Matt Bishun Evaluation

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

The Short Film

i) Short films that I have watched

'No Point'

Camerawork and Sound

• Short films contain some of the most inventive and unconventional work to be found in film making.
• The director of this film decides to use a typical feature of camerawork in his work to show the strong relationship between Ben and his coach. He uses many MS's to give us, the viewers, a clear representation of the bond between the two men.
• The majority of the film is in a medium shot, however on some occasions a CU or ECU is used. This shows that the director has decided to use varied shot sizes to give the viewers a different perspective of the film.

• The director uses lighthearted music in this short film to express the immature nature of both Ben and his coach. This is an example of non diegetic sound. Furthermore, we hear a lot of diegetic sound such as; the voices of the characters and the sound of the ball hitting the tennis racket. 
• A good point when sound is used is the scene where Ben is being washed by his coach in the bath. Ambient sound is used here to express the relaxing mood. 

'Popping the Question'

Narrative organisation

• The narrative structure of this short film is linear, as the story is in chronological order.
• We can also use Todorov's theory to describe this film. 3 stages would be more appropriate than 5, as not all possible stages are covered in this film.
• The Equilibrium is the man's intention to propose to his girlfriend.

• The Disruption is the frequent times which the man fails to propose.

• The Resolution is the man eventually proposing to his girlfriend.

ii) Our Short Film

'Pranksters'

Similarities and differences to other short films

Similarities

• Our film is a comedy, which is a popular genre for many short films. A similar film could be ''Brando-ing'', which is also a comedy film. 

• Another similarity is that it involves only two characters, again who have quite a close relationship (they are good friends).

• This film, like ours, involves a character playing a joke or a prank on the other character. This re-emphasizes the fact that both sets of characters have a strong relationship.

Below is the film''Brando-ing'' which you can watch for yourself

Differences

• The film 'Finding Myself', as you might have thought involves one character only. The film genre is a documentary, and is about a young man who is trying to work out what sort of person he really is.

• Our film is quite different, with it being very upbeat and lively. This film is quite deep and it is obviously an emotional time for this main character.

You can watch the film below

Finding Myself - Short Film from Joshua Stocker on Vimeo.

Film Poster

i) Film Posters which I have analysed

'Without Words'

Conventions of film posters

• The title 'Without Words' is about two people who are reunited after many years apart. I am led to believe they are a couple, however they could just be friends.
• The setting is in the middle of a road during the summer, as the two people come face to face for the first time in a while.
• The title is all in lower case and beneath the image of the two characters. There is some small text in the sky of the background image to give us more clues into what this film is about.
• The Production Block is on the very bottom of this poster, to state all the directors, producers and actors.
• The camera has chosen to use a long shot for this film poster, trying to get as many codes and conventions into the image as possible.

'Best Man Wins'

Conventions of film posters

• The title 'Best Man Wins' immediately tells us that this film involves a competition or a battle between two men.
• The title is all in upper case and there is a plane placed in between the second and last word. This denotes a special trip away for the winner.
• We are led to believe this is a cookery competition. The two men are seen raising a glass of wine and the man on the left is wearing an apron to further emphasize this.
• The men are smartly dressed, either especially for the occasion or because they are reasonably wealthy, hence they are middle to higher class citizens.
• The background is of a modern kitchen. Two wine bottles are also seen, this could further add that this is an important competition for both men.
• No further writing, other than the Production Block and title, is seen on this poster. This is because the audience has a clear indication of what the film is about.

ii) Our Film Poster

• We have used a blank You Tube page as our background, as this is a main theme of our film. We have placed all of our previous work in the search bar at the top.
• The title is at the top part of the poster, and we have decided to use a naive looking design for this, as this would appeal to our target audience.
• We have placed a large image in the centre of the poster, so the audience can identify who the main characters are.
• We have used two reviews, one from the Metro newspaper and one from Little White Lies magazine. They are situated to the left of the main characters.
• To the right of the main image, are two awards this film has received, at the Edinburgh and London Film Festival. We also have our website for viewers to check out.
• At the bottom of the poster is our Billing Block, giving details of actors, directors, sound technicians and editors.

