Media Evaluation

Media evaluation from melissakerrison96

FINAL CUT

Changes made//Difficulties we are facing

We have come along way since the beginning of our project and a lot of changes have been made from our old ideas. Initially, we begun with an interview with the prime minister and after that went on to a montage of the protagonist's house and alcohol bottles and empty pill bottles to connote his insanity and mental unstability. However we then got some constructive criticism and realised that if someone was planning to murder the prime minister they would carefully plan it out and would be very neat and organised rather than messy and unstable. A lot of development has been made between then and now and we are just editing the last bits and adding in the titles.

As a group we realised that we have become so focused on editing and trying to make the storyline clear that we haven't included anything thrilling. This worried us a lot as we are running out of time so we have had to think about a few extra shots we can intercut into our opening.

The shots:

• An over the shoulder shot of the protagonist scrolling through the web with searches such as 'how to make a c4 bomb'
• A close up of the protagonist pulling his tie tight- connote anger
• A shot of him on the phone to someone "I've got the bomb, i'll be at the houses of parliament at 9 tonight"
• A close up of a picture of the prime minister

Moreover we have finally thought of a title for our film- 'Vengeance' we have chosen this because the term refers to punishment inflicted because of a wrong doing, in our case, the protagonist wants to punish the prime minster for the economical crisis and the current state the country is in.

Editing

We are currently in an ongoing process of editing our opening title sequence. We are all working very well together to carefully edit our political thriller. None of us have used Adobe Premier Pro before, therefore we are all learning as we go along. This is very helpful as we are helping each other and learning new things constantly. Some parts of editing are difficult and we have had to face a few problems like intercutting different parts with different sounds and trying to match up the voices. However we have learnt a lot and been able to overcome problems such as these by asking for help and using our intuition to work it out. Moreover, we realised after the London shoot that the ticket we zoomed in on said 'child' rather than adult which obviously breaks the realism. Hannah and I have been trying to be technical and edit the shot so the 'child' is blurred out. We are struggling with this but with the use of the internet and the teachers, we will be able to do it. This process is very helpful and will not only help us with our media next year, but will help with our editing skills for the future.

Titles

We are getting to the point in our opening title sequence where we're almost ready to put in the titles, however we were a little stuck on the order so I have decided to look over and revise it.

I have looked at various opening title sequences and analysed the order in which the titles appear, the order is usually:

• __________Presents
• A __________ Production
• *Actors name*
• *Actors name*
• Film Title
• Music by _________
• Editing by _________
• Produced by ________
• Written by ________
• Directed by________

The main one I look looked at was 'Panic Room' as this gave me an accurate idea of how titles are meant to be and in what order they should appear. I am glad I went back and revised this because before looking at the order, I would've thought that the film title would go at the end, however it's more in the middle. This has helped me as I now remember a lot more about opening title sequences and especially the titles.

Questionaire

Whilst finishing off editing and shooting the last few bits of our opening title sequence, we have put together a questionaire that we will each post on social networking sites after we have finished our opening title sequence to get feedback from our work.

The first draft of our questionaire includes these questions:

1. From our opening sequence, does it make you want to watch the rest of the film?

2. Does the opening title sequence make sense?

3. Do the camera angles work and do they create realism?

4. Are the transitions smooth?

5. Is the sound track suitable?

6. Does it have thriller elements within?

7. Is the storyline presented well?

8. Is the lighting contributing to the suspense and ambiguity?

9. Are the props in the film realistic?

10. Did the characters work well within the opening of the film?

11. Is the whole production easy to understand, or is it complex?

12. Do you think the locations chosen are suitable within the opening title sequence?

13. Are the titles easy to read and do they last for a long enough amount of time?

 From this questionaire we will elaborate and keep thinking of appropriate questions for sort of feedback we want and this will help us when writing our evaluation because we will know whether we have attracted our target audience and so on.

Filming; Shoot 4

Yesterday, February the 14th, Jacob and I went to London to film with Callum Carroll. We found this trip to London very successful and after editing it, are very pleased with the outcome. We prefer it much more than the last draft.

1 Thing that went well:

• We got every shot we intended, making sure we didn't make the same mistake of the shots being too short. 

1 Problem we came across:

•  We couldn't get a good view of the houses of parliament without viewing it from the bridge only which wasn't helpful as Callum was meant to be right outside and waiting for the Prime Minister. However, overall I am very happy with how our project is coming along.

Here are some of the pictures whilst filming:

Rough Cut

This is our rough cut of our opening title sequence. As you can see we don't have the beginning shots in yet and we don't have non-diegetic sound such as music but we will be continuing work on it over this half term to meet the deadline for the final draft on Friday the 1st.

