Evaluation Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Here I have used camtasia to demonstrate how I used Motion for my own title sequence:

Evaluation Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

We also reached our audience through: Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr. All of which are social networking sites that our target audience would use daily and frequently.

Evaluation Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Evaluation Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Preliminary film 

2. PRELIM Saffron Jaram Jakub Jamey from 283goswell on Vimeo.

Final film

2. Jamey, Joel, Joram from 283goswell on Vimeo.

Password: student 

Evaluation Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Here is some feedback I received from a friend, after showing her my title sequence on Vimeo. I asked her to comment on the representation of the characters in our film.

Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Using Social Media Further

I have decided to create a Tumblr page in order to connect more with our target audience as they are mainly teenagers. This Tumblr blog reflects our film and links you to the influences that we've had whilst in the process of putting our film together.

The Extra Mile: Tumblr Blog

Final Day of Editing / 6th March

Today was the final day of editing as the deadline is at 4pm sharp. I came in at 9am so that I could spend all morning and lunch, making sure that everything was in place and that the correct titles were included. This took longer than expected as there were a few bad shots put into the film and our title sequence was far too long (3:50), so I had to remove some unnecessary footage. Also, whilst organising some of the shots, I disorganised some of the shots that went with the music as I wasn't watching carefully at what I was doing. Once I noticed the mistake I was making, I locked the music in place by clicking on the padlock on the far left hand side so that the soundtrack wouldn't be affected. Another aspect I changed was the title at the end of the film. Initially, we wanted to place the title at the end as it adds that special touch and almost serves as a finale to the sequence. However, after watching it all back, it looked too much like a trailer. Therefore, I moved the film title to it's correct place in the title sequence (after the second actor's name) and it looked much better. Overall, I think today has been a stressful day of trying to complete everything. Luckily, our film is finished and ready to be marked. I am personally not 100% happy with the outcome as I am a perfectionist myself and some of the shots we had were quite shaky and not 'smooth' enough. This could be an evaluation point and something that could have been changed.

Editing Session / 5th March

Today's editing session was mainly focused on re-watching our footage, seeing what could be changed, and adding in the extra titles that were missing. Me and Joram looked through all of the shots to make sure we never left any important ones out and during this process, we did come across a few clips that should have been in the film already. We also asked Dan for feedback on our footage and his main points of improvement were to: make the rapping scene at the end longer (as that's what people are waiting for/expecting to see) and to change the beginning so that the audience can connect more with the character and get an idea of what he's like instead of just seeing the back of his face (which is what our initial opening was).

Skills Learnt in Production

Extension Blog Task 37: Further Changes to the Blog

After changing the layout of the blog the first time, I thought it looked a little bit too 'plain' as a whole and nothing stood out to me in particular. Therefore, to fix this problem, I decided to add a top header with our film's logo to give the blog a main focal point.

At first, this was the header that I had created. I downloaded the font ('Street Soul') online as I couldn't find a better font and the one's we had first initially selected didn't fit well. However after uploading this onto the blog, it still didn't hold much character and the blog was too monochrome.

So to resolve this issue, I decided to add in the companies logos that will be producing/distributing our film to the bottom of the title. Not only did this add more information about our film, it also made it more interesting to look at and gave it more character.

I created this header: 

Here is the design of our blog now:

Blog Post 41: Blogging Health Check 2

My blogging work is now currently at a B (on target) with 15/20.  

My improvements were to: 

> Not leave any empty posts i.e Holiday Homework (which I have now completed and uploaded)

> Add some of my own points to my blog post on Motion, add some of my own research and skills that I have learnt 

> Lastly, the post my re-make (however I was absent on the day so couldn't film one)

Blog Post 40: Revisions to Pitch

As a group, we have decided to not include the bedroom scene that we originally planned on filming as our opening. This is because we thought that it wouldn't fit in well with the rapping 'theme' and the soundtrack we chose wouldn't tie in well with a bedroom scene. Hopefully this turns out to be a good decision.

Extension Activity: Wix Website

Here is the link to our very own website that I have created. It includes 4 different pages: Home (which introduces our film poster), Institutional Detail (which gives information about the companies producing/distributing our film), Information (includes the different equipment and software we used in the process) and lastly, the blog (which links to this blog).

Enjoy!

The Extra Mile: Website

Film Poster

I have personally decided to create a film poster for our title sequence, to promote our film and reflect what it will be about. I used Photoshop to create the poster as I am extremely familiar with the software and I have used it plenty of times before.

Editing Session / 2nd March

Luckily today we had a 3 hour media lesson in the morning so that we had plenty of time to do some editing. In today's editing session, we mainly focused on completing the titles and making sure that they reflected well against the film. We chose a template and exported them all onto Final Cut Pro, however the particular template we chose wouldn't show up against our sequence (even though the background was made transparent). After consulting the technician, and finding out that we couldn't resolve the problem, we made the decision to re-do the titles with a different template. Again, we had many difficulties in making sure the titles appeared visibly against the sequence and didn't blend in. In some cases, the titles couldn't be seen against the background of the shot and this turned out to be extremely frustrating as I had to keep re-doing them in Motion. Another aspect of the sequence we did in today's lesson was work on the soundtrack. The track we chose is a copyright track however contains a deal of 'bad' words. In order to bleep out the most evident ones, we decided to lower the volume of music at that particular time. This took a while to get right but eventually it worked.

Reflection: Overall, I think that today's editing session was half a success. The panic mode has now started as our film is due at the end of this week. I'm most worried about getting the titles completed and looking somewhat decent.

Research: Analysing Real Media

Editing Session / 26th February

Today's editing session consisted of looking through all of the shots we had on our video drive and making sure that we didn't leave out any important ones. We asked our teacher, Dan, for feedback in which he mentioned that we should think about the beginning of our sequence and think about how we can make it more visually interesting to the audience. After thinking about this, we wasn't sure on what to do as we didn't have any extra clips to make this happen. Therefore, we stuck with what we got. However, we did re-arrange some of the shots we put e.g. instead of starting with an over the shoulder shot (as the audience wouldn't be able to connect with the character), we started with a shot where you can see the face. We still kept the over the shoulder shot as we really liked it and thought it made our sequence more interesting.

Reflection: As a whole, I think today's lesson was a bit stressful as were trying to figure out the best way to go about organising our clips and making sure they were in the correct order.

Production: Filming Session / 5th

Reflection: Today's filming session involved re-shooting some of our shots from the studio scene as well as the outside scenes of the "studio" building. When taking out the equipment this time, we decided to try using the fig rig and experiment with what we could do with it.

We first started off down in the studio, re-filming some of the shots but in different angles to make our film more interesting. Additionally, we also decided to film some close-ups of the studio equipment to show the privileged rappers wealthy side and his access to top quality equipment. Then we decided to go outside to film next to the Jamie Oliver restaurant again and also the subject walking into the "studio." This time, we used the fig rig to follow the privileged rapper on his journey and this had a much better effect as it shows him close-up.

Fortunately, when looking back at our shots this time, we didn't have any issues with what we filmed and we were happy with the angles that we have captured.