Evaluation

For the final part of my opening clip, i am going to simply answer some questions as a conclusion to the whole peice.

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

In our opening sequence we wanted to establish characterisation, setting, genre, narrative as well as vistual style and even ideology. In our opening clip to establish the setting, we start off opening the door to the room where she is being held, it doesn'f focus on the the room, but in the background all you can see is furniture covered by sheets, which automatically gives you the sense of the house being abbandoned. To establish the genre of our opening clip, the way we see amy in the clip helps that, seeing her tied up and covered in blood shows that it obviously a horror genre or torture porn. There isnt a lot of charactisation in our opening clip, as she barely talks, we dont know where she is from, who she is etc, but there is a great deal of ideology going on in our first clip, as Amy looks vunerable and innocent, and she appears to have been attacked and abused, so obviously we tend to take her side.

This is a screen grap from a part in Hostel - as you can see it looks very similar to a shot in our own media clip just before Amy grabs the knife, we liked this clip becuase it spooked me as the audience and i felt it added to the drama of the situation and i wanted the audience of our media clip to feel that.

This is a screen grab from Hostel part ll - As you can see it is not exactly similar to the shot in our clip where amy is screaming for help at the front door, but they are very a like, while she is screaming for help at a gated door, Amy was begging to be freed at the front door, even though they are a lot a like it is obvious that they are shot at different angles, so that is what makes ours different to Hostel.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our opening clip, doesn't really represent any particular social group. Amy just represents an average girl in her late teens, but obviously we do not know why she has been put here. Amy is just an average girl, she's pretty with and up to date hair cut so she obviously takes care of herself. She was put in a white dress because the white helps with the innocent vunrable apperance that we wanted to create. This helps with our target audience, as she is an average girl in her late teens, and that is who is included in our target audience.

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

We have made a very very low budget independant British film. It is very far from a Hollywood Blockbuster. A media idustry that may distribute our media clip would be Film4. Film4 is a free digital channel that shows only films. It ranges from hollywood big screen blockbusters to low budget independant low budget films that they have sponsered including, SlumDog Millionaire, The Lovely Bones, Happy Go Lucky And Nowhere Boy. So we would have an institution like Film4 to produce and screen our low budget independant film.

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience for our media clip is someone in there late teens and above this is because we rated our film as an '18' due to the swearing and violent nature of the film. It is for any gender, its not to be specifically directed at just men or just women, anyone can watch it. You don't have to be of a certain subculture like 'emo', 'goth', 'chav', 'indie kid' or anything else to watch it, its not aimed at anyone in particular, but a strong stomach may be needed. The genre as i have said before is 'Toture Porn' so this type of genre probally has a very selective audience as it may not be to everyones taste and preference.

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

To get feedback about our opening clip we decided to go round and ask about 20 of our friends in and out of school and family members to see what they thought to our opening clip. As a result of that i have a couple graphs and charts that will show evidence of their answers. I also have the responses that friends and family posted on our opening clip from a social networking sight.

One question i asked was 'What would you rate the film?' They had a choice of: Horrible, Alright, OK, Good, Amazing or Outstanding. And much to our satisfaction the results from this question were very very pleasing. 9 of the 20 we asked rated it as 'Amazing' while the remaining 11 thought it was 'Outstanding' that means we did a great job with the film, we as editors producers directors etc know that it wasn't perfect, but as long as the audience is pleased thats all that counts.

Another question we asked was 'Would you carry on watching if there was the rest of the film?' They had a choice of: 'Noway', 'Maybe', 'I guess so', 'Yes Please' or 'Give me more'. One person voted for 'I guess so' which is understandable as our clip is not to everyones cup of tea, but 7 went for 'yes please' while the remaning 12 of the 20 said 'give me more'. This once again is what every film maker wants to hear. It is also very encouraging to hear this and get this kind of responce, i just wish we could of carried it on.

The final peice of audience responce is the feeback comments left on the social networking sight, as i explained in an earlier post, these are just the type of reactions and comments we set out to get when we were producing andediting the clip.


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

What i have learnt about technologies during the process of constructing our media product, is there is a lot more to it than there looks. It is all very intreaging as well looking at how it works and what amazing and creative things you can create, specially with editing, and how you can make almost anything flow together and for example merging 2 images together gives the idea and thought that time has passed, just simply by merging you can create a great effect. I also learnt that a lot comes into just looking for the right location, thinking if the lighting is right there, how the lay out, where would we get the shots we needed etc. We have also watched and researched the actor and director Eli Roth, talking about his past films that he has directed and sort of commentaries that he has created about the films for example why he chose certain locations etc.

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

Looking back and watching our preliminary task - it seems so basic to what we created this time round and what we have learnt now. I think its great how we had the chance to do the preliminary first to get a feel for story boarding, choosing locations and actors/actresses, choosing certain angles we woud like the scenes shot at and the dialouge. We learnt that we can't also film everything the way we want it. In the preliminary task we used simple angles and shot and simply let it flow one after the other, not having to do a lot of editing at all. But when it came to the main task we thought about being a little more adventorous and experimental with the angles we would shoot scenes, and if it didnt work, we would try something else. It was also a lot more challenging when we tried to make it flow together and fit from one scene to the other, as we learnt while editing. We had to try things that were totally new to us when editing, we used grey scale and added text onto the clip, we also took a sound from one clip and added it to another clip in the scene, something that wasnt nessacery in the preliminary. So my knowledge has widely expanded from what i knew filming and editing our preliminary task to what i know about filming and editing.