Group 9 - Foundation Production: May 2013

· In our production we set out to appeal to our target audience. In order to appeal to them we first had to recognise their demographic information and interests. Our target audience’s demographics were young male adults, aged 15-25 who earns an average salary and lives in urban and rural areas. It is also important to distinguish the psychographics of our audience, our target audience, being young; would dress in casual wear and enjoy various popular forms of media in modern society, including films, music, television and radio. Our target audience would also fall into two psychographic categories being ‘opinion leaders’ and ‘early adopters’ who would help distribute the popularity of our film.

· In our production, we have used stock characters of an antagonist and a protagonist to appeal to our target audience. Our protagonist especially does so, an example of this being the protagonists demographics as in our production the protagonist is a young male adult aged 17 whom dresses in casual clothes being jeans, a t-shirt, and a jumper. The use of matching the character exposition to our target audience demographics allows the target audience to relate to the characters in our film; in addition to this it helps position the audience on the side of our protagonist. Furthermore, we used the psychographics of our target audience to determine the interests of our protagonist. An example of this is our protagonist’s interest in modern technologies such as the shot at the start of our opening which consists of a close up of the protagonist calling his mum on a mobile phone.

· To find out which aspects of our ideas appealed to the audience we carried out audience research using web 2.0 through ‘Survey Monkey’. Our choice of questions influenced the audience impact on our production, as a result we needed 10 questions that would identify the audience and then review our ideas against the opinions of our target audience. In order to identify our target audience, our survey included two closed questions which referenced the age and gender of each person that took the survey. This then showed us which ideas our target audience preferred. To test our concept on the target audience there then had to be questions highlighting the key areas in our production. These areas included location, music, characters, plot, and props. There was a question for each area as well as a question defining which area is the most important for a horror film. The answers to these questions included typical horror locations, characters and props such as an abandoned house, a psycho and a knife respectively. Resulting in a quantitative result highlighting the most effective aspect of each area in a horror film.

Example result from my audience research (Question 4)

· To collect results survey monkey gives the user a URL which links the participant to the survey. I used this as well as web 2.0's most successful social networking site Facebook to distribute my survey digitally among people whom qualify for our target audience.
· The results from our audience research proved our ideas for a horror opening to be effective. In most of the questions asked we received a positive result towards a certain aspect of our film, an example of this being the result from question 4. Question 4 asks which location out of a selection would be most effective in a horror film. When put to the target audience the majority agree that an abandoned house would definitely be most effective with 38% of people voting for it out of the 30 recipients. Another result which showed the success of our ideas among the target audience was from question 6. To find out whether or not our plot would be appealing to the target audience we devised question six to ask which out of a selection of plots they found most interesting. The plot selection consisted of a chase between a killer and their prey, a ghost story, and our chosen plot - the abduction of a boy by a psychopath. The results from this question proved useful as the majority of the sample being 41% opted for our chosen plot idea as the most interesting and effective plot.

Pitch

· In response to our audience research most of our ideas remained the same as the audience seemed to favour all of them. On enhancement we could have made to our production was the inclusion of a knife to add a sinister mood, however, due to constraints we deemed it wise not to include a knife during the filming because of health and safety.
· We also tested our film opening concept through a pitch to a group of our target audience. The pitch included the use of technology through a Power Point and reviewed different areas of our chosen ideas against the audiences’ opinions. Our power point gave a treatment evaluating the main plot of how the protagonist is controlled by a voodoo/ psychopath; in addition to this the Power Point presented our plans for key shots such as the pull focus used at the beginning of our film opening. Also in our pitch we explored our ideas for moving titles, similar to that of Zombieland; which we would create in Adobe After Effects including the bold ‘Riot’ font and colour from ‘www.dafont.com’. Finally in our pitch we presented what props we would use and the difficulties we would face on the days of filming, for example the risk of rain and the variety of terrains to film in.

