Thursday, 26 April 2018
Wednesday, 25 April 2018
Evaluation Question 2
How effective is the combination of your final product and the
ancillary texts overall?
Our project aims:
The Uses and Gratifications theory can certainly be applied to demonstrate
our projects aims. The short Sci-Fi Comedy we created was designed to entertain
the audience, which is one aspect of the Uses and Gratifications theory. In
order to entertain our audience we included many comedic aspects to our film to
entertain the viewer and keep them laughing and engaged. We created a film
poster and radio trailer to both advertise and promote our film.In order to create successful ancillary texts such as our films posters and radio trailers we first had to conduct enough research and comparisons to real media texts to ensure their success. This is why we formed guidelines through research and followed these to advertise our film effectively and in a consistent way that properly represented our film. We connected our products successfully through synergy creating a large advertisement platform both visual and audio. Both ancillary texts also clearly represent the films genre of comedy.
Film Poster:
Film posters are an important part of marketing for a film and have been for years. The internet has only strengthened this due to the proliferation of devices with a connection to the internet and the cross media convergence for devices such as smartphones being able to access the internet, particularly movie sites and social media where the posters are most likely to be viewed. In order for a film poster to be truly realised, it needs to capture the attention of the audience. That’s why for our poster, I wanted the primary colours to pop, making them yellow and red.
How does my poster reflect the intentions of our film?
The yellow was mainly for the Fidget Spinners and the text to have synergy with the film as those are the colours of the spinner and text in the film too. I think the light hearted nature and comedic themes of our film can be clearly interpreted through our poster due to the expression on the main characters face which is clearly in view on the poster due to him being the main focal image of the poster. The bright colours also add to this light nature as well as the comedic title "Winner Winner Fidget Spinner", a play upon the saying " winner winner chicken dinner", something that is actually in the public eye right now for many, and for our main demographic of teens to young adults due to the videogame Player Unknown's Battlegrounds popularising the phrase.
This adds another piece of attraction towards the poster, making the viewer more likely to engage with and watch our film. The reason the Sci-Fi elements don't pop up much in the poster is because they are not as big of a factor in the film as the comedic elements are. It is one of the main reasons we decided to go with my poster instead of Dan's as the intent and relation to the film in my poster is much clearer and more representative of the film as a whole.
For inspiration for this poster, I was mainly inspired by the poster for
Her (2014) and Volver (2006) as can be seen in the positioning of the main
character as the main focal image of the poster, as well as the red background
and related items such as fidget spinners rather than flowers, the positioning
of the title and the selected image.
I also used an image of Liam from the film to keep synergy and used positive 3 and 4 star reviews like a real world poster to keep that faux reality to it. That's why I also included the company logo (the dinosaur Carebear in the bottom right) and a fake website address for the film at the bottom.
Synopsis:
Our film is a Sci-Fi Comedy, rated a 12A. It includes themes of implied
violence although it is never physically shown. Our film was inspired by many
films and forms of media such as The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, Back To The Future
and The Evil Dead.
We also made a questionnaire about the multiple film posters that we made.
80% of the audience said that they enjoyed my poster the most which is another
main reason as to why we ended up choosing it in the end. When asked about who
they thought the target audience of our film was, just based off of the poster,
60% of those asked understood that we were aiming for many different types of
people and the rest of those asked understood that the film was aimed for at
least one of the members of those audiences. This just further showed that the
poster correctly reflected the intentions of our film. A lot of those asked
what they liked about the poster noticed a lot of the small details and
appreciated that, as well as how it fits with our film and looks professional,
all things that I tried to create when making the poster; meaning that my
intentions were met.
