Evaluation: Question five

Below is the link to our Questionnaire for our film Parallel, feel free to give some constructive feedback.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MSLNJZ2

We got a lot of interesting, constructive feedback from our focus group and from people who answered our questionnaire. This helps us determine the good and bad parts about our film, making our evaluation better.

We got a lot of helpful feedback.

A lot of people said that they would pay to watch our film in a cinema which is ultimately the most important feature of a film as at the end of the day it is a business. This also makes us confident that we have created a film that can realistically be made into a real movie.

Most people felt the film kept their interest going. Although some people said no which we think could be down to the walking scene as it did go on for a while.

A lot of people liked the cloning effect in the editing as it was different and more complex than most other media projects. This seems to be a popular advantage to our film.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/XT1yS3dLmVk

Final draft

This Is our final draft of our opening sequence Parallel. From our first draft we have made quite a few changes. We read our feedback and mostly made changes which were mentioned in our constructive criticism. For example, our titles in our first draft didn't look very successful so we decided to change the font and the size to improve the film opening. We changed the names as the names used in the first draft looked very unprofessional and cliché. Some of the footage we got didn't really add to our film so we cut it out. E.g the shop scene. Myself and Olivia spent some time fading different shots into the next to make the film flow and cutting out the irrelevant/ boring footage. When our peers were watching it they didn't really understand what was going on when Zac went into the shop. Also first of all we added to may shots of just walking which made it quite boring to watch so we removed those and added backing  music. The music we chose was by the Arctic Monkeys. We thought this song went well with our opening sequence and also makes a few of the shots less boring and the opening scene more interesting and engaging. We had some feedback from our teachers that our first draft was too long and dragged out a little bit too much hence why we cut quite a few of the boring scenes out. The sound on our first draft was almost too quiet to hear but when editing our film opening for the second time we increased the audio gain on the dialogue which has made the sound in our film a much better quality

Film poster

This is our film poster we made to represent our film 'Parallel'.

Class feedback from first draft

From watching our first draft of the film opening, we sort of had an idea of what needed to be changed or improved. The editing for our film took a long time due to the cloning effect we needed to clone Max into the two characters shown in the opening sequence. Because the editing took a long time the group didn't have much time to tidy up the rest so we decided to focus mainly on the tidying up of the opening once the first draft had been handed in ready for the final draft.

Once we had received our feedback we knew what the class thought we should change in order to make our film opening more successful. For example, we thought adding music would completely ruin the opening but after reading the class feedback we thought maybe we should consider adding it. Also, we were advised to cut some shots out to stop it being so boring, E.g the shop scene. If it wasn't for the feedback we probably would have kept it in there but we did in fact delete it. We also think now that scene has been deleted, it makes more sense.

Here are a few pictures of the class feedback:

A lot of the good feedback included the cloning effect we used for Max. We were also complimented on a few of our shots at the beginning of the opening. One popular shot from the class was when max enters the house and you just see the door from an angle, closing. I think Max did a really good job on the editing as the cloning looks very realistic and also Olivia's help with the tidying up of the final draft and putting it all together as a final opening sequence made it as good as it could be. Marcus chose the final song choice and it works really well with the filming. I think we have all done well all in all whether it involves the actual editing of the film or the paper work and research of different parts of the task.

We also had some criticisms alongside the good feedback. Most of these included the shaky shots and the lack of music which we have taken on board and tried to improve. 

Blog reflection

Technology:

As i have added more and more posts to my blog i have tried to vary the different programmes used so i can have a lot of practice which i think will be useful in future when deciding on which programmes will work best for certain tasks. Recently i have used SlideShare. This programme is for uploading powerpoints so they can be viewed via the blog. During our film opening planning we have used SlideShare quite a lot for some of our research. For example, audience research. For our prelim task i practiced using Prezi to show all the different aspects of our planning. i wasnt very keen on Prezi as i found it quite confusing to use and there was nothing to tell us how to use the programme. I have probably spent the most time using premiere throughout our filming tasks. the first couple of times we used it i found it very confusing and wasn't sure how to apply different effects for different parts of the footage. For our prelim task i spent a lot of time using premiere and i became more confident in using it and i liked my outcome. I particularly liked the ghosting effect.

