Saturday, 29 March 2014

Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?


Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?


Websites/Blog

Before I began doing AS media, I had never used a blog, an Apple Mac or any film editing software (such as Final Cut Pro or iMovie) including sounds, text etc so when I began I had pretty much no idea what to do. The first form I used was my blog and originally quite overwhelmed. My first impression of blogger.com was daunting as it was all too new for me. However, once I got started and added a phew things to my blog, I found it quite easy and straight forward. One of my favourite aspects of this site was that it has a very modern essence. By this I believe that there is a sense of community and togetherness, where anyone and everyone can share information and interests.

Furthermore, in a way, it is relevant to the industry. I think this because technological convergence is continuing to progress allowing more & more pieces of information to be quickly and easily published across the internet. This brings something new to the table as it can constantly be changed and updated to suit the continuous daily change, unlike books for example. To begin with, I mainly used the blogger text and images. After this, I progressed and learnt how to put YouTube videos onto my blog, pasting the HTML code into the HTML section of the blog and converting it into a video in my blog. After this, I began to experiment with different websites to add diversity and to strengthen my blog, rather than just simply using plain text and images directly off the blogger.com site. I was constantly learning and finding out about interesting new sites to use for my blog work, such as: slideshare.net, prezi.com, scribd.com, dafont.com etc.

The sites I believe I have used most often on my blog during the production of my thriller opening are SlideShare and Prezi. In my opinion, Prezi is a highly developed, intricate and diverse form if a slides how/power point. Prezi allows it's users to be quite free and creative with their presentation, using a combination of text, images and videos on the same or different path (ways of viewing them). Like the first time I use most sites, I was quite much, especially at this sure because if how advanced an in detail it is. However, within a few minutes I became comfortable with the site. Now, I find prezi.com easy and highly effective to work with. It is also makes the view more entertaining and pleasing for those who watch it as it has more depth than a simple slideshow on PowerPoint for example. By depth, I mean Prezi allows individuals making a slide to pretty much add layers to it, e.g. if there's an uploaded picture, Prezi makes it possible to zoom in to any aspect of the image and add another image, a video or text, then zoom right out either back to the image, or more interestingly to another image, video or text. I also used the site slideshare.net quite a lot. This site allowed me to upload and embed PowerPoint presentations and Word documents to my blog, showing the use of multimedia. For example, in only one post I could upload a PowerPoint presentation, Prezi, Word document along with a few images and additional blog text to explain in depth one Blogpost. The combination of all of the above together strengthens the aspect of my multimedia usage.

Although, for the evaluation of the project I began to experiment further with websites to challenge myself and enhance my knowledge for different software's. It was at this point when I began to use other websites like photopeach.com, beeclip.com, dafont.com, scribd.com and screenr.com. When I discovered photopeach.com I was quite relieved, as this site allowed me to make a video then edit it by adding text and images. Pretty much a mini, more basic and simple version of the editing programmes I used to edit my opening. Similar to Prezi, beeclip.com and scribd.com is like an developed version of PowerPoint, but different in some ways. This site shows yet another way of showing a slide on my blog and is a diverse, useful presenting technique. Dafont.com was used to research and investigate fonts to use for my production name. This is an easy website to use, probably the least daunting of all that I have tried in this process. It simple to get around and find what you think is necessary or looking for. On this site, it is possible to even find things that are different to what you are looking for, but still could come in useful as well as expand and develop ideas making them more creative as there is a variety of styles and fonts. Last but not least there's screenr.com. Personally I believe this is an amazing site with outstanding functions and abilities. What Screenr does is allow you to record all of or a section of the screen, along with a voice over. It is good to show and explain what you're doing and/or how to do something.

 



Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

 


 

Thursday, 27 March 2014

Question 5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Before considering how i would attract my audience, I would have to look deeper at what audiences are attracted to. Below is a graph on what I believe audiences are attracted to;
Now I will see which of these things are associated with Mad House;



Thursday, 20 March 2014

Question 4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

On a whole, the target audience for my film opening would be for young adults. Originally my target audience was people aged between 18-35, but after doing research into my target audience I found that people younger than 18 have interests in the opening and would watch and recommend the rest of the film. As a result of this, I altered the target audience from 18-35 to 16-35. To test the accuracy of my chosen age range for a target audience, I got people in, above and below the age bracket to watch the opening then asked them if they were interested. One of the individuals I asked is 15. After watching the opening, she had a buzz of enthusiasm about the film, eager to watch the rest. Although there may not be highly explicit scenes of crime and violence, if the complete film was to be made there probably would be. I don't think it would be appropriate for those under the age of 16 to see this. I also asked a few people above my target audience. Some didn't really understand the storyline, possibly because it's not a topic they would have to comprehend of go through at their age. Others enjoyed watching the opening, but said they wouldn't watch the rest of the film as it's not their 'style' of film.

Looking deeper, I found that more specifically the target audience would lean more to a male orientated audience. This is because not only is the main character is male but also during my research I found that of all the people that view thrillers, it is heavily male populated by males for this genre. Below is a graph showing the difference between people who would watch my thriller and people who would watch 500 days of summer. Although 500 days of summer isn't a thriller, it can show just how much it varies in a demographics sense.


This charts shows clearly that the female bar is the highest in general, more particularly, it is highest for females. This indicates that romantic comedies are celebrated mostly among the female category. This also would depend on age, it is more likely that it is young men to watch Mad House and older women to watch 500 Days of Summer. The results of both films contrast each other completely. It is said that females are more likely to watch films that involve romance, emotions, chick flicks etc. Whereas males tend to enjoy action, violence, blood and gore etc. Psychographically, the storyline for my opening is more relatable and generalised among the young adult population.

For this reason, I believe the target audience for my film would be young adults particularly males. Reasons why my film, and this genre in particular is male dominated is as follows: thrillers tend to shows a lot of violence; they are often quite fast moving with has many things going on at one time; most questions remained unanswered for the majority of the film.




Wednesday, 12 March 2014

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?


 

I also used a range of shot types. For example;


In terms of editing, I used a range of techniques to enhance my films noticeability as a thriller. Throughout my opening, I use only low key lighting. This is because during my research, I found that most thrillers use massive amounts of low key lighting. For example;




This opening mainly shows objects and very little of the character, to a way more extreme extent than mine. However, even with this, you can see the use of low key lighting and high amounts of audience enigma.