HANNAH ALFRED EVALUATION

1

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

Short films in particular have some very inventive and unconventional methods in film making compared to that of a feature length film.

I have thought about 5 categories in which I could analyse the ways in my film either uses or challenges forms and conventions of other films. These I have differentiated by colour to make it easier to read and navigate:

1. Narrative Organisation

2. Characterisation

3. Mise en scene

4. Use of genre conventions

5. Editing/ posproduction

Firstly ‘Narrative organisation’.

Short film’s length means that they often can only fully deal with a situation that surrounds only one or two main characters and they are often a slice of life because they only focus on one event or occurrence.

For instance with ‘Love Sick’ – one of the short films we did our research on:

In this example we are thrown into the middle of the man’s life, in fact, this short film starts with action right from the start. The whole story is set over the actual time of the film and so it’s but a few minutes of the man’s life. We don’t know what the character was doing before or will be doing after.

Similarly, my film first introduces the male character walking and we don’t know where he is going or where he has come from.  

We took great inspiration from the ending of ‘Love Sick’ like the fact that it is open but also closed in some respects this gives us as the audience some satisfaction but leaves us wondering.

Our film could be seen as having a closed ending because the two characters are left separated at the end and the male characters seemed to establish that he is not interested near the end.

However it could also be seen as open because the complexities of the storyline show that the pair often cross paths but take no notice of each other, so therefore it is likely that they might meet again and possibly develop their relationship from there. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Our narrative structure is chronological but it is broken up with flashbacks.

These flashbacks are essential in forming the concept behind our film, which is the fact that the two characters have met before. 
Other than that, the occurrences between the characters happen in a chronological order. [picture of their relationship start process end with subtitles]

The flashbacks are also used in ‘Apricot’ one of the short films I came across whilst doing my research. However here they are used to represent a flashback from her memory:

We have challenged the way flashbacks are normally used as conventionally they are used in a similar way to Apricot (as a memory) however we have used them in a way that makes our audience more knowledgeable than the characters about the fact that they have crossed paths before, creating suspense. Using flashbacks in this way, I believe, is more difficult and resulted in some of our audience not fully grasping their role in the film and getting confused as to whether they were flashbacks or flash forwards.

Both short films and full length films nearly always have a twist in their storyline. Although they may not always follow the simple narrative structure (introduction, rising action, climax, resolution) exactly, they nearly always have a climax or twist.

So we conformed to that narrative organisation and have our introduction of the characters meeting, the rising action of them beginning to get along, the climax of them getting along the falling action or the twist as it turns out the boy comes back only to get his phone.

Secondly ‘Characterisation’

In terms of representation our film dealt with a lot of different social groups:
Ethnicity: Our main character was afro Caribbean and we chose to represent him in a modern way as an accepted member of society - rather than going down the path of using his culture difference as the main issue in our film. We wanted to show that black and white people can live together in Britain today without their being any reference or attention drawn to their differences. The male character is quite passive at the start but that is a reflection of his character and not because we are trying to say his entire culture is that way. A scene in the film that draws on his origins is when the female character says ' where do you live' and when he replies where he lives in England she then says 'no where are you from originally'. In asking this we can presume that she assumes that due to his ethnicity and accent that he was obviously not from England. Perhaps this then represents young British teenagers are quite naive to the fact that once someone is a British citizen they are British despite their colour. Nevertheless when he replies which Caribbean island he is from she reacts positively so the question could be seen as innocently being curious.
Teenagers: British teenagers in general have also been represented here is a modern way which is reflected in their costumes as the clothes we told them to wear are quite normal everyday clothes for this time and so they don't fall into any stereotypes which might make the audience form preconceived views of them. The way the boy and girl interact shows a more forward concept in the way that in the past, opposite sex teenagers were perhaps more timid towards eachother, as the male character demonstrates. But in our film the female character has been represented in a very self-assured, go-ahead, confident way which is a modern representation of femininity. Then again in the film the female character typically falls for the male character and in doing so we have made her conform to some of the stereotypical characteristics of the female sex.
Class: There's also a representation of the working class in both the characters. We see them riding the train which is public transport which again could be a reflection of the amount of money they have.They also come across as rather open minded and sociable people as we see them grow their relationship quite easily from stranger status.

