Evaluation

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (camtasia, slideshare)

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

3) What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

This is our question three evaluation question done on Prezi. In this Prezi you will find information that influenced us to make a better Short-Film. This Prezi has screenshots of audiences commenting on our Short-Film with their views and honest opinions, and we took all of this into account when re-shooting our Short-Film. The audience played a big role in improving our production because we were trying to give them what they want as well as having our own style to it. We have more images of our first Short-Film which we made and the comments on that which guided us into making a much better production and end product. 

4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? (video)

Ancillary Task

Ancillary Task

For any Movie, Short Film or even book, there will always be some from of advertisement for it to make the public aware of their products. These advertisements can come in different forms such as Trailers or TV adverts. However for a Short Film with no budget the most obvious way to advertise your Short Film is by creating an in detail poster and a Radio Advert. Michelle and Myself focused on doing research and planning and the creating of the poster, and Yazid  focused on the research and planning as well as the creating of the radio show. 

Creating The Short-Film Poster

This poster gives the feeling that the Short-Film is going to be very serious. The colours used and the editing is very good and it gives a very big and clear clue about what the Short-Film is going to be about. This helped us make decision for our Poster because there is a lot of blurring and hiding in this Short-Film poster because they want to give us the clue that there is something to hide but will be revealed once you watch it. Which is what our short film is about, and this is why we felt it would be best if we used a similar idea for our poster. This poster is very specific to what the short film is going to be about. By seeing the poster you can tell that it is to do with something landing from the sky and it is being discovered by a little boy. This is what we were trying to do with our poster, we were trying to give a bit of the Short-Film away but not a lot because we wanted to surprise our audience.

Main Features of a Short-Film Poster:

Colour: The colour in a short Film poster is very important, because it has the power to create a strong feeling and message from when you just look at the poster. This poster has more of a green colour to it but they have decided to keep it natural, with the sky and the view. This Poster helped us with our Short-Film poster because we felt that sticking to two colours which are black and white would make the poster stand out.

Slogans: This poster does not have any slogans but this is a code and convention of posters, and as you can see the poster above doesn't have a slogan so we decided that we would not use one as we felt our editing was strong enough to get our point of the short film across to our audience.

Arrangement: Arrangement is very important in any poster, not just for Short-Films because if the Title on the poster is placed in an unprofessional place, it will make it seem as if the poster and short-film is messy and no one would want to consider watching it whereas if the positioning was placed well then people would pay more attention to it.



For the making of the poster we decided that we wanted something that would give an idea of what our Short Film is going to be about. The first idea was to take a picture of the two main characters staring each other in the eye and keeping a straight face. Below is the first picture we decided we wanted to use for our poster. It was a good picture to have as a poster but we thought it was too simple and wouldn't interest the audience to watch our Short-Film.

Shortly after we decided that we wanted to get the extra characters involved. We decided that this would make the poster more interesting as it gave us more do to with editing and a wider variety of choices of things to do, to make it as eye catching as possible. The following is a picture of the characters that we are going to use for our poster. These are the unedited images of which we were deciding to use for our poster. 

After taking this picture we had a group meeting about what we should do with the image and we decided that we would edit the front two characters so that they stand out and then blur the background characters so that it concentrates on our two main characters. We decided to do this because it reflects what our short film is trying to achieve. By blurring out the background characters and concentrating on the front two it shows that they do not care about their friends and are just concentrating on themselves, we felt this would be the best option for the poster because it is very similar to what our short film is like. The first Edit for the poster is shown below: 

The Editing on the Full poster is shown below, using Photoshop. We felt Photoshop would be the best for the editing of our poster because we tried to keep it very simple but very powerful and the tools on photo shop allowed us to do this very well. For the font of our heading, we had to use an online website called "1001 fonts" which had a selection of different fonts, also shown below. we picked a font that reflects what the short film is going to be about as well as blending in with the poster to make it look better. 

This edit shows the black and white tool. This is what we used to get the background colour.

This is after the effects of the black and white tool. We then used a scissor tool to cut out the front to characters and a blur tool blur out the characters behind them.

