Final Evaluation

Evaluation of Short Film Production

The use of camera shots, angles and framing, is crucial as the sequence will need to remain interesting throughout its entire length. We used a panning shot of outside to represent time passing as the cake was being made. A lot of films start with an establishing shot which out film did as well with the outside of the house waiting for the father to leave for work in the morning. The forms and conventions which short film follow are things such as, no character names are shown throughout the clip and instead are left until the end of the clip or not included at all. This is because the cast isn’t well known enough to include and wouldn’t help to improve viewings if they were included. This is true in our film because we don’t reveal any of the people names who created the film until the very end of the film, so the audience isn’t confused or distracted only the title of the film is shown at the very begging. The lack of/or low quality CGI is very common in short films because the film wont be based around a large budget and the use of a continuous setting for example in our film we used one of our groups house and we filmed all of our inside and outside the house. The CGI we used was we only used a fade at the end of our film before the credits scene and our whole film was shot inside and outside the same house. Short films only have two or three actors because of the low budgets and too many actors will over complicate things in the film. We followed this because we only used three actors in our short film. Short films use cheaper more direct methods to target their audiences such as specialist sites where independent film makers can upload there creations and broadcast them for free to a large audience via the web. Using such sites as You Tube, Future Shots and social networking sites. Our films will be uploaded on to YouTube so that we can use in for future reference and to attract a larger audience. In terms of music, short films tend to be very similar in the way that it is used, in terms of gaining a reaction. Such as in our film we use two non-diegetic extracts of music. The first extract is of the “happy birthday” tune which is what our film is based upon and the one that plays at the end is and instrumental lullaby which is a sad piece of music which represents the strong emotions shown by the characters in the film. The use of camera shots, angles and framing, is crucial as the sequence will need to remain interesting throughout its entire length. We used a panning shot of outside to represent time passing as the cake was being made.

Our ancillary texts combine with our film perfectly because, the poster doesn’t reveal any of the scenes in the film because we used semiotics because we only showed the birthday cake on the poster which when people think about birthday’s the cake is one of the first things that springs to their mind. The main colour of the poster is black, this helps the viewer to focus on the cake in the centre but it also connotes mystery which is what our film is about. We had to make our own review page I believe mine gives an incite to one of the characters roles more and his name is revealed but the plot of the film is not revealed in any way. The review page also advertises the film in a big way because on the sides I wrote “ the best short of 2010” empire and “a great debut hit” the sun. You see things like this on most films either on a review page or on the case of the film, people trust the companies that give these ratings and it makes them more likely to watch or purchase the film. The layout of my article is very similar to ones you see in professional magazines such as Empire, the over lapping of a smaller picture with a white outline makes them clearly separate. The transparency of the text box of the photo makes sure that some of the photo is still visible.

From our audience feedback we have learnt that we need to re-think our target audience slightly because people over the age of 15 may be able to grasp the plot of our film rather than just people over the age of 18. We also gathered that a lot of people said that the smoking scene in our film was irrelevant and maybe if we re-did the project again we may have replaced it with another scene. We also learnt that the majority or the audience liked the use of our music and thought that our camerawork was very good. They said that the music we chose wasn’t irrelevant and it fitted into the film perfectly and didn’t ruin the film.

We used blogger to show the whole of our project online which in the past hasn’t been the case, I think blogger is a simple and easy way in which to show your work because it allows you to show links to research and embed YouTube video codes onto your blog so that people can see the video your referencing about rather than having to search for it themselves. We used Photoshop to create our poster where we used skills from our as level production to help us, we used an effect which makes in look like you are looking down a camera lens and that is why you only see the cake rather than the whole photo. For our preliminary task we used editing software such a I movie but when it came to our actual short film we decided to use final cut pro which made it a lot easier to edit things more precisely and it was a lot simpler to edit the sound. We decided not to use the school camera because we had the opportunity to use a professional one which a better picture quality and a better sound quality because he had a separate sound microphone which we could move closer to the actors so that we could pick up on the dialogue. I used Microsoft publisher to create my article because we used it last year and it gives you the perfect layout for a double page article.

Final Article

This is made by just me as we need to make our own articles. I made it whilst getting inspiration from magazines such as empire and their film reviews. Mine has columns which line up with each other which gives it a professional look. I like the white outline around the picture which overlaps the larger one. i also like the fact that the red text box over the main picture is translucent because it doesn't hide all of the elements of the picture.

Short Film

Above is our final finished short film.

Film Poster

For are movie poster we wanted to keep the same theme as the movie therefore using a simple layout to hold suspension and leave mystery to our audience. As shown in are previous research we were inspired by the sixth sense poster, having the theme of the black background and the main picture focused in the centre of the page. By using photo shop i manipulated the photo of the cake with candles and changed the brightness and contrast, i also used the round cropper tool to pick out the section we wanted to focus and and by using the inverse button changed the rest of the photo black to blend in with the background. I think this was a very effective image and the orange of the flames worked well with the deep black background.
For the text we wanted to keep it plain and simple, and using the obvious black on white effect worked well as it made the writing stand out. We researched posters so we could pick out items to use on ours. For instance the writing at the bottom of the poster listing all the directors and actors is very life like to the posters that are out at the moment.
We also used a tag line to draw in the audience and leave a sense of mystery about the film as we did not want to give away the story line from the poster.
I think our poster came out very effective in the end and I'm pleased with the turn out, the only disappointment i would say would be the quality of the photo, as we only took it on a digital camera therefore not getting the best quality pixels.

Audeince Feedback Questionaire Results

Audience Feedback Questionnaire Results

Evaluation Questionnaire

Below is a copy of a questionnaire that we created for people to fill in when they watched our film. we handed these out to people in our target audience and got a range of age results that were in our target market.

Evaluation questionnaire

 

 

1. To what extent do you think our film appeals to our target audience of 18+?

 

Not at all   To some extent    A reasonable amount     With great accuracy

 

2. Please rate our shot composition, lighting and framing

 

1 Very poor    2 Poor     3 Satisfactory     4 Good       5 Very good

 

3. Please rate our camerawork and angles

 

1 Very poor    2 Poor     3 Satisfactory     4 Good       5 Very good

 

4. Please rate our editing

 

1 Very poor    2 Poor     3 Satisfactory     4 Good       5 Very good

 

 

5. How effective did you think the use of music was in the film?

 

Not at all   To some extent    A reasonable amount     With great accuracy

 

6. Please rate our actors

 

1 Very poor    2 Poor     3 Satisfactory     4 Good       5 Very good

 

 

7. Did you see the twist coming in the plot before it was revealed at the end?

 

              Yes                                                 No

 

8. Was the story clear?

 

Very clear                     Confusing in parts                     Very confusing

 

 

 

9. Was the twist in the plot clear?

                 Yes                                                 No

 

10. What were the strengths of the film (e.g. the plot etc) and was there anything you particularly enjoyed about the film?

 

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11. What were the weaknesses (e.g. any irrelevant scenes) and was there anything you disliked about the film?

 

 

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Artcile Reasearch

In this article i particularly like the fact that the picture is the main focus and this is something i am keen to include in my work.
I don't like the fact that there isn't any smaller pictures around the main one which helps to break up the text so that readers aren't put off by large amounts of texts. the colours used on don't attract the attention of the reader is mainly made up from black and white.






In this article i like the fact that there is still a main picture as the focus but there is two smaller pictures on the outside which are framed which makes them more eye catching. The layout of the article is very simple which nothing over lapping each other there aren't any different shapes used either.