Peer Assessment / New Storyboard

Our work was shown to the class and peer assessed, from this is was evident that we had a lot to change in order to make our opening title sequence good. There were so many faults we found with it that we decided to change the location and many other things. For example, we've decided not to show the interview now, and instead have it on the radio whilst the man who wants to kill the Prime Minister is doing things like reading the paper on the economical collapse and assembling a gun etc.

We need to keep in mind many things like holding the shots for longer so we can edit them if needed. This is because we found that our current draft is too quick.

In order to grasp the concept of our new ideas we have made another storyboard to follow.

 1. This shows the radio being turned on and the Prime Minister's interview will be playing aloud. Next will be a title.
2. There will be an establishing shot of the murderer sitting on the edge of his bed reading the paper and then a close up of the article which will be a political crisis
3. The murderer planning to kill the PM, scratches a picture of the PM's face out and then closes the newspaper angrily
4. He then gets out his diary and reads it (The diary will explain his motives to kill the PM) and after that he will pack his briefcase, ready for 'work'
5.The next shot will be him telling his wife he's going to work and walking out the house with his briefcase, followed by another title
6. There will be a shot of the murderer approaching the gates of his house to leave and then another title
7. He will then purchase a ticket for London and wait for the train 
8. There will be a shot of him sitting on the train and a close up of his face with him stroking his chin, our aim is to make this bit mysterious and intense
9. We will have a close up of him tapping his foot to connote his impatience and after that another title
10.Next there will be a close up of the 'westminister' train station sign to give the audience an idea of where he is, and this will be followed by a shot of him in amongst a busy crowd
11. There will be a shot of iconic landmarks etc like the London eye, Big Ben and things like red tour buses and black cabs to portray the horror of him being free to roam around London being as dangerous as he is, and then next another title.
12. Then there will be an establishing shot of the houses of parliament and a shot of Callum (The man wanting to murder the PM) from behind watching the houses of parliament as if he has another ulterior motive than wanting to visit it as a tourist attraction
13. One of the last shots will be him looking at his watch as if waiting/anticipating something significant to happen.

Overall, I am happy with the new storyboard as I'm not happy with our current draft and I think starting again will make it a lot better. Aswell as this I feel I am able to justify what shots we have chosen to film and why, whereas before I couldn't really justify some of the shots, I just put them in to fill a gap.

Changing and Developing our Political Thriller

After attempting to put together and edit our opening title sequence, we came across two problems. The first problem is that we don't think it will be long enough to fit 2 minutes and the second problem is that many of our shots don't look as good as we wanted them too.

Resolution:
-We have decided to do a re shoot at Jacob's house and things we need to focus on are:

• The panning of alcohol bottles needs to be smoother
• Callum's head has to be in the shot completely as it has been cut off in our original shot
• Various shots need to be held for longer

-We have decided to go to London to shoot Callum amongst an iconic setting because this presents the horror of unstable people roaming around without anyone knowing the dangerous motives they hold. Moreover, we want to film an establishing shot from behind him of him standing outside the houses of parliament. I feel this will make his intentions clearer and help the audience understand that he wants to murder the Prime Minister.

-Whilst taking the tube to London, I also think it will be a good idea to film Callum on the train, within a crowded area of people, indicating the difficulty to differentiate aesthetically his danger. I want him to be tapping his foot and looking at his watch to connote his impatience.

Filming

Over the past week, Hannah, Finley, Jacob and I have been filming for our opening title sequence, we have found this challenging but have now got most filming done. This experience has allowed us to understand the difficulties and problems filmmakers have to face as we had to overcome problems of our own. One problem we faced was that some shots were harder to do than we originally thought, for example, zooming out of a TV as it's very hard to keep the zoom straight. We had to make sure we always shot more than one of the same thing to compare and see which one was better. However, we all had a lot of fun filming and I think we worked really well as a group. I'm pleased that we ended up adding in different shots to make it look better and overall filming so far has been very successful.
Below are pictures taken during filming.

Actors

The actors we will be using in our opening title sequence are Callum Carroll as the mad teacher, Reece Garside as the Prime Minister and Millie Warren as the interviewer.







Reece Garside
We thought Reece would play a very good Prime Minister. This is because we didn't want to use an adult for the part as it would be difficult to choose a time when everyone is free, therefore we needed someone that looked a bit older and can pull of the smart/sophisticated Prime Minister look to create realism. Reece was very confident and conveyed a sense of authority. Like Millie he was dressed smart/casual with a shirt and trousers.

Millie Warren
We chose Millie Warren to be our interviewer because we needed someone enthusiastic and confident to play the role and we needed them to seem very interested in what the prime minster had to say. Millie was very good at acting in this scene and her costume was perfect because it wasn't too formal that it would appear on BBC/ITV news, but more smart/casual for younger viewers that would be watching.

