Emma - Evaluation

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

 

I was inspired by many short films while researching for our own including Apricot, Black Hole and I Am Butterfly... you can read more about these films HERE!

 

-The main short film that inspired me was ‘black hole’ I loved the idea of having such a simple narrative and it to be so effective. I think our film develops this common short film convention of having a simple narrative by using interesting editing techniques such as the green screening sequence. what makes of narrative simple is having ONE main character ONE setting and ONE prop of the games console. This is seen in the short film Black hole, the only character is followed as he moves around one space and uses only one main prop.

-in retrospect the greenscreening we were able to achieve was not overly difficult to do but the result of it in the final product is very effective, it also acts as a key moment in our film allowing the narrative to have a purpose.

 -Mario coming into the real world and then having to leave to save the princess is a relatively simply story, but the way we showed it on screen challenged the basic convention.  

-The narratie organisation of 'Apricot' is very interesting, it shows flash backs and the present but aslo brings the two together by having the 'past' characters in the present setting. this became one of our main insperations when we were thinking of bringing our own character into our present world. but we decided to use a linear narrative structure for our film unlike the non linear style of Apricot.

 

-The slow pace of editing, drifting camera work and extreme close ups during this short film also adds to the film as a whole, it gives a magical and calm feeling which brings the narrative to life even more.

 

-I chose the center image from i am butterfly becasue it shows the close relationship that the two characters share, i wanted to make an intimate friendship between our two characters and found from this film, and others like it that close shots at eye level create an intimate feel, between the characters and the audience themselves.  

 

-Looking at Todorov's narrative therory our film follows a Linear narrative structure we begin with the  equilibrium, the gamer alone at his house, Mario then arrives, this is the 'disruption' and the attempt to repair the ditruption is when the characters play the game to get Mario beack inside the game. after Mario leaves the gamer is back in the same room alone and the equlibrium is reinstated.  

-Throughout our film the relationship between our two characters becomes closer and closer, by the end of the film when Mario goes back in to the game only his hat is left, The last shot shows Jonah picking up the hat as if the object means alot to him. The way the relationship grows throughout the film is a common convention from other short films i have looked at such as Apricot and I am Butterfly.

-We used extreame close ups through our film to allow the audience to feel closer to the story, and emotion from the characters. This technique also could create a slightly uncomfortable feeling from the audience because they are so close up to the characters faces.

-Our film uses mise en scene conventions from the comedy genre such as costume. we chose a similar costume that Mario wears in the original games which is brightly coloured and comedic in style. We decided to have our character of Mario in full costume throughout the whole film, instead of making him blend in with the rest of the setting.  

-Our film represents young middle classes, we achieved this by using realsim in our filming, sound and editing process, instead of adding lots of unnatural sounds and music through our film we decided to keep it simple and only use nessicary sound our sounds that would be heard in real life.This is why the majority of our sounds are diegetic and are heard by the characters as well as the audience.   

-The genre of our film would is both social realist and fantasy, we have a hyper, magical fiction coming to life and entering the real world where people arent used to seeing things like our Mario character dressed in his bright and animated style costume.

Ancillary Tasks.

Poster:

We researched film posters to get an idea of what they include and how they are structured, click HERE to see this research.

 

-Our poster design follows the rules and conventions that others do, the most noticable thing that we found from our research that the majoritiy of film poster include a large image of the main character(s) also allows viewers to see which actors are in the film which could sway their opinions on whether or not they go to see the film.

 

-The images also give important information about the film itself, we understand key narrative aspects simple my looking at the poster, we can see...

 

-where the film is set,

-what the characters are like,

-what the characters situation is.

 

-The title of the film is always the biggest text on the page. this allows no confusion over the name but also appeals to game litterate people as they would recognise the font and style of our title. 

 

 

 

 -Our poster shows the theme and issues of fiction vs. reality and also gives detail from reviews from 'The Gaudian' and 'Empire' two reviews that are very highly regarded by film fans who we are targeting through having the Mario games as an underlying theme of our film.

 

-we also followed the layout of other posters by having clear lines and levels that our images and text lined up to on the poster.

 

-i would say our only issue with our poster and somehting i would chane if we were to do this again, would be to get review quotes from specialist video game magazines as it would appeal to a wider audience demographic and allow people to understand further that our film has a theme of gaming.

 

-We followed a structure of clear lines and boarders on our poster as many of the posters we looked at had clear alignment of text and images and it makes the poster look more proffesional.

 

Review:

 

 

 

-Our review layout and style of writing was based on the format of a Little White Lies Magazine film review, by researching this niche media product we found details such as the magazine have a word restriction of 550 words per review which helped us make the layout exact.

-The review is aimed at young, intelligent people interested in film and cinema, normally the team at Little White Lies also write for this target demographic so we focused alot of our research on how the revies are actually written, what kind of language do they use and how they explain things.

-We also found that they often use restricted code in their reviews which allowed us to connect to our target audience through puns and details they would understand. 

Click HERE to see our Little White Lies research.

-I think our review was a successful interpretation of a Little White Lies style review, we were able to get the layout the same as LWL by using the programe InDesign.

 

-Every detail on the page has been given its place through carful planning and measuring on the page, even down to where the word 'review' was placed on the side of the page took planning and carful consideration so that our review looked proffesional. 

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

 

-Branding our film and both ancillary tasks would be a success as well, becasue we have used the same title style font and colour on our poster and at the start of the film people will begin to recognise it as our brand. it can also be linked back to the Mario Games as it follows a similar style which people, young and old would recognise, building up a successful brand.

 

-This is also seen by the characters costume being the same in the poster and the film.

 

-Game over works well as a title becasue is suggests many things including.

-Video Games

-something ending

-something not going well

which all give our adience ideas about the content of our film and get people talking and therefore building up a well known brand.

3- What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

-Our target demographic are young, middle and working class people aged between 13-21
because of this we decided to post our ideas on to social networking sites Facebook and Twitter because the majority of the ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ on these sites are the same age as our target audience for the film. 

 

-Our first post was questioning the film’s title, we had chosen three but used audience feedback to finalise a single name.

-The most popular choice of the three was ‘Game Over’ closely followed by ‘Mushroom Kingdom’ and then ‘Get me out of here.’ The feedback was given simply by the audience giving us the letter or number of their chosen title; because it was so easy to leave feedback it meant that a lot more people commented which gave us a wider idea of what to call the film.

-We posted on twitter a choice of two poster designs to see which of the two our target audience preferred  and the result was the one we went with of Mario. we chose to agree with the response we got from twitter 

-While editing the film together we had a disagreement on whether or not we should include game footage at the opening of the film before the title sequence so we went and spoke to people in our Media A2 course, including teachers and built up a simple tally chart of each version.  

-One respondent questioned whether or not the game footage was needed as at that point in the film, the audience have not been introduced completely to the films gaming topic. We thought this over and came to the conclusion that the footage gave an interesting opening and introduction to the film and its content. 

 

-Another reason we used the footage was because it allows us to see the Mario character in the game and usual animated state before we see him ‘come to life’ which we don’t see later during the film. 

4- How did you use new media technologies in the construction, planning and evaluation stage? 

Click HERE to see my Prezi