Final film- The unpredictable

The Unpredictable film poster

Here is the final poster which we as a group put our ideas together and collaborated them to make our final poster. We felt that this poster was really good so we made a slight adjustment by adding a slogan from the other design poster.

The Unpredictable- Radio trailer

Critical Evaluation question 1- Matthew Gollick

Question 1: In what Ways does the media product, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product uses conventions of continuity through language and editing. Continuity editing is one way of continuity of post-production. The reason for continuity editing is to have a smooth cut between shots which makes it flow freely. However in some films just like ours we uses a large style of fast paced continuity just like at the beginning of our film where Brian is preparing for the day ahead. We used a fast paced edit once Brian has hit his head on the wall this shows something has changed to the character and fast paced cuts gives the sense of speed making it more intense. In comparison to the ending of our film we use UN rhythmic from slow to fast edit to capture the tensions in the upcoming moments before Brian is run over.

Throughout the filming process we had to take into account the continuity of our film so that it made sense and that it gave the audience a rhythm to the film as described above. Continuity is a big factor in terms of conventions of real media products as it ultimately makes the film or brakes the film. We noticed when editing our film that continuity was an issue in the morning scene when Brian is preparing for the day ahead. The continues shot didn't flow correctly so we had to make adjustments here and it turned out for the better as we captured tension at the beginning with the fast rhythmic cut and this really worked out for us. Also we had to consider the 180 degree rule which we used a lot in our film. At times we had to really take into account this rule when we was in production as it needed to be 100% accurate so that the film made sense in terms of character placement in the scene where Brian and Neil are sat at the table playing poker, as it could easily confuse the audience if this rule is broken as characters may appear placed different from one shot to the next. Another convention we had to consider was eye line matches and match on action which works really well throughout our film especially in the morning scene at the beginning of the play where we get a series of "Bangs" between each shot this helped draw in the audience and was something which naturally came to us when we filmed and edited our film to get this convention 100% accurate. 

We also during the post production stage of the film we had some sound effect which we planned to add later in our film. These really worked well in our film and really gave the effect which intended to do to the audience. Also whilst in the post production editing stage of our film we noticed sound at times from the background environment such as cars, public, wind and dogs these were all sounds which we found in the post production edit stage of our film. We used sound bridges and effects in final cut which helped the audio/ sound of the film run smoothly without the blowing of the wind this was a really useful filter effect which we used in post production editing. Also Final cut enabled us to alter sound levels this was key as we had music overlapping some aspects of the film and we still wanted the audio of the characters to standout above the non diagetic music. 

  

Our film works in nature of the supernatural thriller genre. Just like the genre states the supernatural aesthetic of the genre has the link to paranormal and horror as well as fiction fantasy which our fill has close hints to. The whole idea of the gift which Brian gains from hitting his head on the wall follows a paranormal and fiction narrative as it’s made up this would not really happen. We don’t subvert the expectations of our chosen genre we have only included the nature of the conventions of this genre.