Shooting Schedule

Our shooting schedule for media is below

Wednesday 16th- Interview scene outside- front of school

Sunday 19th- Teacher's house and montage at Jacob's house

Thursday 24th- Re-shoot at Jacob's house

Scripting for our opening title sequence

SCRIPTING

Interviewer (MillieWarren): I'm here outside of the Chalfonts Community College with the Prime Minister David Cameron. So why have you decided to visit schools around Buckinghamshire?

Prime Minister (Reece Garside): I want children to be aware of the current state that the country is in and I want them to understand the reasons behind the decisions we make. There were rumours that we're sliding into a triple dip recession. I can confirm these rumours are not true.

*Change of location to the mad teachers house*
 *Montage of newspapers, alcohol bottles, empty pill packets etc to indicate how unstable the teacher is*

Wife (unseen): [Shouting from downstairs] Dinners ready!

*Teacher walks out the room and slams the door, allowing the viewer to see a dart board on the back of the door with a dart in the middle of a picture of the Prime Minister's face*

Our Animatic

This is our animatic. We had to do a storyboard containing every single shot of our opening title sequence. We imported the pictures to Adobe Premier Pro where we inserted the pictures in order and set the correct amount of time it stayed on screen. We also added some diegetic scripting (the speech from the interview) non-diegetic ambient music, titles, transitions and effects such as panning and zooming in/out. This took alot of time and allowed me to realise how much work goes into animatics. This has really helped me come to terms with how to use Premier Pro which will really be useful when editing our title sequence. I learnt how to make images pan right/left or zoom in/out which is also very helpful. Overall, this has allowed me to stand back and see roughly how our opening title sequence will look and has also allowed me to identify any problems that we may face. For example, we were going to use a shot reverse shot for the interview, however we realised this wouldn't create realism as interviews shown on TV usually consist of the interviewer and interviewee standing side by side and both facing the camera. After creating the animatic, I am confident to start filming.

Political Thriller Conventions

I decided to go back and revise the conventions of a political thriller as we have been so busy creating our storyboards and organising the shot lists that we have forgotten the conventions we must stick to in order to make our opening title sequence successful.

Conventions
-Usual conventions of a thriller but set against the backdrop of a political power struggle
-Either political corruption, welfare or terrorism is a main theme
-Innocent people are usually drawn into political world
-Different locations shown
-Different cultures/countries
-Deceit- false hero

Considering these conventions is not something we've done very carefully as we've got caught up in the storyline we created about a demented and unstable teacher wanting to assasinate the prime minister due to his strong views against the prime minister's views. However by choosing to do a montage of paperwork and newspaper articles on the prime minister alongside bottles of alcohol and prescription medication, we find ourselves going down the psychological route rather than political and this is something that we want to avoid.

To ensure we stay on the route of a political thriller we will need to add in a government crisis (political power struggle convention) which is why the teacher will want to assasinate the prime minister. We already have more than one location and I want to add in the teacher's wife and portray her as innocent, this is so she can be the innocent woman drawn into the political world. I think with these aspects we have made it more of a political thriller than it was before.

Updated roles in the group

Due to the deadlines we need to meet, we have decided to briefly split the group up and have given eachother different roles.

Myself and Finley are in charge of the animatic storyboard
Hannah and Jacob are in charge of the location, props, costumes, shot list etc

These rules will ensure we meet the deadlines and it allows us to understand what we've done and what we still need to do.

Deciding on locations...

We have been thinking about locations for our opening title sequence. We have three possibilities of where to shoot our interview location. We want it to be outside our school because that is where the interview is taking place. These are our three possibilities...

1. This is the first possibility. We thought this would be good as this is the entrance to school and it has both the school logo and motto at the top, however we realised that it would be a burden having to stop everytime someone goes in or comes out and the automatic doors may stay open.

2. This is our second possibility. We originally thought this would look good as it's the sign for the main entrance and has the name of the school and logo etc. However we don't like the brick wall and fence and it doesn't look how we wanted it to look.













3. This is our third possibility. This is our favourite one as our school logo is prominent and bold emphasising the school location, the only negative point is that it doesn't have the school name written but that doesn't matter to much.
















I'm happy that we have kept our options open and had different possibilities and overall I think it's good that we have chosen option 3 due to the boldness of the logo which makes it stand out.

Storyboarding and Development

In our last media lesson of the term, we finished off our storyboard for our thriller opening title sequence, we took a considerable amount of time putting them together and changing them around to experiment and see what looked best. It was really interesting to see the visual side of our opening and how we wanted it to look. This will make it much easier and less time consuming when we come to actually filming because we will know exactly what we're doing. We originally had it in a complete different order but having the shots down on paper allowed us to see what it looked like so we could decide what would be better. We changed various shots around because some shots went on for too long or needed to be broken up, we also added a few to also help break it up and this was the end result.

At the bottom of each picture we have written the time the shot lasts, what type of shot it is and the transition. In the picture you can see the costume and facial expression. Overall I am happy with our storyboard and think that it's detailed and easy to understand for all of my group.