Evaluation 7

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

I believe I have found that preparation is key to success. Our preliminary task hardly had any work done to it before hand; we put together with a script some basic ideas and couldn’t wait to begin filming and editing, rushing into the process. This year, research was much more important. Looking into real media products was the best way to decide what kind of media product we wanted to create. Once that was acknowledged, further research into the chosen genre, our target audience, music, camera angles and titles were vital in order to produce the best film opening we could. We knew from our experiences with the preliminary task, filming outside would have been more difficult and so location was decided indoors in order to have better control over the surroundings, in the way real media prodcuts use a studio environment to control the atmsophere for certain scenes. We also learnt from our mistakes and found that our first ideas were not necessarily the best. A good example of this was changing our title name and title font more than once after speculation, discussion and audience feedback on the matter.

After our preliminary task, we found that the music available to use on our film was limited and so the decision to create our own was definitely best. We could then create exactly what we wanted instead of trying to muster up a piece similar to how we imagined.

Overall, I believe we have progressed well within our research and practise into the new technologies that were available to us. Our film opening has been carefully thought out with many minor details that when put together have produced a film opening I am ultimately proud of.

Evaluation 6

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

During the production of our film opening, we used a lot of new technologies that we had not been familiar with before this year. One major example of this were the Apple Macs we were given access to in lesson. Both Gina and I had to get used to the small changes such as holding down Control before right clicking in order to copy and paste objects. We also had some trouble with the internet on the Mac’s, having to go through a lengthy process every lesson in order to allow the internet to be shared from the Administrator’s area to our Log-in area. There were some programs that were exclusive to the Apple Macs and so hadn’t been used before by Gina or myself; I-photo and especially I-movie that we used to edit our film opening, were both completely new to us; however the editing process was easy enough to understand. There were however, some drawbacks to the program such as adding our own titles. To add our own text instead of using the fonts I-movie offered automatically was quite complicated involving screen grabs, editing in Macromedia Fireworks and adding freeze frames.

Using Blogger to keep track of our process was also a completely new experience. It was quick to set up and blogging was made easy, using the given icons to upload photos and videos and transferring over into the “HTML” format in order to embed codes for things such as Prezi (Prezi was also a new interactive presentation software we had never come across before).

On the other hand, one major issue we had with Blogger was trying to upload my music onto the site. There was no set icon to upload music without a video to go with it. We attempted to upload it as a video at first however this failed and I decided to seek help on Google’s help forum. I blogged about how I researched into uploading my music on Blogger and how I found what was needed; a “third party site” to upload the music onto in order to create an embed code I could then paste into my blog. At first,“IodaPromonet” seemed the most promising site, yet my registration failed to go through for unknown reasons. “SoundCloud” was then another option and so I made an account and uploaded my music almost straight away and was able to embed the codes onto my blog easily.

I had spoken about on my blog how I used Audacity to record my music which I have had past experience with. I find it very easy to use and to create layers so as I can edit for example, the guitar separately to the vocals. The only technology I used apart from the software itself was a microphone to actually record the music.

YouTube was something both Gina and I were familiar with; however, we had never uploading videos before. We had blogged about our issues with YouTube and the slow process of uploading videos to the site. We found that uploading was much faster at home on Windows instead of the Apple Macs that seemed to be advanced elsewhere, yet disadvantaged in aspects such as speed efficiency on the internet.

Some technologies such as the internet for film research and of course the school cameras used to film our media product, could have been easily overlooked as they did not stand out as new experiences. However, this year, we have learnt a lot about new techniques especially with the cameras. We had to improvise in order to produce the aerial shots we wanted as well as positioning the camera correctly in the bathroom without it being seen in the reflection of the mirror. We had to think carefully about the continuity between actions from shot to shot and also make sure the camera was steady enough in every take.
Overall, our experiences with technology has been expanded immensely this year, progressing onto vast software and internet based materials as well as hardware. 

Evaluation 5

How did you attract/ address your audience?

To target young people, we have used a teenage girl as our protagonist in order for the character to be relatable to the audience. Her OCD may be familiar abstractly to the issues of young people and so allow the audience to empathise with her character.

The music which I created was purposefully inspired by our research of similar media products and the contemporary, acoustic style that was present throughout as to attract young audiences. The lyrics, because they are comparable to a conventional love song, would especially appeal to female audiences. Furthermore, the storyline of our film opening is relatable to our target audiences, considerably to that of the younger generation, due to the dysfunctional family that may be relatable to some family situations.

