Evaluation! :)

We had certain questions that we we asked to answer about our project in our evaluation:

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

We decided as a group from the beginning that we were going to make a really conventional authentic film noir movie because we believed that this type of movie was the most effective towards an audience, and they could really pick out the interesting pieces of the film. We chose to set the film in black and white because we wanted to make the film look as if it was shot and made in that time period, and not just a copy of what a film back then might have looked like – most of the films from this time period were straight after the tragedies of the war, meaning that
cynical views, death and corruption was a hot topic of that time. We really focused on films like ‘Double Indemnity’ because it had inspired us a great deal in the planning stage, we tried to use some of the same conventions they had, however obviously couldn’t add them all because we had to work with an approximate time limit of about five minutes, therefore had to keep it simple –simple story line (so the audience could know what is going on) and simple conventions (because if we added too many in we felt that the film might seem cluttered and it would draw the audience’s attention away from what was actually going on in the film. The characters presentation was a main point that we wanted to make sure was true to all of the conventions; both men were wearing suits, this is because they were both business men and in those days if a man wanted to look professional he would wear a suit – we have seen this exact look in such movies we have studied like Double Indemnity, The Black Dahlia and L.A. confidential, all the detectives/main male characters would wear suits and hats exactly like our Detective Carter (grey suits, white shirts, black ties, black shoes and a hat) we made sure that it all matched up, also like said in a previous post we looked deeper into this character before choosing the right actor the present him: He had to be tall, not fat, clean shaven, short hair etc – this is because we knew this
character would be the main focus of the piece and therefore had to be the most conventional. Our mob boss, Bobby Dents, also looked similar – short hair, well dressed, clean shaven because we wanted to show him as almost the same type of person as the detective, just on the other side of the law. Our femme fatale was another extremely conventional character, we wanted her to be a mix between Phyllis from Double Indemnity and Laura from Brick – she needed to be a strong powerful woman, who seduced men to get her own way. At the beginning the first shot was her head before she entered the room, the first thing an audience would notice is her red lips and big curls, this would have been very suggestive in those days, we took inspiration from Phyllis and teamed it with pale clothing (to overall signify innocence with a hidden passion and lust.
Later on as her secrets and mysteries are reveals she changes to red, first showing a sexual power she has over the other characters, but also warning the audience as they realise that she is the dangerous character. In that era of America women were becoming a lot more powerful and independent, Bonnie Kensington would have fit right in and although deviant, many women of that era would have probably idolised her to being able to fool the men and get her own way – the amount of fur she wears throughout the movie also signifies wealth and power, both of which she has by the end of the film - this also challenges the male gaze theory that women in movies are powerless and 'needing to be rescued' because while our femme fatale pretends to adopt this role at first (asking the detective for help) we soon realise that she is actually the one is control of the situation and have played both men off of each other. We decided to challenge a few of the basic conventions in the editing stage, the main thing we wanted to work on was making sure people understood that the film was being told as a flashback, although conventional to have the male characters voice over parts of the movie, when watch double indemnity we were at first confused as to what was going on – we do not have time for our audience to be confused in our five minute piece therefore we added the effect ‘ripple’ to show it going into, and coming back out of the flashback. Unfortunately we a breaking a few conventions of that time period as they would probably not have had undated effects like ‘ripple’ in those days, however we felt that our film needed this to be really understood. Another thing about our movie that is not so conventional is the music in places, for example the office scene (scene five) I believe that we could have made this music slightly more time period accurate, as I believe electric instruments were used/that hadn’t been invented yet, and therefore something slightly more classical could have really given this scene the music edge like the first scene and the restaurant scene. We also wanted to make sure that (like most films of the time) it challenged Torodov's narrative theory, meaning that we did not want a restoration of the state of equilibrium - because films of this genre were made to have sad/unhappy endings and we wanted our film to be the same.

