Evaluation Question: Conventions

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

I researched the codes and convention of crime dramas and psychological thrillers and compared them to my film production- in regards to the way my film used, developed and challenged their these two genres conventions. I also gave examples using real media products.


Both Crime Dramas and Psychological Thrillers use enigma codes in order to engage and sustain interest amongst their audience.
The narrative theorist who came up with enigma codes (an important aspect of enigma codes) is Roland Barthes, he concluded how stories use different codes to control the way information is given to the audience. In effect enigma codes set up a puzzle for the audience to complete and solve and usually crime drama set up stories full of mystery and therefore enigma codes.
We used the concept of enigma codes profoundly in our opening sequence, and as a result we maintained a successful aspect used within films that are within the same genre as ours- crime drama.


Crime Drama Genre by EnnySilva

Codes and Convention- Psychological Thriller by EnnySilva

 

Day 15 Editing

In lesson today, Conor and I darkened some clips of the blood, to make it look as realistic as possible as possible. We felt that when it was darkened it wasn't as shocking and obvious to the reader that the blood was fake, compares to when we had brightened it a lot.

We modified the sound levels of our soundtrack, so that the music does not overpower the voice over and make it hard to hear. When the voice over plays the music is really low and when the voice over stops the music levels pick up. This application in Final Cut enabled me to do this; which was great because our voice over was already quite low when we were recording it.

We continued using Garage Band to create our soundtrack and due to our desire to make the music as precise and synchronous to the clips as possible, it is taking us a long time. After the feedback provided by the year 13 students, our teacher advised us to change the instrument we used in the happy scene as it destabilised the structure we were trying to achieve with our excessive use of flashbacks- the flashbacks appeared to be a lot because the romantic music was contrapuntal to the clips and this distracted our audience from the voice over- now that we have changed the music to be more fast-paced, it is now parallel to our fast paced editing.

Day 14 Editing

In lesson today we peer assesed each others work. Chelsey, Ralph and Dylan peer assesed our work and we did the same to them.
These were their comments:
Conor and I decided to present it in an interview format:




I made the whole of the happy scene clips Black and White in order to create a dream-like sequence and make it more obvious that Sarah is having a flashback...

I used the Radial Blur effect in Final Cut to make the POV shot look more realistic and to emphasise to the audience that Sarah is crying and hurting, the blur is supposed to represent the blur that occurs when a person is crying.

These are the effects we added to the above clip within the violent scenes... They are a lot but the desired effect is what we want and has been created- the blurry, shaky format (that represents tears and fear) is what we were trying to achieve.

I got some Year 13 media students to give us feedback on our opening sequence, they provided constructive criticisms that we later acted upon to improve our opening sequence.



As a result of the feedback I made the clip of Conor 'attacking' Sarah slow motion, so that the domestic abuse issue would be able to be seen by our audience and enable them to see the link between the voice over's statements and the images they see, the green tabs show the clip has been slowed down- hopefully the choice of slowing the clip down would get rid of this confusion:

Day 13 Editing

Today, Conor worked on our soundtrack for a bit whilst I worked on the voice over. 

I split the voice over into parts in order to make it synchronous to the images our audience will view.

 As a result the words in the voice over are expressed a lot more strongly, and hopefully it will be noticed a lot more by our audience and create a lot more questions within them, in regards to the reasons to the images that they see and their attempt to find the correlation between the images that they are viewing and the cynicism they hear in her voice-adding to our enigma codes. 

Before I had split the voice over to make it parallel to the images in the screen, our teacher felt that our voice over was too dramatic and the person that was the voice over sounded more happy than sad or angry, but when I had synced the voice over to the image, the voice sounded a lot more angry. Also I had informed Conor that at a particular time in the clip with the voice over there needs to be "hard" music that connotes violence playing, and when we played the clips, voice over and soundtrack together the voice over's angry emotion was expressed a lot more and the overall effect was quite captivating.

We started to experiment with the colour balance of our clips in order to change the colour of our blood and make it look as realistic as possible 

This is an example of one of the clips we changed the colour of the blood by moving the dot within the circle to the red region.

