Evaluation question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

 

 The image above depicts our poster, review page and a print screen representing our short film.

As you can see our three products work collaboratively and individually, as we have remained consistent for each using similar fonts, images of the character and maintained the same foreboding feel for each product. We decided the layout for each product had to be clean and sharp, allowing for a professional appearance to each.

Our products also work individually, as we have carefully considered editing, giving each product its individual lookand colour scheme, that allows each product to be effective inidivudally.

Our audience was carefully considered when creating these products, as we wanted to ensure they exceeded expectations our target audience would have and effectively reflected aspects that would appeal most to them.

Evaluation question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We sought feedback on our short film and ancillary tasks through various ways, asking our peers to comment on improvements, suggestions and what they liked and disliked about our short film.

Two group members added links to they're facebook pages, taking viewers directly to our short film  on youtube. This appealed directly to our target audience. As you can see from the print screen, we recieved only positive feedback, with several 'likes'.

 

These images all show our short film on youtube, where recieved views and comments. The reviewers commenting found two negative aspects, the speed of the live typing effect text and that the note was unreadble. We corrected both of these by increasing the typing speed of the text and slowing the note sequence images to allow for easier reading.

The image above shows more clearly the youtube auduience comments.

I sent an email to select individuals, with an attachment of our poster:

 

Hear you can see an email I receieved back, stating what they thought of our poster.

I also conducted a short survey, asking what people thought about certain aspects of our poster. The results of this survey concluded that people liked our poster overall, and only one weakness was highlighted through this and the emails, the posters copy. We decided to make no alterations to the copy, as it was highlighted as being a comparative weakness, as our audience found our poster effective despite this.

Finally this image shows some of the commentary we have recieved for our products:

 

In conclusion we recieved a very positive response from our audience, who as a whole enjoyed our film and ancillary tasks and could only pinpoint a few aspects that could be considered weaknesses, all of which apart from one we rectified.

Evaluation question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used a wide variety of technologies throughout our process of creating a short film and ancillary tasks, in order to ensure we created work that was well researched, produced of a high standard and altered accordlingly from feedback.

 Google:
I used search engine google in order to conduct my research before beginning the short film and ancillary tasks.

 Blogger:
Blogger has been used to show my process whilst making the short film and ancillary tasks, allowing my work to be shared for others to view. It has also allowed me to view fellow media students work during this process.

 Apple I-mac:
I have used an apple i-mac in order to complete my coursework, accessing photoshop, i-movie and adobe premier. The same i-mac has been used for the entire process as it contains all our uploaded images and saved work.

 Digital camera:
The samsung pro815 digital camera has been used to capture all of our still images for our stop motion animation. We used a high quality camera in order to ensure our images were of high quality, allowing us to then edit them as we wanted.

 Video camera:
A video camera was used to capture our silhouette scenes, that eventually we decided not to include. We used this high quality camera from our school in order to increase our chances of getting a good result as the camera has good sound and image quality when recording.

 Tripod:
Alongside using this video camera, we used an attachable tripod in order to keeping the camera steady whilst filming. As we filmed our silhouette scenes in one go with a stop start method, the tripod was important as we didn't want the camera to move after each scene was shot.

Adobe photoshop CS5:
One of the most important technologies we used was photoshop, enabling us to edit all of our images, giving them the surreal look and experimenting with colour and effects. The vast majority of our short film is told through this series of edited images. We also used this program to create our review page and poster ancillary tasks.

I-Movie:
We used this program available on the I-Mac to sequence all of our edited images, altering the time of each frame. We also used this program to add our sound, title pages and extra visual effects, such as our transition.

Youtube:
We used youtube to share our final product and seek feedback regarding it, as well as uploading our video diaries and film rough cut. Youtube was also used to source our sound and a great deal of research I conducted.

Deviant art:
Deviant art was used to seek feedback regarding our work, as we uploaded our review page and poster for the art community to see.

Facebook:
Finally, we used facebook in order to share youtube links to our work, and recieve feedback from peers

Multimedia sharing

In order to show good use of new media technologies, we have shared our film with fellow peers via youtbe:

  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeuQtRO3UzE&feature=related

We have also shared our short film via a link through one of the group members facebook

Changes made after feedback

This is our film with appropriate changes made, re-uploaded.
UPLOADING

Audience feedback

After viewing our film in various ways, we have recieved constructive critism for ways to improve our film. The most popular answers were:

• The note cannot be read as the scene is not long enough
• The live typing of our characters thoughts is too slow
• The friends scene, with our character seated at the base of a tree with her friends in the distance is not long enough

We will discuss as a group and consider making these or any other alterations and then re-upload our final piece.

