Evaluation question 1

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

Convention: The way in which things are usually done. An example of a convention is that conventionally humans walk on two legs, upright.

In comparrison

I have choosen to compare it to a conventiona teen drama called "Adulthood"

One large differene in comparrison with our movie is the amount of drama happening on the scene. There is a lot of drama in that trailer whereas, our video has 2 dramatic 7 second flashback and most is focussed on the boxing. We choose to use boxing as our main focus so that our film could be part of a much wider audience. This means that in comparrison the film is less conventional as it does not focus just on teen life.

Camera
Another point worth notocing is the lack of establishing shots in both. This is done deliberately in our film as we felt that the enviroment did not need to be established, it also allows the aduience to feel closer to the charaters and the scene developing.

Mise en Scene
Our mis en scene is fairly minimal and does not feature any stereotypical teen drama props ( e.g drugs, guns and knives), this unconventional. By comparrison Adulthood has a lot more of these props and follows theses conventions.

Editing
 The editing is fast in both films but for different reasons. Our film has a quick pace due to the boxing, which is quite a fast paced sport, whereas Kidulthood has it pace because it is dramatic and the quick cuts heighten the drama.

Sound
 Our music is very theartricl whereas Kidulthood uses rapping. We choose theatrical as it means we are adapting for a wide audience, not just teenagers.  Kidulthood is purely a teen uraban drama therefore they used their music to appeal to their audience.

Summary

 

We challenged conventions by

• Not using Establising shots
• Focusing on the life of a young boxer as opposed to a young teenager who boxes
•  Not using stereoypical props for an urban teen drama
• Minimalising the amount of drama.
• No sound for production or distribution idents
• Use of theatrical music as opposed to Hip-hop rap etc.

We stuck to conventions by

• Conventional teen film title sequence
• Conventional urban backdrops
• Conventional dramas/conflicts

To summarise, our film is more of a british urban drama  because it expands out to a wider audience due to the challenging of conventions.

Evaluation question 2

How does my product represent different social groups?

Evaluation question 3

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

Big talk productions are a British film distributor company who publish quite a few art house films. They sometimes enter movies into film festival and are attracted to British films made by small production companies that make exceptional films

Lionsgate are a large American distributor they big budget Hollywood movies such as The Hunger Games

They never really distribute small indie films at all.

Revolver Entertainment are another British Film Distributor. They specialise in British drama films and have

distributed quite small films in the past.

Here is a comic that I made

Evaluation question 4

Who would be the audience member for your media product?

Captain Safeguard has all the answers

To summarise my audience is

• Indie cinema viewers because of the low budget filming and the adult feel to the film
• Boxers because they may relate due to the fact that this a film based on boxing
• An urban teenager between 15-20 because the urban backdrop and teenage characters make it relatable to them.

Evaluation question 5

How did you attract/address you audience?

An anonymous news reporter has some very unsurprising and mediocre news coming in...

Evaluation question 6

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

  Here is an "E-mazing" presentation on what I have learnt in terms of technology

If it does not function it can be found directly at:
http://app.emaze.com/267580/as-media-evaluation-question-6-pharez-vitalis-2014

Evaluation question 7

Looking back at you prelim task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

The large thing for me was the variety of shots. Although the objective of the prelim was to experiment with the camera in order to develop skills, I felt that we did have a wide range of shots from the start but there are still far more shots that we used in Safeguard (final product)

The shot above had a really bad problem with the sound, because some of the sound picked up is through the camera, it added a strange effect to the sound. This would never happen in our final product because my director (Yuksel) was far too fussy and also because we used pre-recorded foley sounds and music to create a sound-scape in comparison with this fairly basic one.

Most of our camera shots in this prelim we also not well thought out, this one is an exception where we used a low angle to show that some dodgy business was going on. But again this is nothing in comparison with our  final product which used very effective angles to show how the character currently felt and status changing, where at the begin he had a high angle at the flashback to show how small he felt and at the end of the film the camera was at a low angle to show how triumphant his rise was.

This picture was a section of really bad editing. The section flips really quickly between me holding the ID card, putting it away, putting it away again then my arms being suddenly crossed. This can be compared to the fast and snappy flash back scenes in Safeguard that really took advantage of editing to tell the audience quickly, what was happening and most of all, had no editing mistakes.

One feature that stood out from our prelim and remained consistent was the framing, the framing, even in our prelim was very good and obeyed rules like the rule of thirds and 180 degree rule. The 180 degree rule is a rule of thumb in media where the camera does not go past what it is focusing on and does not cross this imaginary point across the character. However in Safeguard this rule is frequently broken during the boxing scene. This is because the sport is fast paced and the characters are clearly identifiable. The thirds rule is simply using thirds of the screen as main focal points. Our skills have allowed us to be comfortable with these rules and know when they are not needed.

A final comparison point is that our location here is a bit lame. Really? Only filming in college. The boring location really removed any hope of interesting Mise en Scene completely and was replaced with quite mediocre settings. one big thing was that we could not control the lighting at all in our footage and it meant that basically our prelim looked mundane and uninteresting.  

overall I feel that my skills have greatly improved. There has been a vast improvement in framing , editing and sound largely. The difference between the prelim and Safeguard is huge and it has been a really steep learning curve for me. Everything in the final product feels a lot smoother and transitions better even though it jumps between locations. Also there is a lot more experimenting in this one. If you noticed from our Behind the scenes vlogs there have been a lot of finishing the shot list and then experimenting below is one of our most experimental shots and it really paid off. I think that our final product had a lot more freedom to do shots like this which was the main cause of improvement as well as the skill development.

Production Complete!

Our production process is now fully completed, here is a short of us ticking it off

We will be evaluating our performance as filmmakers soon but the filming, is done as well as all that crazy editing.

But no celebratory images yet, we still need to evaluate!

Health and safety

Health and safety issues when filming the second flashback

The first and most obvious issue that came to our attention was the huge amount of broken glass on the ground which was a massive problem since one of us had to be falling on the floor.

So we found an area which was relatively free of glass or other hazards present in the alley such as vomit and syringes, and did our best to clear it even further by kicking away all glass and rubbish.

now we could roll all over the ground without any harm coming to us, however we will definitely be washing ourselves thoroughly after.

Photos from filming the second flashback