Short films typically only follow one or two characters in the plot; this is because of the length of short films and the nature of them, so I have taken this on board and followed only two characters in my film.

The costume and makeup of our characters is in no way traditional. Our film has more of a modern approach to masculinity and femininity like most modern short films do, reflecting on the changing attitudes towards the subject.
We chose a black actor to represent our male character also to represent the modern ethnic equality because we feel it gives the film a more diverse and urban edge, especially as he is involved in a romance when our white leading lady. 


The characters are opposite in a lot of ways and we chose them in particular for this reason as it creates an interesting atypical relationship.

It is similar in that way to ‘Love recipe’ where the characters differences contrast each other:

We thought about exactly who are characters were and how they behave. We came up with one character which was quite annoying and loud and sure of her and one that was quite submissive and passive, so not only did they contrast in demographics but also in personality.

Creating these differences allowed our film to have a deeper meaning like demonstrated in ‘Love recipe’.

Short films usually involve a story or part of a particular characters life. This means that point of view shots often occur because the best way to express to the audience how someone is feeling is to show it from their point of view. As we have two main characters, we have examples of POV shots from both of their prospective. In the first frame a POV was used to invite the audience to share how annoying the female character is being as she chews. The second frame shows a POV shot simply used so the audience can see what the female character is looking at.

Thirdly ‘Mise en scene’

Our short film has used a recognisable location and everyday props because after doing research we realised that a lot of short films create realism this way like short film ‘Winter’:

‘Winter’ seems to have not altered the natural background that the characters are portrayed in which makes the background a common British setting. Winter uses this simple setting because changing the surroundings isn't normally necessary in short films due to their length nor would it suit or be justifiable for the narrative. So we have done the same in our film as one of the main ideas behind our film is that the situation could apply to any of audience and could possibly have happened to them before. Which is why we chose a train station/train as most of them have been on some kind of public transport before, creating that sense of realism.

It seems a lot of short films use realistic settings like all of these:

Short films normally do not have a very big budget at all, probably a reflection on the fact that they a given/accumulate small funding, because, as a whole, the short film industry does not generate much money. This reflects on the popularity of realism in shorts.

Fourthly ‘Use of genre conventions’

 According to this article 'here' - “One of the conventions of romantic comedy films is the contrived encounter of two potential romantic partners in unusual or comic circumstances, which film critics such as Roger Ebert or the Associated Press' Christy Lemire have called a "meet-cute" situation. During a "meet-cute", scriptwriters often create a humorous sense of awkwardness between the two potential partners by depicting an initial clash of personalities or beliefs, an embarrassing situation, or by introducing a comical misunderstanding or mistaken identity situation.”

This is exactly what we did for the plot of our film because it is a rom-com. We have tried to establish a ‘meet cute’ by showing the unusual circumstance being that the male character misses his train. When they do eventually meet there is a clash of personalities as the female character really annoys the male character by doing things like talking on the phone loudly and chewing her crisps in his ear etc. This creates that sense of a comical situation for the audience, but then also typical to romantic comedy’s that awkwardness soon changes into the characters relationship growing so they appear to like one another. We thought it was important to follow the conventions of the plot of our film because we feel it is this that is key to defining the genre of a film.