Similarities and differences to other short films

'Gift'

• Our film poster is similar in that we both have large images of the main characters. Also, the main theme is evident on this poster, as it is on ours.
• A difference is that this poster's title is at the bottom and isn't as large as it could be.

'The Last Game'

• A similarity is that their title and ours is at the top of the poster and is quite prominent.
• A difference is that they have no Billing Block, reviews or awards on the poster.

Film Review

• Below are three links to previous blog posts of mine, explaining what Little White Lies is all about. Feel free to click on them.

Link to What is LWL blog post

Link to layout conventions of LWL blog post

Link to style conventions of LWL blog post

Our Film Review

• We have addressed the target audience by using language appropriate for this demographic.
• We have tried to use similar language which would be seen in a Little White Lies Review, using specialist vocabulary when needed.
• We have also followed the layout of a conventional Little White Review, by having an image at the top of the page, in 3 columns, between 5 and 7 paragraphs and having 3 out of 5 ratings.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?

Script

Poster

• Our title suggests the content of our film, that some pranking is going on. We have used a large font so our audience can see what the film is about. The font is Arial, which is fairly basic. This shows off the characters naivity and youthful nature. Furthermore, we have used a dark blue font, again which re-emphasizes the fact that these two characters are normal people living normal lives.
• Our main image is of two teenage characters. Their gesture in this image shows their pranking relationship, as well as their naivity. It is quite large so we can put across our idea of two amateur looking pranksters.
• Our target audience is teenagers so we have decided to use a colourful design behind our title, something which would appeal to this type of age bracket. Also, the YouTube page in the background as well as the teenage characters would appeal to our chosen target market.
• Our theme is pranking, something which our target audience would do to their friends or family as a joke.
• For our poster we have used Little White Lies as one of our reviews. This is because our film review is to be in the style of this popular film magazine. It also fits with our audience, as they are young people who are short film enthusiasts. 
• Social networking sites would be important in the advertising of the poster. Uploading our poster to Twitter or Facebook would be useful in attracting our target audience, as many use these sites. These sites would be free to upload content on, which is really useful as short film makers have small budgets and therefore would have to try and distribute these themselves.
• The film title and film poster title are the same, in terms of their colour and style. This is because we are trying to create a brand and to make us stand out in the short film world.

Review

• According to The Church of London, the publisher of Little White Lies, the magazine is read by largely 25-35 year olds, who work in the media industry.
• This is a very different audience to our short film. We have tried to follow the conventions of a Little White Lies review by using; sophisticated language, three out of 5 ratings, being a page in length, in 3 columns, between 5-7 paragraphs and having an image at the top of the page.
• A Little White Lies review is written in a very professional manner as it wants to appeal to film fanatics who are interested in the latest movies out there at the moment.
• A good review would really give our film a good chance of being successful, as Little White Lies are quite prestigious in the film world.
• A poor review would dent our chances of being successful, but it wouldn't be the end of the world as some people may have very different opinions on our short film.
• We spent long and hard discussing what language we should put in the review. We understood that it should look exactly like a Little White Lies Review, so we also discussed the image we should use at the top of the page. This took longer than expected as we were looking for something that would really sell our film to our target audience. We also discussed the length of our review, whether it should be 5 paragraphs or perhaps 7. 
• Like the poster, social media would be vital to reaching our audience. However, Film Festivals could be used as the Little White Lies audience is more film fanatics and enthusiasts. Film festivals would be attended by mainly film lovers, whereas social media sites have people with a wide range of interests. This would be a perfect channel of distribution for our review, as we could then really target our audience and get their views and opinions on it. It would follow after our film and film poster so we can try and create a 'buzz' for our production.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Target audience demographic

• Our target audience is 13-17 year olds, basically teenagers. 
• Our film used characters from this segment, as we played a brother and sister who constantly prank each other.
• Our film poster used a naive design to portray this childlike nature.

Audience feedback

• Below is some audience feedback we collected at the start of this process. We posted on our Facebook and Twitter pages a link to a survey on our blog, asking respondents to choose which prank option they liked the most.

