Evaluation- Hannah West

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

Used forms and Conventions- In a typical thriller film the girl is the protagonist and the male is the antagonist,we followed this typical convention just like in the film Silence of the Lambs and No Mutual Friends and we used typical Binary opposites such as male vs female,crime vs good and upper vs lower class.We also followed the proairetic enigma code and is the code which builds tension and suggests something will happen,we used this when there was the line of items lined up.Similarly in Argo there are riots with people chanting and burning the american flag,this scene also implies something bad will happen just like in our film opening.

                                                      

Developed forms and Conventions-In No mutual friends we developed forms and conventions because at the start of a film you are usually introduced to all the main characters straight away however we have not introduced one of our main characters,which is the police investigator so this leaves us to wonder who he is and we did not formally introduce one of the main characters,Jacob because for the first 3/4 of our opening sequence you don't see his face.In the film se7en we are introduced to the 2 main characters played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman during the opening of the film we are introduced to detective David Mills.


Challenged forms and Conventions-Unlike generic thriller films we decided to create the climax of our thriller at middle to end rather than beginning to middle, as usually the situation is resolved at the end of the film, whereas our overall plot indicates that the killer is still out there despite the polices best efforts in the investigation of the serial killings. Also in the end of our 2 minute opening, we show the knife being raised to indicate some sort of violence later on, however in the beginning it is not seen and is only suggested.  A film which is unlike our opening is Seven Pounds, which shows Will Smith committing suicide in the beginning, and then shows the events leading up to it in the middle to end , this is violent to begin with and goes straight into it unlike our thriller film which leads up to violence and crime. Also unlike Taken, the murderer is not at the end whereas in Taken a thriller film the kidnapper is found.

Question 2-How our media product represents particular social groups?-Hannah West

Hannah West-Here is my evaluation on prezi below and here is a link just in case the embed is faulty.(http://prezi.com/oma-h_83y4zs/how-our-product-represents-different-social-groups/)

Evaluation 3-Hannah West
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Our film is a niche film which targets only small numbers of people with particular interests and will be distributed in art house cinemas so we will have low cost marketing and distribution of our media product which is partly discussed in a post on our blog. (nfgssteel.blogspot.com).Our film uses the theme of social media throughout the film so it would be good to market the film online because the majority of our target audience will be online and will relate to the use of social media in their own lives.


For this film we will use horizontal integration for the production,distribution and exhibition and we will be the production company and we will distribute the product as this is only marketing on a small scale,marketing and distributing our own product will mean that we will get our own profit and won't have to share it with other people if we synergise. However because this is a potentially a popular niche film we may decide to ask another small local cinema to advertise our film around the area or we would likely ,if we were going to synergise, with Film4 for distribution and exhibition as they also produce niche films such as A Field In England which similarly to ours uses black and white throughout the film(Link to Film4-http://www.film4.com/).Our film would be released partly to show the dangers of online social media and it would be released to entertain the person watching and persuade them to buy the DVD and by word of mouth promote the film.There is potential for merchandising such as a book based on the film,DVD'S,action figures,T shirts and games about the movie.There is potential for a sequel about the man when he escapes or leaves prison once he gets caught or there could be spin offs,but a spin off is very unlikely,this would therefore if it were to happen get our company more press and profit if the sequel were to go well.


In conclusion production would be done by us,however for marketing and distribution we may synergise with a bigger company such as Film4 to get a bigger audience for our film and as Film 4 produces and distributes lots of genres of films we would fit right in with our own film,"No Mutual Friends".


Left- a field in England VS

right- No Mutual friends

Evaluation 4-Hannah West
Who would be the audience for your media product?

 The audience will be in there 15 to 20's and might be both genders as females might relate to the female victim but male audience members are the typical audience members for thrillers and  they may be interested by the crime and what will happen to the girl.They would probably be working or middle class as they are more likely to spend time on social media sites and they probably spend a lot of money on new technology such as phones or tablets/laptops.The older part of our specified audience might have children and it is possible that a very small niche of people in there early 30's would watch the film.The people who have children would watch the film so they could be educated about the potential dangers of social media so they can warn their children about the dangers that are highlighted in the film, as well as watching a entertaining film in the process.The audiences believes would be obvious- they would believe that it would be obvious that you shouldn't meet up with someone you don't know on your own but as the antagonist as a girl of 16/17 it would be believable that this situation could happen to a younger naive person. The audience would enjoy more realistic films such as psycho and some of the audience are very likely to be fans of the show catfish which is about a person who is speaking to someone online and the person they want to meet up with won't meet up,this is often because they are hiding something.They may also be intersted in films and gaming.