Evaluation 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

We researched specifically into independant and British film audiences as this is the origin of our film opening. It was important to consider large scale institutions and how they target British audiences as well, as the Hollywood Market is known to dominate the film industry and overpower the British film industry. 
From our target audience research, we found that Comedy Drama’s often attract younger audiences and female audiences due to the elements of comedy, so these have been our main targets. We also found that older generations and male audiences, on a smaller scale, may be attracted to the drama aspects of our film opening. 

Evaluation 3

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

Gina and I created a distribution company name to include at the very beginning of our film opening. We called the company “Moody Cow Productions” to relate through colloquial language to the younger members of our target audience. We used casually 'sketchy' text and a small cartoon image of a cow as well as the comedic sound of a cow's moo, all to relate and target our audience. 
Through our research into production and distribution names, we found the interesting name which originally insipred us, "Red fish Blue fish films". However, this was not a company that was likely to distribute our film. We did acknowledge how similar media products had distribution companies in common such as “Fox Searchlight Pictures” that distributed both “Juno” and “500 days of Summer”. This is a good example of the kind of company that would distribute our film, as it specialises in independent film and tends to stick to similar genres including art house and Comedy Drama’s. 

Evaluation 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

We have addressed certain social groups in our film opening including dysfunctional families, “obsessive compulsive disorder” and stereotypical youth. We attempted to depict these social groups with as much sensitivity as possible without dismissing the comedy aspect of our chosen genre. The music was thus purposefully faded out during the divorce scene, and the girl's OCD is not directly acknowledged, merely shown as a normal part of her life (how the character would see it herself). These methods were used in order to create an empathy for the protagonist and allow the audience to see her life through her own eyes, how the music represents the content she feels with her own routine, thrown off by the silence over the breakfast table. 
We felt, however, that we could be more lenient with the stereotypical representation of the rebel sister. This was because, in our chosen genre, and even the film industry in general, stereotypes are widely addressed and are not often challenged by audiences as “inappropriate” as their inclusion is for comedic purposes only. We believed that by increasing the rebel sister's appearance, we could focus on the comedy her character generates and therefore show in contrast the seriousness of the parent's divorce and the girl's OCD. 

Evaluation 1

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

Gina and I planned and produced our film opening in the genre of Comedy Drama. This genre is widely demanded across the world and would be a difficult market to compete within; audiences look for particular consistencies within Comedy Drama’s while at the same time are searching for something utterly new in order to spark their interest. We kept to the conventions of this genre through the foundations of our film opening using familiar aspects such as a teenage protagonist and dysfunctional family. The stereotypically “rebel” sister and troubled protagonist along with the parent’s divorce are all aspects associated with similar media products.

However, we challenged forms of our chosen genre through the acknowledgement of OCD and the seriousness in which we addressed this. The divorce scene was also a more serious part of our film opening, where the light-hearted music faded out and the parents speech picked up. As our film opening was acquired to incorporate elements of both comedy and drama, I believe we balanced out the latter with the final sequence depicting humorously our protagonist spontaneously bursting into tears.

Final two minute film opening

Editing and footage reduction

As previously noted, we had over forty minutes of footage at the beginning of our editing process. We are now close to finishing our film opening, and have drastically reduced the amount of footage in use. You can see here, in these examples, how the orange highlighted sections (representing the footage we have used) are in dramatic contrast to the huge sections we had filmed originally.

You can see here how drastically the footage has been cut down. The most prominent example being the  bathroom scenes and the crying montage at the end of the film opening.

Audio

On our film, we transferred the music and allowed it to play in the background. As we did this and played it back, we realised we had an issue with the sound; the music was extremely quite compared to the sound recorded in our film. To fix this, we doubled the volume of the music to 200%, and decreased the remaining audio to 20%. This made sure the background noise didn't overpower the music.
We decided to switch around one shot with a neighbouring shot as the lyrics of the music fit the content of this shot more than the previous;

Sink shot before the Stair's shot

We also had an issue with the beginning of the film. Because we had freeze frames at the beginning of our film opening but wanted the sound of running water over the top of these, we had to detach the audio from the original shot and copy and paste however many times was needed in order to play for the required length of time. When doing this, we heard mumbling in the background. We couldn't however get rid of it as this was the only section of audio with running water. Because we used the same section over and over again it also sounds a lot worse than it would have given just the small section we had on the original shot.