When asked if they would watch the film just based on the poster, 60% of
the audience said yes and 40% said maybe with 0% saying no. These are good
figures and certainly meant that the poster was successful if 60% of people
wanted to see the film based on just that alone. However, just a poster
wouldn’t do…
Radio Trailer:
Through research into radio trailers we discovered key aspects which ensure
the success of a radio trailer:
- Quotes from the film
- Music from the film
- Sound effects from the film
- Voice over to provide release information
Below is an example:
Similarly to our films poster, our radio trailer must include synergy to
represent the films themes as well as successfully advertise our film. Of
course, some films don't do that and market the film completely differently to
what it is like in Deadpool, however, that still gets the satirical themes of
the film across, just in a different manor. We just did the straight forward
thing though, opening with music from the film (I Am by Blunted Beatz) then
narration with information about the film. I was the one narrating and tried to
do the typical gruff narrator voice, mixed with a childish delivery to capture
the comedic elements of our film as well as the child like ones such as the
production company being named "Dinosaur Carebears". There's also a
hint of the way Frank Reynolds from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia delivers
his narrative lines in the way I do which adds to the informal nature of the
trailer and the film.
Dialogue from the film is also featured in memorable lines to act as a 'sneak peek' such as the classic "OH MY GOD!" and "It does work". I tried to incorporate these in a comedic sense rather than taking a typical; approach to it, replacing original lines of dialogue meant for the narration with the lines from the film; just further adding to the comedic aspects. This is also done to entice the audience so that they want to know more about the film, a successful aspect of the trailer. Music and sound effects from the film are used to connect the ancillary texts. Narration (recorded on a H1 Zoom Recorder so that the audio would be clear and without background noise interfering with any of the mix) clearly defines the trailer as a film advertisement and states important information in regard to the genre and release date: Narrator: "Starring Liam Bowskill and Richard Grainger, coming June 2nd 2018."
When creating the radio trailer, we used already existing radio trailers in
order to learn the tropes and conventions of them; as well as to use that new
found knowledge when creating our own trailer so that we could incorporate it
and wouldn’t be completely lost on what we needed to do. The main trailers that
we analyzed and took inspiration from are the Star Wars trailers that can be
seen below. From this, we then understood that we wanted clear narration, sound
effects from the movie and music from the film.
We edited the trailer using Audacity as I was already familiar with the
program and find it far easier to edit audio in than I do Premier Pro. In
there, I just added the music, synced it up with the narration; and then added
the sound effects and audio from the film. After that, I just added images to the audio on Premier Pro and exported it as a video. It was a short process.
Film Case Design
Winner Winner Fidget Spinner Film Case
When designing the film case we had to take inspiration from other films to ensure our layout looked professional and detailed. The two films we took as inspiration were: Volver and Her.
The reason Volver was our first inspiration for making our film case was due to the fact that the cover uses bold and bright colours to gain their target audiences attention and to connote what their film was about. For example Volver is about passion, love and lust hence the colour of red being dominantly used in their film cover. However, we decided to manipulate the use of red as well as yellow due to them being primary colours which connotes what our film is about: childhood innocence. Childhood innocence is apparent throughout our film as our main character time travels for mundane tasks rather than serious and helpful tasks and he is completely unaware of his surroundings which further reinforces this childhood innocence to the audience. Now that we had the design of the film case we needed to sort the layout.
One iconic layout we found was the film cover of Her. Due to the film back of Her featuring a close up of their main character and a film reel we decided to feature this on our film cover to ensure our layout looked the best it could. However to avoid copyright we placed screenshots of our short film matched with a close up of our main character on the back of the film case. In addition to this, we added a thought bubble of the blurb to the film due to our main character posing as if he is pondering.
To ensure our film case looked professional we researched into what features on a film case and we added everything we needed to, to the back of the film case such as credits, the blurb, screenshots of the film and copyright information at the bottom of the case as well as the film age certificate and the blu ray logo.
Tuesday, 24 April 2018
Issues Encountered in Editing and Reshoot Details
Issues Encountered in Editing and Reshoot Details
This was not much of a set back in the long run, as I quickly realised what was happening and how to get the sequence back to its original form; just by dragging it on to the editing timeline and double clicking it to reveal the edited footage.
Apart from this, I didn't encounter many other major issues in the editing process. However, when exporting the film, certain parts such as fades and dissolves that I manually made using key frames wouldn't appear the same as they did in the film and would lag a little, causing slight glitches in certain parts of the video. I just went back into editing and re did some of these effects to make them a little bit tighter so there was less room for error in the final export.
