Tigerlilly Winfield: Evaluation

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

THE CAMERA

1. The first frame sets the scene informing the audience of the setting and where our story takes place
2. The camera work and the focus pull in this shot inspired me to use focus pulling our short film as I think it looks really professional and leads the audiences focus.
3.This title clearly approaches the topic of themes and issues as the title is very relevant to the short film. 'The Camera' suggests that the plot has something to do with a camera and supposedly memories.
4.The girl pulls a camera out of a dusty old trunk which really gives the house characterization and suggests that the camera is old and aged.
5.The mis en scene is important in this film, they have chosen a key prop, the polaroid camera, as it is instant and allows the audience to see the photos within seconds. The story is that a boy keeps appearing in these photos and if she was using a normal digital camera the story would be very different and hard to comprehend.
6.This shot helps the audience understand what is happening, this photograph lets the audience see through the protagonists eyes. We can see what she is seeing.
7.Being able to see our main characters expression is key in this film as is creates a sense of character and furthers the characterization  it also allows us to see her reaction and develops the theme more. The camera work is focused on her face and the photo is out of focus, this is a nice use of camerawork as we still can see that she is looking at the polaroid yet the photograph doesn't distract the audience from her expression.

APRICOT

1. This shot opens the film, from this shot and the one following we have understanding that these two characters are on a date, it helps us understand the story. It also develops the characterisation between our two characters, we get to understand what they are like. Their costume is also a major part of their characterisation, the man appears quite smart and the woman seems to look more bohimian and we are communicated by her dark eye makeup that she is a lot more relaxed than him.
3. In this shot and also in the 5th screenshot we are presented with the focus on the apricot, this exaggerates the importance of the apricot and informs the audience that it is a major part of the themes and issues presented.
4. The sound in this scene is quite blurred and muffled, exaggerating the fact that it is a flashback, it is also out of sync and the camera work is quite blurry and distorted, this is a perfect way of emphasizing the flashback element.
6. The character here is drinking tea which again is another important hint at the themes and issues in this film. The lighting is really dark which makes you think that the atmosphere is quite tense. In this particular scene the lighting is very dark making us not able to see his whole face which shows clear importance on the teacup in the middle of the frame.
7.This scene is a flashback again, we see the boy taking loads of photographs. We also know at this point that the man drinking the tea has a memory problem. We put 2 and 2 together and immediately assume that he is the little boy.
8.The woman is taking is tea again a clear symbolism to the theme in this film. The camera work here is really important as we don't see her pick the tea up but we don't need to see this as it's not important. The framing of the tea makes it seem important.
9. In the final scene we understand the characters and it gives us a clear representation of them. The story all comes together in the end which is a nice journey through the story.

POLAROID BOY

Narrative organisation:

The Narrative structure in short films is usually linear as the director/screenwriter doesn't have a lot of time to tell a story in usually less than 10 minutes. By using a nonlinear structure it could easily complicate the story line and confuse the audience. In the short film Apricot the narrative organisation is non linear which is unusual for a short film however this film is just over 10 minutes so there was a lot of time to explain the story which involved flashbacks. In polaroid boy the narrative structure is linear. In the beginning when thinking of ideas for our story we had the idea of using flashbacks or putting the beginning scene at the end, so having our protagonist Lola go out taking photographs (frame 6) first and then having a ‘3 hours later…’ to explain the story however we soon realized this would complicate our story line too much and by having our story non linear it would confuse our audience and not make a lot of sense. Our film being quite hard to interpret as it only includes one character and there is no dialogue we decided sticking to linear as our film was confusing enough.Considering narrative, our short film is an example of Todorov's theory: Brother and sister live happily together in a family until her life is disrupted by his tragic death. She can't except this and struggles to come to terms with it, until a year later on the significant day where she is drawn to visit his memorial of death and finally accepts the situation, and her life returns to normality. This is a circular narrative. Our film plot takes part of this story and is similarly linear and chronological - referring to the significant day.

Characterisation:
Characterisation is an important factor in films. You have to portray your character correctly to get the right impression from your audience. In Good Morning Mrs Tucker we start feeling sorry for the main character Mr.Tucker as we see how frustrated he gets as his wife has a memory condition. It is important to have a strong character and be able to relate with your audience. If you want your character to be the protagonist and you want your character to be likeable then you need to work with your actor and make sure you present your character in a likeable manner. In our film we wanted our character to be likeable and we wanted to hold an emotional journey with the audience. As we find out in the end, Lola’s brother Tom has passed away and we want the audience to feel sympathetic towards her. Having no dialogue in our film it was easy to make our character likeable as we go on a journey with her step by step and there is no reason not to like her. If we wanted our audience to view our character negatively we could have involved some dialogue where she was either being rude or angry and that could have changed the audiences opinions.
 
