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FINAL PRODUCTION

EVALUATION QUESTION 7 - How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups?

Social groups from Dan Neary

EVALUATION QUESTION 6 - In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop, or Challenge Conventions of Real Life Media Products?

EVALUATION QUESTION 5 - Looking Back at Your Preliminary Task, What do You Feel You Have Learnt in Progression to the Full Product?

EVALUATION QUESTION 4 - How Did You Attract the Audience for Your Production?

EVALUATION QUESTION 3 - What Type of Media Institution Would Distribute Your Production and Why?

EVALUATION QUESTION 2 - Who Would the Audience be for Your Media Product?

EVALUATION QUESTION 1 - What We've Learnt About Technologies From the Process of Constructing Our Production

07/03/16 Update

We finally finished the editing of the re-shoot of our new production, which is looking marginally better than the last one. Editing this time didn't take us very long, as we were dedicated to finishing it, coming in during lunchtimes and after school almost everyday. We are now moving on full time to the evaluation, which we have already started.

Our Complete Ident

Our Group Ident - Grey Moon Pictures

We collectively decided as a group to use this ident to represent us. We felt that the wolf symbolises alarm, as dogs commonly howl when something is wrong. The moon is also associated with the horror genre, as a large portion of horror films take place at night, with the moon representing the setting. We chose to change the colour of the moon from grey to red, as it is an intense colour that symbolises blood, and fits in well with the horror genre. Overall we feel that this ident looks professional, and delivers the message we're trying to send from the off.

Change of Direction

As a group, me Megan and Dan decided to re-shoot our production, as thanks to audience feedback, we were able to realise that our film was not up to our standards. Within the production, there was little dialogue, and the lighting was generally dark resulting in several fuzzy and unclear shots. This could have decreased the amount of marks rewarded, therefore we decided to start from scratch, which was risky, however has now paid off. Caitlin Wevill said the following:

'The production did not have an impact on me as an audience member, as I did not find it engaging and felt that it lacked a clear storyline. There are also some issues with the lighting and the way that certain shots appear to be at completely different times of the day. I felt that because of things like this, it will not have the effect on the audience that you were aiming for.' 

Lighting
Together, we felt that the lighting overall was too dark in some shots, which resulted in a low quality resolution, and therefore an inconsistent quality. The production was inconsistent from another point of view also, as our establishing shot was filmed in the daytime, whereas the rest of the production was set in the evening/night time. As well as this, the area gets considerably darker by the time our character gets downstairs, despite it realistically taking 20-30 seconds, in which it would never get dark so quickly. The following two pictures show you both the difference in time of day, and the second shows just how dark some shots were, to the point where you can't make out Caitlin's face.

Narrative & Lack of Dialogue One of our teachers brought up how the narrative was difficult to understand. This was worsened by the lack of dialogue in the production. For example, when Caitlin enters the caravan, she says nothing, and her reasoning for going there in the first place was made unclear due to her not speaking along with the fact that the shot of the caravan curtains closing was from afar. The following image explains this. This was the defining point in the narrative, therefore if an audience member missed it, they wouldn't understand what was happening throughout the remainder of the film. Everybody involved with the filming of our production agreed to restart our project, as it was made clear to us that it required a lot of work, but would be easier to start with a new plot rather than altering the old one.

Sound Manipulation

Once we had collated all the footage and ordered the shots chronologically onto IMovie, I decided to do some independent research into typical, suspenseful sounds that would enhance the climax of our production. Using 'FreeSound.Org', I explored the various, existing sounds that had associations with the words, eerie, ambience, suspesne, climactic. This allowed a narrow search of specific sounds that would be of benefit to our production and therefore, was more efficient. For example: I found audio files that replicated a tense, climactic-build up, with 'clang'-like sounds embedded into the audio which gave the desired effect we were after. The fact that this audio was 'reversed' allowed the climax to be magnified further and this contributed to the tense atmosphere.

Afterwards, we decreased our search variation and focussed on the particular diegetic elements on freesound that were of better quality, rather than using original audio from our footage. Examples of sounds we collated included an old-record player (to synchronise with our own vinyl), an opening of a door & the washing of hands. Sounds such as these allowed the disruption of the narrative to become even clearer, as oppose to the quiet, confusing sounds generated from the audio footage. In particular, the use of an old-record player emphasised the eerie quality to our piece and therefore, created the impression of terror through the use of an out-dated feature. Our decision to use this record-player was influenced by our previous research of Sinister - where we established that the opening whirring sound of the video-recorder created a supernatural feel to the introductory shots. Therefore, by using a similar prop with an overlay of a static vinyl-recorder, the prop became more stereotypical of the genre & added to the peculiar aspect of the sound.

