Advanced Portfolio

1. Advanced Portfolio 205C Evaluation Questions

2. In what way does our media product use, develop or Challenge forms and conventions of real media products We produced a promotional package for a social realism film due to our mutual interest in the genre and the culture surrounding Britain and the production of social realism films, the main reason we chose to produce a promotional package for a social realism is the fact that the majority of the social realism films produced within the last 10 years including This is England directed by Shane Meadows (2006), Billy Elliot directed by Stephen Daldry(2000) and Fish Tank directed by Andrea Arnolds(2009) were enjoyed mutually by the group due to the themes which are present, these themes include an in-depth view of the life of the main character from a working class background and the problems they face due to social or racial injustice or economic hardship, In This is England for example there is an audience wide enjoyment of the main characters personality.

3. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? When developing our media products we were mindful of how independent film companies promoted their social realism films, we researched the variations in the form of media which were used for the promotion of social realism films particularly Billy Elliot. Dissimilarly to the promotion of other film trailers of the genre ‘Knockout’ includes no diegetic or non diegetic speech as we wanted the audience to make their own decision on the personality of the main character perhaps allowing for an internet wide debate over web 2.0 websites such as YouTube and Facebook. Web 2.0 refers to the advanced application of the internet to allow all users to write and read information on the internet through social networking applications such as blogs, wikis and social network sites.

4. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? We begun the production of our promotional package with the trailer, our aim with the trailers production was to introduce to the audience a very broad insight into the main narrative of the film, the area and location in which the film is set as well as the appearance of the main character and her mannerisms allowing an assessed view of her personality. The trailer as a whole was designed to give the audience enough information about the film to intrigue and cause perspective viewers to go and see the film without giving away almost any of the narrative or important scenes.

5. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? We begun the production of our promotional package with the trailer, our aim with the trailers production was to introduce to the audience a very broad insight into the main narrative of the film, the area and location in which the film is set as well as the appearance of the main character and her mannerisms allowing an assessed view of her personality. The trailer as a whole was designed to give the audience enough information about the film to intrigue and cause perspective viewers to go and see the film without giving away almost any of the narrative or important scenes.

6. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? A poster is important to the promotion of a film especially one of the social realism genre this is partially due to the type of people who will see them and partially due to the ease and cost of designing, producing and distributing posts around a town or city. It is very easy to produce a selection of different posters for a film of any genre especially social realism the only tools which are needed are a computer, editing software and a high quality printer as well as some screen shots or photographs taken of the main character. We decided to produce a poster which introduces the main character only as we wanted to keep the main narrative from the audience. The poster only hints to the audience the fact that it is about sport further detail is not revealed about the sport unless it is researched on the internet

7. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? A spread or review in a well known or prestigious magazine such as Sight and Sound or Little White Lies is important to the success of independent films like ‘Knockout’ if the films receive a good review from one of the listed magazines the distributors and film companies will not have to advertise and heavily to find an audience. Social Realism films have a particular niche market in the UK and are not often viewed by the general public as they are not featured in larger magazines or at the chain cinemas such as the Odeon or Cineworld. We decided to promote our social realism film in Sight and Sound magazine as it deals with the biggest selection of film genres and film types. It is just as good at advertising and reviewing a budget film made by an independent film company as it is reviewing one produced by a Hollywood company such as Dreamworks. When designing our front cover we were careful not to advertise our film ‘Knockout’ to heavily as the main film of the magazine as it would not be the case in real life due to peoples viewing habits therefore we decided to create an issue of the magazine which was dedicated to the best and up and coming social realism films.

