Evaluation - 1) In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Firstly, in terms of observing the conventions of continuity and the language of film and editing we had to be very careful as our film included many flashbacks. To keep the continuity correct so that the audience could follow where the film was going we had to wear the same clothes and accessories as well as hair styles. As we filmed different scenes on different days we had to refer back to the footage so that we knew this was right. In one scene in the kitchen we encountered a small problem when we discovered that on some of the footage the cupboard door was open whilst on the rest it was closed, this mean't we could not use this piece of footage as it would disrupt the continuity. 

The genre of our film could be called a romantic drama, it reflects conventions of the genre by showing and expanding on romantic relationships and affairs of the main character, Sally. The audience can see her love life and the ups and downs of this as well as arguments that ensue because of Sally and George's actions. However, there are elements that challenge this genre and go outside of what is generally considered to be a romantic drama. For example, it deals with teenage pregnancy which is usually found in drama's that do not really show the romantic side of things, it deals with Sally's reaction and who she decides to tell, hence the name, Deception. It could also be described as dealing with teenage alcohol use and the negative outcomes of this such as what happened with Sally and George and the pregnancy that resulted because of this. 

Here Sally and her friend are pictured drinking vodka at the party.

In two scenes we see flashbacks of Sally drinking vodka with her friends and becoming increasingly more intoxicated, whilst she walks to the bedroom with George the camera goes very unsteady and shaky as the audience see's that Sally is falling and stumbling over because of the alcohol. All of these things challenge conventions of the drama and give extra elements to the film that you would not generally expect from a movie about a teenage girl and her boyfriend.

For our film we mainly took inspiration from the film, Juno. The ideas we took from this are part of the plot line that deals with teenage pregnancy, however Juno seems to deal more with how the pregnancy affects her everyday life whilst Deception shows mainly the immediate aftermath of the events that occurred at the party. Another part of Juno we really liked and wanted to emulate was the beginning title sequence that showed Juno on herself walking along a street to music, we thought that this title sequence was good and effective as it gave a glimpse into the characters life and established that this was the main character, the style of dress and music playing also gives indications on what the character  is like. So for Deception we decided to film Sally walking along the street toward her friends house through an array of different camera angles from Sally's view point to long shots and close ups. The title sequence set the foundations for the rest of film as the audience begin to learn the story when she begins to tell her friend, Lizzie, the events that took place at her party. 

Here Sally is shown walking to her destination like the film 'Juno.'

This is the opening scene in 'Juno' were she is walking also like Sally.

Four kinds of audience pleasure-

• Entertainment: what form of entertainment does our film provide? (see Richard Dyer)
• Information/education: may watch a documentary to learn something
• Role models: positive or negative, can look at how they behave, may be positive ways of handeling a situation, how people dress or behave etc
• Socialisation: enables people to have something to talk about, as they all have the fact they are watching the film in common, also older and maybe people that don't go out as much have a sort of friend when it comes to tv presenters or characters

Richard Dyer's theory of entertainment

There are utopian solutions, in your everyday lives you are missing something (lack) so in films they make up for what you are missing on that day.

Lack - 

• Tired
• Bored
• Lonely
• Poor
• Ignorant/unaware 

If you have a lack and a film provides things you are lacking then it will entertain you at that time. The things that are provided in the film are called utopian solutions. Pure entertainment films will contain utopian solutions - 

• If you're tired, you need energy. If you sit and watch an action film its hypes you up and therefore you often feel less tired. 
• If you're bored then intense events will provide entertainment, so very high highs and low lows. This is called intensity and can be found in many melodrama's.
• Community makes you feel less lonely, it gives you the feeling of what it would be like if you had lots of friends and company such as films about groups of people working together like Platoon and Wizard of Oz. 
• If you are lacking money, while the film is on it shows you what it would be like if you had lots of money. 
• If you're ignorant or unaware such as if you are not always being told the truth if people are hiding things from you etc. You may want to be aware of how people are thinking and so on, this is called transparency. 

Our film provided audience pleasure by giving community. Watching our film when lonely will entertain the audience by showing Sally as having an array of friends as well as a boyfriend. There is also a party where you could assume many people have attended so it shows relationships and people socialising. 

We took inspiration from 500 Days of Summer to characterise Sally. Films generally have opposites such as rich and poor and good and bad. Our film used the good and bad and Sally can be considered the bad character and James, the good. This is because she cheated on him and then lied about the father of her baby when James did nothing to deserve this. Summer's character in 500 Days of Summer is quite similar as she decides that she does not eventually want a relationship with a guy she is seeing after stringing him along for several months. In both cases genre themes are challenged as in many films it is generally the male that is made out to be the bad one, whilst the female is mostly the victim. We subverted this idea.