· Following the pitch we gave, the rest of the class gave feedback on what they thought about our ideas. The overall response was that we had a good idea but it needed to be clearer to the audience what was going on. A number of people commented saying the pen idea was a great, unique idea which would make our film stand out from others. A suggestion was made that during the shot where a curve is drawn and the camera cuts to Desmond following that curve, we fade both shots over the top of each other. We took this advice appreciatively as we think it would clear any doubt as to what is going on and would also be a nice change to the standard cuts we'd be using throughout the rest of the shoot to help focus the audience's attention to the storyline. In response to the feedback from the pitch we decided to take on board the suggestion of a cross-fade during a shot in our real production by changing the opacity of two shots, this elaborated the aim of our plot to the audience a lot better
· In addition to the research and the pitch, we tested our rough idea through the screening of an unfinished version of our film opening being the ‘Rough Cut’. We screened this a week before the production deadline to receive audience advice before finishing our production. After screening our ‘Rough Cut’ of the opening to our target audience, we received many positive remarks regarding the footage. This included the variety of shots, the camera movements, the pull focus and slow motion shot and that the concept was good. However, we also received constructive criticism in order to improve our film. The criticism included, the sharpness of the shots, could include a faster cutting rate in order to create tension and a build up for a climax and finally our film could include more shots of writing.

Screenshot of one pen movement we added

· In response to the rough cut, the main criticism appeared to be the confusion of the plot and the amount of shots of walking. In response to this during post-production we re-arranged the shots into a more sensible order and then continued to add more shots of the pen controlling the protagonist. We also did this by adding in the suggestion for a cross-fade shot over a long shot of our protagonist walking towards the camera. In response to the criticism against the amount of walking we decided to cut down and remove many shots of the protagonist walking and instead added in more key shots for title which in my opinion enhanced the attraction of our plot for the audience.
· The weekend after the production deadline, we screened the final cut to our target audience to review our finished products to see if we have earned their appeal. After the screening had finished I handed out 8 questionnaires to the target audience asking open and closed questions to produce quantitative and qualitative results which highlighted how we had appealed to the target audience.

For the first question we wanted to find out whether or not we made the plot clear enough for the target audience to understand. The respondents found the production to be relatively easy to understand having 68% finding it easy, which was the challenge as we predicted one flaw with our plot was attempting to convey it on screen, however these results show our success.

Next we wanted to find out whether or not the soundtrack we had chosen matched the visuals as in our audience research we found out that a good soundtrack is very effective in a horror film. The results from this question are very pleasing as the whole of our respondents believed that the soundtrack matched our visuals which we were pleased with as we spent a long time editing the soundtrack in post-production.

Questions 3,5,6, 7 and 8 all received the same results as 100% of our sample responded yes. From this we received results that our film was completely effective in conveying the genre (Question 5), The villain in our film was very effective through the careful choice of mise-en-scene and costume, the 3D titles we created in after-effects were effective and enhanced our films appearance and finally the climax we created at the end was particularly effective to resolve the tension yet also leaving a loose end of which would be resolved in the film.
In question 4 we used a rating scale to find out which aspect of our film was particularly effective. We predicted that the soundtrack would prove most effective due to our audience research, however, our results showed that our simple yet effective costume choice of a plain white mask and a leather cloak were most effective at creating an eerie mood in our production.
Question 9 asked the question which ultimately proved whether or not our film opening was a success in general and from the graph it shows that 100% of our respondents would continue to watch this film. Which we were pleased with.

Our final question was an open question asking whether or not the target audience would wish to change anything in the production, and luckily all of our recipients answered nothing which was brilliant to our delight.
All in all when it came down to producing our film, we made most of our ideas based on our target audiences opinions and preferences, because of this we find the audience feedback extremely helpful and valuable as it evaluates whether or not our ideas match the preferences of the audiences in which we have essentially set out to do. Without the ethos of pleasing the target audience then in all I believe there is no momentum into making a good film, hence why we were pleased with the results we had gathered from our target audience being white, male teenagers after the final screening.

Individual Tasks: 1,2,3 and 6

Group Task: Question 7

Wednesday, 1 May 2013

George Chambers: Evaluation

GC: Evaluation

1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our film opening was very conventional in terms of genre, (it stuck to the psychological horror template), because we included numerous elements in our own film that we picked out whilst conducting our secondary research.

Mise-en-scene in our film was what really helped match our film to the horror

genre. The group tried to keep to very iconic values when considering this element of the film, so we chose two iconic horror locations for our filming: an abandoned house like we saw in lots of previous year groups and woodland which is commonly used in many horror films such as the Blair witch project (Sánchez, 1999). These locations were very conventional to our genre as we found out from audience research and our mood board. Also the costumes used in our production matched the horror convention, with the protagonist wearing casual clothing and the antagonist dressed in a dark leather overcoat and a mask. Scre4m (Craven, 2011) replicated the contrast of costumes we used for our production between the antagonist and protagonist. Another element of our media product

that made it a stereotypical horror film were the iconic horror props used; rusted tools and old, decrepit furniture was also seen in our secondary research in Se7en (Fincher, 1995). Finally for mise-en-scene, we replicated the dim lighting conditions we found in Suckerpunch (Snyder, 2011), by adding on colour filters and hue saturation to the clip once we had filmed. This helped to create a sinister mood that’s so closely linked with conventional horror films.

