Evaluation - Francesca Anscombe-Munn

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

Short films are thought of as some of the most inventive and creative work within the film industry, ranging from around 2 to 30 minutes long. Although short films do not often follow the same rules as feature length films, they have a set of common conventions of their own. 

  

Throughout the creation of my A2 advanced portfolio  I have spent a lot of time researching and analysing a number of short films, learning about the conventions and how I could apply them to my own work.For question one of my evaluation, I will be analysing stills from a range of short films, and my own short films, covering these aspects:

• Narrative Organisation

• Camera work

• Characterisation

• Mise en Scene

• Genre Conventions

Narrative Organisation

Through my research I have found out that as short films only run for around 2 to 30 minutes, they often only deal with one main issue or focus on one main event in the narrative. I think this is to keep it uncomplicated, and to make the simple story line as interesting and engaging as possible, rather than attempt to fit a complex narrative into such a short amount of time.

Screen grabs from 'Sprocket' and my own film 'Betrayal'.

• For example, 'Sprocket' (one of the films I have previously researched) has a linear structured narrative. All events take place in chronological order, and the narrative starts at the beginning of the plot and ends at the close. I think that this is because 'Sprocket' is only 2 minutes and 22 seconds long, and therefore the plot must be clear; I feel that a complicated narrative would disrupt the flow of the film. 
• In my own film, 'Betrayal', we took note of what our research told us and adopted a similar styled linear narrative. All events in our narrative happen in chronological order, even though they are spaced out over different days. All the events that feature in our film are set out over the days leading up to Christmas, however as all the days our in the correct order our narrative organisation is still linear.

• We are thrown right into the main event; the narrative begins with three characters who we have had no introduction to, and nothing about their personal stories are revealed to us throughout the film. 
• We did not feel the need to explain to our audience the three characters own stories  as it was not key to our film. You can tell that they are a family and roughly the girls age. All the information that is needed to understand the narrative, is expressed within the film. As we were limited to creating a film only five minutes long, I felt that it would be unnecessary and a waste of time to give background information of our few characters.

• Todorov's narrative theory can often be applied to short films due to their linear narrative as previously discussed. I would apply the theory to 'Sprocket' in this way: Equilibrium- at the start or the film, three young boys messing around playing dares. Disruption- the two boys give the other a really scary dare that he doesn't seem comfortable with, going into the world of 'sprocket'. Confrontation- the boy meets sprocket a he explores. Resolution  Sprocket is not in fact scary like they thought. New equilibrium- they boy tricks the other two and then they all run home.
• I believe that Todorov's theory can also be applied to my own film 'Betrayal'. Equilibrium  everyone getting ready for Christmas, doing things together as a family, all is normal. Disruption- Jennifer runs downstairs in the night, and see's her mother and father Christmas exchanging gifts and a kiss. Confrontation- Jennifer is moody with her family throughout the new few days, including Christmas day, until finally she is confronted with the watch again and realises her father was the man she saw. New equilibrium- although not much of the new equilibrium is actually shown in the film, she now knows and everything can go back to normal.
• I also feel that Levi-Strauss' theory could be applied to my film, in terms of binary oppositions. In 'betrayal', in an unconventional way I think that our male character, the father, plays both binary oppositions at different stages of our narrative. For example  he starts of being good, as all is normal, however when Jennifer see's her mother kissing father Christmas, he becomes the evil character. However, she does not know that it is her father, therefore he sort of plays two different characters within one role. However when she realises, he goes back to being good again. 
• This also relates to Propp's theory, as the father character plays more than one of Propp's character roles, swapping from the hero to the villain, back to hero again.

• Although our narrative is an example of a linear structure  we did feature a flashback. However, conventionally, flashbacks in short films refer back to a scene that is not involved in the narrative, it tells you a different part of the story  However our film unconventionally flashed back to a scene already shown earlier in the film to remind the audience of that particular key moment.

Mise En Scene

A lot of short films are examples of social realist films, and often a lot of the 'realism' is created through the use of mise en scene. Use of setting, props and even costume are all strong tools in creating a feeling of social realism. 