• It produced this response;

• The most popular option we decided to not show on camera. Instead, we had this prank as something off screen before the opening of our film.
• Out of the next highest options we decided to only use one of them, albeit slightly changing the prank, as we felt the other two were time consuming and unsuitable.
• The 'mixing soy sauce and sprite to make coke' prank we did use, having had several requests of it from our target audience.
• We learnt from this feedback that our audience wanted to see different types of pranks as well as the common ones.
• I feel we could have done some more audience feedback, in terms of location. We could have asked whether they wanted some pranks outside the house, or with different people.

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

Olivia Farren Evaluation

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

a) The Main Task - Short Film 

i) During the research of other short films, I noticed a number of conventions that are commonly used in short films. However, with short films you can't list every convention that is used consistently in every short film because they have become a creative platform for new and up and coming directors/producers to show case what they can do, and so short films are constantly unconventional and showing inventive and innovative ideas that are always changing common features. 

An obviously noticeable feature of short films is the length; the reason they're 'short' films is because they are quite obviously shorter than the length of a motion picture film. This means that the director has to fit the beginning middle and end of the plot into the film in the short time it has; although this means that the plot moves on quickly in the film, it also has meant that directors and producers have showed their story in different and innovative ways such as the plot not starting at the beginning of the story therefore leaving the audience to guess what has happened, or the narrative is non-linear to show certain features of the story and many more other way of presenting the plot has been used in a number of short films. 

When researching into other short films, I analysed four different short films; all different due to their genre; a romantic-comedy, action, a mickey-take documentary and a thriller; I decided that looking at short films with different genres would mean that I could notice the conventions of each short film genre, notice the conventions used overall in these short films as well as realising what I did or didn't want to use in my own short film.

(virgin shorts, vimeo, youtube, future shorts logos)

After creating the opening to a thriller film in my foundation portfolio, I understood the typical convention of the thriller genre; dark/dim lighting, pathetic fallacy, action and enigma codes that make the audience think that something bad is going to happen for example a knife, the soundtrack is often slow and represents a creepiness; even though these were the features of a thriller film, looking at 'Exposure', I noticed these features as well as some others that seemed to be included in this thriller. As it's a short film, there's less time for the director to show a complete story but also build tension and ensure the audience recognise the film as being a thriller; and so the complete lack of dialogue in 'Exposure' meant that it acted as an enigma code that made the audience think and wander about what was going to happen, it also means that the audience focuses on other features of the film to figure out what's going to happen. I do like the idea of no dialogue at all in the film, however, it doesn't work for all genres and so harder to use to create a social realism or comedy film.
This same technique of no dialogue did however work again in the rom-com 'Post-It Love'; it seems this is a fairly popular technique with short films if I have seen it be used twice with two random short films that I found; this could be a sound convention used in short films due to the narrative having to fit in the short amount of time the directors have to complete the story in; and so without dialogue they use other areas to present the story they need to. 
When it comes to sound; the non-deigetic soundtrack is an important part any film; motion length or short; it conveys a mood and aids with representations. 

When in came to aspects of mise en scene in other short films that I watched, I learned to know that each convention used depended on the genre of the film; even in short films where they're usually much more creative and innovative.
With the lighting of shots in short films that I watched, I actually didn't notice anything out of the ordinary that i wouldn't find in any other motion length film; but I did notice lighting decisions that matched the genres;

'Post-It Love', a romantic-comedy hybrid - very bright and colourful lighting; reflecting the colours of Post-It notes and happiness.

'Exposure', a thriller - very dark, dull, dim lighting; a common enigma code used in thrillers 

'Sundays', documentary-comedy hybrid - natural lighting is used to present the social realism genre

ii) Own short film 

We developed on this new convention through joining in on this narrative innovation but using restricted narration at the end of our short film and hiding what news the characters got and cutting before the audience can find out what happened, leaving suspense but also leaving a sort of resolution to the end of the film where they seemed to get their happy ending.

