final products

 

My final products

short film


film poster



















Radio trailer

Question 1-In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products

• Avatar was a radio trailer I found useful to help me with the layout of my radio trailer. I was originally unaware of how to create a radio trailer that would sound movie star quality. Even though Avatar isn't the same genre as ours it still really gave me an idea of how a radio trailer should be structured and what to include.
• Avatar differs from our short film as ours is a tension builder whereas Avatar doesn't have any climactic points so our short film entices the audience from beginning to end.
• As avatar is a recent film I found it important to follow its codes and conventions as it meets everything in order to be a successful film.

• This radio trailer is rather old yet is the same genre as our short film so it is helpful to see how to build tension in a matter of minutes.
• I liked the repetition of "Damien" throughout. I tried to figure out how I would be able to create tension in my radio trailer as there was nothing I could really repeat.
• I liked the use of the music and felt my radio trailer would benefit with some gripping music also.
• It is structured really well and that is one of the main reasons I followed this example. I found my short film is similar to this radio trailer as I structured it the quite the same and I feel I succeeded in building the tension. 
• What I decided to do was create a silent moment on the word "AWAY" it figured it created tension just as much as this one does with the repetition of "Damien".

• This is my finished radio trailer and I used the two radio trailers above to help me on structure and plan on what I was going to include.
• My chosen music I figured would enhance the creepiness to my short film and I made sure it didn't overpower the speech as my first attempt didn't create the effect I wanted.
• The scenes I decided on I felt were appropriate as they fit well with my choice to talk about the women's perspective. I took a part of the receiving flowers clip from Final Cut Pro and put it onto garageband.
• I decided my poster and radio trailer was going to be based from the women's perspective so I asked one of my peers to narrate my radio trailer. Her voice fit perfectly with the genre of the short film as she has a calm yet dark tone to her voice. 
• I chose some background music from garageband and it fits perfectly with the style of my radio trailer. It gives it a creepy feel and automatically reinforces the chosen genre. 
• I picked out snippets of the film to include in my radio trailer. I felt they best fit with my focus on the women's side of the film. As an example; I included Sarah Foster receiving gifts which didn't give the twist ending away yet it showed the film from the other perspective. 
• In order to give a frightening effect, I cut the background music when Natalia (narrator) says the word "AWAY" it is silent. I felt it made the radio trailer unique from other short films but I tried to give it a high standard quality and create affect. Also the silence of the word reinforces the title and creates tension, therefore enticing the audience. 
• I have a background sound of a road when I have included the flowers delivery scene. It created the reality of it and made the radio trailer clear as I wanted to include the most vital parts. 
• I decided on it "now showing in selected cinemas" as it is a short film and I would want it to be promoted through the cinemas then in the near future it would be available on the internet via youtube.


Poster research 


Originally I had no idea how I was going to begin drafting my poster. I knew I had to make it creepy and dark, but I had no initial ideas on how to create that. I then figured I should look at other, well-known films related to our psychological thriller genre. I found 'Shutter Island' included all the conventions in order to make a high quality poster. I wanted to create a dark style poster but with a dominant image similar to this one. 

I found it difficult to create a poster that wouldn't give too much away and meet our target audience. At the beginning of the planning I was going to use a different image. The image of the stalker, but I felt I wanted to portray my work through the womans perspective. 


This poster was what helped me make my decision on having a landscape poster. I wanted it to be eye-catching and the image from our short film I wanted to use would not have benefitted the scary, gloomy style. 





This is my final poster which I tried my hardest to include all the codes and conventions of a psychological thriller poster. I ensured I didn't give too much away yet enticed the audience enough to want to see the film. I wouldn't have been able to create my poster without researching into what is expected to be included. 





The tagline i fitted perfectly under the title "AWAY" I wanted the letter "W" to almost point down to the tagline. I thought this would make my poster grab your eye and be quite unique. I found AIDA useful (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) this helped me to ensure I chose an enticing image, bold text to convey the vital ingredients of the film. 


Film analysis


In the film we see a key different in both characters that myself and Adam took on. We wanted to portray the binary opposites through use of low key lighting when the stalker was present on the screen, and high key lighting when Sarah was shown. We needed to ensure there was a clear change when each character was shown otherwise it would not be a well structured narrative to the audience. In relation to Nick Lacey's schema of genre it was vital we included specific character roles, sounds and music that were relevant with the narrative for example; the owl sound to show passage of time. Also we ensured that through visual techniques we showed the stalker watching Sarah. We did this through framework to get across that Sarah was being watched. Throughout we wanted to not show the victim straight away to the audience and the greatness of it is that the twist ending finally reveals it all. 