• How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I really like the combination between my main products and ancillary texts, i chose to design a poster for the film for one, and then chose to do a film review. The poster at first was an interesting task, all members of our group decided to have a go at designing their own poster, some of us in the group have obvious better skills on the software photo shop that we decided to use - the best one of us is Toby which we realised right away as he is a photography student and therefore uses it all the time. To get a good understanding of posters i looked and analysed a few from both films Ive seen and films i haven't to get a view of how a poster really sets the audience up for the film. Then we all had a go at producing our own posters, to really help myself i not only analysed my own poster, i analysed posters made by Antonia and Toby to make sure we all had the same feelings about what we wanted the poster to look like and how we wanted our film represented (The analysis is all the the blog post below on what i like and dislike about the posters) - i also added a practice poster of mine that i used to get a feeling of how i wanted the film poster portrayed, this helped me with the colours and photos i might want to use for my final poster. My final poster really indicated what the film was about, as the film was in black and white i thought that it was only natural that the poster was too - however the 'Lustful' part is in red in both the film and the poster which really brings them together nicely. However if i was to do my poster again i would probably try and make it less cluttered as i believe there is too much writing on it. Putting the poster into modern day settings ways also really interesting, i decided to put my poster on a train station advertisement board and a bus stop advertisement section, these may have been better if i could have used proper photo editing software but i was on my home computer so had to make do with the bare minimum. As an after thought i also decided to tweak one of Toby's posters and then edit it onto a billboard which i also like the look of, it is very similar to the Spanish poster of Black Dahlia that i analysed. After all of this i decided to make a second selection of posters because i really believe that the poster that i produced didn't show my capabilities within this section to their highest form, therefore i decided to make a selection of posters using the software photo shop to create professional looking film posters for our movie...and then added a few of them to a bus stop.

My Other ancillary product was a film review, i first wanted to do a bit of research so i knew what to add into my reviews - the main website i looked at was the website for Empire magazine which was perfect. I decided to create my own web pages, from the made up site called 'ellenbradfordreviews.co.uk', which made each review look like it had been selected from a list on a previous page - i analysed the formatting stage on a previous post. I decided to first do a film review for a classic film noir movie 'Double Indemnity' and then a slightly more modern neo noir movie 'Brick' this gave me practising time, letting me put my own flavour on the writing (plot and review sections) and adding links to ratings/videos/other pages/twitter and having a star rating, then all the film information and poster. (All analysed on a previous post) Then i went on to review our own film noir, this gave me a chance to critique my own work and let the audience pick up on points they might have missed - I think this is an extra bonus to the film because an audience could watch the film, read my review but also have their own thoughts about it, so it really makes them think.

• What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We had lots of very helpful feedback from a variety of audience members, our YouTube video has had over 105 hits! That's a lot of views and therefore a lot of people to help us view their comments. Both good and negative comments help us, we know that the film isn't perfect but we really want to see the views of people that haven't done all the research, planning and seeing it take form step by step. I am going to list some of the main pieces of critical feedback (as this helps us the most) and then what we learned from it :

1. Sound of the female actors - they couldn't be heard a well as the male actors, so some key lines may have been missed.
We realised in some places you couldn't hear the girls speaking, especially the scene between Scarlett and Carter on the doorstep - this is mainly because Antonia had a sleeping baby in the house behind her so didn't want to make too much noise, in the post production process we attempted to make it audible by turning the volume up on that specific clip, however because we were filming outside it makes a really loud back ground noise. In future we would pick a location where we could be as loud as we needed to, so we could shout if we even wanted too. This was the same in the office at the start, the camera picks up Carters voice well but not the softer voice of Bonnie.
2. Scene one was a bit jumpy, and the characters were out of the frame at some points.
Unfortunately we didn't have much space to work with so a lot of our footage we just couldn't use, therefore when it came to the editing stage we were limited to what we had to edit into place. This has to be one of my least favourite scenes because it is so jumpy, though personally there's not much i can do because i wasn't the person shooting. If i did have to do it again i would opt out of being one of the main characters because then i could have much more input of the camerawork of all the scenes and not just the ones I'm not in - then i could have worked with my two group members to get that perfect shot, even though we were rushed for time on the day and the office was too small for what we wanted but we made do and did the best we could.
3. Restaurant and doorstep scene was at night, yet it was obvious that the office scene (scene five) was filmed in the day time.
This was totally our fault, unfortunately we couldn't get the office at night so we had to make do with having it in the day time. What we should of done was darkened the picture in the editing stage, which we had planned to do at first, but in the rush to get it finished at the end we forgot about it and left it how it was filmed. We should have planned all the editing tools that we will have needed to do before editing so we could tick everything off to make sure we didn't forget anything.

