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.
