Hi,im Tom palmer and im a media studies AS student, im currently trying to pass my A-levels in order to go on to university and carry on with my passion for media.
My evaluation was completed on www.prezi.com this was a new website introduced to me by my media teacher when she sprung the task of completing our evaluation in the form of a presentation on this website rather than in a written format but before we were all aware of this me and my group had already decided to do an evaluation presentation with us all talking about different points throughout the course and what we learned and how things have influenced us when making our product so we all had written short points that we would talk about and did this as well as the prezi presentation to make sure we got our points across and answered the questions given to us at the beginning of the course. At first I was disappointed that we were not doing a written evaluation but once I got on the website and started making my prezi I found the website really good and was pleased that we were now doing our evaluations in a different form rather than just one long essay. To view my evaluation prezi you can go through it bellow by clicking the arrows at the bottom of the prezi but i would recommend that you follow the link below to the proper website to enable you to view my prezi full screen.
I couldnt title the video because the website, Vimeo was having technical difficulties for the last two weeks but I managed to upload it. Its Our Evaluation presentation.
This is our final cut of our production and I am personally very pleased with the standard of it and i think this is also the case in my group members oppinions. To view our final product watch the video below:
"Having become disillusioned during previous visits to the US by the procession of identikit, cookie cutter chain hotels he was staying in and the corporate face of America they revealed, Gorman hatched a plan: return to America; buy a second-hand car; then drive from coast to coast without spending any money in the chains.
He would refuel at dusty gas stations on remote highways, eat cherry pie from local diners and shop at Mom & Pop's grocery store. At least that was the idea. But when did you last see an independent gas station?"
This programme last night was very shocking at how much America is ran by huge multi-natoinal companies that just bombard towns with there huge stores benefiting from the econimies of scale consequently can charge les than local indepent shops, garages, resturants you name it theres an American chain with its name blasted into society. Although this programme was not difrectly relevant to my project throughout the programme when Dave Gorman meet with many people there were lots of interesting conversations about how these chains just frow money at everything and have no care in the world for its tiny independent competitors trying to crush them with every move they make. An independent gas station that was established by a steryotypical American family had been running for 30 years but spent 20 of them fighting against profesional lawers and sales merchants to ployed by an American chain to try and buy there gas station because it was taking a small percentage of there customers. They were offered the chance to be bought out for sums of money that started at $120,000 and when up each attempt, they were given the chance to become partners with this chain or the over option was that they would do everything in there power and with their money to put this gas station out of business.
When I was watching this programme I was constanly reminded of American film production companies such as Warner Brothers and how they are so wealthy they can just munipulate many other production companies with their vast amounts of cash to either join them in world domination or just get crushed under their path. Its just an example to the differeances between American internatinal conglomerate film companies and Brithish independants as one has so much money its products are reaching in excess of a billion pounds, in comparision if an independant Brithish film company such as warp films had that amount of a budget they wouldnt know what to do with it as they could make hundreds of films with the budget of just one American production.
I watched a great programme last night on BBC Three called great movie mistakes, Robert Webb exposes many funny continuity co*k ups from a man in jeans from the production team being in the crowd at the Colosseum in Gladiator To a star trooper banging his head on an opening door nearly knocking him off balance in the Star wars franchise. Although many of the cinematic blunders are from older films many recent productions are also included with many bloopers being spotted throughout. This was a great programme to watch not just because it was extremely funny but also intriguing to how multi million pound movies can still make the simplest mistakes with continuity and as this was a major concern with our production this programme was a great insight to how hard it can be to keep continuity ticking over but also how many people should just be fired for their lack of common sense substituting a petite school girl Gabriella Montez in high school musical with a much taller and butch stunt double when all she had to do was dive into a pool. I'm all for safety but unless she cant swim, that IS a bit over the top and consequently added to there total of continuity blunders.
If you want to watch the whole programme you can check it out on BBC iPlayer but it is only available to watch until the 11Th of April so here is just a small click of some unexplainable mistakes:
If you want to watch the opening title sequence then watch the video bellow:
In lesson we all got together and developed the questions Blaine compiled earlier. we wanted to ask about our production and then we got people to watch it and answer our questions we did this to some individuals but me and Blaine took it too our English group and got the whole class to watch it and then give us feedback. The group of people are majorly the same age as us, 16-17 but there are about three 18-19 year old in our class. This age range would fall into our main target audience as 16-19 year old make up a big percentage of consumers at cinema's so it was good to get their opinion of our OTS and what we received was a range of positive comments and some constructive criticism. We asked a range of open and closed questions because we wanted to acquire feedback upon specific features of the film and what age range and types of places we could play our OTS but we also wanted their own opinions of the production so we added some less guided open questions to receive this. Here are the questions we asked below:
•What are your first impressions of the film? Did any specific moment stand out to you?
