Critical Evaluation

1. In what way does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
One thing that I always seem to struggle with each year is the breaking of the 180-degree rule. Without even realising we had done it, in the first scene we only had one shot that was suitable for this part of the script, but it was the other side of the conversation, breaking the rule. Luckily, we were able to work around this by cutting the audio of the good shot that we had, and have a shot of me and Laura flicking through the photos, while the audio of Connor talking was playing over this shot. It wasn't how we planned this scene to work, but covered our backs by doing that extra shot that luckily saved us in the end.

In our film, we have hinted at one other film; Ghost starring Patrick Swayze. Our reference to this film would be the writing on the mirror, which we use in our film. In the film ghost, the character played by Patrick Swayze writes 'Boo' on the mirror to scare his assosciate. We contrast this in our film by writing 'Help' on the mirror. Not a massive reference to another film, yet, this is as close at it gets.

Audience pleasure was something that we tried to achieve in our film. The moral to our story was that despite how horrible you can be to someone, or vice versa you can still miss them when they are gone. In our film, despite being nasty towards his brother, Lewis learned that he missed Ryan when he was gone. One thing that we hope people take away from our film would be to start treating others better, because you will miss them once they are gone. Luckily, Lewis had a second chance to put things right. The way we portrayed Lewis' grief was essential to audience relation. In the shot below, we see Lewis crying as he looks at a picture of him and his brother, by using a close up shot of Lewis which we do not use very often in the film, we can see the emotion in his face and hopefully the audience can relate to him. We weren't trying to provoke a reaction out of the audience in which they cried at our film but we were hoping that the audience would feel a bit sorry for Lewis despite how badly he treat his brother.

One shot that we used in our film, was the shot of Lewis shutting the door and then opening it again to be fully clothed. I originally got the idea for this off the trailer of Freaky Friday where Lindsay Lohan closes the door and opens it again, clothes changed. Since this was not a hard shot to do, as it was just a case of keeping the camera in the same poisition and cutting the time in between where it's just a recording of the door closed, it was something I incorporated into our film. It was a nice little shot, which required minimal effort. As well as the door shot, we also have the afore mentioned mirror shot.

We tried to achieve audience pleasure from our film by showing a sense of social interaction and the interaction of a family. By showing a somewhat dysfunctional family come together at the end, and get along with each other gives the audience some pleasure. The family on screen could be easy to relate to and allowed us to create a family film that hopefully the whole family would sit down and watch. Children would enjoy our film through the element of fantasy and we should see an element of remorse, if they were to have a younger or elder sibling who they weren't too nice to. We also covered Richard Dyers theory of Intensity of Eutopia as we tried to get the audiences emotions running high by including a scene where the elder brother is upset over losing his younger brother.

One element that we tried to achieve in our film was a bi-polar effect where we have moments a moment of severe sadness where they are looking over the pictures of the granddad, where the elder brother seems to get some sort of enjoyment off of the younger brother missing their Granddad and relishes in his discomfort. This role is changed when the younger sibling disappears where the elder sibling gets into a severe state of depression because he misses his brother, whereas the disappeared sibling is having fun playing with his brothers mind. Finally, at the end we see that both brothers are back to be in each others company, and seems to have changed their view of each other for the forseeable future.

In the film that I analyzed off the BBC Film Network, a noticeable comparison can be drawn between the younger sibling of Ryan in our film and the character of Darren in The Fall. Although Darren has a mental problem and his older brother Jason looks after him, the main comparison that can be drawn between the two would be the independence of the two of them, and the fact that they both go missing. The Fall was a great insight into something that we were wanting to achieve with our film and actually gave us some ideas that we could use in our final film, such as dialogue and highlighting the feeling of being alone which we applied to Lewis.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?
The main moral to our story is the idea of losing somebody is close to you. Despite, the two bothers not getting along very well, and one actually being very nasty to the other, he still missed him when he had gone. The main thing that we want the audience of our film to see is that make use of the time that you have with someone, because before you know it, they could be cruelly snatched away from you. Luckily, Lewis was able to change and got Ryan back. But others obviously won't be as lucky to acquire a second chance.

When it came to creating our radio trailer, we obviously didn't want to give too much of the storyline away. In the trailer, we tried to highlight how nasty Lewis was to Ryan by including the line 'Would you cry if i died?' Honestly, no. Then later on, Jayne in a state of panic by saying 'fine i'll go look for him by myself, clearly showing that she cared that he had gone missing By doing this, there is no way to know that Ryan disappears through something enchanting, the audience just thinks that Ryan has run away.

We also used the element of voice over, using the voice of Luke in which he told the audience certain elements of the story which could not be put across using sound clips from our film. The voiceover tells us of 'two brothers who never got along, until one of them goes missing', which helps the audience to understand more what the film is about. Voice overs are used often in radio trailers to highlight parts of the story that would otherwise be difficult to tell. Through the radio trailer, we were also able to tell the audience that there is some history between the brothers, and have not been getting on very well for quite a significant period of time.

The film poster that I chose to analyse was the one by the film Freaky Friday. I chose to analyze this film simply because it was so close to ours int what we were trying to achieve in terms of characters and relative plot. Some ideas that we took from this film idea was the use of both main characters been used in the poster in a similar position. We then obviously included the usual things you would expect to see in film posters, such as the title, the actors names etc.