"The basic plot of a romantic comedy is that two people, usually a man and a woman, meet and then part ways due to an argument or other contrived obstacles. Initially, these two people do not become romantically involved, because they believe that they do not like each other, because one of them already has a partner, or social pressures. However, the screenwriters leave obvious clues that suggest that the characters are in fact attracted to each other, or that they would be a good love match"
Again this is from the website mentioned above which describes conventions on rom-coms. Our film has exactly that a man and a woman who meet and then part ways, however this is at the end of the film rather than during and that it what gives our film that edge - by not following that particular convention. Again though we did follow making the two refrained from liking each other at the start as the male finds the female annoying, but then we have left obvious clues that they begin to like each other (like the close-ups of them smiling). The fact that our characters leave each other at the end is a reflection on the way that our short film twisted some of the rules of feature length genre conventions. 


"Then, after one of the two makes some spectacular effort to find the other person and declare their love, (this is sometimes called the grand gesture), or due to an astonishing coincidental encounter, the two meet again. Then, perhaps with some comic friction or awkwardness, they declare their love for each other and the film ends happily." Again we have half a grand gesture at the end when the boy is in slow motion like he's coming back for the girl, but unfortunately for her he is not, which again creates the "comic friction" and our audience is left sad and shocked rather than the happy ending.


Another convention of rom-coms is the use of humour. Obviously we had to create subtle humour in our film, but we didn’t want to overpower the story with loads of bold attempts at jokes.

So we used things like facial expressions, annoyances and misunderstandings:

The use of sound is very important in capturing the film’s genre. The music for rom-coms tend to differ according to whether it is the comedic part of the film or the romantic part. In our film however we have used music more as a way of creating a light upbeat feel to the parts of the film that have no dialogue.

To get our music for our film we had to ensure that it was royalty free so that we weren't breaking any copyright laws. After much searching we found a couple of sites that offered free royalty free music - 'Jamendo' and 'Incompetech'. However Jamendo's music mostly had lyrics, and our research had actually shown that few short-films used songs with lyrics and rather instrumentals. But we found we found a couple of songs which fitted our film perfectly on Incompetech:

 We wanted to establish a buoyant atmosphere right from the beginning and kept it alive as the song continues later on. This song we chose comprised of guitars and drums which are instruments that can’t help but make a more upbeat tone. Its appropriately called 'Brightly Fancy' and you can listen to it HERE.

We also had a song for the romantic scene at the end of our film. The song is an instrumental with a piano, which creates that soft, tender, loving feel between the two characters. Its appropriately called 'There is Romance' and you can listen to it HERE

Humour is then brought back into the film when that song harshly comes to an end with a record screech. As the romance stops the music stops as it is parallel music.

The dialogue also uses conventions as at the end the male character creates humour by coming back and saying ‘forgot my phone’ when the female character thought he was coming back for her. Also there is a rather starry-eyed moment created when the characters say ‘it was really nice meeting you’. This indicates a possible romantic relationship between the pair which is exaggerated by the use of close up’s which is also a convention of romance films as they exaggerate emotions.

Fifthly ‘Editing/ postproduction’

As short films are indeed short, a lot of thought needs to go into the editing of the sequences so that the whole story can be told. Therefore this means that cuts and cross-dissolves are necessary to move the story on and create space for more interesting and important shots.

Again, short film ‘Love sick’ has also done this, used cuts to show a small progression and cross-dissolves to show a significant amount of time passing.

I also had to incorporated cross-dissolves to show time passing by in my film so that we get the idea but don’t have to sit through all of her on the phone.

And the use of cuts meant that I can still maintain continuity but not show every frame:

We did follow the way that a short film like Apricot attempted to aid the illusion of a flashback by making them very light and bright and changing the colours of the shots in post-production:

For us to create the illusion of our flashbacks we unsaturated the colours to make it seem less bright and sort of faded (like the past is) and added a glow which gave the flashbacks a hazy blurry feel, differentiating it from the present footage.