This convention is something that we wanted to portray in our own film.

Screen grabs from 'About a Girl'

• As you can see in the about screen grabs, the setting and props suggest a social realist setting. The cafe for example is a typical location that we would expect to see in real life. In this short, the mise en scene features are also used in order to communicate certain things about the character. For example these two screen grabs suggest that the characters are most probably working class.

• As you can see from the screen grabs taken from my own film 'Betrayal', we have followed the convention of choosing a realistic location that suits our film, therefore emphasising the social realist themes of our film. We chose to film in a house that suited the traditional elements for our narrative, and I think this location worked well and added a 'homely' feel to our film.

an example of our location

• However our film was based around the theme of Christmas, therefore we needed some more specialized props. We had to bring in a Christmas tree, decorations and even roast dinners.  It was important that we went the extra mile with these aspects of our mise en scene as they were key to the plot of our film.

• 'About a girl' also features really realistic and simple costumes, once again adding to the realistic themes. I think that this is done in order to suggest certain things about the characters, such as social class and background. Short films often use mise en scene features to suggest things about the characters, as they are so short and therefore do not want to take up time in the narrative.
• We let Jennifer pick her own outfits out for our shoots, as I felt that if she was wearing something she chose herself, it would be as accurate as possible as to what children of her own age wear. Obviously we also had her dressed in pajamas and snow gear. I wanted Jenifer to dress as a normal young girl would as it is important to keep all the costumes as realistic as possible.
• As we had to use teenage actors to portray our parent characters (due to our low budget), we had to ensure that their costumes helped to convey them as adults. We dressed them in fairly plain clothes, typical of what parents would wear around the house. We did not want to communicate anything about their own stories through the outfits, simply trying to ensure that our audience understood that they were the parents. 

Genre Conventions

Short films are often an example of cross-genre, as they are so experimental and alternative they often resist being put into only one genre category, and sometimes sub-genres are created. Some cannot be put in to any at all.
Our film is an example of this, it resists being put into a genre category. 
'About a girl' is also an example of this. Alike my own film, it cannot really be placed into a genre category. However both 'About a girl' and 'Betrayal' are examples of social realist films, and I feel that this is becoming a genre in itself. 
Because of our films resistance to genres, it is hard for it to be compared to a genre theory. I have attempted to apply a range of theories to my film however I have found this really hard. I have found that Steve Neale's theory of repetition and difference could be applied, in the sense that the repetition would be all of our Christmas aspects, the traditional aspects and the family activities together, this is typical of Christmas films and is commonly portrayed in the way we have shown it. However the difference would be the slight twist to our narrative, something a lot less traditional and a bit darker, as a child finds out that Father Christmas is not real. This slight twist is not something that you would typically expect to see in a Christmas film.

Here is a clip from 'About A Girl'.

Camera Work

Camera work is a really important tool in expressing certain things about your character and representing them how you want them to be seen.. A common convention of short films is to use camera techniques to portray the character in a certain way, influencing how the audience see them; this could be in order to make the character seem like the 'goody' or the 'baddie', or to make the narrative more effective.

• For example in 'mixtape', we are introduced to the young boy character in a close up shot of him looking just below the camera. Instantly we can tell the characters age, gender and we can also see some facial expression. As we being to understand what the boy is doing, there are a number of close up shots shown in order to communicate with the audience how he is feeling, and allowing them to empathise with him.
• We used this technique throughout our film. As we had minimal dialouge throughout our short film, we used close up shots expressing facial expression and body language to communicate to the audience what wasn't being said in words. Through these shots, the audience were able to understand how our characters were feeling and how our plot was developing. I think that this was a really good convention to follow, as mininmal dialouge is very common in short films, and using different camera techniques to show our characters made our shots more varied, detailed and interesting.
•  Alike 'mixtape', our second shot is a close-up of jenifer, with her eyes level to the camera, in this particular shot she looks excitable and happy. This communicated to our audience her excitment for chirstmas day, and introduces our main character as a chirpy young girl. (see screen grab above)

