Evaluation So Far - Final Film

Hello!

We have completed the evaluation of our progress and planning so far. To do this we split it down in to three questions that we asked ourselves. 1. "What did you learn?" 2. "What surprised you?" 3. "How will you use this in your production". Here is our response:

Part 1 - What we learnt: 

The first thing we learnt was that females are more likely to watch a tragedy drama, therefore we only listened to what the females were saying which changed our plans and ideas dramatically.

We learnt that most people we interviewed would prefer a female main character. However, two people said male, therefore we will include a few male characters in the main story line, and base it around the female. Also, out of the people we surveyed, 70% said they wanted a teenager to be a main character. Therefore we will definitely make the main character a teenager. We will also include a victim and a prisoner as they had 10% votes each and we are able to include these characters.

Also, we learnt that the people we interviewed all wanted the film to be set in a small town that’s a real life experience. We think that this would be a good setting because a tragedy drama has to build sympathy for the viewers. Therefore, we are happy with the setting that the audience want.

When we surveyed people, we included the question “What would you prefer the storyline to focus on in a drama film?” The responses were quite equal apart from one, crime solving. 40% chose suicide, 30% said prison and 25% said murder. Therefore, we will include all of these aspects in our storyline, making suicide the main aspect that the story is based around.

We learnt that most of the people we interviewed and spoke to only go to the cinema once of twice a month. This is mostly because of the expense and the other options that there now are such as free streaming. To get around this we will not put our film through the cinema. Instead, we will release it on DVD as a limited edition for a month to get our viewers hooked and make them go out and buy it. Then, after another month we will release it on to free streaming companies.

The last things we learnt is that drama is a very popular genre with our audience. And in drama, tragedy is the favourite subgenre, which is a massive relief.

Part 2 - What surprised us:

The biggest surprise to us is our audience’s cinema habits. We all enjoy going to the cinema and think that once or twice a month was surprising.

The other surprise we had was again, the target audience. We were set on males and had written up a ‘Target Audience Profile’ that we thought was perfect for our movie. However, it just shows how important research is because we were totally wrong! It seems that females would prefer our film much more! Now we look back over our film ideas, this makes sense. In our interviews and questionnaire we found that females wanted it set in a real life situation with a female main character their age. This is because females are much more effected with emotions and therefore would be much more interested in a dramatic, saddening tragic film where they can place themselves as the character and be moved by the film. It is understandable that females and much more likely to want to be moved by a film than males.

Part 3 - How we will use this in our production:

The first thing we changed is our target market, originally we thought males would be more likely to watch a tragedy drama because although they don’t get involved in every day drama as much as females, they prefer eery films that involve a big blow. However, we found out that females would be more likely to watch them as they prefer sad films and it would affect them more.

The second change is our male character. We had planned from the start to have a female character. However, when it came to surveying our audience, although females got the most votes, a male main character was also popular among a particular group of people. As film producers, we want to ensure we suit as much as the female gender as possible. Therefore, we decided to keep our main character as a female, however we have made the male character more of a big character who plays more alongside the main female character and is featured a lot in the film and is a huge part of the story line.

The final main change we have made is the plot line. We originally wanted the plot to be about a prison break. However, when surveying and interviewing our audience, we could that many of them would prefer things like murder and suicide and much deeper things. Therefore, we decided that we would keep a prison break as a part of the story line, however focus it around suicide and incorporate murder. This has dramatically changed our plot line. 

Our next step is create a new Target Audience Profile for our new and improved target audience: females!

See you soon!

Interviews

Hello!

We have recently done some interviews to find out about our audience and what they want. The first set back we had was that we originally planned for our target audience to be males. The reason we thought this is because we thought males would be the gendre that's more likely to go and watch a deep film that's saddening and exciting. We even wrote up a 'Target Market Profile' which you can see here:

James is a 20 year old Christian man. He lives on campus in a room with his friend Ollie at Warwick University studying Business. He came here from Milton Keynes college where he studied 4 A-Levels: Business, Media, English and PE. He has a part time job in Hugo Boss, working three evenings a week. He is currently single and enjoying University life although is interested in females.

