Blog Closed

Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

On the left are three screenshots of me in our film opening and on the right a picture of the main characters of the movie 'Mean Girls'. 


What they all have in common is that they are very girly.

• They're really into make-up, shopping, fashion, parties and boys. 
• They spend their days with their friends going shopping, reading fashion magazines, doing each others hair and talking about boys.
• They wear pink, short skirts and a lot of make-up.

The main difference would be that the Mean Girls are a lot worse and more extreme than the girls in our film opening. They do wear make-up, high heels and short clothes, but they're nicer and walk in a normal way. Also our opening was filmed outside in winter, so the options we had for costumes were quite limited in terms of wearing mini skirts and low necklines, because it was freezing. And in the dark it was quite hard to see how much make-up our characters were actually wearing. 

Evaluation Question 5

How did you attract/adress your audience?


The connection to a possible target audience is probably our weakest point and we don't think we did enough to get feedback.


We presented our ideas to our class (see here) and got feedback from them and our teacher watched our roughcut and commented on it (here), but that's basically it.


We have a YouTube channel where we uploaded our videos and initially set up a facebook page which in the end we never used.

What we should have done with it is post our videos on there as well and then get our friends to look at it so they could have given us feedback, even though they don't really fit in our target audience it would have been better than no feedback at all. 
The feedback would have been helpful for us and made it a lot easier to improve our opening; they probably would have commented on things that we didn't even think about or changed our mind about something we thought of as finished.


It really is too late to change anything about that now, but we are aware of that in this aspect we could have done a lot more.

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?

We have definitely improved our media skills and learnt a lot about pre-production, production and post-production over the last months.


When we filmed our preliminary video we only knew little about different camera shots, movements and editing and it was the first time we used Adobe Premier Pro to edit a video.
We had to include the 180° rule, match on action and shot/reverse shot. Other than that our video didn't have many various shots and movements.

So we started doing some research and the pre-production for our main task: the film opening. We analysed similar products, collected and presented initial ideas, made a working outline and a storyboard and tested the cameras we'd use before we could actually start filming. We didn't do any pre-production for the preliminary task apart from researching those three things we had to include which are mentioned above.

When we then started with the production of our opening, we had a wider range of shots and movements we could use to make it varied and interesting. Right at the beginning of the opening for example we used an establishing long shot from the "hunter's" point of view.

To show facial expressions we've used close-ups in our opening which we didn't do in our preliminary task.
The post-production was a real challenge for us! Other than for the preliminary video, we now had to add titles and music for the background, too. Even though it became easier every time as we knew how to do it, we still had loads of problems with Adobe Premiere Pro itself. It also kept telling us that there wasn't enough memory to save it on the system but we managed this by asking the school's ICT staff for help.

Evaluation Question 4

Who would be the audience for you media product? on Prezi

Evaluation Question 1

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

The genre of our film is crime/thriller. Films of this genre often create tension with shadows and dark settings. Our opening is mostly filmed outside in the dark where we only used street lamps.
  
On top of that, the costumes and props of our opening are classic examples for the genre. For instance, mobile phones are often used in real media products like ours at the end.

We tried to use different kinds of shots and angles to make it rich in variety. At the end we used quick cuts which is typical for this genre.

Our titles are kept simple and without any frills which is also conventional.

The song we used is not typical for the crime/thriller genre. There is rather suspense, instrumental music used in the background to create tension. But we still find that our song is good for our opening as it sounds dramatic and suspense even though it is not a typical convention.

There are also a lot of crime films which start like ours. At the beginning the victim is introduced to the audience as well as what happens to them and then the film carries on showing the inspectors searching for them and/or trying to solve the crime. We thought that in our film there could be shown extracts from earlier and now which is also typical. By showing the girl in the room shouting for help we wanted to make the viewers interested in what happend to her and how the film will go on.

All in all, our film opening uses codes and conventions of crime/thriller films.

Evaluation Question 6

What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Me testing the camera

Video Camera
We learned how to handle a proper video camera, which wasn't really a hard thing to do as there's not much that you can do wrong. 

Tripod
The tripod was helpful because it holds the camera steady. Without it our film would be very shaky. The only problem is when you lose bits of it in the grass at nighttime.


Camera
We used a camera to take pictures of locations and were supposed to take pictures while filming, what we unfortunately forgot every single time. We didn't have to learn about our cameras, we knew them before.


Adobe Premiere Pro CS4
Premiere Pro turned out to be our biggest enemy in the editing process (see here). It really is quite hard to use in the beginning, it has loads of functions and it's not easy to find the ones you need, but we got help from YouTube video tutorials (like this one) and it becomes easier with the time.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 
Photoshop was nice, it created our logo (see here),saved our screenshots (like here or here) and edited our pictures (like here). We were familiar with Photoshop before, so no problems on this one!

Prezi
We had never heard of Prezi before, but it's a pretty good thing for creating presentations and looks a lot nicer than PowerPoint. It's also quite easy to understand, it's simple to create things, like we did for our ideas (see Prezi here). 

Blogger
Blogger is obviously used to create this blog. I had used it before and find it easy to use, even though it sometimes has problems to understand what you actually want it to do, like placing pictures in the right place in a post.

YouTube
We used YouTube to create an account (it's here) for our production company and upload our videos, so we could embed them in our blog as well. No problems here either. 

Evaluation Question 3

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

You already know the name and logo of our production company, Pieker Pictures. The name is just made up of our own surnames Piep and Iker, and as well as the logo, which was really just meant to look quite nice, it doesn't suggest a genre of movies the company might produce and distribute.

