get the lighting perfect.