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Thursday, 3 May 2012
Evaluation
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Winston Churchill once said "Who is the true fool, the Fool himself or the men that follow him?". Judging by this quote I feel like a class A fool because what I have essentially done with my production is take the ideas of a controversial Director/Writer and water them down. Tarantino has in a sense created his own genre of film with its own forms and conventions; whether it be the gangster drama of 'Pulp Fiction' or the western horror of 'Dusk 'til Dawn' all of his films are unique to his style and you can tell one of his films immediately upon seeing it. With my production I took these conventions and re-invisioned them so that they appeal to a wider audience. Below are what I call the four Tarantino signatures and how I have used/manipulated them:
How Effective Is the combination of your main product and your ancillary texts?
Truthfully, the main source of synergy came from the combination of the Poster with the main production. And in my opinion, the combination of these two is extremely effective. With my poster I tried to capture the genre very simply. I did this through researching posters from similar style films such as 'Reservoir Dogs'. The photographic editing on the vast array of posters for this film showed me exactly what I needed to do so I applied the same technique to my own photograph of the protagonist. However I also wanted to represent that it is a futuristic film and has moved on from this 90's gangster film style. So I decided to do something a bit different, I tried thinking of landscape film posters, I couldn't think of any unless they were on Buses or Billboards. So, I decided I wanted to be different and do my poster horizontally. I created the image and added the effect, I then used this as the background. It's clear that the font I use on the poster is not the same I use in the film; this is because I wanted the poster to be symbolic of the film. The distorted font of the title is subtly meant to reflect the crumbling of society in this hyperreal world. Finally after creating the poster I used Google to find landscaper posters... Turns out there are quite a few. On the other hand, it was pleasing to find that several were similar to my own design, this convinced me that I had done a professional job of creating and designing the poster. With the magazine review however I feel that it is hard to connect this task to the film itself. However, the style of magazine which I have chosen to review it in gives the reader an insight into the target audience as it must be the same as the magazine's target audience, otherwise why would they bother reviewing it? The informal style along with the design elements (blood splatter etc.) shows the genre and that the film targets a wide range of audiences.
What have you learnt from your audience's feedback?
I collected my audience feedback via Facebook, Tumblr and Youtube; which proved to be a critical part of my process. I put up my original draft of the story/script and had people comment on it. I found that several people thought the non-linear structure I had originally perceived, was far too complex to accurately portray in a short film. If it weren't for the few people that were honest enough to tell me this my film probably wouldn't have come out as well as I feel it has. After the production was completed I released the film via Youtube & Facebook and I held a public viewing in my 6th form common room. The feedback I have been given so far all seems to be of a positive nature. I am very pleased with the fact so many people have watched the film and no-one has mentioned the films length as it is quite long for a short; it seems to however be gripping people's attentions so that they do not notice. I also believe I owe the films gripping nature to some fellow students who gave me the feedback to remove a few connecting scenes, this removed an element of waiting between scenes which thinking back on may have bored the audience. Overall I have learnt that the mass opinion tends to be the correct opinion. Below I have posted a few quotes from the feedback I have received:
"Nice one lad."
"Not a lot has happened story wise, but I really like the moral message."
"Should we start calling you Glenn Tarantino after this?"
"That was really quite enjoyable."
"I can really see the Pulp Fiction influence in the opening scene."
How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
Research: During the research stage of my production I used several websites to gather relevant information. The main ones of these were: Youtube (which I used to view short films and short film reviews. This combined with being able to see the audiences reception via comments and likes really showed me what aspects a lot of the public were looking to see.), Wikipedia (which I used to gather factual information on all sorts of things from who wrote the song 'Juggernauts' to how to best explain post-modernism.), IMDB (which I used to source information of previous movies such as 'Pulp Fiction', 'The Matrix' and 'Jackie Brown'. This also taught me interesting techniques to try with camera work via the 'trivia' section.) and Facebook (which I used to get an even more in depth understanding of what my target audience would be looking for from a short film.).
Planning: During the planning stage I used Textedit on my Mac to note any ideas for lines, scenes or shots accompanied by the 'camera shot' images in iMovie. At this point I also started to use the blogging site Tumblr to bounce ideas back and fourth of my followers. The massive positive of this was that if someone follows you on Tumblr, they tend to have very similar interests as you, meaning that their imagination was more than likely capturing the same idea that mine was. I eventually created a rough draft of my film using just stills in iMovie of myself and two friends and a voice over of us simply reading the first draft of the script.