A production company, as the name suggests, produces the movie, which means it has to organise the crew, actors, locations, props, technology and everything else needed to make the movie.

Making our opening, we always had a special product in mind we were aiming for, which is the German series of crime films "Tatort". It's on TV at prime time weekly with different inspectors from different cities. We always imagined our movie to be part of a series like this and not like a huge Hollywood blockbuster.

The Tatort films are produced by local TV stations or small production companies working for them, so Pieker Pictures would probably be one of them.
The film are not promoted in a special way, the 'fanbase' knows when they're on TV, the only advertisement is on the respective TV station showing an advert saying which time the Tatort is on.

The money for the production comes from the TV stations producing the film and also from the German film funding company 'Deutscher Filmförderfonds' which is about the same as the UK Film Council Film Fund. 

The titles in our opening appear in the following order:

• main title
• actor 3
• camera
• sound and music
• actor 2
• production
• actor 1
• editing
• written and directed

We started with the title of the movie and then the least important one and finished with "Written and Directed by", which for us is the most important one.
We left out titles like costumes or make-up, as those really weren't important parts of our opening and it would have been too many titles in the end.
The names appearing are only Alina's and mine and two other actors, because we were only a group of two, so both of us almost did everything.

Final Video

I can't believe we finally made it, but today we can proudly present our final video.
We almost stopped it from happening when we accidently deleted all of our videos, but fortunately our ICT support could bring them all back.

Music Update

After we contacted EMI to ask if we could use one of their songs for our opening, we didn't recieve any reply, so as this









was part of the message we sent them we felt free to use the song now.

Working on the Titles

Today we worked on the titles in our opening.

Music for Opening

As we wanted to play music in the background of our opening, we needed to get the permission to use it. We decided to use the 30 Seconds To Mars song "Night Of The Hunter". The group has a contract with EMI Music, so we contacted EMI over the Contac page on their website.

We hope that they'll allow us to use the song, if we recieve a reply I will post it as well.
 

Roughcut

After our teacher watched our roughcut, he told us some things that we can improve to make the opening better:

• Improve the titles.
• Music!

So we started doing this; the biggest problem we have is that Premiere Pro doesn't always work properly, which makes the whole process of editing pretty hard.

Editing

After finishing all of our filming we could now start editing the videos to make a roughcut of our opening.

 We first had to select all the videos we wanted to use for the opening and delete all the scenes that weren't good.

We then started putting them together with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Now that we started editing we noticed that some of the scenes don't really work, so we will have to refilm some of them. We're probably going to do that this weekend. 

Filming

We finally started filming on Friday, but even though the forecast again said it wasn't going to, it started raining before we had finished filming all of the opening. We filmed the rest of the outdoor scenes on Saturday, which now only leaves the short indoor scenes for us to do.

Script

Our film opening doesn't contain a lot of dialogue, so our script is quite short.

There will be a short dialogue in the beginning, as they leave the party, which will be like
"Thanks for inviting us!",
"It was a really great party!"
and then "Bye!" and "See you!"
or something similar to that.

There won't be any or only very few talking when the two girls walk home, maybe one of them saying
"Oh, it's sooo cold!".

Then, when one of the girls arrives home, they will say "Bye!" and she's going to say
"Text me when you're home!" to the other girl.

Similar Characters

I looked for characters in movies that are similar to the ones in our opening and I came up with these:

Bring It On

High School Musical

Clueless

Mean Girls

They are all that kind of "girlie girls" as the girls in our opening are supposed to be.

Filming

Unfortunately we couldn't film our opening last weekend, because even though the weather report predicted no rain on Friday, it was raining all day and so it was on Saturday.

We will have to film the opening this weekend.

Friday and Saturday would both be good days for filming if the weather report is right this time, because it won't be raining both nights.

Weather report

As we want to film our opening this weekend, we looked at the weather forecast and decided that Friday would probably be the best day to film the parts outside as it's not going to rain. We could then do the parts inside on Saturday or Sunday.

Characters

The characters in our film opening:

• between 16 and 18 years old
• all very girlie → dressed up, a lot of make-up, high heels
• actors: I'm going to play the main character and two of our friends are going to be the other two girls.

Risk Assessment

What could go wrong?

1. It could start raining/snowing.
2. Batteries could run down./Camera could break.
3. An actor could be unavailabe.
4. We could forget to film a scene./A scene was filmed wrong or doesn't look good.

What could we do about that?

1. We need to have an alternative date to film.
2. We have to take spare batteries./Have an alternative date.
3. We need to have alternative actors and actors we can trust.  
4. We need to be well organised (stick to Storyboard and Shotlist).

Classification of our film

We wrote about the Biritsh Board of Film Classification (BBFC) earlier (here).

If we would have to classificate our film, it would be

15 - Suitable only for 15 years and over

• work mustn't endorse discrimination
• drug taking may be shown but not promoted or encouraged
• (no sadistic or sexualised) strong threat allowed
• no dangerous behaviour on detail
• may contain frequent use of strong language
• nudity allowed in sexual context, but not on detail
• sexual activity permitted, but not on detail
• may contail strong violence

because not the opening but the following action would possibly contain violence, threat and frequent strong language.

Testing the camera

Alina and I tested one of the school cameras, because we wanted to see if the light of a street lamp was enough to make a proper video, and luckily it is most of the time.
The video also shows some possible locations for our opening.

Watch on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DApvVVqDweQ&feature=youtu.be