In the end, this only happens once in the film rather than the few times it originally did. I tried many different times to prevent this from happening but did not succeed. As you can see here, the dissolve is not perfect.
There were two main reshoots that occurred when creating our film. One was the original videogame scene that had to be reshot due to Jonny no longer partaking in filming with me and no longer being allowed to use his house. An edited version of this can be seen in the deleted scene. That is why we switched to Liam's house. In a lot of ways, this was a lot better for filming as his house was more freely available to use and the lighting was much better and didn't cause a rolling shutter effect on the video like Jonny's bedroom did due to the lighting there.
YouTube Thumbnail Analysis
For the thumbnail to the video, Armand suggested that I make a clickbait thumbnail in order to gain views and parody pre existing YouTube fidget spinner videos.
I created it while he gave me advice on what to add to it such as the emojis which kids love to get them to view it, arrows and text to make the video seem important and awake the analysis and intrigue part of the mind. As well as the rainbow background to be bright and colourful, representing the playful tone of the video and making it standout in a sea of bland and uninteresting student films on YouTube.
Teaser Trailer Creation and Inspiration
I wanted to make a teaser trailer fore the film and intentionally have it be misleading to begin with, following the contemporary common movie trailer tropes. I thought that being misleading would be funny and further add to the comedic aspects of the film. This is something that Deadpool did in its advertising too.
In the editing process, I followed the common tropes of single shots fading to black over dramatic notes to create suspense and drama. This is used in so many blockbuster trailers and is a really common trope so poking fun at it feels warranted.
I just used key frames to change the opacity for these shots and used the music from this video which also makes fun of modern day movie trailers, as the song (a cover of You Spin Me Round by Dead Or Alive) fit very well with the film, using overly dramatic covers of a popular song, another common trope.
I then wanted to subvert this even further by no longer being dramatic, but full on comedic which is why I switched from dramatic fades and switched from the dramatic cover, to a Neil Cicierega mashup of You Spin Me Round and Wonderwall by Oasis as seen below. I used this as it still fit with the themes of spinners and spinning but subverting the song again.
I then concluded with the films title and rather than giving a release date, I added the words "SOON" to be vague and keep the trailer as a teaser.
Monday, 23 April 2018
Proof of Music Consent
Proof of Music Consent
For the film, I asked two musicians that I like if I could use their music/ if they would create music specifically for the film. The music was used in the final edit, and here is how that came to be:
Thursday, 19 April 2018
Wednesday, 11 April 2018
Complex Edits
Complex Editis
Some scenes and shots in the film took more editing than others to achieve the vision that I wanted. Here are some examples of those edits:
Dramatic Shake:
There are three main instances of the camera shaking dramatically to show action/ frustration in our film. One is at the gaming scene, the second is at the bank/ house scene and the third is at the first time travel scene.
I did this by adding the motion blur effect and just moving the position of the frame in Premier rather than doing it manually as the effect is much easier to do in post and looks more like what I wanted to achieve. When adding both the movement and motion blur, the effect looks like hyper real dramatic movement that I think is emphasised well by the characters expression and the loud sounds in those shots. By spacing each effect apart every other frame and changing the amount of blur/ movement on each frame, it stops the effect from looking static.
Time Travel Through Space:
I wanted the first time travel sequence to feel different from the rest in the film. It was probably the trickiest but also the most fun part of editing the film.
There were many different effects that were used to get the look of the character travelling through space. The first was stabilizing the footage of the character in being pushed backwards on the skateboard. I originally planned this shot for the character just moving backwards in the real world but the background didn't match the previous scene so we decided that he should be travelling through space instead. Stabilizing the image using the Warp Stabilizer tool made it much easier to mask and key the character as he was no longer wobbling.
Of course, masking the whole image was the most tedious part, not really hard, but tedious. Each frame had to be correct meaning no big gaps that revealed a lot of the background could be left which took a while to do. I had to manually do this too which made it take much longer.
After that came keying out the background and making sure that none of that seeped through on to the character. I did this by selecting the background with the colour picker; then I used many other sub effects to try and make it so none would seep through, mainly by creating a kind of glow around the character rather than having rough edges as a way to get around that.