THE ORIGINAL

THE EDITED CLIP

In one of the films I researched ‘leave me’ I picked up on the use of fades:

 They used fade to black which I felt was appropriate for that particular film as there was a death and black has connotations with death. However we wanted to use fade in a different way, we wanted to almost use them to separate reality and something that was in the past. So we also used a fade, but instead a fade to white – on either side of our flashbacks. We felt it really helped to isolate the flashbacks and separate them from the film:

Earlier in the course we looked into how we would perhaps distribute our film and created a prezi that looked at the various ways we could. I will talk about how we would distribute our film in further detail in question 3:

Now I will talk about how my ancillary tasks used, developed or challenged their forms and conventions

POSTER

After doing my research into posters like ‘Shame’ and ‘Juno’ I didn’t find much differences between the two of them even though one was a British film and one was an American film.

I also briefly looked at these three short film posters:

Similarities to my poster:

• They all contain an image that it similar to how they are in the films (I presume) somewhere on the poster - poster 1&3 contain what looks like actual screen-grabs from their films and poster 2, I can imagine, reflects how she portrayed in the film.
• The main images are of the main characters in the film and they are very prominent. 

And at these three feature length British film posters:

I did not see any particular trend of differences between a short film poster and that of a feature length film but I did see similarities.

Some of the conventions I followed were the use of a large title in order to make sure the name of the film can be seen and recognised:

The use of reviews from appropriate sources and awards they have achieved in order for the target audience of the poster to be able to establish that it is a film worth seeing:

An image that incorporates the main characters and gives a hint to the tone and events of the film:

REVIEW

It was essential that I found the most appropriate magazine to write about reviewing my film. After much searching I decided that Little White Lies was the best because film review magazine to write for because it was a small British magazine just like my film. Its writing style was very original and modern and it was one of the only magazines that reviewed short films.

After my research into some of conventions of Little White Lies film review articles I noticed some conventions of the layout which I was told by my teacher from here::

So I did the same with mine:

2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our target audience:

15-25 year olds

Both sexes but perhaps slightly more females

Did I successfully manage to target and appeal to my target audience?

I targeted my audience to get my feedback through Face-book because it is an interactive social networking site commonly associated with the younger generation, which means I could gather a lot of feedback easily. I am 18 years old and our target audience is between 15 and 25 years old. This means that most of my 1,300 friends on Face book should be within my target audience. So most of the feedback I got was from my target audience and therefore I did successfully target them.

I appealed to my target audience by having the characters be a similar age as them. By having the location be a recognisable location for young people as they perhaps don’t drive yet (because they aren’t old enough or can’t afford it) so they catch the train. Trains being a form of public transport, most people should have been on one before and so the surroundings are identifiable. The plot/concept surrounds something that 7/10 people I asked from my target audience said they had thought about before. That age is also very much associated with strange romances and ‘young love’ so it’s a topic they could relate to. It also has humour in it which mitigates the romance factor but this genre is known for appealing to our majority female audience.

And with 55 ‘likes’ on Facebook from my target audience I would say I successfully targeted and appealed to my target audience.

This is one of the more detailed Face book messages that I analysed earlier in my blog post about audience feedback on the film:

This message was from a female aged 19 and so she is therefore our ideal target audience and her message seems to sum up pretty much most of the concerns that were also brought to light by other people who viewed the film on Face-book.

I have gone through and analysed her response to our film further and said what I have learnt and how I would address the problems she has brought to light and talked about what went well that she has noticed. What her feedback has thought me is highlighted in Yellow.

On a whole:

In hindsight –

We would have probably left another day of filming after most of the editing because a lot of the problems with the film came from us having to settle with certain shots postproduction because we didn’t have a backup filming day.

Enjoyment –

By the amount of positive comments we got from people in our target audience via social networking site Face-book – I would say that they enjoyed it. The audience even found both the romance and the humour in the film.  The music seemed to come up a lot as being good and well timed.

Characters –

the feedback about the characters was that the acting was actually quite impressive. A few spectators even said that they found them quite relatable especially in that situation.

Did they understand it –

There were some issues with some of the audience understanding the flashback scenes due to perhaps there not being enough of them, or clear enough indicators that they were indeed flashbacks.