This is the font website and we used the last font and edited on photoshop to get this finished version:

This is the finished Poster for our Short-Film.

Creating the Radio Advert

Research into existing Radio Adverts: 

Me and my group have done some research into existing radio adverts for short films and these are the ones we have found. We decided to pick these because they sound serious and have a catching tone to it which makes you want to stop and listen. This is what we were trying to achieve with our Radio advert.

Codes and Conventions of Radio Adverts: 

Timing: Timing is one of the biggest codes and conventions of a radio advert for a short film, they shouldn't be longer than one minute and usually most of them last to up to 40 seconds. we are trying to keep ours at 39 seconds because if we exceed to 40 seconds then usually there is an extra charge, as Radio companies charge in 5 second slots. So timing has to be very precise.

Music: Almost every short film radio advert I have listened to has contained some form of music, this makes the advert more interesting as listeners can obviously only listen to the Advert but not see it. so if there is no music and just talking viewers may get bored and make an assumption that the short film is going to be as boring as the radio advert.

Quotes From Short-Film: Using quotes from the short film is another code and convention which most radio adverts have used, this is a good technique depending on the line from the short film used because it can give the listeners an insight of what the Film is going to be about.

Our Short-Film Radio Advert: 

This is our groups radio advert which we are going to use for our Short-Film, and we decided that we wanted to create some tension at the beginning and near the end because that is usually what the audience want to hear and that is also usually what makes them listen. From listening to the radio advert you know that it is going to be about lying. The voice we chose to use was serious because thats the point we were trying to get across with our short-film.

Feedback:


We received a lot of criticism for our Radio show as the vox pop above shows. So we decided that we were going to change the middle part of our Radio advert which involved taking out the tension music and replacing it with a quote from the Short-film.



 As a group we felt that this was the better decision because we wanted to listen to our audience and to give them what they wanted in order for them to watch the short-film.

This is our final Short-Film Radio Advert, this was made after taking all the Audience Feedback into consideration.

Here is a screenshot of the editing of the radio show. As the screenshot shows, some of the recordings were too high and in order to bring them down to sound better we had to use the amplifying tool which is circled. The amplify tool allows us to make recordings sound higher and lower, and in this case we wanted to bring ours down because it was tool loud and sound off when it came to putting the whole radio show together.

The Main Task

Members in our Group:

Michelle Pescatore
Yazid Jamaaoui
Daniel Samaan

 (Skip to 1:47) 

My original plan for my short-film was for it to be sport based and about a young boy who wants to leave school and chase his dreams to play a sport and it was originally to show how he worked for it and how made it to where he wants to be. When it actually came to the making of the Short-Film I thought of better ideas to use and this is when I decided I wanted it to be about lying and hiding the truth in order for other people to not laugh at you and I thought it was an improvement from this Story line because it was something people go through every single day and it would have been a more interesting story with a plot twist instead of a more mainstream one where the ending is more obvious. 

Creating a Short Film

Firstly, this is the first time I have ever worked on creating a Short Film. However I do have some experience using the equipment from my AS course. The equipment which I used were things such as a Tascam DR-05 voice recorder and software like Audacity in which I have a good amount of experience using and working on. I have had a few film ideas but I have never attempted to turn it into an actual Short Film so it is going to be a whole new experience for me. My group and I plan on making 2 Short Films so we are able to cut down on mistakes and make it as interesting as possible.

Using new equipment and editing software.

This is the first short film I created using the new equipment which I have never used before. It was a difficult task near the beginning because it was hard getting used to how to use the equipment and how to use it and get accurate and good quality shots. It was also difficult getting different types of shots as neither of the people in my group had any experience using a camera like the one we used to shoot this short film.

When we edited this we also used software that we were not very familiar with and it took us time to get used to it and understand how to use it and manage to edit the clip the best we can from what we learnt on the new editing software.

