Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
As I detailed in this post, short films tend to adhere to certain codes and conventions such as, for example, tending to have a plot twist at the end. For our production we tried to keep to these codes, this (hopefully) can be seen in our film where the main protagonist finds that instead of everybody else going backwards, it was actually him all along.
We found it fairly hard to locate films that shared a similar narrative to ours, possibly because our final idea was an amalgamation of two ideas that had already been derived from other ideas.
Our film has tried to follow Todorov's narrative theory (Equilibrium - at the start where the main protagonist is getting up and is unaware that anything is wrong. The disequilibrium occurs when he sees other people going backwards and gets confused. The recognition of the disequilibrium occurs when he speaks to the Blue Man who explains why it all is happening and as he finishes speaking everything rewinds back to the start to create a new equilibrium.
To provide further exposition to the audience, ideally we should have included footage at the end showing that everything had returned to normal (for example by including footage of him seeing people walking forwards instead).
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
As part of the specification, we had to design and create two ancillary texts and we chose to do the film poster and the magazine review.
The magazine review itself wouldn't usually be linked to the film production company (unless is was part of a larger conglomerate).
The poster on the other hand is one of the film industries biggest forms of advertising, being located on billboards, buses, trains, in the cinemas themselves and even (in some cases) on whole buildings. Some films have developed upon the traditional poster by making them 3-D! Or even making large models to advertise them (anyway, I digress).
I feel that the poster works very well to create a sense of who is in the film and where (the majority of) it takes place. There is also a hint of things being backwards (the backwards text) but I feel that more could be added to emphasize this effect (a clock perhaps?).
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
We have learned a lot from our audience feedback and it is this that made us change things throughout production, starting right after we showed the initial animatic to the class (a group of about 10-15 17/18 year olds).
Initially, people were doubtful as to whether we would be able to produce a film which incorporated the backwards elements but we knew that we had the tools and skills to be able to make the video track go backwards. This did mean that we had to reduce the amount of dialogue as that would be very hard to do in reverse.
After we'd finished filming the first initial waking up/getting ready scenes we and the audience noted various things, such as:
There was a slight bump in the camera when tracking the main protagonist down the stairs,
You can see the blue man stand up when the main protagonist takes the bowl out of the microwave (you are supposed to see his reflection but not him standing up)
On the whole, the introduction needed a soundtrack to cover it.
We listened to this feedback and although we couldn't find the extra time to do a re-shoot we tried to edit it so that they were less obvious. I did record a soundtrack though at home. The soundtrack had a sort of jazzy/lazy morning feel to it which doesn't alarm the audience who don't think anything is wrong.
After completing the rest of the filming, the feedback that we received was that when the Blue Man was speaking, it was very hard to hear what he was saying. Some people said that it he would be better as a mute, and speak backwards instead if at all. However, we were not able to re-film and devise a new screenplay in time so instead we dubbed over the blue man (which would work easy since you can't see what he's saying anyway due to the Morphsuit. We had also added music over the ending re-wind and credits which the audience said worked very well.
Slightly less noticeable to the audience was the jump in the music when the main protagonist enters the school, this is due to the fact that the soundtrack that I made was slightly too long but I think that, due to some careful editing, it blends in seamlessly.
Other feedback given to us by our teacher included that, at the moment, our films twist is very weak and doesn't create the reaction we intended therefore including all this should make it more creepy.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout the production of the film we have been using varying new technologies to carry out different tasks.
For example, for the construction of the film itself we used various pieces of software on Apple Macs and Windows operating systems such as Final Cut Express - Mac (a lighter version of a full professional editing software), Sony Vegas - Windows (another professional editing tool and the one which we did almost all of our editing on, LiveType - Mac (an additional piece of software to Final Cut which allows the user to create very good titles, we used this for the opening "One Step Back" title and iDVD - Mac - to burn the final cut onto DVD.
For the poster we used Adobe Photoshop (Mac and Windows) and its many tools to produce the final logo and for the magazine we used Microsoft Publisher (Windows).
To capture the actual film we used a digital camera using a DV tape. Although using a tape doesn't seem very digital (especially when there are many camcorders that use varying types of memory card nowadays) it actually can be imported straight to the computer by the use of a DV to Firewire cable.
Throughout production I used Safari (Mac) and Mozilla Firefox (Windows) to keep my blog up to date.
For the research stage I used different websites (such as IMBD) to look up information and YouTube to look at existing short films in order to check out the existing codes & conventions.
To create the soundtrack I used some home digital recording software (as detailed here). This is a great example of how modern technology has changed how things are done. Back in the 1960's and for a while afterwards, the only way to record was to record on to tape and every new track would require a new tape and although some artists (such as The Beatles) drove technology forwards in their need for more tracks, it wasn't until later that computers were used. The introduction of this new technology means that an artist can use a virtually unlimited amount of tracks to create a better overall music product.