Camera techniques also helped greatly when replicating horror elements into our film. Our camera movement involved lots of handheld shots to give a slight shake to some shots. We felt this gave our production a creepier feel to it as if it were almost a POV shot which helped to engage the audience. As far as conventions go, we did not witness many films in our secondary research that mimicked this technique so I feel this maybe slightly unconventional to the horror genre. Camera angles and shot size were all rather conventional as we used lots of long shots to convey loneliness or isolation. We saw lots of long/extreme long shots of people when we searched horror related images on Google for our mood board. We used a good mix of close ups and long shots to shake things up and make the audience feel uncertain, which is what we saw in the opening scene t o The Ring (Verbinski, 2002). We used mainly close ups of the antagonist and longer shots of the victim to help convey the victim’s vulnerability and help build up his character profile contrasted with the antagonist. So in that sense our camera techniques were also conventional to horror.

Choosing the soundtrack is one of the biggest challenges when attempting to conform to horror. We chose lots of electric/white noise sound effects and we had the iconic screechy horror build up before the final jump scene. This made it very conventional to horror. On the other hand however, the actual music we had running through the whole clip was more suited to a crime/thriller film as it was fast paced and it wasn’t in a minor key (unlike traditional horror music). Although this worked well with the mix of horror/thriller sound fx/music to create a psychological horror feel, it wasn’t entirely conventional to horror. We didn’t have much diegetic sound which made it conventional to horror as most horror films rely on silence or music to create a tense atmosphere for the audience.

When editing the titles, we had to make sure the text was bulky enough to look good in 3D, but looked creepy enough to make our clip look like a horror film. The text we chose worked well but wasn’t very conventional due to its bulkiness and glowing white colour. Despite this we feel it added atmosphere to the clip.

Overall, our film intro was very conventional all round despite a few unconventional elements like the titles and the soundtrack. But in a way these unconventional elements develop psychological horror conventions further by using a mix of horror and thriller aspects to reinforce the psychological side of the film.

2. How does your media product present particular social groups

The three social groups present in our film are as follows: (no class applicable to any of them) White male teenager; Middle aged woman, mum; Older white male, mid-thirties (played by a teen but portrayed as an older man)

Both the mum and the teen are positively portrayed, contrasted to the older male who plays the antagonist and is therefore negatively portrayed. So far as age and gender roles go, the woman definitely fulfils the stereotypical housewife role because she is on the phone to her son (the teenager) at the start of the film, which conforms to the commonly portrayed image of a mum being protective of her children. The teen also fulfils gender and age roles as he is out of the house exploring and has headphones in, (both of which are so often conveyed in the media). Again, the older man fits the gender and age stereotype that traditional psycho-killers are older males. We saw this confirmed in our secondary research (Se7en, and Suckerpunch). None of these characters really challenged any social norms which made our production more believable.

Camera work used on the teen made him look vulnerable and isolated. Long shots helped to get this across to the audience, as did his verbal language towards the end as he looked scared and even gasped in fright at one point. This interestingly challenged the conventional gender role of men being brave as the male this time played ‘helpless woman’ role as the one who gets killed/abducted or whatever else. Age ideologies were not broken though as the victim is still a young teen and we found that teens are often the victims in horror films. Also, his walking style suggested he wasn’t really bothered by anything going on around him which conforms to the teen stereotype. This was used on Suckerpunch to effectively make the character seem vulnerable which is why we chose to replicate the technique.

The fact you couldn’t hear the mum over the phone helped to strengthen the typical image of a mum ‘helping behind the scenes’ so to speak.

The antagonist being portrayed as the older man had a few close ups and mid shots but no long shots. This makes him fill the frame which is used to convey a slightly scary air to him and contrast his framing to the teen to make the teen look even more isolated. The desk he was at had lots of props like hammers, screwdrivers, and chains on it to help portray his masculinity and dominance in the clip. Also, older men are more commonly associated with tools like these which helped the audience to understand he was older than the teen. Texas chainsaw massacre works in the same way of putting males with typically male objects like tools to reinforce their dominance.