4. It could have been a lot better with a better camera.
We can easily see that this is true, at times the camera we were using goes out of focus which loses the energy of the film. Also we used about three different camera overall, one of which broke meaning that we lost everything we had filmed on there so it was a bit of a disaster! If i was going to do it again i think we should have got the best camera we could find to make it seem a lot more professional and realistic.
5. You can have used a few more interesting angles.
We wish we had, usually the reason we didn't was because we were under time constraints at every location we went too, also we couldn't put too many in because it may have made the film even longer! I wish we had used some more interesting angles however the main scenes that i personally shot was the doorstep scene, and Bobby's office scene - i put a lot of work into those two scenes on the filming and editing side of things (with Antonia) and I'm really pleased how it came out.
However we also did get a lot of amazing feedback; with people saying that they loved the characters, the setting and storyline. Also the costumes were a huge hit, which is nice to hear as we put a lot of time into it. We also had a lot of nice comments on the editing, saying one scene flowed nicely into the next, especially the doorstep scene where Carter walks from behind the camera and down the path - with the camera positioned very close to the floor. Also there were some nice comments on the acting, especially about Ed and Ben, the accents were apparently spot on and the whole film really felt like the 1950's era, which is exact;y what we wanted so we are very happy with those comments.

• How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The main media we used was previous film noir movies that were professionally made, we watched these in class but I also researched them online so i could get a complete understanding of what was going on and what conventions they were using. These films really inspired us as film makers to see how directors have put these together, many film names are mentioned throughout my blog as i show which inspired me to do which sections. Directors like Rian Johnson of the film 'Brick' was really interesting to research, as normally you don't notice the amounts of work actually put into just once scene until you analyse it completely and then try and make your own. The characters and the storyline were always a big part of the film for me, I think that is why we focused on the film Double indemnity so much - because there is a relatively simple story line, and each character is strong. We chose to give each of our own characters an analysis and a back story, just so we knew what we were doing with each character when it came to writing the script and filming. Researching online also gave me little details about some of the movies that i didn't notice before, it really came to me that the details were the most important, that's why i insisted on all the archaic props (which were mostly supplied by me or the props cupboard) because the audience really has to believe where and when the story is taking place for it to be real.
Planning came down to our story boards, we each took a section: Antonia - first office scene to outside the restaurant scene, Me - doorstep scene to just after the gunfight, Toby - end of gunfight to the end...we all worked on the story boards for our sections adding in details about the lighting, camera angles and music etc - then we each scripted our sections, then all reviewed each others scripts to make sure we were all happy with everything.
Creating the film and editing it was a lot of our own inspiration with hints from certain movies, and i really think it shows the authentic conventional nature that we were so desperate to achieve. We used the Mac computer software Final cut to edit the video, this was good as it is semi-professional software - editing was hard because we didn't know where to begin, between editing clips, transitions, effects, lighting, colour, adding text, music, sound effects, voice overs (there was a lot we had to do using this software and not a lot of time to do it in) - and for photo editing we used photo shop on the schools CS3 computers. The ancillary products also needed a lot of media research, I had seen many film posters on bill boards and train stations, however i thought it best to research and analyse specifically film noir based poster to get a dark feel to it and then set about creating my own. The film reviews again took a lot of online research, going on to different film review based website to see what kinds of language they used and what information they added which really helped me a lot when creating and writing my own ones. Unfortunately as i was at home i could use photo shop to produce a magazine page film review, which is what i originally want to do - however i overcame this by spending a lot of time on Microsoft word and producing the web pages on there, which took a long time to achieve but at the end of the day i am very happy with it.
Putting the movie online was relatively easy for me, I Uploaded it onto YouTube and within a couple of minutes (more like an hour) the film was able to be watched by anyone in the whole world with Internet access, this is an amazing achievement and this kind of 'we media' also helped us out in the feedback stage. I advertised our film to be watched on both my face book (tagging both other members of the film group) and my personal tumblr blog, we just wanted to get as much feedback as possible which we got. We got likes on both the face book video and YouTube video and comments on both which really helped, also it meant we could log onto any computer and show people our video to get extra feedback - this is so much better than how the Internet used to be as our video is now everlasting and an unlimited amount of people can see it completely free and without the need of disks! Finally the last piece of media technology i used was this blog to document all my work which has been very useful as i can change things, yet still have everything in chronological order.
Conclusion:
In conclusion i am very happy with my blog and film, i do believe there is a lot we could have changed, mainly within the filming section - however I'm afraid that we did lack team work, meaning that a one of our team members did not keep up, and work as hard/up to scratch as the other members of our team (this has also been mentioned by the actors and teachers who helped us.). Me and Antonia did most of this movie and worked extremely hard, practically carrying Toby (who only got involved in the photo editing side of the coursework) - We did all the planning, scripting, filming and editing...at all points we tried to get Toby involved, unfortunately he did just not seem interested and lacked enthusiasm (sometimes not even turning up to filming shoots) - I have been advised to be totally truthful about the work ethic of our team members, and i believe that me and Antonia worked extremely hard and well together to produce almost everything - While Toby didn't help out much. However as a pair Me and Antonia produced some amazing work and i am really pleased with how it all came together.