 James spends most of his days revising, however he allows himself time to hang out with his friends and have some time to himself. He goes home every other weekend to visit his family in Milton Keynes. His family is large and are very family orientated, caring a lot for each other. This is very important to James and he ensures he always has time for them. When he is in Warwick and has spare days, he enjoys spending time with his friends. They often go out in Warwick in the day to do activities such as shopping, going to the cinema and going to the football and basketball ground near by. He hates antisocial people and loves a bit of drama and gossip. He likes to think of himself as a fashionable modern guy. At night time, he often goes out for a meal with his friends, usually picking burgers, steak, ribs and chicken meals with salad side orders. He never goes for, fish, vegetables, lasagne and pasta meals.

 In 10 years time, James hopes to be high up in a retail business, preferably selling cars. His goals are to climb up in a retail business to eventually become the boss and then start his own business. His dreams outside work are to make a lot of money and own his favourite car, an Aston Martin. He also would like to do a bit of travelling when he makes his money, and take his family on a trip round Europe. His family means a lot to him and therefore it is important that he shares his hopeful fortune with them and likes to treat them. He would like to move out of his family home after University to his own flat near Milton Keynes as he doesn’t want to live too far from his family.  When he has a flat and a job, he wants to find a girlfriend and settle down, hopefully buying a house together and going on to get married and having two or three children. It is very important to him that he makes a family of his own and provides to them.

 James has a TV in his flat and loves to watch all the big programmes. His current favourite’s are The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Homeland and Bones. He also loves films and takes recent trips to the cinema, trying to see all of the currents films with his friends. However, his favourite genre is drama and action. He loves films about families as they suit him for all genres. In happy films, it makes him like it as he is a family orientated person and so he enjoys watching happy families, and in sad or scary films he enjoys it because it gives him the sympathy and fright even more as he thinks about his own family. He loves the actors Matt Damon and always sees the films he is in. He also follows the director Joel Coen and loves his work. In terms of music, he is very up to date. He follows the charts and his favourite artist is Avicii. He spends a lot of time with his headphones in when doing work, at work, walking to trains ect. 

However, when it came to interviews, we realised that we had made a mistake. We took a group of three boys and showed them the trailer to a tragedy drama; "Titanic". We then asked them some questions about what they had seen and they made it quite obvious that they would not go and watch a film like this. What we found interesting is that one of the males we interviewed said "It reminds me of the films my girlfriend makes me watch". This was a big milestone in our planning. We then chose three females that recently took part in our questionnaire  their response was a lot better. We played them the trailer, then played it again with the sound on mute, while asking them some questions. While they watched through the clip again and again, they gave us feedback to our questions, some of the answers remaining the same from their answers in the questionnaire. I will insert their interview here:

We then took two groups of two girls and a group of one girl and interviewed them. We them edited these together showing a variety of different answers. We feel that the response was again, vey positive. You can see their interviews here:

Our next step is to evaluate our progress and planning so far and review the changes we need to make. I hope to get this up on the blog very soon.

See you soon!

Questionnaire Results

Hello!

A very exciting day today, we have had our questionnaire results back! We gave our questionnaires out to 20 people and luckily got all 20 back. These people ranged from the age of 16-60 which is our target market. We chose this age range because although it's very large, we want our film to be suitable for most ages. We chose to start at 16 because we feel that this is the age where people are able to start coping with emotions and tragedy films can be hard to cope with in some cases as they can be very upsetting and deep. We ended at 60 because we think the older generation are more interested in history and factual films as they like to keep their brains active and learn something from the film.

After getting our results back we put each question in to different graphs to show the information. From this, we decided which answer we would go for and use for our film. Once chosen, we analysed the results and our choices in a quick paragraph next to each graph. I will now insert pictures of this work on to the blog!

See you soon!

Different Genres

Hello!

Today we looked at genres! We are starting to think about our final task and therefore need to know our choice of genres.Before this lesson I only knew the basic genres, for example horror and comedy. However, I did not know how many genres there are and how many sub-genres there are!

