In what ways does your media product use, develop or change forms and conventions of real media products?
With film noir there are very clear and stereotypical elements that should be included, as without them it wouldn't be a film noir. These being; dark storylines, mysterious characters including a protagonist and a femme fatal and powerful lighting. All of these things we included in our film as we felt they were important to the genre and thought that if we didn't put them in it would be hard to get the genre across successfully. When writing our storyline we took these things into consideration and used our knowledge of film noir's to aid us in making our own. In the end our storyline was quite typical of that of a classic film noir with shady characters each with their own private agendas which don't get totally reveled until the end in the form of a big twist. Some of our themes included; revenge, murder and affairs all things that are relatable to film noir.
Although we did challenge some of the classic film traits favoring some from neo noir, although we didn't set a definite time frame for our film as we wanted it to realistic and didn't want to have to contend with making it factually correct of the period it was set. Therefore there is a mixture of old and new in our film. A bit part of this is the way we edited our film, we incorporated some things that wouldn't have existed when film noir first came about, so therefore wouldn't feature in the films.
There are two parts in our film that particularly relate to this, the very first scene 'dream scene' where Barnaby is in and out of consciousness and we hear the flashback this part I feel was quite futuristic and carried the feel of neo noir more than classic noir. The other instant is from 2:44-2:46, the style of how the scene merges into the next (whip pan). Although we did use some extreme shot types, for example, high angle, low angle and dutch tilt to name a few. These can be seen in both types of film noir and both have become famous for the interesting and different shot types they use. Also capturing some very power and artistic shots, my personal favorite is at 4:36 and 5:54, I think this is a very beautiful shot and looks very professional. I think our mise-en-scene works well too, we have tried to make it authentic by using relevant props, like the old fashioned telephone in the office scene, and the classic mirror in the getting ready scenes. We tried to dress our sets as much as we could and put a lot of attention to detail within them and took a lot careful decisions to find the right locations that we all agreed on. We had very characteristic locations, an office, a house, urban area. We wanted to show the types of place you expect to see and as the protagonist is usually a successful man we thought putting him in his own office would show his status well, we then wanted to show his house or at least parts of it to show the audience another side to him. I think this also makes the character more relatable showing him a normal home with a wife as sometimes you can feel very unattached to film noir characters. As a big part of film noir is their urban setting we really wanted to have one in our film, we choose the tunnel as it was visually interesting. But the location twist we used was the church, I have never seen a film noir where a church has featured in that way, but again we thought it would a compelling place to film and the place itself would give us some strong filming opportunities. It was our version of some of the grand houses you see in film noir's.
Our sound also keeps to the traditional film noir to an extent with the frequent use of jazz, but we added our own modern element following in the footsteps of the neo noir film brick as we brought in hints of more modern music mainly the track 'investigation theme' from LA Noire. But the mix of music we used worked well together and it didn't seem disjointed.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
As we finished our film first and the ancillary texts came later I was able to combine them all, I think this was a good way of doing it as they all link well and you can tell they relate to the film.
When making my poster I wanted it to be dynamic and catch people's attention, therefore I didn't want to over crowd it, this is why I made the decision to only use two of the characters. Even though Bones Goodwin (Matt Williams) isn't revealed to the very end of the film I think it will incise people in as when they see him they will be waiting for his entrance creating suspense and atmosphere from the start. I used images that we all took as a group at the start, the two images I used where originally separate but I merged them together I chose these two as they worked well together I particularly like the eye line of both characters. I chose to put it in black and white the same as the film as I felt it wouldn't look right if the poster was in colour, the black and white isn't dominating it is quite soft and i think this works well as the background of the poster is black and if the characters where too dark they wouldn't stand out. I wanted their to be colour and after experimenting I found that just using bursts of red worked best, I chose quite a dark shade of red rather than a bright shade as I thought it made it look more menacing than the bright version.
I also wanted to make my poster look authentic so I researched other posters and found out the type of thing that they wrote across the bottom, I then made my own version. This along with the production company logo and age certificate gives my poster a more professional feel to it.
I then went on to doing my film review, I wanted to make it look good as well as being a good review. I researched film reviews with my main source of research on the Empire Magazine website. I used their review as a template for mine, although to make mine slightly more like the genre I decided to make it very stylised using a red, black and white colour scheme the same as my poster. In my final review I added a screenshot of the film, I chose to use a screenshot of Barnaby Frisco (Luke Jones) as he does not appear on the poster I wanted to show his character, that shot in particular I found to reflect the genre with the spotlight like lighting. I wanted my review to be honest even though it was my on film I was reviewing. For this reason I took my audience feedback into consideration whilst writing it and giving it a rating. As the majority of our feedback was positive I think my review reflects the comments said. I wanted my review to be up to date and as I was basing my review on an online review I chose to include the 'share' option and including links to facebook, twitter and google+.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
I found the feedback we got very useful and I was pleased that people had gone into quite a lot of detail about our film stating what they really like and perhaps what they didn't. It was nice to know what worked well and what we maybe need to work on. We found that the majority of our feedback was positive. We used some feedback that we were given on a general viewing of all our films, this was good as it gave our peers a chance to judge our films and vice versa. I think getting the view of people who had also produced a film in the same situation was good as they could appreciate it more and see strengths that others may not have seen. But on the other hand we felt it was important that people who hadn't been working on their own film were asked their opinions too. We found that some of them were slightly more sceptical which was good as we got some constructive criticism. We also got feedback from some people who weren't that familiar with the genre in general so they were able to give us comments through the eyes of someone who wouldn't usually watch this type of thing, therefore we were pleased when they said they enjoyed it.