Storyboard

1)                                                                                 2)

This is our groups (YMD Productions) Storyboard for our 5 minute production which is called The Deceit. The Storyboard number one shows the main two characters sitting on a bench which is the main scene for our short film because it sets the tone for what the rest of the short film is going to be about. In this storyboard you can see that there are some annotations because it makes it clear to us of what we need to remember to do in terms of shot type and angle. By doing these annotations it helps us understand what is going to happen in each scene. In the second storyboard it tells us about each character and what will be happening when the characters are on the bench and how they are feeling. which is what our short film is about, hiding feelings and not telling anyone. 

This is the script for the first 90 second short film we created, The Deceit:

First Draft of Short Film (The Deceit) 

In this short 90 second or so film, it was our first draft at trying to get out production together and to get an idea of what we need to improve on for our 5 Minute short film. One conclusion we came to is that we need to have better actors in order to be able to perform the scenes and shots better. This clip shows some errors in which we need to make sure not to repeat in our 5 Minute short film and some errors include looking at the camera and noises not being picked up and sometimes outside noise being picked up. As this was our first Short-Film we knew we made a lot of mistakes and we also knew that there was a lot we could have done to improve on it, so we decided to show a few people and get there feedback. This is what they had to say about our first draft:

Audience Feedback and what I have learnt from it: 
Audience Feedback is very important because without getting feedback we will not be able to say if our Short-Film is good enough or if it needs improvements. When we get people to view our Short-Film and get their feedback it enables us to make more improvements and make our Production better and more professional. I have learnt that the audience may not understand the young "slang" language so we decided that we were going to do something about it. In our second Edit we tried to keep the language the same just a little bit more simple for people to understand but we still managed to keep the slang as well as making it simple and understandable.



This is the second attempt at the Short film that my group and I have attempted to do. We tried to listen to feedback that we got on the previous video and try to improve it more. The first obvious improvements are the different location and the fact we have changed actors. We decided to change actors because we thought that we could find people who knew what they were doing and were familiar with the settings and atmosphere they were in. The actors that we chose spoke the way they normally would when they are with their friends, which is why we felt they would be suitable to take part in this Short-Film. Another change is the ending scene compared to the first attempt. We tried to make it more clear as to what the Short-film is about and this helped us with the creation of our poster.

This Feedback was possibly one of the most important ones we received back from our viewers because it helped us improve the beginning of our Short-Film which gives it a completely different feeling. The way we started our short-film is unique and not yet been used until we decided to put it in. The beginning scene sets up the rest of the short-film very well.

This is our final version of our short film The Deceit. In this final version we used all the audience feedback that we had received from comments and some interviews we had taken from letting other people watch our second draft of the short film in order to create this last and final version. Many changes have been made, for example instead of using the location as the opening shot we decided based on feedback that it would be better to use images of our characters and then move straight into the first scene. We also agreed as a group that this would be the better decision because people would enjoy it more if they saw images of all the actors before the short film started and so that they become familiar with the scenery quicker than if they just saw the scenery of the park. 

Evaluating our Short-Film: 

The opening scene of our short film shows several pictures of our actors, this was purposely done because we felt it would be a better opening than just having the scenery shot. At the end of the pictures we leave it as our two main characters and having a close up of their hands, before the screen turns white and straight into the short-film. This was much better for our short-film because we got an opportunity to show our characters bonding and showing that they are comfortable around each other.   We made this decision based on Feedback we got from our Video. During our Short-Film past the minute mark we have a selection of 14 different shots within 22-24 seconds, this was purposely done as we did a close up shot of the characters that were speaking then back to a shot of three, to get all the reactions, then we went back to a close up of one character then again back to a three shot of all the characters to get all their reactions. 

A big role in our Short-film is the use of slang. It was important that we used these slang words because we are trying to make it as realistic as possible, and this is the way our characters usually talk which is why we planned to put slang words such as "sidechick" which means a girl on the side. Our Short Film used the codes and conventions very well as we had a plot twist which wasn't expected from the two characters because they are supposedly seen as "Gangsters" and the stereotype is that they do not have any problems as the ones seen in our short-film. 

