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!

Our First Ideas

Hello!

We have started thinking about our first preliminary Task! Here are our first ideas:

Our plot is preparing for a Zombie Apocalypse. We want the style to be like a documentary where we see conversations about preparing for the zombie apocalypse that will soon be taking place. We think this style will be good as it will enable us to do all needed shots and also show our skill by editing text over the footage.

Our first thoughts were to do it out of school as we thought it would be difficult doing it inside school, however we then changed our mind and decided that doing it inside school will be a lot easier. We had some difficulty thinking about how we will keep it serious inside a school but we came up with an idea to use the conference room. We will move all chairs and just have two at the opposite ends of the table.

The people who will be in this video are Ellie Bacon, Beth Parry and Chloe Hill. Ellie Bacon will feature as The Head Director of Health and Safety, she will be the main character and will be used for match on action shots when walking to a meeting. Beth Parry will be the Prime Minister of England’s sectary and will be having a meeting with Ellie. Chloe Hill will feature as the documentary reporter and will interview Ellie.

Settings used: Math stairs, Buckingham lay-by, Conference room, Staff corridors.

See you soon!