• Another common convetions of short films, when discussing camera work, is the use of close ups to signify certain props as important, or key to the narrative. 'Mixtape' does this a few times throughout, one exmaple being the big-close up shot of the mixtape itself. This is really key to the narrative and to the spectator, as it reveals what the title of the film is about, and begins to suggest certain plot structures. As shown in the screen grabs above.
• We followed this convetion in our film 'betrayal'. Our plot is based around one significant prop, the watch, however the audience would not neccasarily know this. Therefore it was really important to the inderstanding of our film that we made that particualr prop really stand out. By doing this, we had a big close-up shot of the watch when it first appeared in our film. To create even more of an emphasis, we dragged the clip out a little bit longer. This is shown in the screen grabs above.

Characterisation:

Characterisation is really important as it is a way of constructing how the characters are percived and represented. It establishes the audiences view of each character, right from the start of the narrative.
This is shown in 'The most beautiful man in the world'.

• As you can see in the above screen grabs, the young girl character is portrayed as alone, vunerable and deprived. This is dhown through close up shots of her unwashed and emotional face, and long shots of the dirty room she is sleeping in. Instantly, the audience see the young girl, and empathise with her. She is represented as a victim, and the audience are encouraged to feel sorry for her and want to reach out to her character. The audience are also therefore encouraged to dislike the mother character, and see her as the 'baddie', before they have even met her character; this view is based purley on what the audience have seen of the young girl.
• This is very common of short films, to create a representation of one character, purley on the representaion of another.
• The childs character is represented as helpless, and therefore it causes the audinece to want to fill the role of her 'helper'.

I think that this shot is particually effective for characterisation, as she appears so small in the frame making her look really alone and vunerable.

• In our own film, 'Betrayal', we have portrayed the young girl as cheerful and happy, showing her excitment for chirstmas. As our film is an example of social realsim, it was important that we kept jenifers character accurate to a real young girl of her age. This was fairly easy, as jenifer is obviously not a real actress, therefore as she is so young she didnt really get into character as such, we more just told her to act as herselft but in the situations we put her in. This was succeseful, as now her charcter's images is accuarate, creating a realistic characterisation.

• We portrayed the parents as typical adults, bonding with their child over the chirstmas season.

Our Film Poster

Film posters are created in order to attract and audince, and advertise the film. They must be enaging, in order to create a hype and draw in an audience. Through my research I have found that film posters, both feature length and short, have a set of common convetions that always appear, no matter what the film. Obiouvoly each poster is adapated and designed differently to suit the particular film.

Some common conventions of film posters being:

• Titling
• Key Image
• Billing Block
• Cast Names
• Critical Accalims
• Film Website
• Film Festival Logos
• Sponsors

Here are some images of film posters, both short films and feature length films:

Here is my own poster:

I attempted to convey all the above convetions, in order to make my poster as proffesional as possible.

Title-
Through my research I found that it was imporatant for the titling to be the largest text on the page, more specificly it should be around 1/3rd of the whole poster. I attemptted to confrom to this by making my title large on the page, in dark bold writing. I felt that this text stood out, and definatley created a focus as the main writing on the page. The title is also an important feature as it gives the audience a clue as to what the film may be about.

My titling

Actors names-

I found, that the bigger the actors, the bigger their names will be on the poster. This makes logical sense too, as if you were a huge Johnny Depp fan, and you saw his name written in large on the front of a new film poster, you'd want to go and watch it simply because of the actor, and therefore it is important that his name is shown in large. However, if the actors are less well-known, then it becomes less important. This is the case for us, as we are a low-budget film company we cannot afford to hire well-known actors. Although the acting in our film was very good, they are new to the acting scene and therefore would not draw in much of an audience themselves. This simply means that for my own film poster, I felt that the actors names did not need to be very large on the page.

Key Image-
I think that every poster I looked at, had one key image of one of/the main character. The image may also include some key setting or location, or even a prop. For example, the 'Brighton Rock' poster features a background of the pier, communicating the setting of the film, also supporting the title. However other posters, 'Juno' for example, take the key image and edit it onto a new, sometimes plain background. This can create more of a focus upon the characters if location is less important.

