Tuesday, 14 April 2015
Evaluation Question 3
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
How did we respond to the brief?
The brief was to create a short 5 minute film of any genre. Firstly, we as a group we decided that we were going to make a psychological thriller. We put together a short story idea and a synopsis of the story and put it to a range of possible target audiences. This is the synopsis they were given and what the participants said.
Our synopsis
Damian and Lily are in a relationship.
Damian wakes up in a strange place (psychological hospital) and sees a picture of himself and lily. Clip then goes into the memory of being happy in a park. Then the memory fades out and returns to the hospital room. Damian then goes in search of his love Lily and walks around the hospital. When Damian cant find Lily he starts to panic and in doing so remembers the time they were in a restaurant, this sends Damian into a quick edited in more depth search for Lily. In some of the clips lily appears faded and distant. Then it fades into another memory yet this one shows the floors in their relationship as they are fighting. This memory shows the start of the progressive violence between the couple. Then it goes back to the present time when Damian catches up with Lily. She tells him that he killed her but he doesn't believe it. Lily shows him a file (a patient record) that belongs to the hospital that explains everything that happened. He breaks down and in comes Dr Luna who works at the hospital she sends Damian back to his room. during the time it takes him to get back to his room the flashback that shows the audience exactly what happened to Lily appears. This scene is going to be quite violent as Damian beats Lily to death. The guilt then ways upon Damian and when he gets back to his room he hangs himself. The end shot will be of either his still body or of the photograph from when Damian and Lily were happy.
As you can see there was a large age range between some of the people who read our synopsis. This was so that we were able to see who our story might appeal more to and if there was anything else we could do to make our film appeal to those who were not so interested in the story.
Rough Cut
From the results of our questionnaire we found out that many people who saw our film didn't understand why some of the scene were in pink. We choose to have this one scene in pink as we thought it would represent Damian's and Lily`s love for each other more but, the audience didn't think this. They said in our questionnaire results take it would make more sense if all the memory scenes were in the same effect and of the same contrast. Here are the results from the questionnaire, as you can see most of the people we asked thought that this rough cut should be a 12/12A and many believed that they would find it on Netflix. As most of the people we asked were students and were between the age of 17-20 we decided that our target audience would be for over 15`s as, we believed it would appeal to this audience.
When we sent out our questionnaire to find out what our target audience thought about our rough cut we were hoping for more responses. Unfortunately we only got 5 responses but, even though there is only a few we were still able to see trends forming of how many of the audience like the storyline idea but, when we were talking to them they didn't really understand the reason for the pink scene.
Finished Film
This is the questionnaire that we put to the audience and there responses. We decided not to ask too many questions as we know that people do not filling in questionnaires. The questions we asked the audience were to see if our film appealed to our target audience and to see if they actually liked The Forgotten Truth and if not what we could improve on.
Questionnaire for the film poster and radio trailer.
Here is the questionnaire that we sent out on Facebook so that we were able to see what the audience thought of our film poster and radio trailer and how they came together. We wanted to know if there was anything that we could change to make these texts appeal more to our target audience. We received 10 responses to the questionnaire and all though this is many it is enough to be able to make a judgment on whether the audience like the texts our not. We did have some problems though with the questionnaire as some of the results didn't show up. For example look at Liam Fox`s results, only his name and occupation showed up and we do not know why this is.
We received a range of ages which is good as this allowed us to see if the poster and trailer appealed not only to our target audience of 15 + but to older generations for example people between the ages of 21 and 31+.
Only on person said that the poster didn't appeal to them but, that was because they prefer other types of film genres. Most of our potential audience thought that they both worked very well together and liked how the poster was on the radio trailer and for those that had seen the film they liked how the image is actually taken from a scene in the film. They also liked how the poster was very informative as it had all the necessary classification ratings on it and also who produced it and who distrusted the film.
Many people who answered our finished film questionnaire rated it either 4/5 (23%) or 5/5(69%) and said that there wasn't anything they would change however, there was some suggestions to have more dialogue on the film itself so that there would be more interaction between the characters and others thought, that there could have been a larger range of music to set the mood in the film.
As you can see from this pie chart 100% of our audience in our audience feedback said that they liked our film and also 100% of our audience said that they understood the storyline which is a large achievement as, when we let our audience watch our rough cut many of them were confused by the story.
Most of our audience after viewing the rough cut of The Forgotten Truth 60% of the audience thought that our film would only have an age rating of 12. This is why to start with we decided that our film would be a 12A. However, after the audience had viewed the finished version of The Forgotten Truth 73% of the audience thought that our film was appropriate for 15+. This is why we changed our age rating to suit the audience.