Despite having a fairly complex storyline in the planning stages, we tried to make the story as easy to follow as possible, so only used a linear narrative so as the audience weren't confused. An advantage of this was that editing was a lot easier as we just had to make sure it happened in the right order, and other advantage would be that the story was easy to follow and you weren't having to think about earlier flashbacks or have to sort out in your head what order everything was happening in.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

With our original audience research, conducted on the HDV Sony Camera, are main question that we wanted to find out would be the use of swearing in a 12A film. We also asked many other questions, which included giving us some ideas on what they would do if they were invisible for a day. We already had an idea what we were going to do, we just wanted people to be creative and suggest some ideas.

From the question about swearing we discovered that they would expect mild swearing but no use of strong words such as the 'F' word or the 'C' word. This helped us in our final film as we ended up using the word 'pissed'. Not a swearword to most, but it is quite a strong word, but it would pass for a 12A certificate. Other things we found out from our original audience research was if people regularly watched films, espsescially short films and what they though to our particular genre. It was also interesting to see what people though of our original pitch and we got a unanimous answer that it was good pitch, if we pulled it off.

Editing took us a long time this year, since it was a 5 minute film we obviously had more shots to shoot, meaning more shots to edit. When originally creating our story on Final Cut Xpress, we ended up having the film touching on 9 minutes long. This was obviously not acceptable and through extensive cutting we got it down to 5:35. So that the audience followed the linear narrative of our film, we added titles saying 'The next day..' to a few shots so that the audience definitely new that a day had passed. Despite only being on for a few seconds, it just gives the audience a push in the right direction.

One positive accolade that a lot of people was saying that they were impressed the enjoyment that they got from watching our film seen as we only filmed in one location. Other groups were travelling up and down the country, or going to different places around Barnsley to complete their films, yet we had a simple walk down the street to our location and no more was needed to be done as everything that we wanted to achieve could be achieved in the house. When conducting audience research, I asked the question where did any of the characters reminded them of anyone and were they relatable. One interesting one that I got back was that the character of Lewis was likened to David Platt off Coronation Street, in the general moody behaviour that he displayed. Although this was not something that we were wanting to achieve, it is an excellent comparison of two young outlaws who were generally not very nice people. We also received numerous praises for our film saying how we were able to create such a good film without spending any money and just using resources that we already had available. No money was spent on props or anything for our film, and this was advantagious due to us setting our film in the present day, meaning no money was needed to be spent on costumes or props, like we had to do last year.

Using the social networking site, facebook, I sent the some review questions to a lot of people and received some feedback. Of the feedback are two friends of mine below who provided us with some useful insights on how to amend our film and what they thought were good. We generally received positive reviews and any constructive feedback was taken into account and we then set about improving our film.

Above is a video that we created after conducting a question and answer survey on what people though of our short film. This was a great use of resources and allowed us to get in some last minute work using the camera. It also made our reviewing a lot more professional and gave us a more visual outlook on what people though of our film.

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

For our media project I have successfully used an HDV Sony Camera, as well as Final Cut Xpress when it came to editing our project. As well as this, I also used Blogger to record all of our posts on an online blog. An advantage of using the HDV Sony Camera is that it is able to shoot in very good quality and it is a very professional piece of equipment, and I enjoyed using and operating this piece of technology. The only minor problem I had with the HDV camera would be carrying it to our destination became a real pain seeing as how heavy it is, but this was not a major problem.

Final Cut Xpress really enabled to me be creative. I am one of those people who will try every single effect to see which one is the best one, no stone is left unturned. After searching through all the effects on Final Cut, I eventually found the ‘Flash-Frame’ video transition which became an important part of our film and I ended up using this transition 3 times in our film. An advantage of this particular transition is that the shots didn’t have to be identical, and in the 3 shots that I used them, the character in the shot moved, but this is not noticeable seen as a flash takes up the entire shot. One problem that I had with Final Cut Xpress would be the computer itself that it was actually on were generally quite fast, but one time our computer completely crashed and refused to eject a disc I had in the tray, meaning no editing could be done for a lesson until the computer would be fixed next lesson.

Finally, Blogger is a very useful way of uploading our work as this meant that any person in our group can access our work, if needs be. This also meant that none of our work could be distorted or lost and people could apply tags to particular posts that they have contributed to, showing us who has done which pieces of work. One problem that I encountered with blogger was the ordering of your posts. By adding pictures to a post, it automatically added the picture at the beginning of the blog and this was irritating if you wanted the picture at the bottom of the post and you had to try and drag it to the bottom of the post, in a relatively small box.

Apart from a few minor problems, I have been able to let my creative nature go into full flow and maximise my potential and overall, I am really satisfied with the end product. The equipment I used was very simple to use and if I didn’t know how to do something, I would somehow figure out how to do it.

Blogger, became a royal pain in the arse, and really annoyed me this year, compared to last year. After deciding I had some time to type up some evaluation, I wrote 3 lengthy paragraphs. I then decided to try and embed a video and blogger crashed, wiping my work that I had done previously. General log in issues also became quite frequent in that we couldn't actually log in and edit work due to an error code saying that I had signed in but then said that I hadn't signed in. Also the uploading and dragging of photos to the place where you wanted to be on your post became quite tedious and the embedding of videos would often be quite irritating if it was bigger than the actual blog post and was too big for the blog itself and made it generally unmessy. However, one major advantage of using Blogger would be anybody could update their work at any time and see what other work other people in the group, as apposed to if we had done all our work in a workbook, we could have all done a similar piece of work and only one could have been submitted. Also, being a faster typer than I am a writer, I was able to get work done a lot faster.