Question 1 - In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?

Post 20 Final Film, Final Postcard Final Reveiw

Post 19 Post Production Report

In this post i will be looking at all the stages that we as a group went to after we had filmed our short film. filming is just the beginning of the process to finishing our short film, a lot must be done after for the film to be finished.

We stated with the logging. this is making a table on a Microsoft Word document and going through our film picking which shot takes we wanted to be used in our film as we took up to 10 takes on some shots due to mistakes or unhappiness with the shot. We had to find the start time and the end time of every single shot that we did, log them into a table, wright a short description of the shot and then wright yes or no next to the ones we wanted. This took a very long time a lot longer than any of us had ever anticipated it to and found it very boring by the end. however we manged to eventually complete the logging wick all four is contributing which as good as the work was shared and not one person was handed the job.

We then went on to the next stage which was capturing. After we had decided the shots that we wanted we needed to put the exact time start and exact time finish of all the shots that we had chosen into the Adobe Premier pro. Then the Adobe Premier Pro would take the information and run the tape playing all the shots we had chosen. after this we could begin to edit.

Now we could start edit our short film together which is what we have all been waiting for. For this section of the post production is the combining of shots into sequences. this is where everything is put together in order and then we can play about with it a bit by cutting down scenes, using cross dissolve ( when the end of one scene fades out and the start of another scene fades in causing both scenes for a few moments to be seen simultaneously) and other aspects such as adding music and changing the brightness and colour of a scene for what ever reason. Also credits and titles need to be put in when editing like the 'Presented By Clockwork Productions' and the director, camera man ect.. i had to familiarise myself with the editing as i had not done it in over a year and it was important for me to get a good understanding of all the editing equipment. after a short while it started to come back to me and with help from my media teacher this was made possible.We had to make sure we did this as a group to make sure we were all very happy with the final look of the film. we all made a contribution which was vital for the successful completion of the short film.

we did have some problems when the camera had reformatted to 4:3 from 16:9 but thankfully Nicola and the director Anton managed to solve this problem by zooming in on the shots to make them the correct size. unfortunately did this have a consequence as some of the quality was last in these shots where we had to zoom this is something I have learnt and will improve upon if I was to make a another film.

In conclusion i felt as a team we worked well together and avoided any argument causing our film to be a success in my opinion there are things which i would have liked to have done better as with all things when finished but on the whole i felt that the short film we made was very good and I and my group can be very proud of ourselves.

Post 18 Production Report

In this post I will be reveiwing our full production on the day of filming which eventually came to pass on the 4th of March 2011. I will be looking at how we had planned the day out and how we went about doing our filming.

first of all we had to set out a plan before hand because organisation was key for a successful production. we had all agreed to meet at the filming location at 10am which was a sunday morning. we came at 10am with the ambition and thought of filming by 12 (the arrival of the actors our director had organised). so we had one hour to organise the house and to set up all our eupiment and to fully organise everything before the actors got to thr filming location. For some reason which i am not aware of the actors could not arrive until abot 2 oclock leaving us a huge problem as we would not have enough time in the day to film and that it would be equally difficult to rescedual a filming day especially as many of the production team including myself had booked time off work. but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise as one hour was no where near enough time to organise the house to be ready for filming. there where a lot of things that we had not fully accounted for and under estimated  how much time we needed to organise everything. the main problem was organising the house to make it look like what we had drawn our plans of the filming and furneture. 3 hours was more than enough time and we had everything perfect awaiting the arrivel of the actors. it gave us time to sit down and calmly discuss our plan which was very helpfull. we drew up a plan which is here -

This set out all the tasks that we individually had to do to ensure that our filming day was a successful one.
this was very helpful so we could all refere to this plan so no one was confused with what thewy had to do.

we then had to take pictures of the hole house because we felt that it would be a wise idea to put everything back as we found it so using the camera we took photos and coul refere to them so we knew where everthing had come from so we could put it back accordingly.

after we had put all the rooms into the correct position we had to look at the lighting as the camera man i was looking through my camera and made the point that thwe room looked very yellow and did not portray the atmoshere that the scenes need to be portrayed. I with my fellow work mate Ryan set about putting filters on all 12 of the lights in the living room. This was a difficult and frustrating task as the filters did not seem to want to stay on the lights causing frustration between both of us. But eventually we managed to put them up, here are some of the pictures that were taken of the filters to try and dampen the light into a colder/darker feel of the room.

The Actors in our film

in our production organisation it was important for all of us to know who and how many actors were coming to make it easier for us to know what is happening when they arrive. the fact that they were from comumbia was important information to know before hand as their english could have been poor and we would need to prepare for that but it turned out there english was fine and there were no issues. we had never met these people before unlike Anton our director so we had to rely on him for all the information about the actors that were going to be in our film.