Mark out of 20?

I would give my blog around 15/20. I need to include more pictures on my blog to make it easier when giving examples for each topic. E.g Representation. I also need to add more detail to certain parts to make my blog more interesting and in depth. I think i have completed tasks well and done what i have been asked to do, including my own knowledge.

More thorough or less complacent?

I reckon i could be more thorough with quite a few of my posts e.g Mise En Scene. There is a lot more i could write and i could also add some pictures for examples of what Mise En Scene actually is. I think this would make it more interesting for the person viewing my blog and it would also make a lot more sense to them. I don't think i've really been complacent as i have tried to fit in quite a lot to all my posts to make the topic quite obvious however i think it could be better if i added images to some of the less interesting posts.

Is it fun to look through?

I think my blog is fun to look through as i try to change the design and text quite often so it isn't boring and 'same' looking. I prefer the colour of my text to the original black text as i think it makes it more interesting to look at. I have also changed the text setting so the colour of the text changes as and when you hover over it and also once you have already visited a certain link. However i do think i need to add a few more pictures to my blog to make it stand our more and to make it more interesting. 

Learning journey 

The learning journey is evident as when i started posting on my blog you can see how little i knew about media and as i have been doing media for longer my posts have got more in depth and more detailed. If you look at my first practice edit using premiere compared to my prelim task, the difference is very noticeable and you can tell how far i have come with using different programmes. I have also improved on written posts and understand a lot more about the theories in media than i knew in the beginning.

Targets

To improve my blog i think i need to add more photos to make it more visual and interesting. I also think i need to keep practicing using premiere to get as good as i can be and make my videos as good as they can be. I should probably change the layout quite often to stop it being boring. 

Parallel First Draft

Conventions

Here are some conventions which make our films genre clear:

Setting

Our film opening will be set in Admirals park. We think this is a good location as it isn't usually busy so there won't be any interruptions whilst we're filming. It is also very spacious which would create an eerie atmosphere to help with the genre. I think the fact that we will be filming outside in a park will also convey the genre as it will be foggy and quite grey which relates to the schizophrenic mans dark thoughts.

Themes

There are a few themes in our film opening. Duality is one which we have considered due to our character having schizophrenia. This is where binary opposition is also relevant, we see two sides of Zabel (Max); the good side and the bad side. One of our themes also includes sanity, whether our chosen character is sane or if he is crazy due to his mental illness. There is also the question of reality. What is real and what isn't...

Icons

The main icon in our film is the medicine bottle filled with pills (Tic-Tac's) to treat the schizophrenic character. Another icon Is the coke can in which Zac's second personality mentions in a dark joke.

Narrative

We have planned out our script for the film opening which we will then follow throughout filming. Max came up with the dark jokes to match the genre.

Characters

Max will play Zabel and Zac (schizophrenic character) and Liv will play the random woman that sits on the bench with him.

Textual Analysis 

Film pitch feedback

                                  

                                    

When we showed our film pitch to the class we got a lot of comments based around how they thought the editing ideas were good and how they would work quite well, before we even showed the pitch we had already thought the editing sides of things would be the most popular. Some of the comments also included how our group had worked together to come up with the idea, which, in the long run would make our filming process etc a lot easier as we were all in on the idea. We also had a lot of feedback on the confused genre. After the presentation we discussed this as a group and decided to change parts of the opening/ the name to make the genre more obvious and to stop people getting confused about it. We were also advised to make the target audience more specific rather then just stating ‘adults’. As a group we decided to only use two locations rather than three and to reduce the dialogue to give us more time to focus on the effects and the title edits etc. This will hopefully make our film opening make more sense and also better quality.