From the screenshot above, you can see that it took some time to edit this Short-Film together. The image on the right is one of the best shots we took for this short-film and it took us a while to edit it correctly in order to make sure that it looked good when the other scenes came in. On the left was our First scene shot before we decided to change it and make it into images of our characters which was challenging codes and conventions of Short-Film. 

One of our original plans was to start the short film with a close up of a phone playing music and this was then changed into a scenery shot before we finally changed it to images of our characters which at the end we thought it was one of the best creative decisions we had made to improve the Film. 

Post Production Vlog

This is our Post Production Vlog which me and my team member Michelle made on Camtasia. This is an update on where we are currently on our production of the 5 minute short film. In this Vlog you will also see that we discuss the difficulties we came across when we first started the production. We felt it was important to talk about these difficulties to show that we have learnt from the mistakes we have made and improved to work more efficiently with less mistakes. We also discuss our characters and why we chose them and why the location we chose was important to the characters. The reason we picked our location (Paddington Recreation Ground) was because our characters go there very often and they would feel comfortable acting somewhere in which they know very well.

Production Images

This image shows team member Michelle and Director of the 5 Minute short-film The Deceit explaining to two of our main Characters how they should execute the scene. It is very important that she does this because it means that they execute the scene better and the way that the script says it should be done. She directed this scene at night, which meant we had to use a light at night so the shot was of good quality. We chose to shoot at night because it makes the scene look more realistic and as the characters are meant to act as if they are 'Gangsters' we thought it would be more realistic if they were out till late at night and we filmed then to make it seem as real as possible.

 As you can see from the picture, we were recording when it got dark because we were trying to show that our characters had a lot of time to spend with each other when the extras left, but we found it extremely difficult to get good recordings because the wind blowing and sometimes rain, which prevented us from adding a tiny touch of realism. After a few nights of recording we eventually decided that we were better off recording normally during the day.

In order for us to actually record scenes we needed a lot of help and we managed to find volunteers looking to help us. As the picture shows we needed light in order to record in the night. Luan De Jesus is helping us with the recordings in this picture and makes an appearance in our Short-Film as one of the main extras.

Research And Planning

Research And Planning

Research

Moving forward from AS I learnt a lot of things and one of the biggest things I learnt was how to do research into exactly what I was looking. In My AS course I was part of a team to create a LOCAL RADIO NEWS BROADCAST. I had to do research on things such as the GENRE and AUDIENCES. The Genre was obviously NEWS and the Audience was of course LOCAL, as it was a Local Radio News Broadcast. Relating last years work to this years work I know that my Target audience are cineastes (People who like to watch every type of movie or short film). For my A2 course I have to make a five minute SHORT FILM. 

I know that in order to make a very good short film I have to do appropriate research into my TARGET AUDIENCE. My short film is not aimed at people who do not watch short films because I know from my research that they will not waste their time watching it because it is not their type of film. 

There are many ways in which I can conducts my research and usually they are very efficient which is good for when it comes to knowing about my target audience. The two biggest research methods are Primary Research and Secondary Research. 

Primary Research: 

Method	Advantages	Disadvantages
Questionnaires	·      You can hand the questionnaires to your specific target audience. ·      When the researcher gets the information they can analyse it specifically and choose which information they want to use.	·      The answers may sometimes not be relevant to what the researcher wants to know ·      The answers the participants give may not be the truth ·      Participants could have rushed the questionnaire because they didn’t want to really do it
Interviews	·      You can get accurate information from those who are taking part. ·      You can get honest answers ·      You can use most answers given for your research	·      They take up a lot of time ·      Not everyone will be able to attend the meetings

Secondary Research:

Method	Advantages	Disadvantages
Internet	·      You can easily access the information ·      Usually accurate information	·      The information may be out of date.
Books	·      They are easy to find and read ·      The information never changes	·      May not be relevant

Most Media Producers look at several factors before starting producing Media. These factors range from the equipment they have, the budget of the media they want to make and the availability of areas they have to use to produce the Media. In the case of my group we are producing a 5 minute Short film, which has virtually no budget and can shoot the images and recording in any area we want. We have been provided with the equipment to make our 5 minute Short Film which saves us a lot of time and money.