Our film successfully provides pleasure to our audience. From the Richard dyers theory of entertainment I have pulled out the “Lack” which he refers to it as which makes the audience want to watch the film.  The lacks which this theory refers to are as follows tiredness, boredom, loneliness, poor, social and unaware. I feel that our film uses some aspects of this theory which provides the pleasure to the audience. First of all I feel our film engages the audience’s boredom lack through its Utopian solution of intensity throughout the film as the film flow a series of events that appear change from good too bad the instant story twister at the end of our film where Brian gets run over. I also feel the title name is always in the back of the audiences head as it states the unpredictable this is makes the audience think about the title and think why is everything predictable but the film states unpredictable then the sudden change in story sums it up at the end. This is a really big intense moment at the end of the film this Utopian solution of intensity is something we witness this engages the lack of boredom which the audience have. I also feel in connection with Richard Dyers theory of lack in terms of audience been entertained via money/ wealth. The Utopian solution which our film feeds to the audience is through the “gift” which leads to money and wealth which makes Brian richer. Our film successfully uses this lack to pleasure the audience, throughout the film Brian becomes wealthy as a result of the gift which he gains at the beginning of the film.  This makes the audience think about winning money and the audience will feel pleasure from this lack. Our film also covers aspects of the uses & gratifications theory which relates to the expectations of what we expect to get from watching that media text, which is the gratification. The kinds of gratifications which have been discovered cover four areas these are, Information which we would expect to find out details of the society today to satisfy our curiosity, this information comes from learning about society around the world and this helps the audience to learn about the things that happen in society allot of films capture this. Personal identity, is another gratification which inter prates the ways in which films use this gratification to make role models for example most action films like 007 for example use role models so the younger generation can be inspired to be come someone like him this gratification may change the way they dress or act to be more like their role model, also when the role model character succeeds it make us feel better ourselves. Another is Integration & social interaction, this gratification finds more detail into the character of the film, they become a friend to the audience which for example is used in more reality TV programs such as Big Brother which people may become drawn to a character throughout the show, this also happens in films for example a main character may change in a film which may effect the audience as if they have lost a friend. Watching a film helps the audience to sympathies with the character in the film which makes the audience feel like they have lost a friend. Finally, Entertainment, is also a gratification this simply highlights the main reason to why we watch a film and this highlights the more straight forward uses which we refer to as border  relaxing or even just to pass time. After researching the uses and gratification theory I feel our film uses only two of the four gratification theory's this being For information, As our film follows closely the events which unfold in Brian's life heavily impacted up society and gambling which turns out to be a positive impact until the end of the film where we see a drastic twist in the story line which shows how bad things can also happen from gambling, its as if our film is educating the audience on the world of today and the outcomes of such actions. The other use of gratification which our film "The Unpredictable" uses is Integration & social interaction, as our film follows a long story line we follow closely the day to day happenings of Brian's life and the audience gain a real incite to his life, the audience may feel drawn into the characters life and the drastic twist in the story line which makes the audience sympathies and feel as if Brian is a friend of their own. 

When I was researching into films from the same genre and similar genres I came across some great shots which I gave thought into how I could use similar shots in my film. The real media texts which I used were "psycho", "the gift" and "Alphas" these gave me a good set of ideas for producing my own film from these real media texts. The idea which I really liked the idea of was from the film psycho this was from the shower scene where the women is killed we see the camera cross zoom into the plug hole and out from the eye of the women where the camera zooms out from ( To help explain here is the shot bellow this paragraph which i am explaining from the film psycho). This shot was an aspect which I really liked so I decided to take it into our own film where we used it in the morning scene where Brian is getting ready to go to town. This consists of Brian turning on the tap where at this point the camera is looking down at the plug hole where the bubbles begin to flow down the camera zooms into the plug hole and out from an extreme close up of Brian’s eye once the camera reaches into a close up of Brian’s face he begins to dry his hair with the towel. We also used a similar shot in our title sequence where the camera zooms into the poker chip as it lands flat and out from Brian’s eye. This also works really well with the film. I really wanted to put this shot into our film as I feel it works really well and captures the effect of an inside perspective of Brian when the camera comes out from his eye we get a feeling for the film and character within. I also liked a shot which I decided to use in our film until we later decided not to. The reason we took this shot out is that we didn't feel it was relevant and large amounts of cuts had to be made to ensure we didn't run too far over the time requirement of 5 minutes.  This shot was from a short film text called “slippin” the shot which was used was showing a passage of time in a transition, when the young males were leaving the scene once they crossed to road a bus went by in front of the camera. I liked this shot however we later decided to cut it from our film as it didn't really need to be there as it already was clear a passage of time was taking place.During our title sequence i also took the inspiration form the film "se7en" the use of titles jumping and double glazing over each other gives it an effect which makes it feel abnormal this really worked well in our idea. 

                                                                      

Critical Evaluation question 2- Matthew Gollick

Question 2- How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?

