Evaluation Question 1

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

We chose Horror as the genre for our film,  we did a lot of research in to what the conventions of a horror similar to ours was by looking at films such as 'Sleepy Hollow' and 'Paranormal Activity'. I preferred the wide open spaces and use of forests in 'Sleepy Hollow' so we incorporated that in to our film shown by the screenshot below.

We wanted the suspense and release convention shown in 'Paranormal Activity' to be a key convention in our film. An example of this is the screenshot below where the 2 protagonists stumble across the antagonist in the form of a corpse. 

We never thought of trying to challenge any conventions of the horror genre apart from shooting in daylight, as most often horror movies are at night or in the dark, which was mostly due to technicalities.

These are some screen shots that may show some of the conventions we chose to use in our film.

Evaluation Question 2

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

A media institution that might distribute my final project is Paramount Pictures . I chose this institution as our film is similar to both "Sleepy Hollow" (1999) and "Paranormal Acitivity" (2009) which Paramount Pictures released.

The reason why I feel Paramount would distribute our media product is because our film contains a lot of the same concepts that Paramount's Horror releases do such younger protagonists, suspense and pschological horror instead of gore. This is contrasted by the slightly whimsical comedic feeling present in both our film and "Sleepy Hollow".

Our film isn't aimed at the audience suited to independant films as it is quite a mainstream film aimed at a general Horror fan audience. We think that Paramount would distribute our film because they focus on distibuting more mainstream films such as "Paranormal Activity".

Evaluation Question 3

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

This is a commentary over a slideshow of screenshots and charts to explain about our target audiences and social groups.

Evaluation Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

This is a commentary over a slideshow of screenshots and charts to explain about our target audiences and social groups.

Evaluation Question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

This commentary over a slideshow of screenshots and charts also explains about how we attracted our target audiences.

Evaluation Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

This is a Commentary on our film describing how we have improved with our use of technology since our preliminary task. 

Evaluation Question 7

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

This Commentary on our film is also describing how we have improved from our preliminary task to our full product. 

Diary of Editing (Day 1)

Wednesday, 2 February 2011:

Today we started deciding where all our clips were going to go, which ones we were going to use and started playing around with all the different transitions to see what each one looked like.

Diary of Editing (Day 2)

Thursday, 3 February 2011:

Today we started inserting transitions between our clips and adding effects to some scenes. We edited about 3 scenes and decided we wanted the titles to be just in the park scenes. We added a fade in to the initial tracking shot and an additive dissolve transition between the first two scenes.

Diary of Editing (Day 3)

Friday, 4 February 2011: 

Today we added 4 more scenes and added the transitions between them, we decided to slow down the chain rattling scene to 50% speed to make it seem more eerie. After the chain scene there is a cut to black to the next scene of the two actors talking. Using logic pro 9, I amplified the sound of the gate to produce more top end frequencies to make It squeal more as it closed. We tried putting the tower scene through different effects such as desaturation, gamma and additive effects but we didn’t like the look of any of them. At the end of the gate closing the video cuts straight to the tower with a sound bridge from the gate closing.

Diary of Editing (Day 4)

Monday, 7 February 2011:

We spent our time looking at what we could do to make sure our audience know for sure that our title sequence was for a suspense horror. We did this by editing the first walking scene to produce a jump back in time with tv static playing at the points it jumps. The second thing we did was to reverse the clip of the roundabout slowing down to make it look like it starts up on its own, then we sped it up to 250% to make it seem supernaturally fast.

Diary of Editing (Day 5)

Tuesday, 8 February 2011: 

Today we focussed on cutting down scenes of the actors walking because they were far too long. We did this by cutting chunks of film out and putting luminance maps in between to make the clips flow together. We did this to both walking scenes.

Diary of Editing (Day 6)

Thursday, 10 February 2011:

We finished all the transitions up until the last scene today as they were all straight forward   cross dissolves. After that we reversed the clip of me walking backwards and sitting down to make it look like I’m being pulled up by an unseen force.

Diary of Editing (Day 7)

Friday, 11 February 2011:

Today I worked a lot on all the original sound caught by the video camera such as the dialogue. I cut out parts that we didn’t need, used the fading tool and the pen to alter the volume and add fades. Equalized the sound to make sure there were no annoying pops or noise.

Diary of Editing (Day 8)

Monday, 14 February 2011:

I used Logic Pro 9 today, whilst James was testing different titles using Livetype, to find samples of background music/ambience. I chose 5 or 6 to show to James which he then picked 4 from. We then chose some ambient wind noises and short stings of music and sent them, as well as the 4 chosen samples, to Final Cut Pro via bluetooth.

