Lights out - Final film

Finished film poster

After testing many ideas, we finished our film poster. We use the font steel tongs to insert all of the 'film based' text onto the bottom of the poster. We feel like the poster has gained a professional look and ill stand out if we put it next to other posters. It has a dark and mysterious look to it and it keeps the audience wondering about the film.

Lights out - Radio trailer

Evaluation Question - 1

Evaluation Question 1

Throughout our film I believe we carried out the continuity and development of continuity to a good and very reasonable standard. When watching our film back there tends not to be major continuity errors, there are some errors which are very slightly noticeable and throughout our audience feedback we noticed one or two of the candidates picked up on these. One major issue that we picked up on whilst trying to film our shots was filming them on different days, as we are in college the clothes varied from day to day in what we were wearing. Most days we would have planned to bring in the correct clothes but other days when we needed to add in shots we found the difficulty of being able to film. There is one point in our film when you can notice the different clothes. This is when Jamie is walking into college the day after he goes missing from Jordan’s House. As he walks into the lift he has skinny jeans on, when he walks out of the lift he has Nike joggers on. This is not a major problem because both the jeans and the joggers have a dark sense to them, so you cannot really notice unless you are paying attention to the bottoms Jamie is wearing. This does not affect the quality of our film even though they could have been easily corrected. There was no need for us to break any continuity rules as the narrative of our film didn’t need it.

 

We chose the film genre drama to base our storyline on, and the genre, being drama, showed some very challenging aspects of filming and adding the ‘drama’ feel to the content of our 5 minute film. For example, from my experience with dramas, they tend to contain mostly adult characters, this was a cause for concern with our group as we have only teenage characters as we are all still in college. Adults can add more depth to their acting and can bring more to the scene as they have more experience to bring to the camera work and there is more to talk about which is very useful in dramas. For example the 1972 film ‘God father’ is one of the most widely known dramas of all time and this film only contained adult actors which gave the film more depth as they can act on a deeper level, compared to our film which all the characters are teenagers and no adults are seen at any time.

I feel like our film generally followed the criteria of a 'thriller drama' and other than having young actors didn't really challenge the well-known aspects of a drama film. Drama films tend to have some dark sense throughout, it can include; death, revenge, tragedy etc. I feel like our film includes a lot of these dark related themes (Our main character is being stalked and dies at the end of the film). Our film leaves a cliff hangar and leaves the audience wondering why this has happened to Jamie, and why did he have to die. The ending to our film took a lot of thought and is very fitting to the Drama side of the film industry. Throughout our film there are many situations which may appear as quite confusing to the audience, and have a sense of mysteriousness. We did this on purpose to leave points for twists and turns to easily come along in the film. We don't have much dialog throughout the film and always try to keep the stalkers face hidden which again adds more mysteriousness to the film. When Jamie is screaming and is locked away in the room at the end of the film, it adds a real sense of shock and scare to the film.

Throughout our film I believe that multiple scenes are very good at tension building, scenes where Jamie is just walking around or being followed can be amazing for tension building as anything can happen at any moment throughout those particular scenes. For example someone could jump out on Jamie or Jamie could be scared in any other way. We use rhythmic editing at the end of our film to up the pace when Jamie is trapped inside the room. Jamie believes there is a presence with him inside the room and is trying to get out, so we start to speed up the cuts and make Jamie look like he is panicking a lot more than he is. Rhythmic editing was very useful for us to exaggerate the mood of our characters. I believe the ending to our film is the best part and I am convinced this is the part of the film which will make the audience want to see more. It can add a dramatic effect to the film also.

Evaluation - Question 2

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

Ancillary texts are usually very important during the films production, using an ancillary text can help to promote the film and open up your films audience onto a wider base. Numerous ways of promoting the film through ancillary text can become very useful. During and after we had finished our treatments for our initial film, we were constantly sharing ideas of how we wanted the film to plan out. Producing an ancillary text for our production seemed pretty easy as we had already had an idea of how we wanted to portray our ideas to the audience.

After we had finished our film we started researching into different kinds of film posters, film slogans and different promotions that big blockbuster films had used but also at the same time making sure they fit into the same genre type as our film. We found some big films like Physco and Stalker. Through analyzing just one poster, I used my own creativity and ideas from older film posters to help create a professional and genre-fitting poster for our film.

I think the poster that we produced is at a really good standard, we used many ways to find the best lighting and the right effect for the type of film ours is (Thriller Drama). I like to think that the way we organized the poster will promote our film to a great extent and help the film gain a wider based audience. The ‘Stalker’ (Me – Tom Barrow) was the main focus of the poster and allowed us to add a sinister loom to the film. We had a aim in the film to never let the stalkers face be seen to add an element of mystery to it, on the poster the you can barely see the stalkers eyes and shadow is covering most of his face, we were very happy with the turn out of the final poster that we produced.

The poster is generally dark as we tried to add the sinister look, the only highlighted piece on the poster is the face of the stalker, you can slightly see the eyes of myself in the picture, which grows to become quite creepy on the audience as we found from our audience feedback. I believe the fact that the other characters from the film aren’t in the poster, is just as important as if they were. It makes you think about what’s missing and in our film it is Jamie what goes missing in the end, so this is why we felt the need to leave the other characters out of the poster.

The picture above is of our final poster. I feel that it is very well produced. Our intention was to entice the audience and I feel that my poster (the final poster) does this perfectly.

We created a radio trailer for our film, it was quite simple and easy to create as we used a voice recorder and there was nothing over complicated after recording.

Radio trailers are very similar to movie trailers; we used several audio clips from our film and placed them into sections of our radio trailer where they fit the best. They give slight hints to the storyline of the film, but not too much. Extracts such as ‘Jamie’ being shouted as he goes missing etc.