Ancillary Text 2 - Theatrical Poster

The poster was designed in Adobe Photoshop and I used a variety of tools in its production such as the lasso tool (with feather), the eraser tool, the clone stamp tool, the text tool and some more.
I added the production logo, reviews and rating to make the poster look more professional.

Ancillary Text 1 - Magazine Review

S e Ttin g Th e s Ta g e

Final Cut

This is the final cut of our media production.

New Rough Cut

Our new rough cut can be seen on my partners blog:

http://thomassama2.blogspot.com/2009/12/rough-cut-3.html

Rough Cut ......

Below is a rough cut of out film, One Step Back.Any comments or criticism is welcome

It is clear to see that certain films have influenced this such as Shaun of the Dead.

Podcast 2

Screenplay

This is the screenplay for our short film:
One Step Back Screen

Storyboard

After a load of technical issues I've finally managed to scan the storyboard and uplolad it to Scribd.

One Step Back Storyboard PDF

Ancillary texts ideas & research

As part of our
coursework, we have to include two ancillary texts.
For our coursework we have chosen to do:
a poster for the film
and
a film magazine review page featuring the film

Our poster will most likely be produced in Adobe Photoshop and the film magazine review page in Microsoft Publisher.

We will produce the ancillary texts after we have finished our main production as you can't review a film that hasn't been made and the main poster needs to be relevant to the film, for example, you can't include things on the poster that won't be in the final production in case things change (cast members changing etc.)

I have a basic idea for the film magazine review page based on the main review style of the magazine Empire.
This includes a large picture/screencap for the top half of the article with the main review in the bottom half. The bottom half of the page contains the article itself as well as

Production Schedule

A production schedule has been uploaded by my partner, Sam Thomas, for this week.

Schedule for Filimg

This has been made to give us both an idea of where we should be in the filming process and takes into accounts dates when we are not available.

Casting/Costume

All casting has been sorted and organized by us.
The costumes have been/will be organised by my partner, Sam Thomas.

There will be two protagonists in our film. The rest of the cast will be filled up with extras which have been sorted out as friends and other actors have agreed to help out where-ever they can.

One of the protagonists will be the 'Blue Man' he is never named but this is what people have come to call him. He will be portrayed by my partner, Sam Thomas, and will be dressed in a work-style uniform (white shirt, black ties, working trousers, black shoes blazer and a hat) over a blue Morphsuit.
He is too look like a busy business man, with not much time on his hands and will be holding a newspaper under his arm.

Our main protagonist will be portrayed by Ben Gibson. He has had acting experience when he was younger as well as in my AS coursework film and he is also available whenever we are as his school timetable is roughly the same as ours and is also a friend of ours and will happily give up free time to work on the film. He is of a normal stature and is what we see as the average teenage boy. He is 17 years old and is middle class.
The costume for this character will be basic clothing. He will most of the time just be wearing a leather coat, jeans and a t-shirt.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack for the film will be almost, if not entirely composed by me and my partner, Sam Thomas.
We will be using the Garageband software. We both attended a workshop on composing music in Garageband at the recent Coop Young Filmmakers Festival.

I recorded the music for the film by initially making a drum track out of loops in Garageband at school.

I then took this home and played around on guitar trying out different chord sequences until I was happy with them.

When I was ready to record I used a program called Tracktion and imported the drum track into there before using a piece of hardware called a Stealthplug to record the lead, rhythm and bass guitars over the top, using another piece of software called Amplitube to apply filters for different sounds.

The product of this resulted in a song which we felt wouldn't really fit in our own production but which was donated to a fellow student, Holly Davy.

Our own production required a slower sort of track so I went back into Garageband and made a slower, more jazzy drum track before settling on just using bass for a more lazy "just woken up" feel.

Podcast 1

Genre Research

The genre that we decided to do was an action/thriller/comedy hybrid.
There is a list of various comedy/thriller hybrids here.
Films like Hot Fuzz and Bad Boys are examples of action/comedy films.