My last project was producing and 5 minute Local Radio News Show. During the year I had to do a lot of research into the Genre of Local Radio News and its Codes and Conventions. Most of this was done through primary and secondary research methods. With the 5 minute short film I will be doing similar research as to the research I done last year. 

I have very little experience recording with a camera and getting a good quality recording but it is something I will work on in order to get the best recordings possible. I also have very little experience with editing software but I will also work on editing softwares in order to become familiar with it and be able to edit the clips we take. 

Evaluating other Short-Film 

This is the first Short Film in which I am going to evaluate its codes and conventions and how our short film either uses, develops or challenges this Short Film. This film is similar to ours because it is about lying and covering up the truth because the characters are too scared to be honest. This particular short film is about a man who is struggling for people to like him and he realises the only way he can get people to like him is to lie. This is again similar to our short film because the characters are lying to each other in order to 'fit in'. A code and convention in 'WHITE LIES' is they only use 2 main characters with a few extras, however our Short Film challenges this as we have 4 extra characters, all with very important roles in the Short Film because they set the scene for what we are trying to achieve.

The second code and convention for this short film is how they had the main character as the narrator as well, mainly speaking about the letter he had written, explaining why he had lied. our short film challenges this again as we do not have a narrator, instead we chose to let the characters speak throughout the whole of the production. A code and convention in which our Short Film uses from this Short Film is the use of background music to set the tone of the environment. For example we used some rap to set the scene of the type of Short Film we wanted, where as this short film used more of a simple and serious song to set the tone for setting they were trying to create.

The sounds which are used in this Short Film are only used when the moment is serious which is very often in the case of this Short Film. However with our Short Film we have different rap songs throughout different stages and when the scene changes, so this code and conventions is being challenged as we felt it would be better if there was music when the scene changes but only for a few seconds before it starts fading away.

The last code and convention is the length of both Short Films. Short Films range from 2 minutes to 20 minutes however we were only allowed to have a maximum of 5 minutes, where as this short film went on for 15 minutes, because they had more things to put in to make the scenes more clearer. We felt as if 5 minutes was enough for us to get our point across because the timing limited us so it allowed us to get straight to the point.

This is the second Short Film in which I will be evaluating its codes and conventions. The first code and convention is the starting shots used. In our Short Film we took some audience feedback and a suggestion was made that we should change the opening shot which was originally to get a full shot of the location we decided to create our Short Film, instead we decided to put a selection of different pictures of the characters, we felt this challenged the codes and conventions because we haven't yet seen a Short-Film that has been started in that way.


The second code and convention is the background music that's playing throughout of the whole Short Film where as ours only again only has music at selected times as opposed to having it play throughout the whole production. This is mainly because both Short Films are different genres and are trying to get different points across. The songs preferred in this Short Film are long and create tension and specific moments especially when the characters stop talking, the background noise starts to take over. We developed the use of different songs by not using as much because we felt that what the characters had to say was very important.


Another code and convention is the different shots we used, we used the same shots for most of our scenes because that way it keeps it more professional and it keeps the audience entertained. These shots were best for us because we were able to get the most important shots very clearly.

Planning

Below are images of our storyboard for the second short film we created. This made it much easier when we came to shoot our scenes because we knew straight away what we wanted to do and the storyboard made the shot selection much easier when we came to do the recordings.

This is a group schedule in which we created in order to keep track of what we needed to do by a certain date  and when we needed to start it.
This was a group plan which we created while in a group meeting, to discuss edits and to plan tasks for each member in our group to complete in order to work as fast as we possibly can.