Overall, I think our media product can be used to reinforce most ideologies about age and gender because of the roles we allocated to each character. Males are typically dominant as shown by the antagonist and females are typically shown to be worrying about their children, as was shown by the teen on the phone to his mum. However, the one place gender scripts do get challenged by our film is the fact that a male is the victim not a female. On the other hand, this still reinforces age scripts because the male victim is only a teen, and the antagonist is an older male. No other types of social groups were bought up in this production.

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

When a film is made, in order to secure a distribution deal, the production company need to offer a percentage of the box office takings or DVD sales etc. Once a distribution deal is secured, the distributors invest in different marketing techniques such as posters, billboards, TV spots and so on. In order to decide how much to spend on advertising, distribute it to art-house cinemas or big multiplexes, and whether to go for a wide or platform release, the distributor must clarify the target audience for the film. This tends to be easier when working with American production companies as they center their film around the chosen target audience, as opposed to British producers who just make the film with no regards to target audience. Once all this is done, the distributor will print copies of the film and send it to cinemas. The difficulty and expense of distributing the actual copy of the film can vary depending on whether it was a digital film or filmed on 35mm film stock. Another factor that has to be considered when distributing the film is where to send it. Art-house audiences are suited to low budget indie films, whereas the ultra-high budget films and tentpoles are sent out to multiplexes such as Odeon.

Our media production would most likely be sent out to an art-house because it uses a very low budget which is typical to an art-house audience. Also we incorporated a focus features title at the beginning which is a production and distribution company rolled into one, and is the art-house films division for universal pictures. This further reinforces the art-house route as focus features is not one of the big six, (20^th century fox, Columbia pictures, Universal, Paramount, Warner bros, or Walt Disney). Instead it is a subsidiary of universal specifically dedicated to the art-house side of cinema.

Our film would not target a niche audience as it is a popular horror/thriller genre which attracts a lot of people however, it would not attract a mass audience either, and due to the low budget and probable lack of advertising to compete with big Hollywood titles, our film would be a platform release because even though it is a digital production which makes it easier to send out to multiple cinemas at once, it lacks status due to no big names being involved (actors, directors, production company etc). This means it is not a mainstream film as it will most likely be shown in an art-house and would have a smaller target audience due to lack of status, but bigger than most art-house films because of the horror/thriller genre which attracts a wide demographic of people.

4&5. Who would be the audience for your film? How did you attract/adress your audience?

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of making your film opening?

Using a blog to plan our film opening was really helpful as it allowed our group to work collaboratively. The comments section under each post allowed us to suggest improvements to each other’s work and let our teacher give feedback into how we were doing and what needed to be done. Also the blog allowed us to embed YouTube videos which meant we could easily access videos to watch for our secondary research, as well as the ability to post photos on there to show our storyboards and screenshots. The blog also helped us work together through embedding other media such as SlideRocket and Prezi. Embedding these meant that we could put our work together and present it as a group on the blog. Finally, Jamie’s administrative powers meant that he could edit or remove my posts in case they needed tweaking or if he felt he could add something to them, he could.

We filmed our work using a Sony NX5E. The only extra equipment we used was a tripod, which was more practical than transporting the other pieces of equipment that were available to us to our filming location as it was a long walk and the crane and track could only be moved by car which we didn’t have access to. However, the tripod had a very big extendable range (roughly 2m high) which meant we did not really need the crane. When thinking about framing the shot, we thought back to our secondary research in Suckerpunch so we used the gridlines on the digital preview screen of the camera to help us with the rule of thirds. We wanted the film to look dark so we thought about changing the colour balance but decided to edit that in post-production. For the pull focus shots we twisted a manual focus ring on the camera which allowed us to have more control over the focus and create a bigger depth of field. Zoom was could be controlled by a ring or two buttons. This allowed us to overcome a problem we had – the ring was impractical to use whilst holding the camcorder so we used the two buttons as it was simply more practical to press the buttons whilst moving the camera which meant the shot came out more steady. Another problem was that some of the handheld shots were a bit shaky so to solve this we kept the tripod attached to the camera for the steadicam shots so the shot would be smoother due to the extra weight and meant the character stayed in the frame. There was a shot that zoomed in to an eye through a keyhole (or in our case a crack in the wall) from Suckerpunch (Snyder, 2011) we planned to use in our own production so we filmed it from three different distances as zooming in proved to be too shaky. However, after reviewing the footage we were advised that editing this shot to the way we wanted was too complicated and would drain a lot of time, so we decided not to go ahead with it. One other problem was that the woods had a rough terrain which meant the tripod did not always sit level, so we ended up adjusting the legs a lot to get it right. Finally, we had to do a lot of takes of the shot where the protagonist dropped the iPod because our actor found it difficult to achieve the ‘stop and drop’ we wanted. Also it was hard to edit because we wanted a matched cut with then pen stab and the iPod drop. This meant we had to zoom in on the timeline and use the arrow keys to navigate frame-by-frame to find the right point to cut the clip at.