Title name final

In a previous blog, I talked about how Gina and I changed our title name to "You Call it Crazy...". After further audience research, allowing students in our class a sneak preview of our film, we recieved feedback on the title. This was generally toward the font style that didn't seen to flow from the previously used fonts for character's names. We also picked up how the ellipsis made the shot feel as though unfinished.

To fix this, Gina and I decided to use the same font as we had throughout the film opening to keep a consistancy throughout the whole two minutes and also to use no ellipsis.
Here was the result:

Discarded footage

In our film opening we had a lot of extra footage due to filming from several angles and many mishaps. We also had extra shots we thought of while filming that were not on our storyboard but do feature in our film opening. The Calendar shot  is one example of footage that was on our storyboard however, could not be replicated to the desired standard during filming, and so was dismissed from our film opening:

As you can see, we attempted to create a straight on view of the calendar and depict the OCD girl's hand marking off the date for the next day. This however, failed as we caught Gina's arm in the background holding up the calendar that was very unstable.
Gina and I, while shooting our film, made the decision to include more shots of the rebel sister as we believed her role was more significant than we originally showed on the storyboard. We filmed different shots of her on the stairs (cutting out the front view) and changed where her name in the titles came up to a new shot, near the very beginning, depicting the rebel sister falling through into the bedroom the morning after a night out partying. Here is a shot we filmed and decided not to use:

Even though it felt as though the hand held camera added to the rebel sister's personality, the change in continuity felt out of place adjacent to the stable shots before and after this particular shot.

There were also a few extra shots we filmed and decided not to use such as this shot beneath, depicting the OCD girl scanning her jewellery before picking out a necklace. We thought, even though this shot depicted the girl's OCD well, we would not use this shot, as the camera was visible in the mirror and overall, the shot was not very stable.




As you can tell, we uploaded three of these videos from youtube and one from the computer straight onto blogger. From our previous youtube issues, we found that uploading videos in general was much quicker at home than on Apple Macs, we also found that getting them onto youtube was much faster at home too. However, because we didn't have the footage at home, we had to email each video to ourselves before we could get access to them outside of school. This was a lot of hassle, because even uploading them to an email sometimes failed to complete.

Youtube Issues

Gina and I are having trouble with youtube.

The clips we want to put on our blogs need to be posted to youtube before published on blogger, however, this is proving very difficult as for a few lessons now, the clips wouldn't load. They were taking too long to upload and therefore we could not get them onto our blogs.

We then attempted to use a different route through bluetooth, using Gina's phone to connect to the Apple mac computer so as we can export the video onto her phone and upload to youtube that way.
If this fails to work, we will use the blogger video icon to upload straight onto our blogs. The only reason we have hesitated to do this is time, as we believed uploading through youtube would be faster and more efficient.

Music 3

I have now completed the song. I have asked my sister Ruby to sing the main part and I sang the harmonies and backing vocals. I have also played the main guitar role while Ruby played an extra part that fits over the top. I have recorded extra guitar parts so Gina and I will have room to edit and cut the piece flexibly:

Lyrics

Here are the decided lyrics for the music i wrote:

It all started with a grin,
I moved back as you lean in,
You take my hand I push you down,
I really like you but oh Stan,
You need to wash those clammy hands,
I have a genius solution,
You see this beautiful solution,
It comes in red and green and blue,
And all that you have got to do...

Lighting

We have decided to edit some of the lighting of our footage. When we recorded the bathroom scenes, we found that the lighting was slightly too dark. We were forced to edit the lighting subtly in I-movie, using the settings on video adjustments to brighten the shots. Here are the before and after shots:

We also edited the lighting of the shots around the breakfast table to create a warmer feel to the scene and contrast with the reality of the parents divorce. This, we hoped, would spark the humour behind our chosen genre. 

New title name

After some deliberation, we decided to change our title name as we felt it was too long and the title shot looked too busy. We created a spider diagram and came up with title ideas involving OCD:

We finally decided on the title name 'You Call It Crazy...'

We also decided we would use a different style of text still keeping to the handwriting idea but altering it slightly. We used dafont again to find the kind of text we wanted and created our own version. The original was called KG Ray of Sunshine.