Critical Evaluation Question 3- Matthew Gollick

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Ultimately, the audience are crucial to every media production. Without the audience to feedback it is almost impossible to know what the potential audience are expecting form you as a producer. The audiences “hype”, ratings or general feedback will help the film reach its best potential and to become successful. The audience is a really important aspect to making a film successful and we started to find our audience from the use of questionnaires where random members of the public gave us useful feedback up on our ideas, for a film story line and for other materials such as title sequences we thought the entire pre-production stages engaged with our audience as much as possible they through our researching stages they gave use some constructive feedback which made us tweak, remove and re gig our ideas to make them fit the audience’s needs.  So that is what we did after gathering the initial ideas.

The feedback below helped us find out what our audience age range was. 

From this questionnaire we found a female and male audience however mainly male audience where draw in by our ideas. We also found that the age of people that looked into our film was between 12-20. However from our audience feedback we did find that our ideas were maybe not as good as they possibly could be, so we decided to go back into our ideas here and re think them. We decided to come up with more ideas around our audience’s response including aspects like a twist. Then we created another set of ideas which we posted to our blog. 

We then put these ideas out to the same audience. The feedback was heavily one sided to using idea 3 which help us make a decision for what idea we was going to produce for our final outcome. 

We then went out and video recorded some of the public in our local environment of the college. However this wasn't as successful for us so we decided to put out a paper questionnaire which we sent out to the public via social networking sites.

We used all of the findings of both video and paper questionnaire to finalise a film idea. We did find that the feedback was helpful and the sound of idea 3 was really dominant when we looked back at our feedback. 

The next stage was to produce our film treatment which the group member Tom made for the film title “The unpredictable” this is where we began to try and sell our film to the audience the feedback was really positive and this motivated us to produce the final film idea. 

We used this treatment to go and produce our film.  This treatment highlighted the key aspects of effects which we planned to use in our film. Also gave a through detail description of the films storyline. I then came up with some ideas for a title sequence these ideas were placed on a questionnaire which I aimed at the same audience as before via social media Facebook.

From this audience feedback I found out that the first idea 1 was more liked by our audience so we decided to go ahead with this idea and continued with it from our research during pre-production and made it in the production stage.

Rough cut of film "The Unpredictable"

            Once we had produced the rough cut version of our film which we took into consideration the audience via their feedback and inputs to what they think we should add to our film and title sequence as a group we highlighted the feedback from the title sequence idea questionnaire and we found that the overall idea worked well in the eye of the audience they really like the idea of using close ups of Brain’s face as it gives the impression of abnormal and paranormal activity which helps sets the mood for the film, the audience will like the cross zoom editing effects which the idea I gathered from my research into real media texts as it is often used in supernatural thrillers, this was something which the audience really liked. However we also found that the audience wanted to see more symbols being brought into the title sequence so I added other symbols such as chess board game this feedback helped me meet the needs of the audience and I feel it improved the title sequences for the better. The main film also included some great aspects which I found from my revised idea questionnaire, the positive feedback around the use of a dramatic twist at the end proved to be a great idea as the audience began to get really engaged with the film through the positive feedback which we received. One other satisfying aspect of the final film was the uses of a wide range of shots we used to keep the audience interested with the twisty storyline which we used for the final film. In terms of editing that we used knowing that our audience would like it was the use of rhythmic edits and sound effects. Rhythmic edits will help the audience to be drawn into the most tension build up parts of the film, our film starts off with high tension and slows down with longer shots and then becomes much faster in cuts towards the end when the tension rises once again. The locations which we used will also satisfy the audience as they often watch films in the supernatural genre and we have used the day to day locations of which Brian and his friends come into contact with this works well bearing in mind that a thriller is often based on characters and it follows them closely to see the insight of what they feel and see.