•How tense did the OTS make you feel on a scale of 1 - 10? 10 being the most tense.
•Did you find the ambiguity and mystery of the piece intriguing? Did you feel curious enough to continue watching the film?
•Which character did you feel had the most power?
•Based on what you have seen, who would you recommend the film to? What age-group?
•At what kind of venue would you expect the film to be shown, Art House or Mainstream cinemas?
•How did the film's visual style make you feel? How did this contribute to the overall atmosphere of the film?
•Aside from film-noir, what genre would you classify the film as, based on what you have seen? To view the footage of the focus group filmed by me and Blaine watch the video below:
After asking these questions we got some great feedback on the tension that builds throughout and how this tension builds. There were some great comments on the darkness of the film due to the lighting styles and contrasts as well as comments on were they thought the production should be shown in an art house which consist mainly of independent films and artistic films that fill a niche in the market. or more mainstream cinemas such as ODEAN or VUE which have multi-million dollar productions consisting of play lists of about 10 different films to choose from with a range of genres and famous actors.
This focus group gave us some vital knowledge in the understanding of our target audience and enforced our confidence that we had for filled the needs of the consumers. As well as this source of feedback I also constructed a questionnaire and gave this out to multiple people to fill in and received feedback through this medium, (this can be seen on a previous post follow this link) Also we asked individual people the questions above and filmed their responses to the film and answers to the questions. Video below:
James and Dan have also posted our OTS on three websites, Vimeo.com, Playstuff.net and railways.national-preservation.com these three websites enable the viewer's to watch the film and write their own comments on it which we can then analyse later. Lastly the final piece of feedback we will acquire is another focus group which we will ask the same questions and record these to then be analysed later, this will be done by Blaine, James and Dan as unfortunately I couldn't make it. But you can watch the video bellow:
I was sent an email yesterday with some funny still images from some well known movies regarding continuity bloopers and because this is one of the main concepts that I have studied I thought I would share them with you all and add some funny capthions..well I thought so..
"Can anyone find my walki talki, I seem to have missplaced it" I didnt know they had planes in 1200BC "Arg captin, I can see JJB in my telescope can I stop off and get a new bandana" Hey Don't shoot, Don't shoot (ow you havnt got your finger on the trigger) RUUUUUN!!!
This is where we strike gold or hit a dead end. I took the first cut of our production to NYBC (Norwich youth bowling club) I have been a part of this club for many years since I was 12. The bowling club is has a wide range of player from 5-18 as well as parents watching so I thought this would be an ideal initial test for our production. I constructed a questionnaire that would both ask the consumer if they enjoyed the OTS and why as well as asking for their feedback with ideas for improvements. Our main target market is around 15-25 year old as the classification of our film is 15. With this in mind I wanted to get a range of both ages and sexes to watch the film and fill out the questionnaires as this would enable us to acquire a wide range of feedback which we could then use to improve our film. I was able to get 23 people to fill out my questionnaire which I was very pleased with. Because I had to take my laptop to show them the film, I constructed the questionnaire on Microsoft Publisher as then I could easily upload the questionnaires to my blog with an analysis of them. To view a range of the questionnaires click the links below: Questionnaire female 15 Questionnaire male 15 Questionnaire male 16 Questionnaire female 18 Questionnaire male 18 Questionnaire male 19 Questionnaire female 40 Questionnaire male 49 With the feedback coming from: our classification age of 15, just over with a range of 16-19 year old males and females who would still have a large percentage of consumer viewings, as well as getting a view from possible consumers depending on their personal preferences with their age ranging from 40-49 who our not directly relevant but all the more good feedback. This would prove vital in making our production even better and overall giving the consumers what they want.
After reading all 23 questionnaires we could begin to see that there were possible changes that were cropping up many times for example: Some of the shots were static for too long which took away from the tension building and lost the audiences interest. Another possible change that appeared multiple times is the voice of the Femme fatale, many people thought she looked the part but they also said that she didn't sound very authoritative and their were unnecessary pauses which detracted from her vicious domineer. Lastly the music in some places was to quiet.
When we then watched the film we could see that there were opportunities for us to change these disliked clips and we extracted the audio for these sections and set about trying to find multiple people who could perform a voice over for the Femme fatale. We also made some of the clips shorter to lose the breakdown in tension through the use of to many and to long static camera shots. We also listened to it multiple times and tweaked the volume of the synchronous background track that builds tension throughout the OTS.