Construction: During the construction stage of my video I came across a potentially huge problem. The digital HD JVC camcorder which I had shot my entire film on, saved the videos in a format that wasn't compatible with Macs. So being the dedicated Media Studies student that I am I scoured the internet for hours, searching for a program that could convert these video files. I finally found one called Handbrake which did as I needed however it took a long time to import all the digital files into the program for them to convert; this slowed down my work pace quite an existential amount. After the files were on my Mac I used iMovie 8.0 to edit every aspect of the film. iMovie provided me with the ability to change certain files black and white and add post-production elements such as text, credits and audio files. To edit all of the audio files I spent a huge amount of time working with Audacity and Pro Tools LE8. I used Audacity for simple matters such as enhancing the outside speech to try and block out the wind as much as possible - however at points this was un-successful much to my annoyance; I could have benefited from having a microphone boom. I used Pro Tools to record all voice-overs and create the simulated speech that is heard at the beginning of the production. The final piece of sound editing was done with iMovie, allowing me to use the speech of one clip dubbed over another clip. This stopped the speech sounding like it was jumping from several different positions with several different intonations. Finally I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 to create and edit the poster and review.
Evaluation: For the evaluation I used the internet in a similar way to as when I carried out my research. I used Survey Monkey, Facebook, Tumblr and Youtube to get the audiences feedback on both my main production and my two ancillary tasks. Once I'd collected the reviews/feedback I used Blogger (as you can see) to upload all my information.
Winston Churchill once said "Who is the true fool, the Fool himself or the men that follow him?". Judging by this quote I feel like a class A fool because what I have essentially done with my production is take the ideas of a controversial Director/Writer and water them down. Tarantino has in a sense created his own genre of film with its own forms and conventions; whether it be the gangster drama of 'Pulp Fiction' or the western horror of 'Dusk 'til Dawn' all of his films are unique to his style and you can tell one of his films immediately upon seeing it. With my production I took these conventions and re-invisioned them so that they appeal to a wider audience. Below are what I call the four Tarantino signatures and how I have used/manipulated them:
- Non-linear narrative structure - This is possibly what Tarantino is known best for. Pretty much ever single one of his films besides the 'Dusk 'til Dawn' trilogy are non-linear. So as you can imagine when planning my film I jumped straight into a plot-line that flicks from one point in time to another and to another, to yet another, so on so fourth. However as my respondents confirmed for this was just not working out. It made the film over-complicated and the plot just ended up getting lost. However, I desperately didn't want to scrap this idea. It took some time but I eventually came up with the idea of the cinematography jumping through time periods instead of the actual plot-line. To my knowledge this hasn't been done in a Tarantino film, therefore I am proud that I managed to re-work this ever popular convention to better suit short films.
- De-sensitisation of violence - Tarantino obviously enjoys the aestheticization of violence, therefore again I wanted to include this. On the other hand I didn't want to limit the viewership of my film purely to include un-necessary gore. So I decided to make my violence a mix between comic book violence and slapstick humour. My choreographed fight scenes includes a pretty vicious head slam into a wall and several ground stomps, both of which were planned out so that the camera angle would block out any violence that could have been seen. It also includes a simulated back-hand slap, which took several attempts to get just right as it was very difficult to make both sound and look realistic. I feel that I did well to include violence without making it so extreme that the viewer is reminded of it every time they squeeze some ketchup onto their food.
- Use of non-relevant scenes - There are no references to this that I can find on the net however, I personally feel one of the biggest techniques Tarantino uses is the way he adds in connecting scenes or passages of text which have absolutely no relevance to the storyline what-so-ever. This can be seen in several of his productions however possibly the most well known extract of this comes from 'Pulp Fiction' where one of the gangsters is telling a cohort the vast differences between strippers, cheeseburgers and measuring systems between Europe and America. Un-fortunately yet again my respondents told me that these scenes didn't make any sense and made the plot-line feel disjunct. Along with this I was worried that these connecting sequences would make the film seem longer, causing it to lose peoples attention; therefore this is the only technique of which I abolished entirely from my film.
