Sam - Evaluation

1- in what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
After researching four short films which we used as inspiration and also to brainstorm on for our own short film i chose to use the following ; I AM BUTTERFLY (Carlos Florez) - Gone Goodbye (Keith Rivers) - Black hole (Philip Sansom & Olly Williams) - Tick Tock (Ien Chi) which you can find a more detailed account on each element on this film by clicking here!

Out of all four i personally picked i believed that Black hole (Philip Sansom & Olly Williams) had the biggest attraction to me as i felt it covered some of the same ground as ours by having a simple narrative which which rely's more on its editing techniques than complex narrative which we felt would be key in our film. Also with the large amount of green screen work to simulate this Portal/black hole which our initial idea was to create film revolving round an awkward relationship between a gamer and a games character. Which ironically can be related to a much recent blockbuster called Ted (Seth Macfarlane) which covers a man and his 'best friend' in which being his teddy bear. Which relates to our character being Mario which he escapes his animated game and comes reality and then having to leave to save princess peach.

Figure 1

As shown in Figure 1 we can see use of interesting camera angles with a variety of Close ups to long shots i felt as our short film will be will be predominately shot within one or two locations there will be little need for such long shots. For example in Tick Tock (Ien Chi) the use of long takes which as you can see from this short it is taken all in one take, also the uses of time lapses and unusual editing techniques interested me and which in the time lapse sequence of our film relates to this.

Along side with our narrative Figure 2 we find that where we start off is where we finish as shown in the film we start with a gamer home along supposedly doing his homework to having a game character join him for a brief period of time and then along again after Mario goes back into the game. Which in some sense relates to a film in the cinema at the moment called Wreck-it Ralph (Rich Moore) which focuses on a old a 8-bit arcade character which leaves his game in search of a gold medal which in the end returns back to his own game before it is turned off.

For instance the narrative in I AM BUTTERFLY (Carlos Florez) is very interesting, it shows  the child with her mother which is spoken via a a childs sing song. Then throughout a various events we are shown we a turn of  this became one of our main insperations when we were thinking of bringing our own character into our present world. but we then take our character out of the world like the example shown here where the mum is taken from the child. this made us decide to use a linear narrative structure for our film unlike the non linear style of Gone Goodbye (Keith Rivers) .The slow pace of editing, long takes in camera work in  I AM BUTTERFLY (Carlos Florez) and extreme close ups  gave inspiration to our film as we would be shooting in 1 location show it made we can experiment with our techniques.
As shown in Figure 1  I chose the bottom 3 images from i am butterfly because it shows the character relationship  of the mother and daughter which is illustrated through the non diegetic and diegetic soundtrack which is used as the script as well. This in particular shows the relationship of the two family members, which we wanted to adapt to our gamer character and Mario charcters which would be easierly done by camera angles such as  close shots at eye level create emotion, between the characters and the audience themselves.

Looking at some narrative theory for example we can apply Todorov's narrative therory to our film follows a linear narrative which we begin with the equilibrium the character we start with is our gamer who is home alone alone at his house getting ready to play some retro games. The the Disruption which is ofcourse where our Mario character then arrives this is then followed by an attempt to repair the disruption which is when they decide to have a intense session of gaming in which is where the charcters play the game to decide whether to get Mario beack inside the game or for him to say. Followed by after Mario leaves the gamer is back in the same room alone and the equlibrium is reinstated. 

                                                                         Figure 2

 The relationship between the 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. This is shown by his emotions by a variable of close ups and panning shots which gives you as the spectator a chance to see how the charcter is feeling at this time. The last shot shows the Gamer picking up the hat as it is a symbol of that he will remember this moment. The way the relationship grows throughout the film is a common convention from other short films i have looked at such as Gone Goodbye (Keith Rivers) and Tick Tock (Ien Chi).

We used a variety of different Angles and shots in our film due to only using one location meant we had time to create interesting angles and shots to experiment with. For instnace the use of  extreme close ups through our film to allow the audience to feel the emotions of the characters and pulls the spectator closer to the story. This technique also could create a slightly uncomfortable feeling from the audience like for example when Mario is first introduced we are shown with two characters expressions, especially Mario's which is an extreme close up to gather the emotion of the character but in this case a sense of uncomfortable feeling.