We brightened up the blood {shown in the bathroom scene} in some of our clips in order to try and make it look as realistic as possible.
We only brightened up some of our clips, so that when the fast-paced jump cuts occur they will stand out a lot more. Also it was the clips in the beginning we brightened up and the ones later on we left with no effect in order to form the juxtaposition between light and dark and to visually create the harshness of Sarah's voice over tone. So her voice gets more bitter and harsher, therefore the clips get darker and become quicker (representing the psychological aspect of our film's genre).

BEFORE:

AFTER:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

(but we felt this effect looked too dull and did not make the blood stand out or look as realistic as it could so we brightened it up)

AFTER:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I managed to ask my mum her view on the blood and the effect we had made, and the impact it would have on her,  as a audience.

Her view/feedback was that:

Our blood did not look realistic, even when it was brightened up and that it looked really pink, and that for some of the clips it would be best if we left them as dark as they were originally because even though they were still a bit pink as well ( especially the ones in the sink) at least the blood on my hand still looked a bit more red and therefore more realistic.

When she stated this and expressed her points to me, I agreed that indeed brightening up the images made the blood look even more fake and more obvious that it was paint that we used (only now it looks like we used pink paint instead of red).
I will give this feedback to Conor as well and as a pair we will make the decision on whether or not to act on her constructive criticism.

Film Opening Development

Conor and I are making comments regarding our production, we are talking about the improvements that we could make and how our opening sequence is turning out...



PowerPoint of Our Film Development, with our success criteria:

Film Opening Development by EnnySilva

Day 12 Editing

We did the voice over today straight onto Final Cut because I couldn't access the clip, we had originally created on Photo booth, because it would not Export.

The voice over script has changed slightly from...

"Every girl enjoys fairytales. Especially Cinderella's.

They love the idea of a Prince Charming who is prepared to whisk them off to a lifetime of bliss and wonder:- you know the line...'and they all lived happily ever after; The end.'

The end? Is that it...?

Not even close... What they forget to tell every girl is the fact that Prince Charming is non-existent,  so you settle for a mimic, a wannabe, a fake, a poser, an IMPOSTER!!"

To...

"Every girl enjoys fairytales. Especially Cinderella's.
They love the idea of a Prince Charming who is prepared to whisk them off to a lifetime of bliss and wonder:- you know the line...'and they all lived happily ever after; The end.'
The end? Is that it...?
Not even close... What they forget to tell every girl is the fact that Prince Charming is non-existent,  so you settle for a mimic, a fraud, a wannabe, an IMPOSTER!!"

We reduced the number of comparisons Sarah uses, because we felt that it was too descriptive and too long and might therefore bore and not create intrigue within our audience and we also thought that "fraud" was a better description that summarised the words "fake and poser" really well. Furthermore, we though that the word "poser" was too alike to the title "IMPOSTER!!"

We continued working on our soundtrack...we want to make sure that every moving image is synchronous to our soundtrack so we looked at the duration of each clip and made the sound equally as long. 

The duration of our opening sequence is exactly, this means we are within the 2 minutes benchmark:

Day 11 Editing

We were experimenting with the placements of our title sequence, I tried to make the placements of our titles unique and put them on items within the frame, to give the appearance that the names were a part of the scene. For example,  with my name I placed it on the soap dispensor and the colours I used helped to emphasise this appearance.

I had originally planned to place my name in the middle of the soap dispensor, but Conor though it looked better placed on the side and I agreed.

 

 This is how my name is place now, however the orange tint in the background has been changed to black and this change (in my opinion) makes our production look a lot more professional.

We blurred the violent scenes, we tried to look for the blur effect that will make the clips look like they are from the viewpoint of a person in tears (the clip is a POV shot of Sarah in tears, as James prepares to hurt her, a teary blu would have made the POV shot more realistic and therefore more effective). However either we could not find this effect or it was unavailable. So we looked for an alternative and settled with a normal blur with an earthquake effect- the effect was still good and did not deter from the overall effect we wanted to create. 

Conor has started creating the music, that will hopefully be synchronous with our opening sequence clips.