Individual timetables:

Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
				1st – Prepare Blog Work	2nd- Look over past papers for exam	3rd- work on my blog
	5th- Work with Mr Matthew on post production	6th- Group meeting to plan for the month ahead	7th- Gather audience feedback	8th Blog Work	9th- meetings with both AS and A2 groups	10TH Revise for Mock
	12th- Make a timetable for our project	13th- Review Team logo with Yazid	14th- Analyze feedback and improve for post production	15th – meeting with Mr Lynch	16TH – Blog work	17th- Attend the London Film Festival event
18th- Talk about my experience in the London Film Festival	19TH- Meet Michelle to make a vlog		21st- Work on blogs

In order for us to create a successful short film and a successful blog we needed to create our own timetables which we needed to stick to in order to complete our work on time. This following timetable is the first one I made at the beginning of January, with my team members Michelle and Yazid. We sat down in a group meeting to organise this so we didn't have any clashes with anything else we had to complete. This Timetable is one of few that we made in order to succeed with the Short-Film. It was very difficult to create this because we had so many characters and we could only record when they had time and when they were available, which made it harder for us to organise a timetable to stick by. Sometimes we had to go against our timetables in order to try and complete our work quicker, which is what we done by trying to blog almost every lesson and every day that we had the chance to.

Recci (Picking a location) 

From our first group meeting we knew exactly where we wanted to start recording and that was Paddington Recreation Ground, which is behind our school and we chose this place because it is where our characters usually hang around so they would be familiar with the surroundings and feel comfortable doing the work. 

However the decision we had to make was where around the park, we felt was best to get a lot of good shots and also would be the perfect place to record our characters. The following Pictures Show the locations within the park that we had chosen to short list for our production: 

These were our Short listed locations, and we made a decision to have it at the local cafeteria at first but then we realised that it would be extremely difficult with the amount of people constantly coming in and out and we also took into consideration that we would need more than one day to record and that there would be different people each time which would create inconsistency within our short-film, so we ended up going for the pull up bars because there would be limited people there in the morning and we would be able to record with consistency and also we would be able to take several different shots which would improve our short-film.
We also decided to pick this location over set of bars because this is also where our characters sat down more than the local cafeteria, so we thought it would be more realistic if we chose to have that location.

Ideas

We had man ideas for a short film before we actually started to record and get into our production, some of the ideas were: 

A young man chasing a dream 

A group of boys with two of them lying to the others

A young girl and a young boy in love

These are only few of the ideas we had and these were all the more realistic one we had. We ended up choosing A group of boys with two of them lying to the others because we had so many good ideas which were realistic and it could definitely be produced. All of the ideas we had were all put into the short film with several different shots which we meant. We also chose this Short-Film idea because we felt sometimes this can happen to young teenagers and they are just ignored but however we put a twist on ours with the characters we chose and the things they are lying about. We felt that we didn't want it to be too serious but we wanted to give an impression as if it was going to be, which is why our radio show sounded very serious at first.

Coming up with the name of the short film was another task which we found a bit difficult because we wanted it to be something different, and we were originally thinking something along the lines of the word "deceive" and we started to match up several ways of saying "lies" and after some research we found the word Deceit which we felt matched our intentions with the short film. 

Production

Gathering the actors together was possibly one of the toughest challenges we faced as a group because we had so many to gather and we had to try find a time where they were free to allow us to record them as well as finding a time while we were free, so it was very difficult trying to gather them all at once. One decision we had to make based on this was changing one of the characters because the one we had originally planned to use was no longer available so we felt that we needed to find a replacement because he played an important role for our short-film. 

Going to the location was extremely easy because it is located behind our school so it made carrying the expensive and heavy equipment easier, because we did not have to travel very far in order to start recording. However the weather was not on our side when we planned to start filming originally. The strong wind made it very difficult to hear the characters speak. We decided that we would use a microphone and place it in between the characters but this turned out to be a bad idea because the wind was hitting straight onto it, making it hard to hear both characters. So we had to wait for the weather to turn around so that it would be suitable to record, and we eventually got a chance to do it and we managed to record all the scenes and edit it together. 

We put a video together showing different recordings we took of the characters and you can hear that the sound is extremely off and that it would have had to be re-recorded.

Post Production:

Our post production vlog shows the progress we've made and how we got there. We also discuss things such as the shots we used in our short film production. The blog is a very important part of the production because it summarises everything we done as a group and everything we done for the Short-Film. 

(Visit The main task and Ancillary to view both of our production Vlogs)