Evaluation Activity 4: Who are your audience and what have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our intended outcome of our production was to create a vampire spoof comedy that did what every comedy is meant to do; make people laugh, to entertain and to leave consumers wanting more.

When researching for our demographic for our film, we looked at the main target audiences for films such as "Twilight", as well the audiences of the various Scary Movie films. We also conducted research into friends and colleagues on their views of films in the parody genre. When looking at the audience of the Twilight films, we learned that the audience was mainly teenage girls and young women mainly, raging from the the ages of 13/14 up to 30.

We found that by making a vampire spoof we already had an audience the fan base generated around the likes of the Twilight phenomenon around the time when vampire films were at their peak we knew that this was going to be a hit. Last year we saw many twilight fans flock to see ‘Vampire’s suck’ a spoof comedy based around the Twilight saga.

Due to the recent surge in vampire film and television productions, we decided to a parody to make light relief of the subjects of these pieces of media, providing our own comedic take on the genre. When gaining feedback for our film trailer we used numerous social networking sites to post our trailer on and to gain feedback and guidance on what we could do to improve our productions. Due to our school's safety policy, we were unable to have access to sites such as ‘YouTube’ and ‘Facebook’ in college hours, so whilst in college we made use of ‘Vimeo’, a video sharing website that allowed us to post our production and other videos online to use both in school and at home. We found that as our target audience for our vampire spoof was late teens we decided to post our production on Facebook as with us ourselves being around that age we were able to reach out to our target audience easily in order to gain constructive criticism. We have learnt from this feedback what has worked within our production and what needed to be changed. From the feedback we recieved from our class members, we learnt that our piece worked well, although the second piece of music did not fit the production as much as the opening piece of music does, and we also learned that the slide which stated "Coming soon" did not fit fully into the section of our production it was in, meaning that we instead moved the slide round to fit more into the finished production.
 
I feel that through this A2 production work, I have developed my editing skills through editing our groups trailer. Although I went into this work fairly confident with using the Pinnacle software, I believe that I have furthered my ability to succesfully edit footage to produce a much better finished product, as well as having a much better technical knowledge over the software. I now feel much more at ease using Pinnacle to edit with. I also feel I have developed my ability in devising a successful piece of media, from the planning to the actual construction of the piece. I have learnt from mistakes made in previous media work, including my AS production work, and with this experience I believe I have created a much better production. From this piece of work, I have also learnt more on voice-overs, having had to perform one myself for our production.

Evaluation Activity 3: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Media powerpoint

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Evaluation Activity 2: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? What particular camerawork techniques & editing tools were used and to what effect?

When performing research into various conventions and themes which we wanted to use in our A2 media trailer production, we made particularly strong use of various internet sites such as YouTube and the Internet Movie Database. We watched a variety of film trailers on both sites, particularly YouTube (www.youtube.com), due its easy accessibility and use, as well as it being used by major film companies, such as Miramax to advertise their upcoming films and generate hype for them. We found good use of Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) as well, due to the amount of institutional information available on the site, and links to related works, such as to trailers and pages featuring similar actors or directors.

When planning our production, we primarily used software such as Microsoft Word to write up our planning documents and files such as our scripts, shot lists etc. as well as using the photo editing software Adobe Photoshop to design our production company logo, as well as our ancillary tasks of a magazine cover and a film poster.

When filming our production, we used a variety of equipment to achieve our visions of what our trailer was going to be like. We used a Sony handheld camera for filming our footage on, due to its easy availability as well as being portable and very easy to carry around due to its small size. The camera also provides clear images and videos to use in our production. As well as our camera, we used a tripod to steady our shots, which we found was of very important use when filming the bedroom scenes at Antonia’s house, due to the odd angle of the floor, which meant that without the tripod, the footage we had would have been unusable. However, with the use of the tripod, we ensured that all of our shots were at the correct angle and could be used.

Although the equipment we used was helpful in a variety of uses, we also had some problems using them. For instance, although the tripod was useful in correcting the angles of our shots, we found it to be hard to set up the tripod up to precisely counter the floor angle, and were a very long and arduous task. Likewise, when using the handheld camera, we found that the built-in microphone of the camera did not pick up the sound and voice of our scenes, meaning that often in times of editing we found that the music often was louder than the dialogue and drowned it out.  We also used a microphone in our production, for recording the voice over for our trailer. When using the microphone, we at first had trouble getting a clear and useable piece of sound from the microphone, due to the microphone muffling the dialogue from the voiceover, as well as picking various pieces of background noise. If we were to re-record the voice over, then I would use a different microphone, due to the difficulties we faced when recording for this trailer production.