All 3 finished products that helped promote our film, I believe were done to a good and reasonable standard. All three promote our film greatly without giving away too much information and spoiling it for the audience.

Evaluation - Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
There are many different aspects that will help the success of a film, but in reality the audience itself is what decides on the success of the film. Throughout the production and development of our film we had a very clear idea on how we wanted the feeling and emotions of our audience  to be. The word of mouth that can be transmitter between our audience and their friends and family is what we had to focus on, we had to get them to love it for them to be confident enough to talk about it as a great short film. This is where we realised the importance of acting upon the feedback we received from our audience.  

After producing our initial treatment for our film we decided that it was time to get some feedback from the desired audience and work the feedback into the original ideas to further improve  our short film.
We produced our first audience questionnaire and handed it out to a total of 35 people and as well we posted it online on the social media website (FACEBOOK). We gained a lot of positive feedback on our film, but we also received some constructive criticism which helped us with the development of our short film. We took each piece of constructive criticism and used them to further improve our film to the point where we were very satisfied with the film we had produced. We could also figure out from the questionnaires whether or not our film had a big enough target audience for us to release it to. Customisation was essential when feedback was received (For example: Shorten down shots so the film doesn't drag on and get boring). Many questions were asked after they read a short extract and a basic outline to how the film was going to be. For example 'What genre would you generally watch?' and 'Do you think our film fits the majority of your age group?' etc. 

Another use for research was filming a random 10 people, after letting them read a short extract upon there request we would sit them down in an interview manner and allow them to answer question we read out to them. We had a major technical fault with this part of our audience research as the tape that we recorded our interviews on broke and we only could save a limited amount of the interviews we did. This wasn't a major problem as we did get all the answers to the questions and wrote them down. We asked people if they could think of any other films that the story line we had created linked to and if it was sufficient enough for the genre and target audience we had chosen. Several candidates explained that they like the sense of mystery about the thriller and that it makes them want to know more about what happens to the characters throughout the duration of our 5 minute film. 

  All the information we collected from the interviews and questionnaires was used to produce our 5 minute film. Although we had a lot of footage to handle we couldn't use most of the footage as the shots proved very difficult to record so didn't work to their full potential, even though the shots didn't work we decided to produce a film out of these shots to show others, but we would never use this to publish as our final film. As many students were respectful and told us that they worked but were not necessary we decided to get rid of them all and create a short version which ended up being around 4 minutes 30 seconds long. They highlighted the very specific parts that didn't work so that we could produce a very clean and nicely cut first draft. 

We got feedback from many different people including close friends and family which helped us to obtain an outline in which we needed to follow to produce a very successful film. Facebook and YouTube were very helpful for feedback as we got comments on both of the sites telling us ways in which we could improve our short film. 

i think that the audience feedback that anyone receives can be very easy to totally discard and to my experience i think it would be a grave mistake. As the producers, you can let the role overwhelm you and think that you know best. But in fact it is critical that you listen to the audience feedback as it will dramatically improve the quality of the product you are deciding to release. 

To conclude i believe that the feedback that we gained has been vital to the success and quality of our short film, without it the film would not have been anywhere near as good as it is as its final export. Possibly more boring and very graphical if we were not told to cut the scenes out that did not suite our audience. 

Evaluation - Question 4

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

There were many ways in which technology came in very useful when researching different ideas for our film. The internet as such a limitless end of research and ideas that coup us and did help us decide on what was best for our film. The internet provided endless creativity and imaginative ideas for us to use in aid of our work. Websites such as YouTube and Vimeo, helped us watch previous short films made by other students, professionals or even by people who do it just for the hobby. As well as watching long films, to gain ideas for endings and story lines. 

A lot of media technologies came in very handy whilst planning our film, communication was key to us whilst planning as we needed to know when we were filming and where it was going to be. Mobile phones were vital as we were able to contact each other in times where maybe one of us was confused by the planning, or confused about what was about to happen. Also Facebook messenger was used when mobile phones were not accessible. 

Once all our ideas and planning was completed we decided to produce questionnaires on templates provided on the internet which sped up the process and allowed us to distribute it on such a bigger scale. The questionnaires were handed out to family and friends as well as posted on social media sites  to help get the word out about our film idea. The results from the questionnaires were plotted on Microsoft excel graphs to help us summarise the results we obtained. 

We used websites such as BBFC to allow us to research the correct certification for our short film, And iMDB for the film genre we wanted to look into. These sites were very useful when planning and researching for our film. It was very simple to use and helped us speed up the process of our film. Google is one of the biggest contributes to the aid of research for our film, it has limitless amounts of search engines where we were able to find important factors of research without any trouble at all. The locations where we would shoot our film was quite obvious to us, but Google Maps was useful to us when we needed to check the areas and plan where we would film the shots from. 

Various image editing softwares were used throughout the production of our film posters, the main software we used was Adobe Photoshop, this software was provided by the college which was easily accessible for us. The photo for our film poster was taken on a Canon 450D which was provided by the college. It was a very high quality camera and allowed us to get the right shot we wanted for our final poster. 

We used a lot of physical equipment for when we were filming the shots, equipment such as HD-1000 cameras were used as the main high definition camera. We also used the tripod which became very useful when trying to film steady, tracking or panning shots. The high definition shots were then transferred from the camera, to the Apple Mac Computer via a cable. This was then all edited to fit properly and flow correctly through Final Cut Editor, this was quick and easy to use and also provided on the college computers so this again sped up the process of our editing. 

To conclude i believe that the technology i used worked very well in aiding us to speed up and complete our film to an excellent standard. The technology didn't necessarily cause any problems for us and was very successful in the way in was needed.