EVALUATION: Question Seven

EVALUATION: Question Six

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

The technologies required for constructing our Media product were all very new to me, and learning to use them was very exciting. It was a challenge at first to learn about all the new technology, but once we had both mastered it, it was much easier.

The first piece of technology we learnt to use was the use of various websites on the internet. www.blogger.com is the website we used to upload all of our evidence towards the piece. It allows us to keep a record of our progress throughout the whole process.
Social networking sites such as www.facebook.com and www.twitter.com worked as a helpful way to conduct my target audience research and the feedback we did. These were very helpful because it allowed us to reach a larger audience, and also was much quicker than conducting several interviews. It allowed me to exploit web-2 technology with each social networking site.

www.Youtube.com is another very useful website that allowed me to upload all of our video evidence, such as our research on Match-On-Action, or our preliminary task. It is a quick uploading site and was easy to use, as I had encountered it in the past, and meant I didn’t have to learn new methods. Youtube also allowed us to watch video tutorials on how to do makeup for our characters and costume techniques.
www.freeplaymusic.com was the final most useful website we used. It contains a collection of non-copyrighted music that we could peruse and use for our piece. In the end, we settled for a piece called ‘Got The Smarts’ that fit well with our piece and got us good feedback from the audience.

Using the newer technology was more of a challenge. The first thing we had to learn to use was the Panasonic hand camera, which was much like a normal digital video camera. Both my partner and me took turns experimenting with it and the various shot types such as worm’s eye views and bird’s eye views, both of which we used in our final piece. This gave us both a chance to experiment with the technology and really hone our skills before we filmed our final product.
The use of tripods was also important, as it helped steady our shots and give them a more professional shot.

The iMac, with iMovie, iDVD, iTunes and GIMP, was another new piece of hardware that we both had to learn. We were given a short tutorial from our teacher, then we were given some time to play around with the technology. iMovie allowed us to slice our clips together, add sound and basically put the whole product together. iDVD then allowed us to burn our piece to our DVD for the examiner.
iTunes and GIMP were two smaller programmes used. iTunes was how we imported our sound to iMovie, and GIMP was how we made our production splash. We uploaded our drawing and coloured it to make it stand out, using GIMP.

We also used a compact digital camera to capture location shots, character costumes, and all sorts of other evidence. This allowed us to capture our evidence.

All of this technology was really fun to learn to use, and using Blogger was a great way to keep track of my progress. Learning all of the new skills were crucial to our success of our movie, and I really enjoyed learning everything.

EVALUATION: Question Five

And the Movie Poster.

EVALUATION: Question Four

 Who Would Be The Audience For Your Media Product?

Our Media product was made with teenage and young adult actors, and directed and filmed by teenagers. The stars in it ranged from ages 17-25, and myself and group were both 17.  

The audience for our piece would be a teenage to young adult audience mainly, as the film was filmed and centred around that age group. This therefore adds in the appeal of a film made just for this group, making them want to support it more.

There is also the evidence from our target audience research to be considered. Our main target audience from the survey was the age group 17-20, so it is likely that these would be the ones most interested in watching the film.

It is, however, also likely that adults would enjoy our product, as it is designed to be suitable for anyone who is aged 15 and over. The action and violence in it are made to be suited to anyone who feels this is an enjoyable movie setting.

The gender of our characters were decided from the target audience research. We found that there was an even split with which gender each person preferred for their main character. To suit all of our target audience’s desires, we had a female lead protagonist and a male, though the male was shown to die at the end.
This means that our audience is probably likely to be either male or female, because we have targeted both genders with it. 

The cast and director are seen by our target audience as important, so the casting of our actors to be the right age and gender was made a priority. This allowed us to find people that would fit the part, as well as fulfilling the various criteria such as age or gender.

EVALUATION: Question Three

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

A film's distributor focuses on financing, publicising and backing the film in many different ways - for example, finance, as I have already mentioned.

Some companies are smaller, such as Sundial Pictures, and these are often quite unknown originally, or made famous by their film's success.
Others are very famous or well known. A good example of this is the Big Five (Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, RKO Pictures, Paramount & Metro-Goldwyn Mayer), and the Little Three (Universal, Columbia & United Artists). These companies are renowned and famous all over the world, and can be seen as huge conglomerates. Some of them also focus their attentions of video games, such as Warner Bros, or TV shows, such as 20th Century Fox (The Simpsons, Futurama).
Other examples are Disney, Pixar and various other animated film companies, but these are not relevant as our film was live action.

I believe that our media product would be best distributed by a smaller indie-film company such as Mutant Enemy or Fractured Films. Mutant Enemy is a smaller company that has worked to distribute sci-fi or fantasy TV shows such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but has also worked on bigger films such as The Cabin In The Woods, a recently released horror film. This shows that they have an interest in the horror or sci-fi genre that our film emulates and would be interested in it.

Fractured Films work to create or distribute dramas and short films, some based around serial killers or other fearful topics that relates back to the idea of horror or suspense we created within our film.


I feel that the independent companies would be more likely to distribute our film because the big 5 within the filming industry may see that it is not as well budgeted or created. The bigger film companies such as 20th Century Fox (28 Days Later) would want a film that was credible and guaranteed to have success, whereas the companies such as Mutant Enemy might be more likely to take a chance on our film without as many guarantees.

To advertise our film to our target audience (17-20 year olds), I imagine that these film companies would use another company to advertise. To help as filmmakers, we would hand out flyers of our film and promote it with budgeted tv trailers or word-of-mouth advertising.