It was good to have these comments as I feel it boosted our confidence and showed us that we were doing well, but they also gave us things to think about and helped us to make our film better.
How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
First of all we all sat down as a class and watched some film noir films, these ranged from some very early film noir's like; Double Indemnity to neo noir's like; The Black Daliah and LA Confidential to some low budget almost cult film noir films like; Brick. These films all helped us in our own way and got us thinking about our own film. After splitting into groups we continued our research on the internet by looking at the conventions of film noir and researching and analysing clips and trailers that we found on YouTube. This all helped us in the creation of our own film.
We then started planing, we made a rough storyline that we finalised and made into a storyboard. Using our storyboard we found a script template on the internet and used to to create our own. We filmed our film on a Canon 500D as we thought it would give us a better quality than the flip cams we could borrow from school. We them proceeded to edit our film on Sony Vegas Pro 9, we used this program as it was more advanced than Final Cut. We were able to use some of that more advanced tools that the program had to offer, including adding sound effects/sound track and making more interesting scene changes. We then used YouTube and Blogger as platforms to show our film and the progress we made from the beginning.
As I created other pieces of media to do with our film, my film poster for example I used other programs to make this, I used Photoshop frequently throughout this project mainly in the production of head-shots, production company logo, film poster and, film review whilst also using Microsoft Word to write my basic film review too. I wanted my head/character shots to get across some of the personality shown in the film. We each took character shots in a photography studio using the lights to get dramatic effects, to take these images we used a Canon 500D. After uploading our images I chose my favorite shots. For each character I chose images in which they were looking down the lens as I thought this made them more intense. Each image I edited in a similar way, they all have a black background with very prominent shadow casting parts of their faces into darkness.
I was happy with the results of these images, as an added extra I put the character names at the bottom on the images, I chose an old type writer type font which I felt made them link back to the genre and make them look almost like police head-shots making them all seem slightly guilty before even watching the film.
I am very confident with Photoshop having used it previously, I therefore enjoyed working on it to create my poster, I was also able to make my poster look more finished by using some of the more sophisticated tools Photoshop has to offer. I used curves to make my images look more powerful by accentuating the shadows before turning the images into black and white then repeating this process to get the images just right. I wanted my text to stand out against the images so used the 'fx' tool to add shadow and arrange it in my own way to get the best result possible on another layer so I could edit it without effecting the background image. I used the same font for both the title and the actors names so my poster had consistency and the poster therefore wouldn't look disjointed. I was then able to create new layers for the production company logo, age certificate and credit text at the bottom so I was able to move them all separately until I was pleased with their positioning before flattening and publishing the poster.
Although we did challenge some of the classic film traits favoring some from neo noir, although we didn't set a definite time frame for our film as we wanted it to realistic and didn't want to have to contend with making it factually correct of the period it was set. Therefore there is a mixture of old and new in our film. A bit part of this is the way we edited our film, we incorporated some things that wouldn't have existed when film noir first came about, so therefore wouldn't feature in the films.
There are two parts in our film that particularly relate to this, the very first scene 'dream scene' where Barnaby is in and out of consciousness and we hear the flashback this part I feel was quite futuristic and carried the feel of neo noir more than classic noir. The other instant is from 2:44-2:46, the style of how the scene merges into the next (whip pan). Although we did use some extreme shot types, for example, high angle, low angle and dutch tilt to name a few. These can be seen in both types of film noir and both have become famous for the interesting and different shot types they use. Also capturing some very power and artistic shots, my personal favorite is at 4:36 and 5:54, I think this is a very beautiful shot and looks very professional. I think our mise-en-scene works well too, we have tried to make it authentic by using relevant props, like the old fashioned telephone in the office scene, and the classic mirror in the getting ready scenes. We tried to dress our sets as much as we could and put a lot of attention to detail within them and took a lot careful decisions to find the right locations that we all agreed on. We had very characteristic locations, an office, a house, urban area. We wanted to show the types of place you expect to see and as the protagonist is usually a successful man we thought putting him in his own office would show his status well, we then wanted to show his house or at least parts of it to show the audience another side to him. I think this also makes the character more relatable showing him a normal home with a wife as sometimes you can feel very unattached to film noir characters. As a big part of film noir is their urban setting we really wanted to have one in our film, we choose the tunnel as it was visually interesting. But the location twist we used was the church, I have never seen a film noir where a church has featured in that way, but again we thought it would a compelling place to film and the place itself would give us some strong filming opportunities. It was our version of some of the grand houses you see in film noir's.Our sound also keeps to the traditional film noir to an extent with the frequent use of jazz, but we added our own modern element following in the footsteps of the neo noir film brick as we brought in hints of more modern music mainly the track 'investigation theme' from LA Noire. But the mix of music we used worked well together and it didn't seem disjointed.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
As we finished our film first and the ancillary texts came later I was able to combine them all, I think this was a good way of doing it as they all link well and you can tell they relate to the film.