Mise en scene:
Mis-en-scene is usually used to show the social groups that are represented in the film. The opening scene in Polaroid Boy is an establishing shot of a big house (frame 1) which tells us this is a middle class house, further along in the film we see Lola turn off her alarm on an iphone which is another pointer to the class of our protagonist.
In the second frame we see our key prop, the photograph of our two characters, this is an important prop, by enhancing its significance we chose a close up apposed to say a long shot, if we had used a long shot the audiences focus would not have been on the photograph at all.

Lola is wearing shiny leggings and doc martins which are very common with teenagers at the moment so by choosing this costume it tells the audience that she is a normal teenager. Furthermore by choosing to use a polaroid camera rather than the usual digital camera tells the audience that she isn't your usual teenager. Our key prop, the polaroid camera was chosen due to it being so instant and we were able to see the photos immediately. If we had used a different camera it would have been hard to make a story out of it as for example if she was using a digital camera she would have had to go home print them out and then have seen the boy. Thats why using a polaroid camera was so important in our film.


Use of genre conventions:
The genre in Polaroid boy is a mix between adventure and fantasy. It was hard to match a genre to our film as a lot of short films don’t have specific genres. In The Beachcombers you start off not knowing what genre it is and then as we get to the ending and know more about our characters we then realize that it is a romantic film. This is the case with most short films as they start off very general and don’t appear to have a genre then towards the end we can classify the film into which genre it most fits into.  Short films are usually quite realistic and relatable so Polaroid Boy was a perfect example of this as the majority of people have lost a loved one and know that you have to let go, with our film being relatable it will gain more popularity.

The title sequence of our film compliments our story and film. The font we chose was typewriter style which makes us think of diaries and the past. The girl is obviously documenting her travels as she is taking photographs with her camera and I think that the font goes nicely with that as it's similar to a diary.

OUR REVIEW
From analyzing numerous little white lies reviews we picked up of a couple of techniques that were presented in each review:

FINAL POSTER:

From my research into posters I realized that the poster of a film is an important part of marketing your film. Your poster must engage your target audience and also inform at the same time. I took this on board when designing my poster. I wanted my poster to come across as engaging, interesting and relevant to our film.

-I think my poster shows clearly an idea of our story. With the use of both the photograph of our main actress and our Polaroid photographs, it makes the poster eye catching and interesting.

-The large photo of our main character really exaggerates that she’s an important part of our film. We get to know our main character even before we have watched the film.

-I chose to have our character in close up as all we need to focus on is her face, I also chose this angle as I want the audience to be familiar with her face. As she is looking down its not an uncomfortable close up.

-The title of our poster is clear, informative and simple. The font I chose was a simple sans serif font, from our research we saw that very little short films used serif font so using a sans serif font it made our poster look more professional and genuine.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and
ancillary texts?

3.What have you learned from your audience feedback?
For the majority of our audience feedback we used social networking sites as our target audience is teens from about 15+ and the majority of my friends on facebook are our target audience. We also used twitter however we were unsuccessful and didn’t get any feedback, I think the reason being was because on twitter you have a word limit and I think people had more to say about our film so they just went over to facebook instead.


FILM AUDIENCE FEEDBACK:




As you can see above we didn’t get a huge response of audience feedback on our first exported video however the feedback we did get was really useful and helped a lot. Jo and I hadn’t really noticed the sound problems that Alex picked up on in the second screen grab so that was really useful in making the sound and the overall film improve. In the first screen grab Rosie points out our bad continuity, that our protagonist leaves the house without a hat and then magically it appears. This was one of our main problems when filming after we had filmed the outside scenes. Unfortunately Lola was unable to find her hat so we had to do without it. Obviously this is a key mistake as the mis en scene has to be perfect for the film to flow and to make sense. Next time I film I will make sure I do it in order so stuff like this doesn't happen. If we filmed the other way round we would have been able to get rid of Lola’s hat and our problem would have been sorted!
Even though we only got a few comments on Facebook we got a lot of likes which is a positive response however a comment would have been appreciated but by the likes that we did get I’m assuming they liked our film.


As asking for feedback on facebook wasn’t very succesful we decided to ask a couple of girls that had some time to come into our media room, watch our film and give their honest opinion and feedback to us as we filmed them.
This was a lot better than asking on facebook as it was easy to film and they gave us their opinions in detail and how we could improve next time.

POSTER AUDIENCE FEEDBACK:
As gathering feedback via social networking sites wasn’t particularly successful, I decided to send out a group message on my iphone which appeared to be a lot more popular with gathering audience feedback and I got a great response.
I created 2 posters and wanted to see which one my target audience liked the best and why.

As you can see from the screen shots everyone preferred the second one, which was my favorite too. By gathering this information I can work out which poster to submit. On the last screen shot on the first line. Fleur points out that there is a colour difference where the credit block is, this is a good piece of feedback as I can now change the poster and make it better.

But overall our audience preferred the second poster because it is:
-Clear
-Professional
-Interesting
-Intriguing
-Neat
-Comprehensible
-Stands Out
 
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?