I felt our product built upon the conventions of other British Social Realism texts in several ways. We had young unknown actors, we focused on an issue that is relevant in parts of Britain (Prostitution in London is a particular issue as found in our research) and we followed the theme that many of the characters in British Social Realism are merely victims of circumstance.
Our trailer has also been edited in a similar way to many other media products both inside and outside the social realism genre. Our trailer begins demonstrating an equilibrium that both characters endure every day before they meet each other and how this equilibrium is broken as they meet each other. Many trailers have this theme of an equilibrium being broken and re established after a particular event. In this case our event was the formation of a friendship. I feel like our main goal was to use and develop existing conventions rather than challenge them, after doing audience and product research I felt like this would be the best path to take as the majority of films that challenge the genre tend to be indie films that have minimal success. However films such as Fish Tank and This Is England that follow the conventions and develop the genre are hits.
How effective is your main product and ancillary texts?
I believe we have a certain look that goes across all three of our products however we have taken a certain approach with each one. All of our products seem washed out of colour and are also fairly dark and all share a common font for the film title. Yet we didn’t want all our products to be swayed from their purpose in order to maintain a common visual them. We specifically wanted our film poster to be somewhat minimalistic with black on white as we felt this would draw eyes towards the poster and allow the viewer to quickly identify the film title and theme of the film, we also wanted the image to create an enigma that would generate curiosity within our audience thus hooking them into seeing our film.This varies to our magazine cover that is actually in colour and has a close up of our actor’s faces, something we didn’t do in the film poster. We decided this was something we would do as it is a convention of most magazine covers that allow the reader to instantly identify the main characters and then be able to read more about the plot later on in the magazine.We decided to use the sight and sound magazine as our template due to it having various other British Social Realism films on its front cover in the past (Fish Tank) , thus showing that its audience will respond most positively to our film.
We therefore believe that whilst the visual theme we have maintained throughout may not be as strong as previous campaigns in the industry each media piece we have created has been built for a purpose to maximise audience receptiveness to our film
For our audience feedback to our production we exhibited our trailer in the Electric Cinema Birmingham and had all our guests fill out a feedback form to see where we had been succesfull and how we could improve. Overall our audience feedback was very positive. ( Almost to positive, not giving us many criticisms to work on! )
After looking at our feedback we felt we were very succesfull on getting the narrative across as everyone could report back to us what the narrative was about and also reported emotions that we aimed to create. However some criticisms were that to much of the narrative were given away, particulary in the car scene. We feel that if we were to do this again the car scene would be something that we would have to focus on in particular as we didnt get the balance between enigma and narrative quite right this time.
We noticed in our feedback that many reported they felt sad then happy and this final feeling of happiness encouraged them into wanting to watch the film, we were very pleased reading this as this was exactly what we aimed to create.
Many reported that the intro and final scene in the woods was their favourite and the fast paced intimate intro gave them an insight into the characters and made them feel attatched ( Some even reported they could relate! ) If we were to do this again we would make sure to keep these scenes due to the positive feedback we recieved regarding them.
Another common criticism that we recieved was again about the car scene, many felt the acting paled in comparison to the proffesional intro and the pace was slowed down to quickly. This is something we did expect as we ourselves were not pleased with the acting or pace change, in the future we would definetly audition actors beforehand and do more research into the flowing of narrative in other trailers as this was a particular weakness in ours.
Overall then we have learnt that by creating negative moods and then replacing them with positive ones it left many feeling good about the film and wanting to go and watch the whole thing. We also learnt that whilst our narrative did come through strongly it may have came through to much and that in the future we should seek to create more enigmas within our trailer to hook the audience in. Another more practical issue that we could address in the future is acting abilitys and we could do this by doing auditions among potential actors.
We also took note of feedback throughout our production process and acted upon this, this feedback mainly came from fellow classmates and teachers and helped us create a much more refined finished product to exhibit at the Electric Cinema. For example we have several versions of our film that can be seen in the production work section of our blog, each time we improved our trailer it was after listening to and responding to audience feedback, our film poster to demonstrated this reaction to feedback as we had made several versions after getting feedback from clasmates and teachers.
This has taught us the importance of not only getting feedback at the end of the creative process but also during to help make our product the best it can be and to appeal to our audience as best as possible. In the future we could potentially gather more official feedback during the creative process in order to create an even stronger product.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We also took note of feedback throughout our production process and acted upon this, this feedback mainly came from fellow classmates and teachers and helped us create a much more refined finished product to exhibit at the Electric Cinema. For example we have several versions of our film that can be seen in the production work section of our blog, each time we improved our trailer it was after listening to and responding to audience feedback, our film poster to demonstrated this reaction to feedback as we had made several versions after getting feedback from clasmates and teachers.
This has taught us the importance of not only getting feedback at the end of the creative process but also during to help make our product the best it can be and to appeal to our audience as best as possible. In the future we could potentially gather more official feedback during the creative process in order to create an even stronger product.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Blogger has also allowed for easy organisation of our work in a more visual manner than walls of text that has helped our creativity.
During our research stage one of the most valuable websites we used was YouTube. YouTube allowed us to view other British Social Realism trailers instantly and draw inspiration from them and even share them on our blog. We believe YouTube has been invaluable for giving us inspiration and a comparison for our own trailer to ensure we followed various codes and conventions that had been set by previous trailers.
During the filming process we used a Flip HD camera. The camera itself is very simple to use yet still maintains HD quality and was perfect for our trailer. It has a built in usb connector and by using our own camera it allowed us to take the footage home with us and edit in our own time to ensure we could immerse ourselves in the editing process.
For the editing stage we used Sony Vegas Pro 8, a program we were all familiar with after using it last year. We chose to edit using Sony Vegas as it allows excellent precision in the trimming and placement of clips and also comes with a variety of adjustable colour correction filters that would help our film achieve a washed out look that fits into the social realism genre. This is a program not available in school so we had meet at my house and edit as a group, we feel this more relaxed environment where we could edit at our own pace really helped us be creative and create a polished final product.
For the photos used in our magazine cover and film poster we actually used an iPod touch, this allowed us to have a really portable camera with which we was able to instantly upload our photos wirelessly. We used Photoshop cs5 to edit both and used a variety of filters and colour correction adjusts to create the initial look then imported various other images ( Such as the sight and sound border etc ) to make the image look like it was a part of a magazine or poster. The poster in particular was edited quite heavily as we used the magic wand tool to edit out a large amount of the background and then used various filters, lens flares and blur effects to create the final image.
The social networking site Facebook has also allowed us to keep in contact and organise filming times and dates outside of school. We have also used it to show our trailer to various friends and aquire feedback on what could be changed.
During the evaluation stage we have of course used blogger to display our work, Photoshop to create annotated images of our posters and filmed ourselves talking over our final trailer before uploading the footage to YouTube and then onto our blog.
