Evaluation Question 1 - In What Way Does Your Film Opening Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products

AS Media OCR Evaluation Question: forms and conventions from thetaleofdemise

Main Task Storyboard

Main Task Storyboard 

We created this story board for my media AS film opening. We thought creating a storyboard would give us sufficient benefits to our filming process. It allowed us to understand the order of each scene and the process we would need to go through to film our opening sequence. It also helped us if we needed to refer back to our initial intentions. Moreover, in the editing process, we knew whether we wanted a fade, cross fade, cut etc. It allowed us to make short cuts during the editing process.

The Tale of Demise Final Cut

The Tale of Demise Final Cut 

We finally have our final draft of The Tale of Demise. This took a lot of practicing with different editing software and effects.
Overall, I am really pleased with how it came out. I don't think it looks too fake and is defiantly scary and leaves enigma codes. 
The whole sequence was supposed to leave the audience members wanting to know what happens to the people on the floor covered in blood and the detective.

Furthermore, I love the fact we used very little dialogue in our opening sequence. This allowed for the audience to gain a small amount of information about the characters personality which left them wanting more. This is perfect and is exactly what we wanted. 

In addition, the idents and production company really go with the genre of the opening sequence. 

If I was doing it again, I would change how shaky the opening sequence is. It was supposed to distort the audience, but I think it did this a little bit too much and some people found it off putting.
I would also like to re-record the detective as we accidentally filmed Josh's bedroom background which included a display case with a car in it which did not relate to the scene at all. 

Target Audience

Our target audience will be teens/young adults between the ages of 15-21, who are predominately from a Western culture, we will not be targeting to a particular gender as we do not want our target audience to be gender specific.

As a group, we decided that if our film were to be BBFC rated, it would be in the 15 classification. This was after we looked on the BBFC website to research what might be seen in a 15 rated film or video. The image below is taken from the BBFC website and we have added ticks next to what might be seen in our production work, yet we might decide against this as in the most opening sequences they very rarely use what is listed below in the first five minutes of the film.

This therefore influenced who our target audience would be, as it would prove futile if we were to include anyone of the age below 15 into our target audience if they would be unable to see the production itself.

Deciding on the Film Title

Deciding on the Film Title 

Before adding our credits, we wanted to add our film title. We were trying to decide between three, as seen in the video above. So , we asked some members of our target audience. They told us that they preferred the first one. This worked out perfectly for us because this was the one we all preferred aswell. I am so glad they chose this and if we have chosen what our target audience like then we are appealing to a mass audience. 

Editing

Editing 

Our first experience editing using Serif MoviePlus X6 on the school computers came with a lot of problems. Serif software are ones that I am familiar with due to prior use and are quite straightforward to use. However, running the software on the school network, which is slow at the best of times, made editing difficult and frustrating, as well as running the risk of the software unexpectedly crashing crashing and deleting our work.

In the end, our group decided it was best to put our editing on hold for a little while as Sophie was going to purchase an Apple MacBook Pro, which comes with the software iMovie already added onto the laptop, which is similar to MoviePlus in certain aspects making getting familiar with it fairly easy. As a result of doing this editing it became a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable.

Above is a screenshot of what iMovie looks like and below is what Serif MoviePlus X6 looks like. As you can see the layout is a little similar and it has similar features. This allowed us to get to grips with how to utilise iMovie the best quite quickly. 

Bloopers

These are all the bloopers of our filming put together in one video! It just shows how many takes you really need to get it right.

First Filming Experience

I loved filming with the camera and equipment we had been given by our school. The camera was easy to use and portable, it was also fast and it had a great battery life. I think we only charged it once throughout our whole filming time. The tripod we received was adjustable in lots of different angles and allowed for a wider range of shots and angles to be accessed when we started filming.
The camera was also perfect for hand held moments that we wanted too. It allowed us to create a really effective credit sequence. Without this camera, our group wouldn't have been able to create such a tense credit sequence.
The only issue we had was once we had filmed and converted our produce, we had realised their was a strange mark on the bottom left of the film. It wasn't on the camera itself, it was just on the actual footage. We were unsure if we had caused this and we then realised it wasn't the computer, it was actually the footage we had filmed. As a result, we had to re film part of our media work.
The equipment was really useful to use and benefitted our work a lot.

The Tale of Demise Second Cut

The Tale of Demise FIRST CUT

This is the first cut of our media production, The Tale of Demise. After evaluating this, we realised we needed to fit the ident to the frame properly as they are out of shot. We also need to increase the volume of the flash back scene as Gray's voice is really difficult to hear, this needs to either be re-filmed or edited to make this.
We also need to make our opening credits, we decided we would do this last to create the best opening sequence we can.
We also need to add a frame that has the title of the film. This would be beneficial for our opening title sequence.
Other things we would play around with is adding some asynchronous sound to enhance our film opening. 

First Editing Experience

My First Editing Experience 

My first experience editing on the school computers/software wasn't exactly the best. The software was quite easy to use, but the older computers made it very slow to run and difficult to access everything we had filmed. It started to become very frustrated with the lack of the resources.
Moreover, when we filmed some of our footage had a scratch on the bottom left hand side of the screen. This was very annoying and made it difficult for us to pick our footage. It wasn't anything to do with the camera it happened when exporting it to a PDF file.
Luckily for my group, Sophie was purchasing an Apple Mac computer which is quick and has all the editing software we need available. As a result, editing became much easier and actually fun to do. We know don't need to use the schools software resources and don't have to wait for the computers to load.