Other than that however they did seem to understand what was going on in terms of the fact that they weren’t really hitting it off at first but then they get along and the girl gets a bit of a wrong impression.

The aims we had before setting out to create this film for our target audience:

• For people to understand the concept behind our film – that the two characters live their lives seeing each other so many times but only think they met once.
• For people to like and grasp the fact that the situation could happen to anyone
• For people to find the humour in our romantic comedy

All of these aims I feel were achieved on the whole.

POSTER

The target audience for our poster would be the same as that for our film.

We would try and display it in youth occupied locations (student campuses) and websites (social networking sites)

Before deciding on which poster we felt would appeal to our target audience best we made these three posters:

General Audience feedback on them was:

1. The first one didn't really look like a poster and suggested too much of a relationship

2. This one was too complicated and picture-like for a film poster

3 The third was the most favourable by our audience but it needed some tweaking.

.

We learnt that all three posters needed some work to be done but we were only to develop one which we felt was the most suitable and professional, so we decided to go with poster 3.

After deciding on poster 3 due to the comments we had to decide what title positioning worked best on the poster and so did a poll on our target audience to decide which they liked best and here it is:

So again we took the audience feedback on board and went with version 1 where the titling was at the bottom and the reviews at the top.

We took everything on board and made and uploaded our final poster on Face book and there were some good comments but they were also some negatives ones:

From this I have now learnt that posters aren't going to suit the tastes of all of my target audience. However as long as I plan, get their feedback throughout and have justified reasons for my decisions, my poster will be appealing to most of my target audience. Then again I do feel that if my photo was more bright and lively it would have better suited my genre. 

REVIEW

Little White Lies target audience:

25-35 year olds

Minority 18-25 year olds

Students and young professionals

Majority males

32 year old Maylo
"A good, well-written review which puts the film 'crossing paths' in today's context. It could do with some 'fleshing out' in descriptive terms, to give a more overall view of the whole scope of the film"

The fact that she complimented our review saying it was 'in todays context' is a particularly good compliment because of the fact that little white lies is quite a modern and 'hip' magazine. Therefore we have sucessfully writen in a tone which is both formal and informal like we were trying to. I agree with her criticism that the review could do with some more detail on the actual film. However I think this has occurred because it is a short film which means that the whole film could be described in few words so I didn't want to give too much away which is why I found myself trying to limit what I said in regards to the plot. 

23 year old Lucy
"This review makes me want to see the film 'crossing paths'. It gives enough information to tantalise the reader and makes me wonder what the twist might be. My only criticism might be the length of some of the sentences, made me a little confused."

In this case the review seems to have been successful because it has done its job and made her want to see the film in particular because of the way we made the 'twist' seem so interesting through our particular wording. I agree that some of the sentences are quite long and confusing but in my defence the Little white lies reviews oftend have complex sophisticated sentences.

25 year old Olivia 

"This review gives a very good insight into what the film is about and what to expect in the film. The language used was easy to read and light hearted which was easy to relate to"

This feedback was particularly positive and she did relate to it which is really good because she is in the target audience so we wrote mature enough for her but also with a young modern register as well. She mentioned that it was lighthearted which I am particularly pleased to hear because Little white lies reviews are quite lighthearted.

29 year old Joseph

He has noticed something that I tried really hard to do - not give any spoilers but still give a sense of what the film was about. This is a convention of little white lies as they never give away any spoilers but still make it interesting and in doing this makes readers want to see the film. The reason I probably slipped into using the pronoun we is because in the little white lies reviews they sometimes involve the readers by using personal pronouns like 'we'. We did try to give different prospectives of the characters which is why we said it that he lives up to 'his' full potential but on a wider-scale not so much.

4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Below is a Prezi I made to answer question 4 in a simple visual way. Watch following the path I've made or simply select the technology you'd like to read about.