Audience Research
During the pre-production stages of the making of The Forgotten Truth we changed our film certificate age from a 12A to a 15 As we believed that it had too much violent context in it for 12 year olds even if accompanied by an adult. I believe that our film could be interpreted in many different ways, from the love that turns to rage to, a man who has a weakness.
The younger people who have watched our film understand the meaning behind it. We wanted to get across to the audience that not all relationships are easy as there will always be ups and downs but, also to let people know that they can walk away before something bad happens. For example, in our film Damian and Lily are happy together at the beginning but, as the film progresses he turns violent towards her and if someone is in that situation (even if the roles are reversed) they have the opportunity to leave before its too late. Also, we wanted to show that when you have done something you truly regret (like Damian did when he killed Lily) then that will way on the other person and eventually can cause them to take there own life to satisfy themselves that they have paid the ultimate price for what they have done.
We were influence by situations like this as on the news recently there has been more and more people committing suicide or have been found to be abused or beaten. The Forgotten Truth was created in a way to help raise awareness of this problem.
Music on The Forgotten Truth
The music on our film was very important to get right as, it would help to enforce the mood/ emotion that the characters are feeling onto the audience. During the making of The Forgotten Truth we did some trial and error when it came to the music as at the time we did not know what our voice over was going to include. On the rough cut of The Forgotten Truth there is a variety of different songs as at the time we could not find one that fitted well as background music throughout the film. The way that we edited our film to fit the music also helps to show the passages in time. Conclusion
Overall I would say that as a group we responded well to the brief and create a piece of media text that our target audience enjoyed. Even though we had to change a lot of our film to make our audience be able to understand it, it was worth it to develop an end product that successfully appeals to our target audience.
Sunday, 12 April 2015
Friday, 10 April 2015
Evaluation Part 1
In what
ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of
real media products?
For our film, The Forgotten Truth, we chose the genre of psychological thriller which takes elements from Thriller films and adds Psychological elements to them, in our films case it touches on mental illness. A common convention of this genre which is reflected in our film is non-linear plots, an example of this would be The Sixth Sense, with the audience finding out at the end of the film that Dr. Crowe has been dead all along. We implemented this narrative in our film with the audience seeing flashbacks of Damian and Lily's past relationship, but as the film goes on it is revealed that Damian killed his wife and is seeing mere visions of her, so in terms of continuity our film could be seen as conventional within its genre. In terms of technical continuity, another convention within the Thriller genre is fast paced, action scenes, and again, our film includes jump cuts short shot lengths in certain scenes, we used this editing technique in order to reflect Damian's desperation and anger. We also stuck to the conventional 180 degree rule in our shots in order to avoid confusing our audience, and adhered to the 30 degree rule. We made sure to include a track in zoom out shot of Damian just before the flashback scenes in order to keep good continuity, we may have confused our audience with a sudden transition from the present to the past without this 'transition' shot. Our match on action shots were also filmed correctly to ensure good continuity. 
In terms of content our film is very reflective of it's genre. Our film contains a strong male lead character and a subservient female character. However, in most conventional thrillers the lead male characters are the protagonist whereas in our film Damian has a sort of anti-hero role and then as the film reaches its end you realise that he was in fact the antagonist of the story, which is a move away from the conventional thriller narrative of the male hero. We did however include a female doctor which subverts the traditional view of male doctors and female nurses. The plot line is also reflective of the genre with it being non-linear, examples of similar films to ours which implement no-linear plot lines are The Sixth Sense and Shutter Island.
Our film contains a pastiche to American History X, with the flashbacks being in unsaturated black and white to represent past memories. We used this technique first and foremost to differentiate the past and present, however, we thought this would be a good way to express Damian's disconnection with his past and present the images in a hazy, illusory way. We also used a voiceover which is a pastiche to Fight Club. This film also contains psychological elements, so we took this idea and used it to help bring Damian to life and tell his story from his point of view, before the actual events that took place in our film were revealed. 
The main audience pleasure that our film provides is emotional pleasure from seeing the relationship between Damian and Lily go from seemingly loving to abusive and eventually Damian killing Lily. We wanted this to come across as heart wrenching and really tap into the audience's emotions, and I think we achieved this, with reference to Richard Dyer's theory of entertainment stating that 'intensity' being vital for audience satisfaction, I believe our film achieved great emotional intensity. I believe our film relates to two more elements of this theory, community and transparency. We achieved a sense of community by having Damian and Lily being in a romantic relationship. In terms of transparency the audience are kept in the dark slightly about Damian's intentions but as the film goes on the audience do encounter a high level of transparency as Damian is revealed to have been certified insane.
We took influences from several films during the making of The Forgotten Truth. Fight Club provided inspiration for the voice over, American History X for the flash backs and Shutter Island for the nonlinear storyline, despite this our film does manage to stay original and true to its genre.
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