Diary of Editing (Day 9)

Tuesday, 15 February 2011:

We spent today deciding where all the sound fitted in and I then went about timing the music and cutting it to size. I then added fades and volume control to make sure it fitted perfectly with the film.

Diary of Editing (Day 10)

Wednesday, 16 February 2011:

I carried on from Tuesday by finalising all the music and ambience of the whole film whilst James decided where to put the titles. I ran through the film with my monitoring headphones to make sure all the volume of the film was equalised. After that, we started to add in the titles that James had chosen. Most titles we had used software called Livetype to create and others we used the simplistic titles in Final Cut Pro.

Diary of Editing (Day 11)

Thursday, 17 February 2011:

Today we discovered that our Livetype files for our titles had been deleted from the computer meaning that they would not show up in Final Cut Pro. This meant that we had to create new titles with the Final Cut software as we did not have enough time to recreate the livetype titles. Nevertheless we created all the titles and added them in. After that we rendered the whole film and watched it a few times over to look for mistakes.

First reactions to our finished production

When we finished our film and watched it for the first time in fullscreen, I was amazed. It sounds strange but even though we spent at least 2 weeks editing it and watching it bit by bit we never got a sense of what the finished product would be like. On the second full viewing I noticed a small filming mistake at the start but it couldn't be edited out so we had to leave it.

Overall, I think it flows very well from scene to scene and even though we had to make it longer than it should be for suspense reasons, It was well worth it for the tension it helps build.

One thing I would have liked to change is the chain rattling scene. I would have gone back and filmed a better scene with swings swinging by themselves to replace the chain scene. Apart from this, I am proud of this film.

Diary of Filming (Day 1)

Tuesday, 25th January 2011:

Me and James Ward started filming today along with Josh Alport (Actor) at Audley End. We decided to shoot here as it captured the intensity of the deserted atmosphere we wanted in our film. This was hard to achieve though, as many dog walkers use this area around the time that we started filming. Nonetheless, as time passed, we found bigger windows of opportunity in between disturbances. We had various problems such as steadying the dolly in tracking shots and needing all 3 members of our group to be in the same scene. We overcame these problems fairly easily.

Josh Alport was a good choice for an Actor as he was punctual and enthusiastic albeit a little overdramatic in a couple of scenes.
In our audience research stage we found that the majority would have liked the film to be shot at night but as this caused too many lighting problems we decided to go against the audience. We decided to shoot at dusk as it provides enough lighting to see clearly but also provides a sinister ambience.

Towards the end of our filming we had to make a drastic decision as to where the characters would find the corpse. This is because we realised we were not allowed in to the area we originally planned to shoot the scene, But also as we stumbled across a tree stump in the middle of a clearing that we thought would be perfect for the scene!

With half of our filming finished we decided to stop there as it was becoming dark and started to rain. We also decided to do our last part of filming later that week.

Here are some pictures of the location and of us filming.

Diary of Filming (Day 2)

Thursday, 27 January 2011:

Me and James decided to film the second half of our film today as the weather was perfect and the destination was sure to be deserted at that time. We set off to the park with our camera and a spool of "invisible" fishing line with the intention of shooting some ghostly scenes. We were extremely disappointed to find that the fishing line showed up perfectly on camera when we made the swings "move on their own".

We decided to go with plan B.
We proceeded to film equipment around the park moving and slowing down such as spinning the roundabout and filming it until it stopped or starting the rides rocking and filming them coming to a halt. We decided to then, when editing began, reverse these clips to make it seem as if the rides started up by themselves.

After a fairly short filming session we decided we had enough footage, in which we could add titles, to use in-between our "story telling" scenes.

Here is a picture of me setting up the fishing line at the park.

Locations we planned to use

Research and planning

To research what I wanted from my film I looked at different opening sequences on youtube and Art of the Title. These included the videos from a previous post as well as 'Paranormal Activity' and 'The Blair witch project' from which I strongly want to use concepts from.

I was inspired by http://www.artofthetitle.com/2008/04/14/six-feet-under/.
The use of cutting between a fixed idea (the corpse) and different close ups and long shots ranging from a flower wilting through use of time lapse and a long shot of a field with a single centred tree. All these shots are interlaced with titles and non diegetic sound. It builds excitement about what is to come through use of lighting effects and video effects such as reversing and grey tone. All of these are effects I would like to contribute towards my film.

Audience Research

Another way we researched our film was by asking 20 people questions about what they would like to see in our film.

These are the graphs we made to show the audiences views.