The character Summer in '500 Days of Summer' was used as inspiration for Sally.

Evaluation - 2) How effective is the combination of your main product and the ancillary texts?

We encountered several problems once we had finalised our first script. To begin with, a lot of the film locations were on a train and after contacting South Yorkshire Travel and asking for permission to film on one of their trains they never got back to us. Because this would take up a lot of time if we where to keep contacting and asking other train companies we decided to not use this story line. Then we had to change the story-line, script and story-board. Our new story-line had one of the casts houses as the main location, this mean't that it was very accessible and easy to organise around. After changing the majority of our film we found that the time in which could finishing filming was very much decreased. This would mean that we had much more time to edit and work on our final film using Finalcut. 

In our film poster and radio trailer I feel that we managed to reflect our overall film appropriately. The film poster showed the main character, Sally, looking distressed whilst holding her stomach to conote that she may be pregnant whilst holding a drink that can be presumed to be vodka. She looks tired and upset which gives anyone looking at the poster the impression that this is a drama. The dark background also adds to the connotations of sadness as it is a brick wall in an urban setting, it looks bleak and as though not much is going right for Sally. In the radio trailer we featured many of the sound clips from our film that give away small sections of the story-line so the audience knows if they would want to watch it, by adding the dramatic parts of speech and key words such as "pregnant" I believe that the overall themes and ideas where presented sufficiently. 

Other advertising products we took inspiration from was the 'Mean Girls' film poster. Despite this film being a comedy we liked the idea of seeing a full length version of the main character being represented with an expression that would connote her thoughts and maybe convey the genre of the film. In the instance of 'Mean Girls' the main character looks on with a look of shock, as if she does not know what to do. One idea from this we took away was the three girls in the background, this had nothing to do with our film and given the time we may have took this idea and used it to show the two other males in the film who are caught up in the love triangle. The 'Mean Girls' poster shows the protagonist in the situation that is the whole movie which would be a suitable idea for ours also. 

Evaluation - 3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When we proposed our first idea and asked an audience the majority of the feedback said the same thing, that our film didn't have much going on and it needed a cliff-hanger or something more exciting happen. This is why we proposed the pregnancy story-line to add an extra twist and increase the drama. We got the feedback from using Twitter and Facebook to ask people we know and don't know what they think of our film to add anything extra that would make our film better or change anything that we have done incorrectly.

Twitter

Facebook

The questionnaire provided a lot of feedback that we took on board. 

This is an example of the questionnaire. 

After we received the feedback we were able to put it into pie charts to summarise the information.

These were all the comments that we received; the good and bad ones. 

A lot of the story-line was conveyed through the script which explained a lot of what was going on. The audience was able to follow the film as Sally explained what had happened to her at the party to Lizzie, during this conversation there is many flash-backs to what actually happened which explains the story-line appropriately. 

Evaluation - 4) How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Digital technology such as Photoshop enabled us to develop creatively in terms of creating our production logo and film poster. Both of these technologies mean't that we could create new ideas and develop on them in order to make something that is unique to our short film. We encountered some problems whilst using these because of the lack of knowledge we had about using them. However, after some research using Youtube and Google we managed to find some tutorials and explanations of how to use all the different aspects of Photoshop so we could create what we wanted to. Furthermore, we used Google Docs to create a questionnaire that enabled us to get audience feedback so we knew what to change in the film and therefore how to improve on it. This was also useful because we could discover what our type of audience was so we could model our film around this and then make the age rating suitable for the people who would most likely want to watch it. Also, Youtube was very useful and something I used a lot when planning our movie, this was because using it I could look at ideas and examples from other films that we could take inspiration from like 'Juno.' Another technology that we used was Final Cut that was used for the editing and final construction of our film. 

Final Cut Express

In Final Cut we had to add all of the difference takes and scenes from our footage and put them together to make the final movie. Again in terms of knowledge on the use of Final Cut it was difficult at time but the internet provided a lot of help to help us make the best of our movie. In the end Final Cut was very effective and useful and made our film the best it could possibly be. 

Sony HD 1000

Also, the camera we used was called a Sony HD 1000, at first there were difficulties as we had never used one before but after getting used to the camera we realised the benefits of using this one. 