The actors that were in our film were as follows: 

Louis Fernandez - 23 years old and played the role of Simon. He was a fun lively character who I engoyed working with I felt he played the role very well and though he did make some mistakes it would have been unfair on us to expect him to be perfect as he is not a contracted actor and is simply doing this as a favour to the director Anton as they knew eachother this is the same for all the actors.

Judith Earey - 33 years old and played the role of Lisa. she played the role well and did everything we asked of her making it easy for us to do what we wanted which was very helpful.

Isabel Earey - 12 yearl old and played the role of Isabel the daughter. I did think that having someone so young could course a problem as she would get bored and loose interest and perhaps be very difficult to do what we wanted but instead she was very good and we had no problems at all she played the role to a high standard as she was the main character this was important.

The Filming

possibly the post fundermentlay important part of the day was the filming. as i was the camera man it was very important for me on a personel level as well as it is very important to use the camera well and film the shot to a very high standard. when the actors finally arrived it was Nicola's job to make sure they were dressed suitably while I set up the camera for the first shot which was outside. Anton was going through the script with the actors as they had not had time to look at our script before hand. after they were all dressed accordingly and ready and comfortable in what they had to do for the day we started to film. this went very was though we did have to take lots of shot retakes to make sure we hade a large variety to choose from we came to editing this is important so if one shot is wrong there are othere to choose from. We had to make small changes while filming with positions of characters and camera positioning becuase we felt it would make the film far better and though we wanted to keep to our plan we also wanted to produce the best finished film that we possible could so we felt that some changes were neccassery though none were very large changes so we kept to our pre production plans very well. All went very well and though we did not finish until late we all walked away very proud of ourselves. Here are some photos of our hole group during the filming day:  

Post 17 Ancillary Task 2 Film reveiw part 1

In this post I will be analysing our film and creating a film reveiw page. for this i needed to look at other film reveiws to see what they have done to try and gain  a full understanding on how to conduct and structure my own film reveiw. this includes looking and newspappers, magazines and websites to see how these film reveiws and been done. This will give me a firm understanding on how to do my own film reveiw to a high standard.

Sight and Sound

sight and sound is a film reveiw magazine which as a class and individualy looked at to try and see what they had put in their film reveiws and what i could take from that and put into my own. firstly we looked at a reveiw from a full length film called frozen. we were put into groups and read the reveiw individualy then discussed in our group what we thought. at fist i found it difficult to understand but after reading it a few times i stared to uderstand that the writer of this reveiw was establoshing important parts of the film and discussineg why it was important and what relevence it had to making it a good and bad film. the writer of the reveiw talked about the location and the cast which I found interesting. i had not thought of these point prior to reading the reveiw as my mind was set on the story line and just the acting. but then I thought about it for a while and thought that the location and cast was incredibly important to a film and must be perfect for a successful film.

after looking at some points on what needs to be mentioned in the film reveiw i went on to look at how it is structured and set out. 

it is clear to see that it is striking with its images and coloring and the different styles of writing that is used. I think the name of the film is obvioulsy very striking and intreiging aswel which makes the front cover a high standard.

Post 16 Ancillary Task 1 - Postcards part one

In this post i will be looking at how we as a group came up with our production name, posters, logo's and out post cards. we had to be far more imaganative with these tasks that we have done previously through out our media course. we had to to a lot of brainsorming in our group tryi g to thin of a production name that would be suitable and would tie in with our film. our director (Anton) had organised all our Actors that they were of from columbia so we tries to link the name to that. But we quickly came to realise that there is already an internationaly recognized production company called 'Columbia Pictures'. we did not want people to think that we were copying so we had to divert our search to other options. we had to try and think of something far more imaganative that linked with our film. in our film there is a constant theme of a clock during our film







we then came up with the name cockwork productions as our film as a constant theme with a clock during the entire film. This seemed appopriate and becuase it was origional and it linked in with our film which made it a perfect choice. now we could start creating our Film posters, Film logo's and Film postcards.

Film Postcards

There is a large range of ways that Production Companies try and advertise their films to rtry and target their target audience. For the big production companies it can be hugely exspensive for them to try and market their films and TV is normally the main way to target audiences.  

for smaller production companies who are creating short films and wish to try and make the films more known about it is more difficult as they have limeted funds compared to larger production companies such as Warner Brothers and Comumbia Pictures. the limited funds that were available would have been used in creating the short filmand would have no money to be able to invest in TV advertising.  short films must then look for other sources apart from the obvious TV advertisement. good ways of doing this is to try and showcase the short film at a film festiva. film festivals are a great way for directors and film writers to try and get recognition of their work so they could then go on to bigger companies and get into full Films with larger funds for disposal. so by showcasing their film at film festivals they can try and work their up to the top, this is usually how directors and film writers beome big, by starting with short films, impressing, then going on the big production companies. this is also the came with the film crew i was the camera man in our Film production and if i wanted to go on and do other films i would want my work to be rtecognized for other companies to see if i could be a camera man in other (bigger) films. But the method that a lot of small poduction companies use to try and make people aware of these film festvial showing (and a method we as a group will be using) is postcards. 

in class we looked at some already existing postcards and discused them as a group looking at their charataristics and why it was good choice of design to try and adverrise their film. the short film postcard we looked at was 'On A Lifes Edge'. 