- Intertextual referencing - Finally Tarantino loves to show off his knowledge of the film industry, one example of this is in 'Inglorius Bastards' where we see a German Soldier lecture a fellow officer on the German film industry at the time of WWII. However, yet again 'Pulp Fiction' provides the best example of this. Some of the intertextual references I can think of off the top of my head are as follows: Mia's haircut represents Louise Brooke's in 'Pandora's Box', 'The Three Stooges' film that is on the TV screen throughout the Overdose scene, Jules references 'Flock of Seagulls' a one hit wonder 80's band, the diner robbery idea is lifted directly from 'The Great Train Robbery' made in 1903, and then there is the entirety of the Jack Slim's diner where everyone and everything references something. Anyway, the point is that Tarantino loves to subtly make it known he is a movie fanatic. I have tried to do exactly the same thing and I honestly became quite pedantic when doing so. I'd re-shoot scenes because an intertextual reference wasn't quite right, and the cast would wonder why I'd re-shoot a perfectly good scene. I'll let you in on a few but there are several for movie bofs to find: The closing voice-over is similar to the closing voice-over of 'The Matrix', The white suit Alex wears is meant to represent Graham Greene who wrote several plays and books about political issues and 'A promise made is a debt unpaid' is me paying homage to one of my favourite poets Robert Service. I think I have sufficiently developed this convention to make it personal, at least I tried extremely hard to do so.
How Effective Is the combination of your main product and your ancillary texts?
Truthfully, the main source of synergy came from the combination of the Poster with the main production. And in my opinion, the combination of these two is extremely effective. With my poster I tried to capture the genre very simply. I did this through researching posters from similar style films such as 'Reservoir Dogs'. The photographic editing on the vast array of posters for this film showed me exactly what I needed to do so I applied the same technique to my own photograph of the protagonist. However I also wanted to represent that it is a futuristic film and has moved on from this 90's gangster film style. So I decided to do something a bit different, I tried thinking of landscape film posters, I couldn't think of any unless they were on Buses or Billboards. So, I decided I wanted to be different and do my poster horizontally. I created the image and added the effect, I then used this as the background. It's clear that the font I use on the poster is not the same I use in the film; this is because I wanted the poster to be symbolic of the film. The distorted font of the title is subtly meant to reflect the crumbling of society in this hyperreal world. Finally after creating the poster I used Google to find landscaper posters... Turns out there are quite a few. On the other hand, it was pleasing to find that several were similar to my own design, this convinced me that I had done a professional job of creating and designing the poster. With the magazine review however I feel that it is hard to connect this task to the film itself. However, the style of magazine which I have chosen to review it in gives the reader an insight into the target audience as it must be the same as the magazine's target audience, otherwise why would they bother reviewing it? The informal style along with the design elements (blood splatter etc.) shows the genre and that the film targets a wide range of audiences.
What have you learnt from your audience's feedback?
I collected my audience feedback via Facebook, Tumblr and Youtube; which proved to be a critical part of my process. I put up my original draft of the story/script and had people comment on it. I found that several people thought the non-linear structure I had originally perceived, was far too complex to accurately portray in a short film. If it weren't for the few people that were honest enough to tell me this my film probably wouldn't have come out as well as I feel it has. After the production was completed I released the film via Youtube & Facebook and I held a public viewing in my 6th form common room. The feedback I have been given so far all seems to be of a positive nature. I am very pleased with the fact so many people have watched the film and no-one has mentioned the films length as it is quite long for a short; it seems to however be gripping people's attentions so that they do not notice. I also believe I owe the films gripping nature to some fellow students who gave me the feedback to remove a few connecting scenes, this removed an element of waiting between scenes which thinking back on may have bored the audience. Overall I have learnt that the mass opinion tends to be the correct opinion. Below I have posted a few quotes from the feedback I have received:
"Nice one lad."
"Not a lot has happened story wise, but I really like the moral message."
"Should we start calling you Glenn Tarantino after this?"
"That was really quite enjoyable."
"I can really see the Pulp Fiction influence in the opening scene."
How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
Research: During the research stage of my production I used several websites to gather relevant information. The main ones of these were: Youtube (which I used to view short films and short film reviews. This combined with being able to see the audiences reception via comments and likes really showed me what aspects a lot of the public were looking to see.), Wikipedia (which I used to gather factual information on all sorts of things from who wrote the song 'Juggernauts' to how to best explain post-modernism.), IMDB (which I used to source information of previous movies such as 'Pulp Fiction', 'The Matrix' and 'Jackie Brown'. This also taught me interesting techniques to try with camera work via the 'trivia' section.) and Facebook (which I used to get an even more in depth understanding of what my target audience would be looking for from a short film.).
Planning: During the planning stage I used Textedit on my Mac to note any ideas for lines, scenes or shots accompanied by the 'camera shot' images in iMovie. At this point I also started to use the blogging site Tumblr to bounce ideas back and fourth of my followers. The massive positive of this was that if someone follows you on Tumblr, they tend to have very similar interests as you, meaning that their imagination was more than likely capturing the same idea that mine was. I eventually created a rough draft of my film using just stills in iMovie of myself and two friends and a voice over of us simply reading the first draft of the script.
