Evaluation questions...

As we come to the end of the term, and our Media coursework is coming to an end, we are to evaluate our overall performance and progression on our title sequences. The following questions are the evaluation questions I am going to answer...

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

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

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

Who would be the audience for your media product?

How did you attract/address your audience?

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

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

Communication/Social Networking outside of school

Throughout the months of preparation and planning for our title sequence, we have done very well as a group to keep in touch over weekends and in out-of-school hours. Mainly via Facebook chat, we have been able to share and work together creating a lot of ideas, that were actual finalised and feature in our final project. During half terms, this allowed us to keep up to date with ideas and also plan when we would meet for filming and a catch-up of planning, ideas and editing.

Class feedback...

In Wednesdays lesson, we had half an hour to tidy up our sequences before having to show them to the two other groups in our class, as well as the teacher and a year 13 student, obviously experienced, for them to give feedback/constructive criticism, to help us notify what we need to improve on in our sequences. After showing the other groups our piece, the feedback we got was very genuine and constructive, and we reacted to it quickly and maturely. We handed out feedback sheets to the our class mates in which they told us what was good, what needed improving and what was missing.

Overall from the lesson, we grew from it and picked up from the places that needed work. From this, we took out the voice over due to many people saying that they didn't quite understand the concept of it and if it made sense. Looking back at it, what they said was true, the voice over and the actual footage gave two completely different messages to what we wanted it to give.

Also, we realised that we didn't give the doctor enough attention to detail for the audience to actually realise that he was a doctor. Therefore, we had to do some last minute shooting to get some footage of the doctor actually showing that he is one. We did this by using some science equipment and shooting in a science room. Hopefully, this would give the audience the right idea of the role the doctor is meant to have.

Re-shooting

After our class feedback lesson, our group realised that we still had opportunities where we could improve our sequence, whether it was editing techniques or scenes we could add. However, due to lack of time, we used fridays lesson to re-shoot some more scenes. The feedback we got the most of was that it wasn't clear who my character was. Therefore, we had to make it more obvious and visible that he was a doctor. So we decided to go to a science room and find some equipment that relate to scientists. Although we filmed in school, which we wanted to try and avoid, I think that we got a good looking and believable shot. Not only did this shot make our sequence make more sense, but it extended the length of it to 1 minute 36 seconds, which we were happier with as we had aimed for it to be longer than 1 minute 30 seconds.

The footage we got, we decided to place it at the very start of our sequence so it is straight away clear to the audience that he is a doctor, as we learnt from our class feedback lesson, that it was hard to understand who he was and what his role was.

I think this reshoot has made our title sequence a lot more understandable as it shows the character in more detail. They now know he is a doctor, so for the duration of the sequence they can understand and have ideas of what they believe may happen within the film.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

The Complete voiceover

This is our voiceover that we made, planning to use it in our sequence. Unfortunately, after experimenting with it n the sequence, we were not convinced that it fitted and gave across the message it was meant to. After the feedback lesson, looking back at the comments and opinions our fellow classmates felt, a majority of them had said that they didn't quite understand the concept of the voiceover. Therefore, due to popular demand, we decided not to have the voiceover feature in our sequence.

It was quite gutting that we couldn't use it because it sounded so professionally done, and was recorded in such good facilities, allowing us to get the rich pure sound. We used the recording studio in the music department. As I am also studying Music Tech, I was very familiar and comfortable with the programme we used to record it, LogicPro. I edited the voices using reverb and echo to give them a mysterious dark sound. After experimenting with the effects, I found, which i believe, were the most accurate sounding voices to the ones we had planned and spoken about. I also had to cut both tracks up into each individual sentence so I could then alter them so they were re-occurring and it sounded as if each character were taking turns to speak.

I believe that if we could have made the voice over work and somehow had it feature in our sequence, it could have really worked and been effective. However, the soundtrack, 'Dangerous Knowledge', that we found, was a lot more effective and gave the right vibes.

First draft title sequence - Captive

This is our first draft of our sequence, Captive. We used Monday's lesson to finish this rough copy of our final sequence, so we could present it to our fellow classmates, and teacher. We briefly watched it as a group before presenting it to our class, and we noticed that there were a few mistakes that we could easily mend with more time and notice. For example, the word 'photography' in our typography  had been mispelled in one of the text animations. We let the class know that we were aware of the mistake before showing them the first draft. Despite this mistake, for a first draft, it flowed well and we felt we were in a good position, but there were clearly moments for improvement, which were also notified by our classmates in our feedback discussion after they had seen it.

Thriller genre survey...

Our group made a survey monkey on thriller as a genre to see oner peoples perspective on it and what they would expect to see in a thriller-related piece. We included questions on gender and age to see what people think the ideal audience target should be for a piece like ours.

This is a screenshot of a few of the questions that can be found in our questionnaire.