As you can see the image that the postcard is showing does relate to the title of the film. personally when I heard the title to sounds like a drama perhaps social realism about someone depressed or close to suicide or death and I think that the postcard reflects these feeling by making it rather a sad, lonely image. the colours of the image imedietly suggest unhapiness and an unhappy atmoshere. the producer has put a short description of the films and then the cast of the film, how long the films is and then the credits of the film.

in our Media class we talked about the important structure and infomation that is needed in a short film postcard. we had to look at several short film postcards and i started to see that they all have similar layouts and structure. 

there was certain infomation that almost all of them had on the postcards :

• location of the showing
• what times is it being showed 
• how long each showing will be 
• who are the writters and directors of the short film 
• the producer and filming crew 
• any sponers involved  

Film Posters 

in our Media class we looked at how film posters are used to advertise films and how effective they are. we looked a few different types of posters and i did some of my own research in film posters and came up with a few theories. Different film posters use different styles in my opinion. some production companies will look to be big and dramatic which will drw people in, these usually consist of  big dramatic image these type of posters will most likely be for actions films. some other production companes try and do the complete opposite by creating a poster with little infomation and not a lot happening on the poster yet it stikes people who see it with interest and curiositty. I beleive this is risky yet a clever way of marketing by perhaps luring people to see the film out of pure cutiosity. but on the whole i feel that most film posters are big bold and stand out to try and grab the intection of anyone who may see it. espeicially if there are big name actors and directors in the film these must be highlighted so people know that they are involved and will imedietly make them more likey to see it. Colours and brightness sets the tone and atmoshere for the films in the poster and can show veiwers what genre it is instantly which is good.

certain infomation must be put on the poster which will inform all veiwers about the film so they know exactly what they are paying to see. Important information consists of : 

• Title of the film 
• Release date 
• Directors 
• Notabable actors 
• company production name  

Production Logo

As a group we had to think of diffeerent design for our production logo. we had to be creative and use the internet for a scourse of images and ideas. As we had agreed to use clockwork productions as our Production name we needed to find images that would relate to clocks. we needed something that was effective but not to complicated and easy to remember so when people see the logo they can instanty associate it with Clockwork Productions.  

post 15 Reflecting on Theory

In this post I will be reflecting on all the different theories we have learned in class over the last few months.we have been discussing 3 main topics.

• Genre Theory 
• Narrative Theory 
• Audience Theory    

Genre Theory 

Genre theory is used in films to put films into categories. Common genres are thriller, action, comedy, Drama, social realism and horror. Genre is very much dependent on different factors mainly things like the story line, who the director is (what their vision is) and what are the audience expectations of the film. when discussing genre theory in class we identified it by using genre theory we can create a short cut in how can try and describe films.

In order to fully understand genre I need to look at several examples. for example with horror films there is a certain expectation and there is a general notion in people that will think everyone will die besides one person. the people who to watch this will expect to see violence and will be scared.

I have already looked at different notions of genre earlier in post 4. The most important theorist for me was Robert Altman. i feel he looked at genre and identified that a genre needs to be easily recognized by audiences he is quotes saying 'that genres are defined by producers and are easily recognized by audiences.' 

This was very important for me when it came to our own short film. it was important for us to establish a genre for our film, our genre was Drama.

The actors are very important in film and genre. some actors are specified to certain genres. For example an actor like Seth Rogen has only done comedy his hole career basically and for him to be cast into a film will automatically make audience's feel that the film will be a comedy.

In my opinion through my own research i feel that there are two reoccurring genres short films these are 'social realism and 'horror'. this is because short films often suffer from small funds which would make it difficult to create an action films with explosions ect.. comedy is another one which is difficult to portray in a short film mainly because in the time period given it would not be easily to portray humour which wasn't a bit corny.

Narrative Theory

Many people mistake a narrative with a story. This is incorrect as a narrative is something far different. a story is just what happens a narrative is how it is related. all good stories has some sort of action which ultimately changes the characters life of how they behave. there are four main media conventions these are:

Character
Genre
Time
Form

Audience Theory

audience theory is very important it is how the audience see the film through their eyes and how the perceive and respond to what they see. this theory fist arrised in the 1920's and it was suggested that an audience receives the information via a media text without challenging what they are seeing and just accept it as reality this is known as the hypodermic needle model.