To edit the film opening, we used a mix of two programmes: Adobe Premiere Elements 9.0, and Adobe After Effects cs6. We used Premiere for the more basic editing techniques such as cutting down footage, sorting out what clips to use, and adding/editing soundtrack. First we imported all our footage from a memory stick using the ‘Get media’ option. Once this was done, we reviewed some of the shots by double clicking the shot frame to bring up a preview. The group then had to decide on what pieces of footage to use which was based on clips suitable to edit 3D titles on to, and key frames. On the whole we looked to include a variety of camera work, so once this was completed we dragged the shots onto the timeline and re-arranged them into order to form a rough outline for our film (animatic). We then cut the clips down to the right length using the ‘cut’ tool which simply split one clip up into two when we clicked the button. After doing this we realized the footage was somewhat shorter than we had anticipated so we put in some establishing shots to help fill the time, which was simple as the timeline let us drag and drop clips wherever we wanted because it automatically shuffled and rearranged clips for us when we added another or took one away. After that for the time being, we made basic titles and put them on the title shots to see how long we needed to make the clip before we edited on the real 3D titles. In order to do this we created a text box over one of the frames and typed in what we wanted it to say. Once we had all this, we drag and dropped some transition effects like earthquake on the clip.

For one of the title shots we planned we had to slow the clip down so we used the time stretch tool to lengthen the clip out in order for it to be on-screen long enough for the audience to read it. In the middle of the opening sequence we had planned to overlay two shots, so for this we used the cross dissolve feature and moved the slider to make sure that both clips were equally transparent. Next we needed to make the closing shot. We went for a similar shot to ‘The Ring’ which involved lots of fast cuts. To achieve this, we had the original clip on one layer of the timeline and then we cut clips down to about one or two frames and put them on the second video layer of the timeline. This meant a high cutting rate without having to cut gaps into the original footage.

We then imported the film to After Effects to put in the 3D titles. The title was typed in to a text box and then we set it to track a certain object in the shot to make it seem like part of the background. This was made easy through the use of anchor points and 3D camera tracker technology. Also, we had to add perspective to the titles to ensure they looked like they were in the background of the shot rather than overlayed.

To achieve the Suckerpunch like colour, we used hue saturation and colour grade to darken the film and matched the white balance to a dark brownish shade. We used the mask tool to add a black layer which made the edges of the screen dark. We had to then cut out the middle to make itvisible with a mask tool. For the mask shot, we feathered the edges of the shot to make it stand out. Once both the titles and the colour grading had been done, we rendered the clip and exported it back to Premiere to work on the sound.

For the audio, once we had imported the sound clips from Freesounds.org and Video Co-pilot scores CD, we dragged them onto the timeline. We had the main soundtrack that would be running throughout the film on the ‘Audio 1’ layer, and other sound fx we were going to use on ‘Audio 2’ which enabled the soundtrack to keep running and have sound effects overlaid at the same time. We used the cutting tool again to make sure the soundtrack was the right length.

To export our final piece we simply clicked the export button and selected MPEG so that the video could be used for video sites such as YouTube We had to make sure we matched the video specifications to the export specifications (1080px1920p with 25fps).

Compared to a real film production, our film was done on a very low budget which meant we spent a lot of time in post production trying to compensate for that and adding some 'glitz-factor'. However, many low budget films such as Monsters (Edwards, 2011), used the same technique of heavy editing to compensate for the low budget. Overall our film lacked both the complex editing software and expensive camera gear in contrast to a real production but we made up for that with mixing elements from our secondary research such as 3D titles from Zombieland (Fleischer, 2009) and colour grading from Suckerpunch (Snyder, 2011).

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in progression from it to the full product?

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