Friday 13 May 2011

Evaluation Question 7

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

From when we done our preliminary task, we made sure our production was much better. When we look back on our preliminary task, I feel that we have used better shots after better knowledge of them from lessons after; we have used a bigger variety of them in our final product as in the first preliminary task, there were only 12 shots that had to be used.

When we researched we had to learn about the 180 degree rule and the rule of thirds, our prelim task actually covered it pretty well, when we needed to, we got Tom to be in the centre to draw the attention to him. We learnt from this and made sure we did this in our production. You can see this well when in our film – Dr Karloff is standing in the woods, in the centre of the camera, with only trees around which makes the audience focus on him, and him only. There about one part where this didn’t count in our film – but because we gave it the independent feel. Right where they were running in the woods and we wanted the camera shaking as if they were being chased.

When we planned what was going to happen in our film we made sure that it was or will be popluar, I watched the human centipede (see blog post on the 7.5.11) and realised how similar our films are, on IMDB.com, that film didn’t have a well known cast, as well as ours didn’t.

When adding the sound, we already knew what we wanted to put in their, the sound starts of like most horrors do, a very eery sound, when the pupils of the school get chased however, we had quite a fast rock kind of track playing in the background because we wanted to build a suspense and grab the audience like ‘What’s going to happen next?!’

We had lighting problems with our production because we shot our first bit at night and the rest during the day, in editing we managed to darken it a bit, but not completely. This might not be too noticeable as it could have been day outside for all anyone knows

Evaluation Question 6

Evaluation Question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

When actually attracting our target audience I think that the main elements that will bring their attention to our product are; using teens – by using them, the target audience of teenagers can kind of sit back and relate themselves as if they could be in the same position as the characters in our film and I think that will work more when it comes to scaring the audience. I also think that by adding typical horror conventions such as using the woods and a high school this may bring in the audience as they may have seen other films they might have liked that also used these conventions – just like the film hit and run that I researched, the film has teens and a part where she’s surrounded by a wooded area in the middle of no where. This will work more if they liked the other films that used the conventions of teens, woods and a high school etc. Our casting was easily picked as we thought using our group and a couple media students were best, especially when a couple were performing arts students too and by doing that we are showing average teens.

We didn’t aim to put any contemporary issues in our production but you could show knife crime as one of these contemporary issues.

We wanted some feedback so our Media group so we got them to watch it, the feedback we got was:

Evaluation Question 4

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation

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

I think that our production would be aimed at an independent market; I know this because it’s a very low budget film. The only way people could see this as a mainstream because our production is a typical conventional horror, we used the woods, the darkness, knives and a school – just like in Prom night which is one of the films I looked at.

Working title may want to distribute this film, they have to make an independent film every year and this is one they could work with, even more so due to the fact Working Title are partly owned by Universal, and our film has some parts that may come about as a mainstream film. I think people could see this as a mainstream film due to the conventions you’d have in a typical teen horror. Distributing this to the best could be on the internet, the cheapest and easiest way. Slumdog Millionaire had great success with paying a search engine to advertise their film with certain searches within that site, this brought attention to thousands of people. Another way to distribute an independent film like mine, is through YouTube, this probably won’t get as much attention as through a search engine, but people can advertise this for you, through YouTube, other people can embed our film on their blogs for other people to see, post the link on Facebook and Twitter.

What mainstream films contain:

· High profile actors

· A big budget

· Good quality editing and use of CGI

· A lot of equipment

· Widely released

What an independent film contains:

· Usually unknown actors

· A very limited location places they can film at

· Shown in cinemas like cinema city – where they show more independent films

· Low budget

Because our film is an independent one, we used shots that aren’t usually found in most mainstream films, when one of the actors is in the woods and they fall over, we catch a shot of the ground, as if it’s through his eyes, and when the final girl is being chased, there’s a shot that follows her – through someone’s eyes, as if they were chasing her. No one knows who our actors are, which makes this more independent too.

Even though we had a limited amount of equipment, as I’ve mentioned we do have some aspects of a mainstream film:

· The fact we used a topic of a similar film that was popular through two step flow.