When editing our film trailer, we used the video editing software Pinnacle Studio Pro HD V.15.

We had experience with the previous version of Pinnacle Studio prior to using it to edit, as well as first using the current version it to edit our AS production, meaning that we felt comfortable with editing and capturing our footage into a trailer format. When using Pinnacle, we found that the new version captured all of our footage and separated the different takes and shots we had taken in one action, resulting in a much easier process of transferring our footage onto the computer to edit, instead of capturing individual shots and scenes ourselves over a prolonged period of time, a problem we faced with the previous version of Pinnacle. Pinnacle also allowed us to easily transfer our created images such as our production company straight in to use in our production. When using Pinnacle, we cut specific shots from our footage down to smaller sections, fitting them together with other pieces of footage in an almost montage style, allowing us to connote across certain ideas and themes, bringing out the comedy of our piece by connecting a variety of our footage with comedy elements in. 
Pinnacle was also used in making our animatic, where we scanned the images of our storyboards onto the computer, before transferring them into Pinnacle and placing alongside each other.
Overall, we found Pinnacle a very useful piece of software when creating our production, due to its easy to use interface, and our previous experience with the software meant that we felt more at ease going into the editing process than we would have with prior experience using the Pinnacle Studio software.

When adding the finishing touches to our production, we used the websites http://www.freesound.org/ and http://www.freeplaymusic.com/ to get copyright-free music to use in our production. We found these sites were very helpful and easy to use, and had a vast amount of sounds to be used, meaning that we could become more specific with the sounds and music we wanted, narrowing down the genre of music we wished to use.

After finishing our piece, we decuded upon placing our finished productions upon both our own Facebook accounts as well as on video sharing sites such as Vimeo, to share with our friends and others, asking for Feedback.

These sites proved particulary useful for us when sharing our video, due to Facebook being instantly linked to our friends so that they could instantly view our video, as well as Vimeo having the ability to share and embed our video upon our blogs and other sites, as well as being viewed driectly from Vimeo. We also posted our animatic onto our Vimeo sites, to embed onto our blog afterwards as evidence of producing storyboards and an animatic.

To post our research, planning and evaluations online, we made use of the website Blogger. Blogger was of great help in easily posting our information online in a structured manner, and we could easily send each other information posted upon our blogs to other group members. Blogger was also good for keeping to schedules for filming etc, and meant that we could work both in school and at home to share our information to be viewed by group members, allowing us to post freely and quickly. The website allowed the ability to easily transfer and embed images and videos to use in correlation with our work and as evidence, and to use to show our characters used in our production and the costumes we had used for the characters.

Evaluation Activity 1: Directors Commentary

Glampire - Finished Trailer

Technical Decisions & Problems faced

When filming scenes for our film trailer, we faced numerous difficulties in securing locations to film in. For instance, we had trouble trying to secure Gawthorpe Hall as a filming location, and because we could not gain the rights to film there, we decided to film elsewhere. We also trouble with the lighting in certain environments we were filming in. For instance, we had trouble with the dark when filming the bedroom scene at Antonia's house, due to the room we were filming in being quite dark even with the lights on.

When it came to editing our trailer, due to the bad lighting in some of the settings we used, we had to ensure that our scenes were clearly visible. For this, we used lighting editing, increasing the contrast and brightness marginally, so that our scenes still looked natural and clear, but were not too bright and detracted from the scene.

We also had difficulty shooting the bedroom scene due to slant of the floor at the house we were filming at. Due to us not being able to fix this problem, we had to ensure that the tripod was securely set at a correct angle and fix the length of the leg stands so that the footage we were shooting came out correctly and was not at an angle when captured onto the computer for editing.

Ancillary Task 2: Film Poster

Ancillary Task 1: Magazine Cover

Our magazine cover

For our magazine cover, we decided to make our primary focus on the main character of our film trailer, Steve the Glampire. For our magazine cover, we created our own film magazine instead of using an established magazine such as "Empire", although we used a similar design principle to how the Empire front cover is designed, crammed in by lots of text advertising other films and television programmes which feature inside the magazine, such as the example here:

We chose to make our main actor and character the focus of our magazine cover, used as a draw to bring in both readers of the magazine and fans of the actor. We took inspiration from Empire due to their covers normally making the main character of a film the primary focus of their cover.