We also used 'Garageband' to manipulate existing soundtracks in order to add a more surrealistic pitch, tone & rhythm to the audio. We started by searching on Youtube for tracks that had influenced us from the Fallout movie sequences. An example of the soundtrack used in the opening title sequence was called: "Ink Spots-Maybe" & "Ink Spots - I don't want to set the world on fire". We believed that these tracks generated an eerie, slow paced atmosphere to the narrative, although, "InkSpots-Maybe" was decided upon as the music that is able to be most manipulated. This is an essential part of the editing so that we are able to manipulate original sounds in order to eradicate the copyright restrictions. - Dan Neary

Storyboard

27/01/16 Update

We're very close to finishing our production. We've constructed the main body of our film on Final Cut Pro, and just need to add some smaller effects to give it a cleaner finish. After we've completed that, we can move on to our evaluation and post-production work.

Final Pitch

Caitlin's Consent Form

Why We Chose Our Location

Plot Graph

Technical Research - Editing

As well as researching into filming, I also watched a Youtube video teaching me the basics of editing in Final Cut Pro, (the software we will be using to edit our production). I haven't any previous experience with film editing so this tutorial helped a lot, giving me simple yet effective tips.

20/01/16 Update

Today, me and Megan uploaded all footage that was filmed on the second day to our computer. (Unfortunately, Dan was caught up in an exam and therefore could not make it to the lesson.) We deleted all shots that will not be used for the final production in order to make editing a much easier task for us. On the second day of filming, we re-shot some scenes with different lighting, and from various other angles, and today we compared them to decide which clip we are using in our final piece

Technical Research - Filming

Before filming, I researched further into different camera shots and lighting so that I could be useful when it came to shooting our production.To start off with, I decided to watch a Youtube video in order to see how different camera angles actually look during filming. I found the following tutorial which helped, although it was rather confusing as I did not study media in the previous year.




Whilst not specifically research, I took a tripod out of media to get used to using them.It didn't take long for me to feel comfortable using it as once I found out what each cog moved there was not much else to discover.

Pre Filming Plan

In order for our production to look it's best, we had to check that the weather was very similar on the second day of shooting as the first. During the first day, there was no rain during our filming time, so we checked to make sure there would be no rain the following Tuesday. The forecast for the day was as follows.

Maximum Temperature	6 °C	14:50	Minimum Temperature	-2 °C	00:20
Maximum Humidity	100 %	00:20	Minimum Humidity	81 %	16:20
Maximum Rainfall	-- mm		Minimum Rainfall	-- mm
Maximum Pressure	1020 hPa	07:50	Minimum Pressure	1018 hPa	00:20
Maximum Radiation	-- W/m2		Minimum Radiation	-- W/m2
Wind Speed (Max)	5 mph	09:20

A lot of this information was irrelevant to filming, as the temperature would not affect our production. We primarily had to check the amount of rainfall, which turned out to be none on the day, therefore we knew we could film comfortably without any weather worries.

Day 2 of Filming

Today we completed our second and final day of filming our production. We felt that overall today was a more successful day of filming, as Saturday was more focused on finalising our plot, whereas today we were able to work on filming a wide variety of shot types to vastly improve our production. We decided to re-film certain sections of our footage because we felt that it would be improved by having different lighting or being shot from a different angle. A scene that we completed re-filmed involved our actor being woken up by a phone call and we re-filmed this in order to give a wider variety of shot types and to work in some more match on action. We also filmed more shots inside the house to provide a variety, as on Saturday we focused more on the outside shots. - Megan West

Shooting Schedule

Day 1 of Filming

- Photos compiled from the 3 of us.

During this day of filming, we shot several different scenes, including those indoor and outdoor. We changed several different parts of it in order to increase the quality of the production. Dan took the role as main camera man for the first  day, whereas I directed Caitlin and made sure she performed well, paying attention to every move she made. This was so when we had match on action shots, it looked like it was all taken in one shot, even though it wasn't. This will result in our end product being much smoother.

Floor Plan

- Megan West

Institutional Regulations

Shot List

- Megan West

Preliminary Task

08/01/16 Update

Today, Dan, Megan and myself filmed the preliminary task. We filmed a conversation between me and Dan, utilising many different shots as practice for the shooting of our real production. We will start to edit the preliminary task together on Monday, and carry on throughout the week. We aim to have finished it by the 15th of January.

Preliminary Task Storyboard

Shot List - Preliminary Task

Form Research