Titles on the way

We have changed our storyboard slightly in order to fit the title sequence in smoothly. Instead of the end shot depicting the title on the wall above the OCD girl, we want her to be the focus where a freeze frame will depict the title over and around the character.
Gina and I have decided the title should appear in three different texts:

This is how the shot will look, appearing line by line such as:

We also have the titles edited for the characters as well, including Louise Weaver, Ruby Harris, Paige Woods and Joseph Poole:

Shooting Script

SHOOTING SCRIPT
5	Camera Angle	Description	Time
1	Close Up	A close up shot of a calendar, where the character will then cross off a date.	5 seconds
2	Over the Shoulder	The camera will already be in position and Lily will walk into the bathroom and then fuss around in the mirror. We will be able to see her reflection in the mirror.  The character will then, bend down to wash her face while exiting off the screen. She will then come back onto screen wearing a shower cap.	5 seconds
3	Close Up	Lily will open the wardrobe door, open one of the draws, select an item of clothing and then close the wardrobe.	3 seconds
4	Mid Shot	The camera will focus on a picture on the wall, which is slanted, the camera will then zoom out and Lily will walk down the stairs. She will walk past the picture, notice it is slanted and put it back in position. She will then walk down the stairs and off camera.	7 seconds
5	Over the Shoulder	The camera will then track Ivy, the sister as she walks down the stairs and knocks the picture.	4 seconds
6	Mid Shot	The camera will then be at the bottom of the stairs in a mid shot, focuses on Ivy the sister as she walks off screen.	3 seconds.
7	Aerial Shot	This shot will focus on mainly Lily’s hands as she prepares some fruit. She will cut two apples.	7 seconds
8	Aerial Shot	This shot she will quickly clean over the board emphasising her OCD. She will then take out 3 strawberries and place them on the board.	4 seconds
9	Close Up	A close up shot over Lily slicing through a strawberry and cutting it up.	3 seconds
10	Aerial Shot	The last aerial shot of the girl picking up the slices of chopped apple and putting them in a bowl, and then wiping the board clean.	5 seconds
11	Over the Shoulder	This will be an adventurous shot. The camera will be placed behind the family sitting at the table. You will see the backs of the mom and dad, and through the middle of them Lily sitting across the table. You will then see Ivy sitting on the right side of the table. The parents will discuss their divorce.	12 seconds.
12	Close Up	The camera will focus on Ivy, looking worryingly to her sister.	5 seconds.
13	Extreme Close Up	An extreme close up of Lily’s face as she breaks out in loud, uncontrollable sobs.	12 seconds
14	Long Shot	A long shot focusing on the girl sitting at the far end of the table. She will still be crying. The camera will then pan upwards onto a blank wall as the titles appear on screen.	7 seconds.
15	Close Up	A close up shot of the blank wall. Using editing we will make the name of the film appear on screen.	5 seconds.

- We realise that our time amounts to only 1 minute 20 seconds, however we are going to add a few freeze frames in to allow our titles to appear on screen make up the time. Our film company name will also be adding onto the beginning of the opening. 

Music 2

I have now officially chosen the chord progression for our piece of music. These consist of C and Cmaj9 played on capo 6, major chords, how Gina and I initially desired. The lyrics are almost complete, they are based around the simple conventions of a love song yet morphed by a girl's OCD obssessions that add to the difficulties of their relationship fitting to the OCD addressed in our film opening:

Fruit scene

As we edited the fruit scene, we decided to experiment with the effects on specific shots. We had a close up cutting a strawberry and decided to put a "romantic" effect using the clip adjustments in I-movie. Here was the result:

However, as we continued with the editing, we decided to dismiss this effect, as it felt out of place and did not support our chosen genre. we also thought it looked slightly amateur in comparison to the original shot.

Title sequence

Gina and I have decided the title sequence of our film opening should be a very important aspect of the two minutes. We have - with research on existing films and the aid of an online text website 'Dafont' - given some thought as to which type of text we want to use. We decided on a sketchy text, one that looks handwritten and also wanted to make our title with three different texts for the three sections. Here are some examples of the texts we found. 