When making my poster I wanted it to be dynamic and catch people's attention, therefore I didn't want to over crowd it, this is why I made the decision to only use two of the characters. Even though Bones Goodwin (Matt Williams) isn't revealed to the very end of the film I think it will incise people in as when they see him they will be waiting for his entrance creating suspense and atmosphere from the start. I used images that we all took as a group at the start, the two images I used where originally separate but I merged them together I chose these two as they worked well together I particularly like the eye line of both characters. I chose to put it in black and white the same as the film as I felt it wouldn't look right if the poster was in colour, the black and white isn't dominating it is quite soft and i think this works well as the background of the poster is black and if the characters where too dark they wouldn't stand out. I wanted their to be colour and after experimenting I found that just using bursts of red worked best, I chose quite a dark shade of red rather than a bright shade as I thought it made it look more menacing than the bright version.I also wanted to make my poster look authentic so I researched other posters and found out the type of thing that they wrote across the bottom, I then made my own version. This along with the production company logo and age certificate gives my poster a more professional feel to it.
I then went on to doing my film review, I wanted to make it look good as well as being a good review. I researched film reviews with my main source of research on the Empire Magazine website. I used their review as a template for mine, although to make mine slightly more like the genre I decided to make it very stylised using a red, black and white colour scheme the same as my poster. In my final review I added a screenshot of the film, I chose to use a screenshot of Barnaby Frisco (Luke Jones) as he does not appear on the poster I wanted to show his character, that shot in particular I found to reflect the genre with the spotlight like lighting. I wanted my review to be honest even though it was my on film I was reviewing. For this reason I took my audience feedback into consideration whilst writing it and giving it a rating. As the majority of our feedback was positive I think my review reflects the comments said. I wanted my review to be up to date and as I was basing my review on an online review I chose to include the 'share' option and including links to facebook, twitter and google+.What have you learned from your audience feedback?
I found the feedback we got very useful and I was pleased that people had gone into quite a lot of detail about our film stating what they really like and perhaps what they didn't. It was nice to know what worked well and what we maybe need to work on. We found that the majority of our feedback was positive. We used some feedback that we were given on a general viewing of all our films, this was good as it gave our peers a chance to judge our films and vice versa. I think getting the view of people who had also produced a film in the same situation was good as they could appreciate it more and see strengths that others may not have seen. But on the other hand we felt it was important that people who hadn't been working on their own film were asked their opinions too. We found that some of them were slightly more sceptical which was good as we got some constructive criticism. We also got feedback from some people who weren't that familiar with the genre in general so they were able to give us comments through the eyes of someone who wouldn't usually watch this type of thing, therefore we were pleased when they said they enjoyed it.
It was good to have these comments as I feel it boosted our confidence and showed us that we were doing well, but they also gave us things to think about and helped us to make our film better.
How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
We then started planing, we made a rough storyline that we finalised and made into a storyboard. Using our storyboard we found a script template on the internet and used to to create our own. We filmed our film on a Canon 500D as we thought it would give us a better quality than the flip cams we could borrow from school. We them proceeded to edit our film on Sony Vegas Pro 9, we used this program as it was more advanced than Final Cut. We were able to use some of that more advanced tools that the program had to offer, including adding sound effects/sound track and making more interesting scene changes. We then used YouTube and Blogger as platforms to show our film and the progress we made from the beginning.As I created other pieces of media to do with our film, my film poster for example I used other programs to make this, I used Photoshop frequently throughout this project mainly in the production of head-shots, production company logo, film poster and, film review whilst also using Microsoft Word to write my basic film review too. I wanted my head/character shots to get across some of the personality shown in the film. We each took character shots in a photography studio using the lights to get dramatic effects, to take these images we used a Canon 500D. After uploading our images I chose my favorite shots. For each character I chose images in which they were looking down the lens as I thought this made them more intense. Each image I edited in a similar way, they all have a black background with very prominent shadow casting parts of their faces into darkness.
I was happy with the results of these images, as an added extra I put the character names at the bottom on the images, I chose an old type writer type font which I felt made them link back to the genre and make them look almost like police head-shots making them all seem slightly guilty before even watching the film.
Also with my understanding of film reviews through my research on the Empire website I was able to make a more realistic looking and sounding review. I used both Photoshop and Microsoft Word in the creation of this as I wrote the actual review in Word then copied it over to Photoshop where I rearranged and formatted it. I was able to make it quite individual and make my own template which was based on the Empire one with quite a few similarities, but I did this as they worked well and looked good. It is also made the review simple to read and the clear headlines tells you clearly what you need to know. Also by adding in my own touches I made relevant and up to date.
I also recorded all of my progress and work on Blogger clearly showing the stages in making the film, I was able to inset images and films aiding my research and development within the task.
No comments:
Post a Comment