Beginning
It begins with an image of Sarah's hand focusing on the jewellery. It was compulsory and we felt it would be best showing the ambiguity of the plot. Also it immediately entices the audience to wonder who gave Sarah the ring? 


Office
As Sarah is typing at the computer she looks directly into the stalkers eyes. This is creating a personal feel towards the film and allows the audience to be able to relate to the situation. The hand held camera is showing the realism, documentary house style we wanted to create. 


Transition 
There is a fade transition from "but good luck on your trip" is a motif transition shown throughout, it indicates the passage of time. 


Train station scene
The train station and bird sound scene is also showing the pass of time through the stalker. 


Voiceover train station
The voiceover was recorded on a zoom box which was to portray to the audience that the stalker was working away, but for people who haven't seen the film would expect him to be Sarah's husband. This scene is vital for reinforcing the titles relevance "AWAY". 
The various shots of the train station, train board and the actual train it is creating the documentary art house style we were going for. 

Letter scene
We placed the camera on a tripod and stood it on the table to create a birds eye shot of the letter. It emphasises the intensity of his obsession towards her. We chose to have a cup there in order to show the realism of the situation and create a casual and informal setting. The lighting was given off through using a lamp. We felt it created a calming atmosphere and the music emphasised that.

Gifts
The wrapping up of the gifts was included to stress his obsession he has for Sarah and the fade outs is prolonging the time and effort he goes to in order to express his love. The card has an ambiguous meaning as it could portray them when they were young? or expressing the romantic style?

New scene added 
We received some audience feedback before the conversation between the stalker and Sarah was added. They felt we needed to add another scene showing them both communicating and the need to make the twist ending slowly revealed.

Letter
The zoom up on the word "Away" exaggerates the intensity he creates in this letter. Also makes the audience question who to sympathise with.

Looking into Sarah's life 
The sudden interrupt of the letter being posted helps build up the second part to our film and separates the whole film from the stalkers life.
The look into Sarah's every day life activities as simple as pouring a cup of tea is beginning to open up Sarah's normality.
The phone shot is revealing the contact they have with each other and is

Cafeteria scene
It is shown through the stalkers eyes as he is watching Sarah having a conversation with her friend. This is a vital part revealing Sarah does not feel the same and is feeling threatened by these gifts,texts etc.

Answering phone message
I recorded the voiceover which is another later scene added to show clearly the rejection and desperation the stalker is going through to contact her.

Outside
There is a diegetic sound of stalker breathing. It really creates tension and meets the requirements for our genre, also the use of the baby fits in well with the target audience 16-35.

Baby scene
The close-up on Sarah's face is showing her as a caring mother and this scene allows the audience to create sympathy.

Stalker shown
Sarah is really emphasised as the victim and when the stalker is fully revealed through the framework. It is creating a build up of tension and the choice of the framework when Sarah believes she sees someone is effective as it hides him.

Owl
The owl is showing passage of time but is quite a conventional style sound when creating a creepy scene.

Flashbacks
The flashbacks gives the audience different perceptions on what they believe has actually occurred in the flashbacks and what isn't real. The ambiguity throughout does meet the psychological thriller genre as it builds up tension.

The final bed scene
This scene is when all is revealed but still we leave questions to the audience throughout. Questions such as; did she overdose? suicide? murder? has the stalker drugged her? or is she innocently sleeping?

question 2

This is a video involving myself and my team clueless productions. We are being asked questions from our teacher about our two chosen ancillary tasks and the final short film.



My poster was not included in this video due to technical difficulties at the time so here is my final poster for you to see:

Question 3- What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

I found this one-to-one feedback very helpful, it opened my eyes to what our target audience truly do feel about this film. I take on board all the comments and realise how important it is to be aware of others opinions. I found some specific comments positive and helpful for example when Amy explains that all three ancillary tasks (poster, radio trailer and short film) link well together to fit the psychological thriller genre. Also the comment Amy made on the unclear beginning was positive as it kept the audience on their toes. I was very pleased with the positive feedback explaining how we achieved our target audience of 16-35. We aimed our target audience to be people interested in thrillers, mainly the female audience and would be at the social grade of c1. Which is working class people. As our film is based around realism I feel our target audience is suitable. The target audience feedback showed me males can relate to the film as the identification of the stalker would be appealing, therefore our film is very open towards the audience choice.