For my own poster, my first draft was an image transportted onto a new, editied background. However for my final draft, some background is shown, however not enough to communicate anything to the audience. I only chose to incorpreate one character into my poster, as she is the main character and I wanted the audience to only see her, as I think it has more of an impact.


Billing Block-
The billing block is an aspect that is always featured on film posters. It is usually found at the bottom of the page in a dark or dull font, and is often hard to notice. It is a legal section that has to be printed, crediting the right people. Below is my own billing block, and some examples from real film posters.
Click here for a link to my blog post about my own billing block.

My Billing Block

Fishtank Billing Block

Critical Acclaims-
There are always some critial accalimes quoted onto film posters. It is important to get a quote from the right people, as it must communicate to your target audience that its a film they want to go and see.

On my poster, I quoted 'Little White Lies', as that linked in with our review. It is also important what quote you feature, as it must give off the right impression about the film. I had to remember when planning these aspects, that although they may not seem as important, it is stuff like this that the audinece read when looking at my poster, and therefore I must plan it to attract the right people.

Film Festival Logos-
Esecially on short film posters, film festival logos often feature. I think that this is because they are a great way of getting your film out there to the public and therefore you want the festivals to be as popular as possible. It is all in order to get as much hype about your film as possible. Below you can see some examples taken off of real film posters, and the festival logo's that I featured on my own poster.

 The review

We created a review in the style of 'Little White Lies' magazine. In order to make my review appear as realsitic as possible, I followed all the rules and convetions that I had researched. I followed the same layout structure, to the exact sizes of columns and pictures. Throughout the research and planning stages, I look at a number of little white lies reviews available at college, making notes on the language features used and the overall layout. More can be read about this in my previous blog post here.

Here is my final review.

Here is a print review taken from Little White Lies.

Conventions:

• Red boxes: These boxes indicate seperate paragraphs. The reviews tend to have roughly around 7 paragraphs and our around 550 words long. We made sure that we had a similar amount of paragraphs and stuck very closely to the word count.
• Blue Circle: The circle shows the 3 point rating system. Each review has it, and it rates the film out of 5, on 'Anticipation', 'Enjoyment' and ' In Retrospect'. We did this for our own film, giving it a 2, a 5 and a 5.
• Black Circle: The small black circle is highlighted the Little White Lies statement large letter. In every issue, the first letter of the review has a large letter, taking up roughly 3 lines. We copied the review in such detail, creating the large letter and making it the correct size.
• Pink Cirle: This circle is showing the film title, the direcor name, actors name and release date. If you look closely you can see that the words 'director' and 'actor' ect are in ittalic. The title is really large, similar to the poster, I feel that this is to create an emphasis.
• Green Box: This box whos the key image, suggesting something about the film.

As you can see, I have stuck to the conventions of a real Little White Lies review as much as possible, making it look professional and advanced. I am really pleased with the oitcome of the review.
Click here to read our review in full.



Question Three:
How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?

Question Two:
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Throughout the making of my advanced portfolio, audience feedback has probably been the most useful tool for making final decisions about my work. It has aided the whole group in all aspects of our portfolios, from the film, to the poster and even the review. 

I made sure that my feedback was sourced from a variety of people, ranging from all age groups and both genders, but of course taking special notice to the comments of my target audience. 

I gathered my feedback in a number of different ways:

• Social Networking
• Youtube
• Survey
• Interviews
• Teachers

                                                       Final film feedback

Social networking sites such as 'facebook' and 'twitter' were the most common ways of me gaining feedback. As our target audience is ages 15 to 25, and this is the most common ages of Facebook users, it was a perfect way of getting people to tell me about my work!

To the left is an screen shot of a post asking for feedback that myself and Ella posted onto Facebook. 

We posted the video onto the site, asking for comments about our film. We also suggest a few things that people could comment on that would be useful to us.
We got a really good response, everyone was really helpful with their feedback and it taught us a lot about our work.