Short film

This is our final short film, as you will notice we did not include the silhouettes and instead chose to use title screens with a typing effect depicting the characters thoughts. This choice was made for several reasons, partly because the silhouettes were not of high enough quality despite numerous attempts, and we felt they did not match the standard of the rest of our work. We also felt the silhouettes would disrupt the flow of the non-diegetic sound track, as it would be hard to re-place the sound after each silhouette in a natural, effective way. Lastly we felt that through the live typing title screens, less emotion and perception could be portrayed through the character, allowing the audience their own interpretation which we felt would overall be much more effective.

Questionairre answers quantitive

TO BE DONE

Questionairre answers qualitive

For our qualitive audience research, we hoped to film a short focus group. However several members of the focus group were unwilling to be filmed so instead we have recorded their answers.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS HERE

Rough cut

Here is the rough cut of all our images sequenced using i-movie, with the timings altered accordingly. This is the stage before adding sound, our silhouette scenes and titles.

Stills

Here are a few stills I particularly like from our short film, to give an idea of the film piece.

Anematic storyboard

Anematic storyboard to be uploaded

Storyboard

Storyboard to be uploaded

Video diaries Laura

Group member Laura's second video diary 'What has been your weakness whilst filming?'

Video diaries Holly

Group member Hollys second video diary, 'What has been your weakness whilst filming?'

My second video diary

My second video diary, 'What has been your weakness whilst filming?'

Again I was trying to say that our organisation could have been better, and that we could have planned to stick to our time schedule more rigidly.

Video diaries Laura

Another group member Laura first video diary. 'What has been your favourite part of filming?'

Video diaries Holly

Another group member, Hollys first video diary. 'Whats been your favourite part of filming?'

My Video diary

My first video diary "Whats been your favourite part of the film?'"

Basically I was trying to say that I found the use of lighting and colour in our note scene effective, as it ties in with our ancillary task.

Deviant art feedback

We have added our review page and poster to popular artist website deviant art, hoping to recieve feedback from users. Currently we have one like for each of our pieces of work, so we are hoping for a good response.

We have posted a link to the deviant art page on facebook using another form of new media technology. We hoping to seek feedback from fellow deviant art users.

PDF File

To show use of different media technologies, we have converted our poster and review page files into PDF documents, allowing us to publish them online for viewers worldwide to see.

Final Review page

Here is the third draft of our review page we chose to keep the deep purple colourings instead of choosing monochrome, with the final adjustments of:

• The written review
• Image and caption
• Text added to the lower bar, stating running time etc

(click on image to enlarge)

Second draft of review page

We also tried our review page in monochrome, to see if this would give a more professional look. Colour difference is more noticeable larger.

(Click image to enlarge)

Changes made:

• Using the rectangular black and white tool to select the whole image area
• Went into edit drop down menu
• Selected 'cpy merged'
• Went into edit again and pasted the merged layers, so that all the items including text and images were on the same layer
• Went into the drop down menu, image/adjustments/black and white
• This changed the image into grey scale from its previous purple without having to handpick all the individual colours

First draft of review page

Our first draft of our review page (click image to view full screen)

(click image to enlarge)

How it was made:

• Created a new file in photoshop, keeping the file size to what the review would be puiblished in, A4
• An image from our film was placed on our new file as our header image, specifically chosen to depict the film title.
• Chose a lighter colour from the image using the eye dropper tool. With this new colour we used the shape tool to create a rectangle for the header background.
• Text colour was chosen using eye dropper and selecting a darker colour taken from the image, choosing colours from the image enabled us to connect the elements of our poster.
• We repeated these steps for the information boxes in the middle of the page, making the text box darker and the text lighter.
• At the bottom of the page we placed a strip of shots from our film, downsized to 90% less than there original size to fit the width of the page. Giving the effect of a film reel.
• We added text at the very top of the image in a light colour, to tell small details - issue number and date.

Before adding these images to the poster, there were previously edited.

• We duplicated the original layer
• Changed the levels of the image
• Changed the hue/saturation
• Changed the hue/saturation of image again
• Used the curves tool
• Added a colour filter
• Changed the colours on the channel mixer
• Finally we altered the brightness and contrast

Review page initial ideas

Here are a few ideas for our review page so far:

Rounded edge boxes, for a softer look



Possible border colours, all dark as we want our review page to be dark and desaturated





Colour scheme possibilities -

• Dark and desaturated
• Monochrome
• Complimentory pastel

We want to keep our scheme simple for a professional effect, above our some possibilities.