 However, this also challenges forms by not having a complete end but all short films are now challenging conventions and so I feel like we used, developed and challenged on the convention of short films that is to be creative and innovative; all together, not just with the narrative.

b) Ancillary Task One - Film Poster

c) Ancillary Task Two - LWL Review

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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

Gemma Thomas- Evaluation

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

A- The Main Task
i) Short films that you have watched

The most obvious characteristic used in short films is that the length of the film is short, this means that the director must tell the story quickly so that there is a beginning middle and an end to the film otherwise it is more of just an opening rather than the entire film, also the director would not be able to use mystery and enigma in the film like you would in a full length film to build a sense of unknown due to the fact that there is not enough time. By the length being so limited in time it is common that few locations will be used throughout the film so that it is easy for the audience to stay interested in.  this is the same for the use of characters as in a short film if you had lots of characters making an appearance they would lose track of who was who as they wouldn’t have seen each character for a substantial amount of time to know them and also to like or dislike a character. In most films the audience will make an opinion on whether they like a character whereas if there are too many they wouldn’t be able to know the characters.

Another characteristic used is stereotypes, it’s easier with limited time to use stereotypes to allow the audience to understand who is who in the film, for example in the film ‘A Favour’ the director has used a Muslim man who is thought to be a terrorist but in actual fact a middle class white man was the one who implemented the terrorist attack. This plot twist challenges conventions of media as the white man is truly the antagonist and goes against stereotypical conventions of religion. In ‘Silent Things’ we see a man who is socially awkward and timid within himself, this supports stereotypical views of people with a disability and follows the conventions used in media products.

Actors used in short films are not often well known stars as I have found that most short film directors make their short films on low budgets so don’t have the funds to have large Hollywood stars in the film. The directors also tend to be new so are using their short films as a gateway into the larger film world.

ii) Your own short film

In my own short film I have used typical conventions. Firstly we used a small amount of locations for our piece which allowed our audience to understand and follow the story with ease.

We also followed a linear narrative structure which allowed us to start at the beginning of the story and progress to the middle and finishing at the end. This is the most common form of narrative structure although circular can be also be used.  Todorovs Theory 1977 is a simple classic form of narrative.

We only used 2 characters in our short film which again allowed the audience to follow the story simply and also build a small connection with the characters as they see the characters for a longer period of time than if we had used 6 characters, this may have become confusing and hard to follow.

In most short films there is a hybrid of genres. In our short film we do not have  a hybrid present as we have only used one genre of film which is comedy. This challenges typical conventions due to short films having at least 2 genres.

 B-Film Poster

i) Film Poster that you have analysed 

When looking at short film posters I noticed conventions which were on each poster in a similar way

• Text  justification on the left/right or bottom/top
•  Names of actors/ directors
• References to other films
• Website
• Age certification
• Credit Block – Legal Requirement
• Title size is larger than all other text
• Rating System
• Source of comment
• Main image- usually of characters
•  Release date often advertised.

Looking at the films I researched they all follow the majority of the conventions of a short film poster although they don’t follow them all.

 ii) Your own film Poster

When designing my own film poster we tried to incorporate every convention onto the poster so that it followed traditional aspects. The nature of our film made creating our short film poster difficult as it was overly colourful and due to the target audience looks childish in the finished product. Although this would normally be a negative for our piece it works well and creates a sense of naivety. We didn’t put an age certification on our short film poster although followed the other conventions which are expected.  

C- LWL Review

Little white lies is a high end magazine based on films and aimed at film junkies.  Little white lies includes film reviews of the latest film releases, interviews and adverts for similar styled films being released. For our task set we had to make a film review for our short film following the conventions of little white lies in both its layout and its language.

Firstly looking at the language of LWL I noticed that

•  The language is very in depth
•  It uses media language terms which the general public would not understand ( so focuses on a selective audience)
• Uses roughly 450 words in the review containing lots of adjectives and verbs
• Doesn’t give away much about the film which is good in case someone reads the reviews before watching the film.  

We then looked at the conventions of the layout of little white lies we then copied the style to make our own _ Click Here to see Conventions of LWL Layout

This is our final film review which follows the conventions of a Little White Lies film review. 

2.How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary product tasks?

3. What have your learned from your audience feedback?

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

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