Thursday 25 March 2010

the final soundtrack

i think its really obvious that our soundtrack was rushed. i made in about the last 30 minutes of one of the lessons so although it sounded ok with our piece it still had alot of issues with it that needed sorting. like we needed to make it quieter so that you could hear the heartbeat and the subtle little effects like footsteps. without them it didnt sound as natural and just sounded to fake. i really hated having the soundtrack and loved our piece when it was really simple. i enjoy having simple projects for our media studies because you can still show your abilities by making a simple piece and evaluating, planning it and drafting it well.

Tuesday 23 March 2010

Evaluation Questions

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge conventions of real media products?
What conventions of professional products have you used in your own film? (narrative conventions, character conventions, genre, camerawork, sound, editing, special effects, mise-en-scene?) Use screen grabs of your own sequence to illustrate each example where you have followed conventions or gone against (challenged) conventions. Also use images from the films that have influenced you where relevant.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups? (Gender, age, ethnicity etc.
Compare a character in your sequence to a character in a professional film (use images). If you have included a villain/victim character, does your character follow the conventions of characters in professional films. For example, is your villain male? Is your victim female? Therefore how are you representing gender?
3. What kind of media institution would distribute your media product?
Discuss similar professional films and their production companies (use images of the films and logos). Which production company do you think would distribute your film? (If it was professional and you had made the full film).
4. Who would be the audience for your media product? (BBFC and target audience)
Use images from a similar product with a similar target audience. Remember that target audience is not the same as classification.
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
Refer to significant moments in your sequence where you have tried to generate a response from the spectator (a close up to encourage identification with a character, music that encourages the spectator to feel suspense, tense, visceral reaction etc.) Use screen grabs of your own sequence.
6. What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing your product?
(Blog, camera equipment, editing software- Final Cut Express, istopmotion, Garageband etc.)
Use screen grabs/photos of all these things. Be very specific about tools/effects/techniques learnt, not just "I have learnt a lot about the software"
7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to your final product?
Discuss your second preliminary task that you did in the week before starting Thriller. Discuss what you have learnt since then about construction or micro elements in order to create meaning, how to use different techniques, practical skills etc. How have you built on your knowledge that you learnt from the preliminary task? Use screen grabs of your preliminary task and your sequence where relevant.

Friday 19 March 2010

Final Version

This is our final and finished version.

Title

We have now decided on our film title to be "Sender Unknown" I think this works well and is a well thought out title for our piece.
I thought it would be a good idea to use a font which looked like cut up newspaper letters put together as words. It would fit well with the letter idea of our piece however, i thought that this is a very typical kind of font and is very overused so i decided against it. The font i went with in the end was a distorted typewriter font. It goes well with the piece and emphasises the theme of the letter in the film.


This is a screen shot of the title. The font is called "Uncle Typewriter" from the website www.dafont.com

Thursday 18 March 2010

Film Title

We have almost finished our clip now, the only thing left to do it to think of a title for our film and add it in to the credits. We decided it should contain the word "letter" as our film focused on the letter quite a lot. I think it should be quite a simple title. Some suggestions i was thinking of were "Letter Man" or " Dead Letter". I prefer the second one out of these two titles as i think it sounds more myterious and more like a thriller than the first.

Wednesday 17 March 2010

last lesson

on the last lesson i added in the final soundtrack to our piece but because it was rushed i still need to work out the kinks with the sound and make parts of it quiter and parts of it louder.

Wednesday 10 March 2010

rough cut video