Firstly, we were all put in pairs and given a genre that we had to go away and make a presentation on and then present it to the class - mine was RomCom. The others given out were: Slasher, Psychological Thriller, Black Comedy, Crime Thriller, Spoof Movies and Supernatural Horror. In our presentations we had to include information about the origin, the narrative, the setting, the characters, the popular camera shots and the mise-en-scene. 

We then presented them to each other and took notes. I will now attach pictures of my notes! (There's  a lot. You've been warned!) - Enjoy

See you soon!

First Ideas

Hello!

Today we started looking into our final project! Firstly, we had to choose a genre. I found it extremely hard to choose a genre because there are so many but I wanted to choose one that I knew we could make look good and effective with the sources and knowledge we had.

At first my group decided on gang crime. However, we didn't want to make it serious, we wanted to make it a comedy. Our first ideas were to have the opening credits (which we have to film) getting to know the characters. Our storyline would be based on a mafia between two gangs after one of the character's from the main gang stole the other gang's dog. However, we knew that this would not show our full potential and decided that the genre of gang crime comedy was not very clear and so we went back to looking at genres.

We then looked into drama, however we knew that drama was too much of a broad genre. So we looked into sub-genres of drama and found a long list of them, but still couldn't chose. Therefore, we decided to create a questionnaire and send it round to see what our audience would want. we chose some sub genres and then came up with some more questions that we would need the answers to. We will be sending them round once we have printed them out.

I will now attach a picture of our questionnaire!

See you soon!

Preliminary Task Evaluation

We had great fun making it but of course had some troubles along the way! Here is the evaluation of our task:

I think our main strength is teamwork. We each had our own job in the group and worked well together, helping each other and being loyal to the group by completing the jobs we had to do. I was the camera operator and editor, this meant I had to arrange all of the filming and then put all the clips together to edit the film. I think the hardest part of this was putting the sound effects on. It was a struggle to put edit the sound effects into the film as once I had chosen them, I had to put them into the film so that the sound matched the action. This was tricky because I had to get it just right otherwise it was obviously edited, and this wasn't the look I was going for. Another thing that I found surprisingly difficult was the timeframe. We all planned what we were going to do before going out and doing it, however I had no idea how long it would take us to film all the clips. This is because we needed each clip to be perfect before it could be used, therefore we had to take at least 15 recordings of each shot, which took a very long time!
Another strength is the shots used, we have included Match On Action, Shot Reverse Shot, 180 Degree Rule and Over The Shoulder shots, all used to effect. We use Shot Revers Shot along with 180 Degree Rule for the conversation in our product between Ellie and Beth. We also used Match On Action through pretty much the whole thing, when Ellie is walking to the meeting there are match on actions of her going through doors and up lifts and after the meeting there are match on action shots of her walking down the stairs.

I think our main weakness was the thought process in the planning. Although most of the planning went well, we originally wanted it all to be in a documentary style, however we did not realise how much the environmental noises would effect this. When we tried to film as a documentary, we listened back on some of the clips and realised the amount of noise that was being caused by things such as wind, other people talking, the microphone being fuzzy and more. Our first thoughts were to record the voices separate from the video and edit them in but then we decided that this would be very tricky and as it was our first task, we probably would have struggled with this much editing. Therefore, we put the idea of a documentary on hold and filmed the main chunk as a normal film. This allowed us to edit the sound out and put sound effects in such as doors closing and lifts working, then the little speech that was in the film was inside and so the noise distractions were not too bad. Then we put in our documentary idea at the end as a little add on. We think that this worked really well in the end because the noise distractions (the wind) in the documentary did not sound too bad as it actually fitted in with the documentary style. However, we are still glad we did not do this the whole was through as the distraction noises would have been too much.

Another change we had to make was one of our settings which was Buckingham lay-by. At the time of filming, this lay-by was full and therefore impossible to film walking in! Therefore, we moved to right outside the school, meaning Ellie had to walk round a slight corner and then up the steps, which wasn't too much of a problem in the end.

Final Product!

Hello!

We are glad to finally be able to present our final product to you. An evaluation of the product will be up soon. To view just go to the evaluation tag at the top of my blog!

See you soon!