After this was done and the background was successfully removed, I added in a space background from YouTube, specifically free footage if a wormhole and just sped it up and added the motion blur to that too so that the same speed of the character was reflected in the speed of the background. Then, the necessary sound effects and music were added.
Blue Screen and Animation:
For the final end credits scene in our film, I wanted to add the main character running from a dinosaur. I knew off the bat that I wanted it to look bad and comical, originally planning to just add a toy dinosaur on screen but eventually settling with a free CGI dinosaur using green screen from YouTube.
This was actually pretty simple to get the whole scene the way I imagined it to be. First, I just used the ultra key to remove the blue background from the image, then added the same tints on to the dinosaur as were already on the footage of the character running. Then came animating the dinosaur properly. The video has the dinosaur running in place but because the camera pans on the shot, I had to animate it when necessary. This was nothing compared to the first time travel sequence for animating the mask so it did not take very long to do. Then, the sound effects were added and the scene was complete.
Friday, 23 March 2018
Responses to the questionnaire on our final film
Results from final film questionnaire
When asking questions about our final film these were our most important questions as they gave us the most insight to whether we did well as a media production company or not. Due to our film being a sci-fi comedy hybrid we decided to ask this question to see whether the audience understood our film and roughly half of our questionees did understand the science fiction elements of our film. However over half of our questionees predominantly thought our film was a comedy which was also an acceptable answer as our film featured more apparent comedy elements than science fiction elements.
Because our audience gave useful advice and nice compliments on our posters and rough cut of the film, we decided to add this question in the final questionnaire to see whether we had met the requirements the audience had set us in the rough cut which was to improve the editing and the sound. Due to the audience leaving comments such as "they loved the storyline and editing" this leads me to assume that we did well in upgrading our media product and making the best possible version we could.
Similar to the last question we wanted to see how much our audience enjoyed our film. We decided to do this for the same reason as the question above to see if we had improved and to see what the general rating of our film was if it was released as a physical media product to the public. Based on these results the predominant number of votes voted for eight out of ten which states the majority of our audience enjoyed the film. This is also apparent in the ratings that no one voted for as everyone voted seven or above for our film.
Results from rough cut questionnaire
Results from rough cut questionnaire
Asking this question was effective because we wanted to find out whether our audience understood our plot fully as our film is a hybrid of sci-fi and comedy. The evidence from our results convey that the audience did fully understand the plot of our film as the dominant answer was hybrid at 60%. Furthermore, the 40% that stated the film was a comedy were also right as comedy was one of our main genres in the film and our film featured comedy conventions as well as science fiction conventions.
This question was crucial to our films success due to the fact that if the predominant reading stated that the audience wouldn't go and see our final cut, then we would have had to amend a lot of details in our film to make our film a successful media product. However, the majority of the audience at 80% stated that they would see the film and the other 20% stated that they might. This was one of the best possible results for our group as we attracted all of our audience.
Recommending films to others is the biggest factor on whether a film does well or not as word of mouth is the most efficient advertising methods around as you are passing your opinion on to someone else who might be persuaded to watch the film and do the same thing. Fortunately, most of our audience would tell others about our film so therefore we would gain more viewers leading to our short film becoming successful.
This qualitative piece of information gave us directly what the audience thought of our film. The answers we received were vague but they said despite them liking the film it needs work. We already knew the rough cut needed work therefore we wanted to see if the audience picked up on this so that they could give us feedback on what we could improve on in the following question.
By asking such a broad ranged qualitative question, this gave the audience freedom to tell us anything that they would improve on if they were the producers. This is an effective question as the audience is telling us what they want to see in the final cut so we had amendments to work with. All of the answers said we either need to work on editing or sound to ensure that our film was a better media product overall. Therefore we decided to take this constructive criticisim and focus on our edits and sound more. We did this by amplifying the sound in certain areas, adding non-diegetic music to match the theme of the film and focus closely on the edits so that there was no breaks in continuity. Furthermore we also synced the sound and the editing together to create a rhythmic edit of our main character walking to the bank.
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