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