Below are some of the comments that we received:

Here are four images of feedback on our final film through facebook, all in our target audience demographic.

• A lot of the feedback we received was really positive, and it told me that people understood and enjoyed our plot, and liked our Christmas and social realism themes. 

• However, audience feedback is most useful when it tells you what you need to improve on. Some of the comments highlighted some issues we may have with our soundtrack. People commented saying that it 'glitched'. This tells me that we will need to go back and listen to our track, and try to uncover the problem. If this problem is non-resolvable we will have to look for an alternative song, as it seems to be quite a serious issue. However, some comments did say that most of the time the music sounded good and added to the atmosphere of the film, which was really positive to hear. 

• The comments on our camera work were really positive, so I do not think that we will be needing to edit that at all!

We have also been receiving feedback on YouTube  This image highlights one particular comment, how many views we have had and how many likes our film has received. 

Poster Feedback 

For our very first stages of poster planning, Ella drew some images, and myself and her spent a long time getting as much feedback as possible. These two images below were our final choices, and up to a very late stage of creating our poster, they were our two final choices to be photographed. 

The original two drawings.

We gained feedback for our poster in a number of ways, below is just one example of this. We did a survey on the two images, asking people what one they preferred and why.

Although the table may look simple, I found this feedback really helpful. It told me what picture was more effective and therefore what image we should focus on photographing. Also, the feedback is from a ranged audience which is really good, as our film as quite a wide target audience  and we wanted to hear what a number of people had to say.

We found out what people felt that our poster should include, such things as:

• Facial expression (suggests plot)
• Christmas factors
• Child as main focus

Although we did not end up using these images, we did stick to the factors that our audience told us to include.

Review Feedback 

Unfortunately I was unable to get audience feedback for our review due to lack of time! However, our supervisor did make some annotations and comments on our work, which as a group we found very useful!

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

Ella Marcham Evaluation

Question 1;In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Short films are known for containing some of the most inventive and unconventional story lines, to be found in film making. Although short films differentiate from a 'film', due to usually being made by amateur directors and being under 40minutes, they still share the same common conventions. To show this i will be reviewing some short films that i have either previously reviewed or that have caught my eye during the ancillary tasks and planning of our short film. i will be covering the five key concepts, which include;

• Narrative
• Genre
• Characterization
• Mise En Scene
• Editing/Post Producation

- Moreover I will be including Audience, Camerawork, Sound, Media Language and Themes and Issues.

Narrative organization;

Due to the time length of short films, narratives are usually based around one or two characters, otherwise it may over complicate the story line and take up valuable time, instead short films tend to focus on a main life event, for example  one of the films i have researched previously; 'Signs'.

To begin we are thrown into the main characters life, starting with a birds eye view, looking down on the main character in bed. Throughout the whole of the film, we watch him in his current life, this means we have no idea what has happened before hand and what will happen after the film has finished, therefore the short film is a main life event. This is similar to our short, as we began with a shot of Jenifer in bed, shot in the present, once again not knowing what has happened previously in her life or after, showing a life event.

Our ending is also similar to signs as both films are left with an open ending that keep the audience wondering. In signs we see the  two main characters meet, but we are left wondering what will happen next. Moreover in our short  ends on Jenifer finding out her dad was in fact father Christmas   the audience will then be left thinking, what will the parents say.

Our narrative structure is in chronological order,  however includes one flash back. We used the flash back as a reminder to the audience that Jenifer had seen the key prop. To make sure our audience knew it was a flash back we altered the colors to differentiate from the rest of the shots.

In most short, and full length films a common feature is a twist in the narrative. Usually the narrative will follow a straight forward path to set the scene of an ordinary life. As short films have a limited time span this can make the film more interesting, in comparison to a full length film that have plenty of time to set the scene and build enigma. Within our short film the twist was towards the end when we see father christmas kiss the mum, we didnt have much time to do our twist as we spent the majority on our film setting the scene.