Final cut of film "The Unpredictable" 

            We had way too much footage for the 5 minute requirement. So this has expressed my editing skills to reduce the time from a 9 minute film down to just over 5 minutes. We produced a rough cut of our film to show this. We also felt that from the rough cut of our film we needed to put music over the none dialogue parts of the film to make it run a lot smoother in terms of sound. also once we had made the sufficient cuts to the film we made a feedback questionnaire for the audience to tell us what they thought of the final film.  We sent this out via social networking sites. The feedback was positive and we were pleased that we produced a film which is what most of the audience expected. As I was involved throughout the entirety of the pre-production till the very end of post-production it was exciting for me to see what people thought of our final film. I also wanted to find out what people would want us to change for next time.  I am pleased to see from the responses which we got highlighted that the audience really liked how I edited the film and title sequence. The majority of people have stated that they like how the film was shot. Also they feel that the film fits the intended film genre of the supernatural thriller as we intended to achieve this from the get goes. We as a group are really happy with the positive feedback. 

The questionnaires were sent out via our social media accounts to gain a much wider response from our audience.

Critical Evaluation question 4- Matthew Gollick

4. How did you use new media technologies in construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

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There was a wide range of technologies which I used throughout the whole of this project. I will start by identifying the most obvious ones, being Blogger which I used throughout this project to create and display my work including text, video, images and much more. Blogger helped me produce a wide range of post In terms of multimedia content with the ability to embed via HTML it was really simple to reference content which I found whether it be text, image or video Blogger enabled me to bring the content into my posts to help me reference my work around my findings from the research. Blogger also gave me the ability to change layouts; these gave me the chance to change the themes of which I have chosen and even add images to the layout such as I have with our production logo.  

I also used YouTube which enabled me to upload my videos of the test which I preformed and also for our group to upload our film and radio trailer. YouTube also enabled us to research and find resources for my research this was really useful especially the use of the embed tools which gave me the ability to directly put the video which I have used into my post on blogger software. YouTube also enabled us to communicate with the public and this enables us to put our film out to an audience which then gives us feedback.

Social media, Facebook and twitter enabled us to share our questionnaires with the audience.  This was really useful as by using such technology we had a much wider response from our audience.

I also used Final cut express. I used final cut express to produce the film and radio trailer this software enabled me to cut and edit the video from the footage which I captured previously on the cameras and recording devices. In this software I was able to add filters and text to the video as well as adding sound bridges and visual effects. Whilst using this software at first I had little knowledge and experience however now I feel really confident in the software as I edited the film and radio trailer products myself. I have continued to learn new features and build on my abilities in the software.

I used Photoshop for creating my very own idea for a poster design. I already had the experience of this software as I use it on a regular basis. However I did continue to build upon my skills by sing gradient and mapping tools which enabled me to capture the effect which I wanted from using a mask and a black and white gradient these features were really useful. I also used other tool such as cropping when making my poster design this enabled me to resize and edit the images until the image fitted my needs.

I also used slide share in my evaluation I decided to make a presentation for one of my answers to the question number 2. This software enabled me to upload my PowerPoint to the internet where I could then embed my PowerPoint into a post in blogger software. This was a new piece of technology which I have never used before and I instantly got the hand of using it and now I will be confident in using it in any future work which i produce. 

I finally used resource software domain Moodle which enabled me to collect resources from A2 Media studies. This was really useful as it allowed me to download work sheets such as the risk assessment which I downloaded for this project. Moodle was a great resource which I enjoyed using when I needed a resource supplied by this course. I also used a wide range of hardware equipment such as the SONY HD cameras which enabled me to capture footage in 1080p which helped my film look professional and crisp on the outcomes. I also used voice recording equipment which we used for narrations for over our radio trailer. I also used fire ware cables to transfer my captured footage from my camera to my MAC and PC when creating the productions of the film for this project.  I also used a DSLR camera cannon 1000D to take shots of the locations on which we used in our film production. I also used Mindomo software to create a visual mind map of all the technologies and software which I have used throughout this project highlighting the key features which I used to my advantage. Finally I used a both Google and Bing search engines to browse content when researching during the pre-production stages of this project.

As a final point I would like to say I have enjoyed working on this project and have found it really helpful in building up my own skills on such software as pointed out above. I hope to take these skills and the knowledge which I have learned whilst completing this project into work which I produce in the future.