Family Guy and Robot Chicken are examples of TV shows like this, albeit animated.
After watching these two shows(of similar creators[Seth green is the man behind Robot Chicken but also stars in Family Guy as Chris Griffin, and Seth Macfarlane will also take part in Robot Chicken at times e.g. P.S I love You S4EP1]) we noticed that random actions add good comedy effect e.g. Random man on fire come on screen screaming for a split second.
Having distorted physics also tends to make things more of a comedic value as well e.g. in Family Guy when people fall off something, they will hit the floor instantly, with a loud thud.

Donnie Darko - Richard Kelly - 2001
This film has a few elements we would like to take into our film.
The film is based around the main protagonist (Donnie Darko) seeing an invisible character, but is seen by him and no one else. This invisible character also has a disturbing/weird look to it which can cause unease in a way to the audience.
Camera shots in this film portray the attitude and atmosphere of the main protagonist very well which we feel would work rather well in our film as well.

A book we found that is useful for Genre Research is Film Genre Reader by Barry Keith Grant (ISBN -978-0-292-70185-4)

The idea for the mysterious blue man in the background of some shots came from the PC game Half Life/Half Life 2. In the game the character, called G-Man, is constantly seen in the background of scenes and then mysteriously disappearing again.

Hardware

The main video camera that we will be sing for our production will be the Canon MV920.

Specifications can be found here.

It has a 25x optical zoom and an 800x digital zoom which would be useful providing you have a tripod to hold the camera steady, which we do.

The camera has a built in microphone which is good in that t doesn't necessarily require an external mic but for some scenes (such as outdoor scenes) the mic tends to be affected by interference, as I found during my AS coursework.
To counter this, the media department has purchased a RØDE microphone and accompanying boom to form a boom mic. Although this will probably require more crew to use it will surely benefit the production in the long run.

Teaser Poster

This is the initial teaser poster that we designed for our film.

It gives clues to the narrative (having things backwards) and the characters.

It also gives the address of the website for the film.

Target Audience

The age range we would be aiming for our target Audience would be 12/12a if not a PG. This because we won't be using explicit language, and if we do, there will be little andnot enouch to warrant a re-classification. The theme of the film isnt too disturbing but it wouldnt be understood as easily to a child audience. There is no sex witnessed in our film, nor violence or drug use.

The film will mainly be aimed at people of a secondary/high school age as the film itself is set in a school and it would be a familiar backdrop.

Our film is aimed at all ethnic minority's. There is no discrimination against either ethnicity however there are only Caucasian characters being used. However this is down to the school we are at being mainly Caucasian.


The gender of our film would be aimed at the male audience. This is because we havnt invested in using any female characters, and the main-protagnoists are male as well. However, we will incorporate the Female Gaze in our film by having either a topless man, or a short love scene, but these are not major plot points. With our film also being a Comedy genre, this will cross out the female audience as Comedy has been branded a more male film genre, the Rom-Com being totally different, but this hybrid genre has evolved into being completely on its own.

Our film will be aimed at C1C2(Middle Class) audience. this is because our characters will be of Upper/Middle class but the upper class will be victims of a mockery and from the view of a middle class character. Also the story may be too complex for a DE class or too boring. However there will be hints of the lower class which can draw them in as the character will be walking around town, through different areas.

Software

Most, if not all of the editing that will take place producing the film will be done in Apple's Final Cut Express 4.

We have chosen this program as it represents a step up from using iMovie last year with its wider array of editing tools and its ability to produce much higher quality work.

Me and my partner, Sam Thomas, also recently attended an "editing masterclass" using Final Cut Pro (a very similar program) at the National Media Museum, Bradford during the Cooperative Young Filmmakers festival.
We have a few books that we can also use as references in using Final Cut Express:
'Final Cut Express 4 - Movie Making For Everyone' by Diana Weynand (ISBN - 978 0 321 53467 5)
'Final Cut Express 4 - Editing Workshop' by Tom Wolsky (ISBN - 978 0 240 81077 5)


To produce music for the film we will be using Garageband.
In Garageband we will possibly use loops as well as some original recorded material (I have already wrtitten and recorded and instrumental demo of some original music).

To design the graphics (such as the posters) that we will be making during the production of the film we will be using Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 .

Locations

For our locations we decided we would need somewhere gothic to give the movie a more creepy atmosphere. We also needed it to be old fashioned as it would fit in with one of our characters in the film therefore we came up with these locations:

The school interior photo is an example of the general setting of the film.
The exterior photo will be used for the opening scenes of the film.