Tuesday, 4 May 2010
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Monday, 3 May 2010
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?
Keepvid is yet another website I had not heard of or used before constructing my media product, and it was a very useful and easy feature to learn. I had used it many times throughout conducting my research, such as when analyzing the 6 films of my genre and i needed to convert my videos of these films so i could easily upload all 6 of them to my blog, capable for public viewing anytime they wanted. Keepvid was also used to convert my Preliminary task, which was soon uploaded to my blog, allowing me to view and analyze it for future reference.
imovie maker was something completely new to me, but it proved essential in making my final as well as draft product, as well as various other videos posted on my blog. Unlike websites I had used before the imovie proved a little more challenging to use, as their were multiple options of ways to improve your product and also various ways of editing your videos which while at first seemed hard, towards the end seemed easy. Imovie allowed us to cut out any irrelevant pieces out of our media product so that it would be able to produce something that matched our original film synopsis as well as follow some of the conventions of thriller films that we had analyzed. In addition we were also able to edit clips from other websites, an example being the Warner bros. clip shown in the beginning of our final product, which was cut down from a much longer video and edited so that it would fit into our using the tools of imovie. In addition, we learned how to use the effects in editing to our advantage by using transitions such as fade in and out to make our shots in our film(especially jump cuts) seem more fluent and smooth. Finally imovie allowed us to compress all of our work into a single file and from there we were able to convert or publish our videos the way we saw fit.
The most prominent of the technologies I learned to use was that of Blogger in which we used this to record all of our research, planning and evaluation. This allowed us to post up timetables of when we would be doing certain activities, such as filmind which meant we could refer back to it to get organised which helped as sometimes not all time were able to reach these deadlines. Our blogs were also used as a base where we constantly referred back to all our conventions summarised from the thriller films we analysed. In addition our blog entries are allowed to be see and commented on by the public allowing them to comment and give feedback to us which ultimately helps us improve our research and ideas. Finally, our media work posted on our blog can shown in multiple formats increasing the visual appeal and sense of professionalism.
Friday, 30 April 2010
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
Both of these videos shown above were that of our final product being shown to two groups of our target audience. We had aimed to target our audience (15-20 year old) to those who not only enjoyed thriller films but met the age bracket to which our characters in our film could be related. We learned this would be our target audience during the progression of our film synopsis when discussing what factors of our filmed would would be liked by our audience and why.
We used our enticing story about corruption in government, with the main character(portrayed as young) to be the heroine which was our attempt to attract a younger target audience who may be able to relate to the heroine, and in particular young females as we conditioned our main character (Rosalyn) to be a female who breaks from the conventions in thriller films and is seen to be taking charge, and being in a suit giving a more masculine, authoritative feel that the young girls in our target audience may aspire to be like.
Our use of locations was also something taken into consideration as most of the time the locations seemed to be dark, and mysterious due to lack of lighting, or life(As no one is shown in the locations except actors in or film) and because of this, we hoped to attract an audience looking for a film with a sense of mystery that does not give any details of the plot away too quickly.
Another thing we did was to host our film on the worldwide film website YouTube, where it was allowed to be watched for public viewing, allowing us to get feedback on ways to improve our final product while also addressing , and the feedback we received proved very useful. These comments such as the ones shown below allowed us to further improve our work and final product. This allowed them to comment on what they thought of the story and characters, and how they though we could could improve on our ideas, which is of the main importance as they are our audience and our final product revolves around them.


4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

This shows that the which films people enjoyed the most, with the blue being young teenagers, reds being older teenagers and the yellow being adults. And from this graph we can see that our primary target audience is older teenagers who may enjoy the film due to the main characters being around the same age allowing the majority of our target audience to relate to our characters, while they may also find the appeal in the dangerous situations thriller films put their characters through leaving the audience clinging to their seats in excitement.
We also feel that a large portion of our audience will be women as the main character in our film is a heroine who seems to break many of the conventions that are seen in thriller films as most females are seen to be weak, who constantly draws there power from other characters, while in our film the female is seen to be in control, and capable of handling herself, something hardly shown not just in thriller films, but also other genres.

We ultimately conclude that are target audience are those who will enjoy a good thriller, filled with dangerous situations, and mysterious plots and although our final product may lack realism in some parts we hope to reach out to the younger generations to their adventurous sides by giving them a thriller film which gives them a thrill and allows them to understand a little about corruption in politics as that is what our film is centered on.
Saturday, 24 April 2010
7. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?





Quality of mise en scene- While our mise en scene in the preliminary was lacking, basic and failed to show any significance concerning the story our final product was carefully thought out, taking into account costume, lighting and props. The phone used in many of our scenes in the final product was key in creating an image that the characters were very modern and technologically adept and wearing suits made them authorative and important something accomplished in the final product while not shown i the preliminary. An example of the costume and lighting in our final product can be seen below.


Quality of editing so that meaning is apparent to viewer? Editing was used very lightly in the preliminary task and for very little reason such as something didn't look that good and so it was cut out whereas in the final product we edited to cut the time, add credits and to make the meaning of our two minutes apparent to our audience by focusing purely on our main to characters, something not fully done in our draft final product but done in our real one.

Quality of using sound with images and editing appropriate for the task set? While no music was used in our preliminary and the only sound we used was dialogue, this was greatly worked upon in our final product as we included music which would play as non diegetic sound acting as a sound bridge for the entire two minutes which created a tense atmosphere needed to set up our genre, this was not included in the preliminary though.
Quality of positioning and movement of actors? While the actors movement remained casual throughout the preliminary with no actual purpose to their movement we took all of this into account in our final product. We would position the actors in the centre of the frame accompanied by close ups to stress the significance of them being main characters in our film to the audience. We would also make their movements fit the character, something we never thought of during our preliminary. This meant the movement, mannerisms and actions of our main two characters would be that of someone serious, trying to accomplish a job and at the sane time acting authorative.
Quality of group planning, meeting targets, organisation? All targets were met with both the preliminary and final product, while more work went into the final product as by then we had a script, schedule and a vision to how our film would look to others. When we sets dates for filming they were met and we got all the footage we needed.
Group dynamics? We worked very well together as we did in our preliminary making sure the entire group were comfortable and ready for filming on all occasions. We were also very patient with eachother making sure we re shot anything we thought we could do better. It was a two way operation as we both gave ideas and advice to eachother on how our film could be better.
Thursday, 22 April 2010
Evaluation Q's
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?
7. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?