Genre;

The catigorisation of genres within short films can prove quite difficult  due to the categories not being fixed and in some cases they may belong to more than one genre. Genres are defined and separated on the basis of common characteristics, style of content, codes and conventions. Another way of defining a short film is Iconography, the idea of symbolic and repeated props that help define a genre, for example, in the short film 'mixtape' the two main characters are a boy and a girl, this is symbolic as this suggest romance, this is also the case with 'signs' as we relate to the social realism.

• Rick Altman developed the theory of 'Semantic and synthetic' approach. this means finding common narrative features for a genre, including typical plot development.

• Films that are classed as more than one genre are usually called a hybrid. This creates an interesting media text.

Mise En Scene;

Mise en scene throughout short films are very important when wanting to portray a certain image, for example social realism. During our film we were representing a family environment, to do so effectively we used a family home as our setting, similar to 'the black hole', they used the setting of an office.

Another part of mise en scene is costume, we dressed the young girl Jenifer in a pink cardigan, this is because it is something that a girl her age would wear, and bellow we also see an example of this in the short mixtape also.

Camera Work;

we used many camera techniques throughout our film, just like any other short film, as they are used to portray characteristics, for instance we used a high angle looking down on Jenifer when she is in bed, we do this to show her emotions, to make her look smaller.overall camerawork is great at portraying emotions and showing empathy, making the audience feel her emotions is important due to the lack of dialogue in our film we rely upon the camera work and soundtrack. There is a similar shot to this featured in 'signs', shot from a birds eye view, looking down on the main character, this is a strong shot as we straight away get a feel for the main characters characteristics. 

Editing/Post Production&sound;

A common technique which we used in our film is to have non or little diegetic sound and instead portray emotions through camerawork and non diegetic soundtracks.once again 'signs' is a good example as there is no dialogue. I believe this is more common in short films as there isnt enough time to develop characters and often can give away the short story line.we conformed to these conventions.

The most intriguing short film i found to do with editing/post production work is 'the black hole'.this film relied heavily upon editing, as the black hole acted as a gateway. we however did not use this much editing however we did have to take multiple shots for each scene and then digitally stitched the together using final cut pro, it was time consuming however after a while we began to get to know the program more and managed to do it quicker and easier.

Characterization;

Characterization within short films can sometimes get lost due to the lack of dialogue. instead we are left to make our own judgement on the character.i believe this is more intriguing for the audience as they make their own narrative.

Themes and Issues;

The main theme raised was the whole father christmas myth that every parent tells their child. this allows parents to relate and children over the age of 11 to relate as we have all been told the story of father christmas. All comes down to the social realism of the film that we tried to create.

Ancillary Tasks

Poster;

• Title; The title is the largest piece of text on the whole poster, it is made to stand out so most people will recognized the film name and remember it. we made it stand out by putting in a bold larger font than the rest of the writing on the page. The white on the image background stands out, it also gives a christmas feel to the poster as you can relate it to snow. We also used the same font that is featured in the film to make a link.
• Image; The image consists of the three main characters, Jenifer, the mum and dad. This is implied by the costume and body language. The shot is a medium close up, this allows us to see the surroundings and the key props that show it is christmas. We are also able to see jenifers facial expression which does not look pleased, this hints to the audience, along side with the name of the title that something is wrong.
• The actors names are also a convention of a film poster, hence why we have made them stand out in bold. This is not as big in short film posters as you will rarely have a hollywood star featuring in a short film, however we have still done it for recognition purposes.
• BILLING BLOCK; we also made a billing block that we placed at the bottom, this includes production companies, cast and crew members and funding logos. these feature on all film posters to show people who was involved in the making of the film. 
• 
  
• the last convention are quotes from reviewers. these were placed on to the poster to show the audience what trusted companies have fedback about our film.

Conventions of a movie poster

• FILM NAME; bold, strong title that can clearly be read for passers by.
• A good IMAGE that features characters and setting, or reflecting the film in some way.
• ACTORS NAME, may make audience want to go see the film if a specific actor is featuring in it, therefore promotes the film.
• a TAG LINE, this is used to give the audience an insight to the story, also may include a quote from the film.
• DATE released so that people know when they can see it.
• cast and crew are featured in the billing block
• all of the above are usually all for big budget film posters.