We received plenty of feedback throughout allowing us as a group to make changes when things weren't working. Mid way through our filming the feedback allowed us to make some changes, for example; we added a couple more scenes in which involved a canteen scene and a phone call scene. They ended up really adding a build up to the final scene where all is revealed.
On a slightly negative I have learnt that the storyline could have been portrayed a bit clearer as our twist ending came to a shock to some people, but it has been a constant learning process.

 For the ancillary tasks I frequently asked my friends to look and my poster and radio trailer then comment to ensure I was aware of things they felt worked and didn't. For example my friend gave me some feedback on my poster and said it would work much better with less writing on the silhouette of Adam's face, and it did look effective.  Overall i am pleased with my final three ancillary tasks.



This is the questions I came up with that I wanted to ask Amy. I felt these were appropriate questions and therefore would give me all the answers I was looking for.

task 4-How did the you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages

What are 'new media technologies'?
In the stages of our short film we used a variety of new media technologies;

Pre production

• I used the internet a lot before deciding on target audience for our short film. I was researching reviews, film posters similar to our genre (psychological thriller). It really helped comparing other films to ours.
• I mainly focused on the film Shutter Island to look at ideas we could incorporate into ours. I watched a few interviews about audience research in order to see how our group should figure what target audience would be best for our film.
• Social networks were a big thing for audience research. I displayed on twitter an image and asked a few people to comment on if they found it worked well etc. If it wasn't for social networks my research would have been less effective.

Production

• The production of the short film was sometimes quite difficult as we were in situations where the atmosphere interfered with the sound. So we used a zoom box, and the audio recorder.  These helped our film to feel less amateur.  
• The use of the DSLR camera was the quality was much better than an average camera. There was two different settings manual and auto. It was good to be able to decided what we felt looked better for each scene.

Post production

• Throughout the whole of the filming we used a DSLR camera to film our footage.
• In order to post updates on our film progress we formatted it on blogger.com. It is an easy website to navigate and upload work.
• The editing process I found difficult, especially grasping Photoshop, garage band and final cut pro. Photoshop is a complex software and the tool I struggled with was the magic wand tool.
• Through the process we have been constantly working on mac computers. With having one myself I found it pretty simple to use, however it would freeze and cause corruption sometimes. Nevertheless the technologies used have been really effective and high quality stuff.

Throughout the process transferring data was very important, it involved;

1. Copying sound files
2. Uploading files onto youtube 
3. Grabbing still shots from the film to use on our posters
4.  Copying over transitions onto our film 
5. Being able to cut specific parts of speech and merge sound footage in order to create a radio trailer.

The new media technologies make the jobs much easier and quicker to do, and I cannot imagine our final film looking the way it does without the new technologies that are available.

Editing

This is a clip showing us in the editing process, we are merging two clips together. 

Final radio trailer

This is my radio trailer, it includes professional structure, high quality sound and a good, strong view on the women's perspective.

film updates

These are two scenes in our short film that reveal the intensity of the film and have relevant speech in them. Even though we don't have a lot of speech, what we do have is really important as it builds up the stalker and keeps the twist ending.

Final film poster

This is my final film poster, I decided on a bright image yet it gives off a dark feel to the audience which was exactly what I was aiming for. My chosen colour of the text is bold and I love the eye catching title. I feel my poster would fit well in the short film industry and would succeed at promoting my film.

film poster analysis

Film poster analysis

 

final film and test screening

This is a test version of our short film 'AWAY' which we asked a group of students to watch, they then commented on what they felt worked and doesn't.
We got audience feedback that we weren't meeting our target audience correctly so we took the opportunity to add more scenes that helped the psychological thriller genre to work.

The use of the test screening is similarly what occurs in real film productions. Famously Fatal Attraction producers would change their ending based on if they received negative feedback from their target audience. We followed this idea and found it very useful to see that feedback is good for a short film.



This is the final film

film research

Film radio research from izzyfoster

Changes throughout filming period

Changes throughout the filming period

The baby

As it was based around a single mother we had to take into account the best way to film a baby. Originally we wanted to use a real baby and the plan was to film my baby cousin. However we figured it would be difficult to organise times to film and it became awkward. So we then resulted in using a doll. At the beginning I didn't find the idea great as I thought it would look unprofessional.  

The park scene

We originally loved the idea of including a park scene to show the single mother life and film the stalker in action. When we came to planning it we figured it wouldn't work well as the audience would be curious as to why her stalker would be at the park. We needed to plan carefully in order to keep up the twist ending. 

Poster draft

This is a draft of my poster revealing my first ideas when deciding on what I was going to include. I firstly thought I was going to use a different image but felt this one worked well to portray the victim.