9. What have you learned from your audience feedback? • When gathering audience feedback we used a combination of feedback from our class mates who were knowledgeable about the styles of the genre and how things can be changed and improved as well as feedback from peers and family who were shown the Trailer and ancillary texts over the college blog. • When presenting the rough cut of our trailer to our classmates we were presented with a long list of positive comments as well as an equally long amount of negative comments which were meant more as positive criticism • Our first presentation of the rough cut was meant with the following positive comments: • The trailer is very simple and easy to understand • A main strength is the fact that not too much information is given away. • A good variety of Shot types and angles including; close ups, mid shots, long shots and extreme long shots which helped to present the main character and the place in which she lives and practices • The titles helped to the audience understand what the film is about

10. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? What have you learned from your audience feedback? Our classmates also presented us with a list of aspects of our trailer which they did not like or had decided did not fit in with the filming, narrative or genre of our trailer, we decided to follow the advice as they could look at the trailer from a different perspective to us and point out problems that we did not notice ourselves. The sections which our class mates thought could be improved were;

11. What have you learned from your audience feedback? • The Muhammad Ali quote which was broken up into sections and played throughout the trailer with black backgrounds did not have a source explaining to the audience the origin of the quote therefore it could only be properly understood by boxing fanatics. This problem was fixed in our final production as we sourced our quote at the end of the last section of the quote this helped to display to a wider audience the boxing narrative of the film.

12. What have you learned from your audience feedback? • When producing our trailer we watched it over and over again to pick out problems with filming or continuity therefore we read the captions and titles over and over again to the extent that we could remember them, we did not notice as a group how quickly the titles played through and did not understand that our audience would not be able to read them the first time. We went about sorting out this problem by extending the amount of time that each title was on display we then asked again for audience’s feedback to make absolutely sure that the titles could easily be read.

13. What have you learned from your audience feedback? • The area of our trailer which was most commonly complained about by our classmates was the lack of both diegetic and non-diegetic sound throughout. It was difficult for our audience to watch the trailer all the way through without and understand it fully without a soundtrack it is also difficult to define what genre the film supposed to be. We were also told in our feedback session that the telling of the story could be helped along with the use of a small amount of diegetic sound in the areas which displayed action especially in the gym scenes. We dealt with the problem of having a lack of non-diegetic sound by using a royalty free music track as our soundtrack it helped to pull the trailer together and brought it to a climax along with the title of the film, we also reloaded gym sections of the film to make sure they played with diegetic sound.

14. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? New media technology was used in every aspect of the research, production and evaluation of our advanced portfolio piece. We begun our project with the research stage this involved a vast amount of Internet and web 2.0 use to research all areas of social realism genre, we used websites such as Wikipedia.org and Imdb.com to research in detail the films that we enjoyed, conventions of the genre and whether or not they were followed by the film in question we also used Youtube.com to research the styles and conventions of the films that we hoped to base our film both in terms of genre and narrative. Once we had gathered sufficient research about social realism films and there production we began producing a PowerPoint presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint. PowerPoint works in conjunction with all media types including text, image, video and audio in order to produce an informative and visually impressive presentation.

15. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? When carrying out the production stage of the project we were loaned a Sony High Definition DV digital camcorder which was capable of capturing digital footage at 1080p a resolution which is similar to that used in the production of commercial films such as Avatar and Spiderman. The HD cameras were supplied with a high quality lithium ion battery and DV cassette which allowed for 60 minutes of footage this was helpful when trying to gather as much footage as we could in the field.

16. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? We used a powerful Dell computer in conjunction with Adobe Premier 2.0 to edit our footage. The computer must be of high specification in order to capture and deal with the 1080p footage correctly. Having use of a computer and high quality editing software made the production of our film extremely easy it was also easy to add titles and a soundtrack to our piece. The sound track that we decided accompanied our film trailer better than any was sourced from a website called incomputech.com which specializes in royalty free music which can be put to any use without the permission of the owner/writer.

17. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? When writing the evaluation for our piece I used a selection of different pieces of production and presentation software's depending on my location. I used Microsoft word to draft the written work for my evaluation piece. I used Google Docs to write from home it is an Internet based word processing software which allows the user to write and save their work online to open from any location or destination later on I found it more secure and useful than Microsoft word as it eliminates the possibility of forgetting work for lesson.

18. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? The presentation work was also carried out on Microsoft PowerPoint as it is far superior to other software in terms of ease of use and compatibility it also allows the insertion of many forms of media including personal videos, those from YouTube, photograph’s, soundtracks and text. PowerPoint presentations are universally compatible over many platforms of media device and offer an extremely high quality and high resolution image which can be presented on a majority of television and projection devices as opposed to a hand produced presentation which has to be kept at a certain size and will likely be riddled with imperfections.