Review;

 

Above is a print screen of how our actual review looks like. 

LWLs review page are always the same, with the same font and template all the way down to font size, dimensions and alignment.

The magazine uses a Tripartite ranking system, The categories; Anticipation, Enjoyment and In Retrospect, these are all marked out of 5 and accompanied by explanatory text. We will be asking our peers to mark our film out of those categories, to come from a non biast angle.

From the example of the Brighton Rock addition i have reviewed the layout. 

• Firstly the picture is a screen shot taken from the film that is being reviewed, like most of the layout this is consistent in each review. 
• Secondly the title of the film, ' Brighton Rocks' in this case, is centered and in bold, Below the title are the directors and the main actors that featured in the film.
• Thirdly is the copy. To start the copy each addition has a capital letter, in bold that is usually 3 lines deep, this gives a professional appearance to fit its target audience. The review itself is around 500-550 word long and is split into 3 columns the third ending half way down.
• Lastly the rating system, marked out of five,this is to give the audience an idea of what the film is like from LWLies perspective. 

Another component i found intriguing was the digital issue of Brighton Rocks. Similar to the printed addition the same print screen is used, the ratings are still featured, the only difference is the layout of the copy

Question 2;How effective is the combination of you main product and you ancillary tasks?

Question 3;What have you learnt from your audience feedback? 

Audience feedback throughout the whole of the making and planning of our short film has been very important when it comes to making a definite decision, whether it be the poster ideas, the film or the review. It is essential that the feedback comes from a wide range of ages and different genders to receive balanced evidence, it is also important as these are the representatives of our target audience.

For the majority of gathering our audience feedback we used social networking sites, such as Facebook. Using Facebook allowed us to ask a wider range of people, from the age of 15+  and ask them on their thoughts of our finished short.

Feedback from the finished film; 

Using Facebook I posted the video asking people to watch and comment their opinions, I also listed topics they could feedback on. In response to the post we received a fair amount of good and bad feedback.

What this gathered feedback has told me is that they all understood the story line and plot and thought it was creative and included a socially realistic narrative that they thoroughly enjoyed.

I have also learnt that the music in our film needs to be looked at in greater detail as many of the comments picked up on the soundtrack having glitches at certain points. However, feedback has also told me that they thought our music was a strong factor of our film that helped set the tone and mood of our film and helped communicate the thoughts and feelings of our characters.

There was also a lot of praise about camera work. We are chuffed with that comment as that is an important technique as you want your film to flow smoothly so that the viewer can get into the film.

Feedback for poster; 

From the initial stages of planning for our poster we began by asking for feedback from people aged in our demographic. After lots of thought i drew out two examples of posters, we then asked our target audience and put into a tally chart. This helped up gather some idea of what our poster image should consist of.

• Child's Facial expression- could be a plot reference.
• Should include all characters, showing body language.
• should include Christmas color and more of a Christmas feel.

Despite the fact that our final poster did not look like either of the drawn images does not matter. We did this investigation to find out what factors we need to include, which we successfully did and included in our final poster. 

To the left is one persons feedback, over the age of 40. I chose to ask her as she is part of our target audience as she is a mother and can relate to the film. she thought the poster looked very authentic, however next time we should consider getting other peoples feedback such as 'Little White Lies'. 
In comparison to the last audience feedback Karen also likes the image and that it includes the whole family, moreover she believes there is a Christmas feel to the poster.

Feedback of review;

For our review there wasnt much feedback that could have got off of our audience, as it was more to do with the language and the all together writing. Therefore we were able to write a draft version of our review and then allow our supervisor to look over our review and annotate. From this feedback we were able to correct any mistakes that we had made and over looked.

Overall our audience feedback that was gathered from a variety of ages and gender, was very helpful towards our ancillary tasks and not only helped us with our planning but our finished outcome.

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