Final Film

Film Poster Final

Radio Trailer

Final Script

Location Photos

The bedroom

Top of the Staircase

Front  Door

The Living Room

The Kitchen

The Kitchen

Staircase

Radio Trailer Script

First draft of our short film

Film poster- first draft

This is the original image that we used as the main feature on our film poster. We decided on this because Jess is the main character in our short film and we used subtle symbolism by her holding her stomach and having what is portrayed as alcohol in her hand. By doing this, it hints at the storyline of our short film as it based around teen pregnancy caused under the influence of alcohol.

Original image of Jess

I used Photoshop to create a film poster to ensure it appears professional. I started by uploading the above image of Jess to make that the background and main feature of the poster.

The toolbar on photoshop enabled us to add different features the main one being text. A default font was used for the text besides the bottom writing as we installed a particular font named 'steel tongs' which is a key feature used on film posters. The font enabled us to add information such as 'directed by' or 'edited by' in the correct way for example, the below images are the bottom of our film poster and the poster for 'The Last Song.'

Last Song film poster text

Our film poster text

I also needed to add other images onto the background image for example, the 12A and the stars at the top. This was done by using the 'magic wand tool.'

After opening the image I had to use the tool quick selection to go over the image/outline I wanted to put on the poster. By doing this, it would erase the background to show continuity on the poster it wouldn't be the same as the colour on the image of Jess.

The same process happened when doing the stars by I had to duplicate them to make sure they were the same size again to add continuity within the poster. The two images to the left show the process I went through to achieve this.

On the poster we added some effects to make the finished product more visually appealing. The first example is on the text as all the text on the poster appeared the same, I believed it would look better to add variation and emphasise the actors names. Therefore, I added a shadow effect shown in the image to the left which is a subtle way to make them stand out.

The second example of effects is to the main image of Jess. Due to the lighting not being good on the photo it was essential to adjust the brightness and contrast. This made it appear more professional and made the overall image appear better and not as dull. However, due to this I thought Jess needed to stand out ever more as she was the main feature of the poster. The effect (shown in the image to the left) did this as it enhanced the colour within the photo which ensured more emphasis was added on Jess.

This is the finished film poster. We went for a simplistic approach because we felt it would leave the audience more intrigued to watch the film as a result and also with the subtle symbolism of Jess holding her stomach and a drink (representing alcohol). The main title 'Deception' is situation around the areas where there is symbolism to draw attention to them more which again, is a way of intriguing audiences. The main title is also in a larger font to the rest of the text because it is the main title of the film therefore wanted to add more emphasis on that along with the strap line. 'Who would you tell' is intended to be a rhetorical question with a massive reference to the film as Jess (Sally) has to make the decision of who to tell she is pregnant after cheating on her boyfriend. 

These two images show that I have distributed out film poster on the social networking Facebook and Twitter in attempts to gain a variety of feedback from friends/followers. This gives us opinions on what other people outside the group may think about out poster and to highlight any areas of improvements to it.

Creating a Film Poster

Steel Tongs

Film posters all have certain elements that are constant in all of them. In order to make our film poster look more realistic and professional we need to incorporate some of these things. To start with they all include the cast and crew at the bottom in a font called 'steel tongs.' I have downloaded this font and intend to use it in our film poster. 

Here is an example of the poster for 'Angles and Demons' that uses this font and idea in the poster -

Gangster Squad - 

As you can see the font and style is used in both and this is what adds to the professional and polished look of the film poster.

This is the font - 

This is the font I have downloaded and installed on Photoshop.

The Style

Something else we have to consider is how much the style of the film poster matches our own film. Generally in very good film posters, they borrow elements of the film to add to the poster. This creates memorability and tells the audience what the film is about, this is key if you want them to decided whether or not to watch the movie. A good example of this happening is in the poster for the film 'Watchmen.' Despite this not being in the same genre of our movie, it still has that style that is carried throughout the entire movie. 

You can see that the post borrows from the beginning scene of the film, whilst adding a key element with the smiley face button that acts as a symbol for the film as it is a big franchise. Considering that our film is not going to be a big franchise we don't need to worry as much about this aspect. However, like this film they have toom a very dramatic and action packed part of the film to use which is good as it entices the audience and interests them. There is a man falling, blood and broken glass, this is very in you're face and interesting so it works in advertising itself and getting more people to buy cinema tickets and purchase the DVD. Although our film is not full of action it does have dramatic scenes that we can play on when making the film poster.