Construction: During the construction stage of my video I came across a potentially huge problem. The digital HD JVC camcorder which I had shot my entire film on, saved the videos in a format that wasn't compatible with Macs. So being the dedicated Media Studies student that I am I scoured the internet for hours, searching for a program that could convert these video files. I finally found one called Handbrake which did as I needed however it took a long time to import all the digital files into the program for them to convert; this slowed down my work pace quite an existential amount. After the files were on my Mac I used iMovie 8.0 to edit every aspect of the film. iMovie provided me with the ability to change certain files black and white and add post-production elements such as text, credits and audio files. To edit all of the audio files I spent a huge amount of time working with Audacity and Pro Tools LE8. I used Audacity for simple matters such as enhancing the outside speech to try and block out the wind as much as possible - however at points this was un-successful much to my annoyance; I could have benefited from having a microphone boom. I used Pro Tools to record all voice-overs and create the simulated speech that is heard at the beginning of the production. The final piece of sound editing was done with iMovie, allowing me to use the speech of one clip dubbed over another clip. This stopped the speech sounding like it was jumping from several different positions with several different intonations. Finally I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 to create and edit the poster and review.
Evaluation: For the evaluation I used the internet in a similar way to as when I carried out my research. I used Survey Monkey, Facebook, Tumblr and Youtube to get the audiences feedback on both my main production and my two ancillary tasks. Once I'd collected the reviews/feedback I used Blogger (as you can see) to upload all my information.
Hyperreality
Hyperreality is used by post-modern philosophers to describe the idea of a hypothetical inability of consciousness to distinguish 'reality' from a 'simulated reality' created by media texts. It is a way of characterising what our conscience defines as 'real' in a world where media influence can dramatically shape and filter events or experiences. The best idea of Hyperreality in my opinion is 'The Matrix' the whole film is based around the idea of a filtered and controlled world. My text could be seen as creating a hyperreal as firstly, it is set in a completely fictitiousness future world where my manipulation of British politics has shaped a story line and secondly, because of the jumping of genres/styles spontaneously. I feel this is a powerful tool in media however I argue that today's audiences are very aware of the fact that they are an 'audience' to a media text.
My Magazine Review
(Click to see in full)
I created my magazine review as if it were going to be in the magazine 'Abandon' that I created for AS. The reason for this was firstly because I thought keeping that running theme would be fun and interesting; secondly, I still read the same magazines I did back then so the influences were going to be very similar. My two main influences on this review came from the magazines 'Loaded' and 'FRONT'.
My Film Poster
When creating my films poster I scoured for inspiration for a while. I already had one source that I really liked and that was one of the posters to 'Reservoir Dogs' by Quentin Tarantino. I have this poster on my wall and have had it for nearly 4 years. I love the layout and effect that has been put on the actors. I knew straight away I wanted to do something similar. However, I felt that this portrait layout had been over used; and therefore I wished to create a poster that was landscape and immediately impacted much like the above poster for 'Control'. Combining those two posters was always going to be a challenge but I think I pulled it off. As you can see in my poster below (click to see in full) I have sourced the way the title is set out from the 'Control' poster along with the idea of the solo protagonist being the only character seen. However I have taken the way the Actor's names are displayed and the effect from the Reservoir Dogs poster. My finished poster can now be seen below...
Ideology
The ideology of the genre I wish to create affects it's visual representation in the following ways:
- I have to use fonts for the text which in a sense cross over different genres, for example I've created a title text which will be seen after the first scene (the first time the title of the film is shown) in the film which includes both a font which uses handwriting formatting and an impact font for the word 'revolt'. Normally handwriting fonts suggest romance or historical aspects, however I am using them to show a juxtaposition of personality vs. conformity.
- The 'Film Noir' aspect of my short film is possibly the one I've played around with most. Somehow I need to create the feel of a 1950's gangster household whilst making sure the audience know they are still in 2030. To do this I'm going to have to be eccentric. The most obvious technique I will use will be the use of Black and White imagery. The entire first scene will be in monotone symbolic of 1950's gangster films. Secondly I have purchased props and costumes which reflect this as well, however when wearing these suits I will modernise the characters ever so slightly in subtle ways. Be it by undoing a button or two or just by removing A jacket. To accompany the outfits I've bought props such as a Cigar for the mobster to be using during the scene. Finally I will try and make sure I get hint of the modern day in the shots such as an electric fireplace or a widescreen TV just to make sure the audience are clear on where they are. These contrasts of tropes and memes should work effectively.
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