Our film uses various elements  misé en scene which can be related to the conventions of the comedy genre such as costume. For instance our costume relates to the Mario franchise as we chose a similar costume that Mario wears in the original games which  has vibrant colours of red and blue which  is also brightly coloured and comedic in style like for example the newest game refenced film Wreck-it Ralph (Rich Moore). 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. 

We chose to represent our film around the demographic of young middle classes, we achieved this by using references to a video game which was infamous around the 90's and early 000's on the N64 and also the use of realism in our filming this can be seen by our minimallistic editing and sound affects and using a naturalistic colour scheme. 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 represents various conventions of a social realist and comedy.

Ancillary Tasks.

Poster: CLICK HERE TO SEE MY POSTER RESEARCH

Figure 3

The initial design of the poster was to follow some of the conventions that films and particular genres have in common. From my research the majority of film posters included a large image of the main character or location which will instantly tell the spectator what the film is aim at or about. Also almost every film poster i found had a large header which would attract the title of the film by using always the biggest text on the page. This meant that the billing block and reviews or staring cast will not be confused with the film Title. 

The images also give important information about the film itself, for example we can get ; the film location, the characters first impression and their posture. The title of the film is always the biggest text on the page. Our poster shows the theme and issues of fiction vs. reality this is portrayed between our characters where we have a fiction character being Marion and the reality being our gamer. Also the detail from reviews from 'The Gaudian' and 'Empire' two reviews that are very highly regarded by film fans where they can get the first impressions of the film which would also give their target audience. we also followed the layout of other posters Figure 3  for example like Shrek in the sense of the colour scheme being we have a traditional Mario Background and character. There could be an improvement as due to the use of websites and magazines game review posts and articles are now more frequent for example like http://uk.ign.com/ which give daily news on all types of media like games and films which would be valuable on the lines of the poster as it would attract a larger demographic. 

Review: Click HERE to see our Little White Lies research. 

For our review we were tasked with recreating our own stylish Little White Lies article which bases its audience on high educated film goers and also with the occasional game review this meant that our layout and style of writing was based on the format of a Little White Lies and how it would look in any of their magazines. By researching this niche media product we found details such as the magazine have a word restriction of 550 words per review however we found working with tiny bit under worked perfect as the Aprijita font used would of made the pxt size to small for the viewer to read. ''restricted code'' was a common style was used in their reviews which allowed us to connect to our target audience in many references and cheeky puns which makes the article more interesting.


Our target demographic is for the young, middle classed intelligent people interested in film media this is also chosen by Little White Lies for their review so we also write for this target demographic so we focused alot of our research on how the review are actually written. For the layout i think our review was a successful interpretation of a Little White Lies style review as using In design opened many capabilities of creating a perfect layout.

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

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?





The initial target demographic was to be focused on the young, middle and working class people which meant the ages around low teens (13) to young adults (21) because of this would help with the references in the film about Mario and about certain props. Also with he coming of technology we are now able instead of doing a hand writen questionnaire we can simply ask for people to comment on our wall (in this case we used Emma Lambert's pages) on to social networking sites Facebook and Twitter because the majority of the people correctly given as ‘friends’ on Facebook and ‘followers’ on twitter which also have a huge following in particular our target demographic.

Our first post which was posted on Emma's Facebook wall was to simple ask what title we should go with as we had some ideas of our own but found it hard to chose from only having 4 people our group gave us not enough answers for a strong decision. The most popular choice of the three was ‘Game Over’ then after was the title ‘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 tpye a single letter due to Facebook being so easily accessed by everyone found that after 12 hours we had enough for a strong reliable decision.

ON twitter using Emma's account we posted our two poster designs which again like with the 3 titles to chose from we wanted a more broadened opinion and the result was the one we went with the one with Mario featured on the front. 

Whilst in the editing process we now had to decide whether we stick text and leave it as that then move into the film or use some game footage provided my Myself which you can see the process of how i did it here. We went and spoke to people in our Media A2 course, including teachers and built up a simple tally chart of each version.

We thought this over and came to the conclusion that the footage gave an interesting opening and gives a sense of nostalgia to most of our audience as it was a iconic title for most of the kids born in the 90's on the N64 which would introduce to our film quite nicely




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

Click Here to View Sam Gregory's Prezi