Music 1

I am writing the music for our film opening. Gina and I decided together that we wanted an acoustic piece and this has been progressing well. I have been recording small progressive clips of the piece to share on this blog using a basic recorder on my computer. For the real piece, I will be recording the music on Audacity and exporting as an MP3 to put on our film.
I have possible chords progressions and lyrics and now just need to put these together.
Here is a small section I recorded:

Music Solutions

After further research, I found a much better website to use in order to get music onto my blog. SoundCloud was a highly reccomended website, so I made an account and now I can upload my music as soon as possible. The process seems very easy, including a simple upload of the desired clip and then embedding the "embed code" into my blog just as I would for a Prezi. I was very glad I found this website because IodaPromonet did not get back to me at all even after a formal email about my troubles with their site.
We have found that the music will need play for almost all of the two minutes, save the dramatic divorce scene where the music will fade out and pick back up again at the end (for the crying scene). Just to be safe, I will make sure I have at least one minute thirty worth of lyrics and thirty seconds of guitar playing in case we need this.

Moody Cow Productions

We have now created our production company design. We found the sound of a cow's moo on Youtube sound effects and imported this as an Mp3 onto our film opening. We designed our text based on our research from Dafont. We typed in "Sketchy" in the search bar of the website and found a similar text that inspired our own. We also decided to add a small cartoon cow to give the design a more interesting quality. Here is the finished product:

Music troubles

Now we have music snippets to put onto our blog, we are having trouble uploading them onto blogger. There is no set icon to upload podcasts and music without a video to go with this. To solve this problem we could only think to upload onto youtube and give the music a background image.

Instead I found, with Google's help forum, a few reccomended websites that allowed music to be uploaded onto blogs. I found what we needed was referred to as a "third party website", as the music must be uploaded onto the internet in some way before embedding into a blog.
The first promising website i found was "Iodapromonet.com", that allows users to use free and legal music from the website on their blogs and even upload podcasts and original music for their blogs.
I made an account and have the music ready to insert on our blogs, however I have to now wait two days before my account is verified.

Editing begins...

Today Gina and I will begin editing our footage that we have filmed over half term. We believe that, after the two days of filming, we have enough of the right footage to produce our film opening. When we uploaded it onto the Mac's, we found we had around forty minutes of footage to condense! We started off by deleting the shots we definitely did not want, such as the slip ups. We then began looking at the different angles we had taken and deleting small sections we didn't need. This got the process going and decreased our footage dramatically. We are now closer to the fifteen minutes region.

Production and Distribution Names

We researched into production and distribution names of the films from our previous research into comedy drama films.
Juno - Produced by Mandate Pictures

        - Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures

500 Days of Summer - Produced by Watermark Productions and Sneak Preview Entertainment

                                   - Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures

I Am Sam - Produced by Avery Pix, Bedford Falls Productions, Red Fish Blue Fish Films

                 - Distributed by New Line Cinema 

We wanted to create a production and distribution name that sound genuine and professional, while still incorporating an element of interest such as Red Fish Blue Fish Films. Possible ideas included Fruit Bowl Productions, Dairy Pictures and Banana Films. We decided that we preferred Dairy Pictures and altered this to become Moody Cow Productions. As most production companies have an animated sequence or recognised musical piece, we decided to include the over voice of a Cow's 'Moo' to fit with the humour of our comedy drama.

Filming - half term

Over half term, Gina and I rented a school camera to begin filming small sections of our film and draft the basic ideas and camera angles we will use in the real thing. Some footage worked out extremely well and may just be used in the final piece such as aerial shots of the OCD girl cutting up fruit in the kitchen. The naturalistic lighting appealed in these shots, spilling though onto the scene through carefully angled shots while other's, such as those shot in the bathroom, failed to capture enough light making them seem increasingly cold and dramatic.
We struggled with the steadiness of the camera during shots where the angle and most awkwardly height of the camera was hard to sustain. We had to improvise, using things such as a broom, chairs, stool, tables at one point a washing rack and very sturdy handyman skills.
One scene we were dissapointed with was the most important shot of them all, the final shot that focused on the OCD girl, crying silently into her breakfast. The angle felt slightly unstable as well as the scenes in the dining room. These may have to be filmed over again.

Decided Settings

We have decided that we need to have a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom and a dining room. Props will consist of average household items to create a realistic scene and specific items we have thought about previously, such as a picture frame, basic kitchen equipment and shower cap.
Some items, we had to make special arrangements such as the calendar, as both Gina and I did not have access to one, we had to borrow this from a friend.