Evaluation 5-Hannah West
How did you attract/address your audience?

Evaluation 6-Hannah West
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During the process of making our media product we used different technologies such as...

Camera-Finepix S2950-We used a Finepix S2950 camera to film our media product as this was a more well known camera to me as it's my personal camera.The camera has 30 frames a second which is good for fast paced thriller films so you don't miss any of the action.Another advantage of the camera is the zoom whilst filming function which helped us frame the shot better (For Example,frame around Jacob's face).However a disadvantage was the use of batteries which meant sometimes shots were interrupted by the camera dying and the batteries having to be changed.Another issue was the focus when you pressed the shutter button because sometimes the focus was blurred once the shot began so we had to re-film however our main advantage was that unlike our school cameras there was no way we could lose the shots because I could take the camera home and make copies of all the clips and we didn't have to check the camera wasn't being used by another group.

Tripod- KONIG kn-LS10- We used this to steady some of our shots such as on the Facebook pages .This product had rubber grips on the bottom so this enabled our shots to stay still.This was easy to use.

blogger-I used the online blogging system "blogger" to present the planning,research and marketing/finished piece for our film, http://nfgssteel.blogspot.com/.To make a post I pressed "new post" to create a new post then named it on the bar above appropriately to the content of the post.To acknowledge who's work it was (mine or Aleena's) and the category that the post fall under we added "tags".To add media products such as videos or pictures we pressed on their icons and added a URL of the picture/video of uploaded it onto the blog.To add captions to the pictures we selected the photo then on the toolbar we press "caption" and write what we want.To put the post onto the blog we pressed publish but we had the ability to "save" the post and then leave the page and go back to edit and "publish" it later.This to begin with was mostly easy and once we'd done it once it was fine however we used things such as layout and template to change the appearance of our blog and we found this a little more difficult to use as on somethings such as layout there were terms such as favicons which I'd never heard of.

Me making this blogger post- you can see the different things such as title,labels,publish and save buttons

illustrator- The next piece of software I used was Adobe Illustrator to create our company ident.To create the ident we pressed "new" and changed the size to 5x8 cm.I then used the "rectangle tool" to go around the edge of my chosen measurements and used a grey colour to create a background.As we had no text that matched the text that we designed I decided to draw the text myself so it will match the style that we wanted.I used the "line" tool to create two lines which my text will stay between then I used the "paintbrush tool" to start drawing the curves and edges of my font.To get an exact copy of the letter "e" on our ident I used the "lasso" tool to select the first "e" letter I made then I copied it them "pasted" it then placed it where it was needed.To fill in the part of the ident which was half black I used "paintbrush" and "rectangle" tool and the ident was done. I then went file and "export" and changed the file type to a JPEG image.This software in general I found easy to use as I am fairly familiar with Adobe software as it is and it was a basic thing to draw so it didn't need an expert user to create what I needed.

Youtube- We created our account and I created our channel and we called it Steel group media NFGS. We added a channel description and we knew how to upload everything we needed to easily however we couldn't add any cover art  as our ident was either to small for this so we decided not to have any cover art.I found YouTube easy to use although sometimes uploading our footage was slow which slowed down how quickly we got things done.

final cut pro- I used this to edit our final piece and preliminary task.When we were first introduced to the program I found it very difficult to use.Firstly I uploaded the clips which we selected were the best when filming.I then selected each clip in order and put them onto the onto the timeline,this part was simple.But other things such as cutting some of the clips,adding effects (For example,the black and white filter on Jacobs clips,cropping one shot(For example,shot of Jacob picking up the phone and putting it in his pocket)speeding up some of our clips(For example,our credits were sped up to 130%) and getting rid of the sound on our main clips I  found this more difficult and had to ask for help or I experimented with the clips until I got the result I wanted.

movie maker- To animate the ident I used movie maker as this is a quick and easy program to use.I uploaded the pictures of the idents then pressed "animation" and picked a fade transition between the 2 pictures which changes the colour of our ident from black to red.

Main login page on prezi-showing my prezi and "new prezi" button

Prezi- Is online presentation software and I used this to make some of my evaluations.I set up our group account and pressed make "new prezi"and selected a template and I typed the title and text into the different paths and I added others if I needed more space for text.Overall this software was easy to use as it was similar to power point and had instructions on user buttons so you always knew what to do.

Evaluation 7- Looking back at your preliminary task what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? Hannah West