Evaluation - Amy

Introduction

Our short film is built around the on line game slender, with a little bit of a twist, shot from the point of view of our main character Max we take the audience through a exhilarating and suspenseful ride through a deep, dark Forest as he is being hunted down by the infamous Slender man.
The idea for our short film came to me as a random thought after telling my team members about the idea we proceeded to develop the idea and expand it to create a good narrative and story to go in our short film.



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

As our film is a short film we had to make sure that we leave the audience with a satisfied feeling at the end of Slender,
I focused on five main things to compare with the conventions of real media products, these are:
1. Narrative
2.Characterisation 
3.Mise En Scene
4.Genre
5.Editing


1.Narrative
Our short film uses a liner narrative, this means that the order of events that happened in our short film happened in real time. As our film is only 5 miniets long we have to get through a lot of the story in a very short time, this means that we cannot allow very much character development, this can make it very difficult to make the audience feel connected to the characters, however I feel that we did well to give the audience the connection that they need. 


2.Characterisation  

We choose to make our characters all teenagers, this was to connect to our audience but also to roll with the stereotypical idea that teenagers get themselves into trouble and danger. Fighting between being into the body of an adult but still with the instincts of a child our characters don't quite see the danger that they are getting themselves into, this is similar to a short film I looked at called Scarlett's Witch this short film really helped me to learn how to create the isolating feeling of being alone in a creepy dark forest. I learned that by  Using various sized shots you can make the audience feel the isolation that the characters do, for instance using big and extreme close ups gives the audience the opportunity to see the characters facial expression giving them  better idea of how the character is feeling, it also makes them feel close and connected to the character. 

The first shots in both my short film and my example really are just establishing the setting, as this is in a woods the audience will automaticicly know that its going to be a jumpy ride. The difference in our shots however is the time, my short film is set late at night in the dark were as in Scarlett's Witch the first shot is set in the light, this could be false reassurance to the audience, the camera movement in the shots are also very different, my first shot is a still shot that allows the character to come into focus were as in my example short film the shot is a tracking shot, this shows a journey and lets the character believe that they are also moving along in this journey.

The second shot is also similar to my short film's shot, this is showing the main character, although my shot is a medium shot, this is to show some of the character although I focused more on being able to see his facial expression, were as in the other short film you can see that they are using the long shot to show some of the setting as well, showing her alone and isolated, however as I chose to shoot my short film in the dark this leaves my main character Max  swamped in darkness, similarly making him seem alone.

3.Mise En Scene

A lot of different conventions to give the audence a real feel of the setting, for instance by using low key lighting I have created a lot of shadows, this can make the audience think that the characters are being watched or followed, it also connects back to everyone's childhood fear of the dark and the monsters that hide away in your shadow, by using low key lighting I was also able to use the angles of the lights to allow light to reflect and bounce from the trees, this can create the feeling that there are more trees then there actually are and make the characters seem outnumbered and small. 
Props were also a very important thing in my short film, this was important as I had to give the audience the right impression, for instance my characters are all carrying bags and other camping equipment  this lets the audience know right from the start that they are going camping, and as they are heading into a forest, so this lets the people watching my short film that I am following the old and well known pretty much tradition of teenagers going off camping in the woods. Through out my entire short film props continue to keep their importance, for instance there is the very important scene were Max finds the note, without this prop the initial danger would not have been recognised. The matches also have a very important role as they are the prop that creates the first real jumpy scene and is the first reveal of Slenderman.
The costume in my short film was not one of the most important pieces of information, apart from with the character of Slenderman, dressed in his black suit and white shirt he is made instantly recognisable to the audience to who he is. Our other characters costumes are pretty basic, they are just normal clothes that teenagers would were, however I did carefully plan to have mountain boots included in my short film as I felt that this was an important piece of costume that once again described the muddy environment that they are in.
Location is by far one of the most important features in my short film, being set in the forest was an absolute must, as anyone who has played the Slenderman Game or anyone who has heard of the urban myth of him will know that his favourite place is to hunt is in a forest. It is also important to create the isolation and spooky feeling that my short film has. I also love the atmospheric that the trees give in the dark and all of the shadows that the forest creates as I feel that this adds to the horror side of Slender. It also gives the great effect of making Max seem surrounded and lost because of the maze of trees, this will allow the audience to connect to his character as many of them will know what it feels like to be lost or trapped.
I feel happy that I chose to set the short film in the night time as the darkness really comes to y advantage to make the location seem more scary and confusing, it also give the illusion that the trees go on forever and that anything could be waiting in the shadows... even Slenderman.

4.Genre
I chose to use the genre of horror for my short film as I feel that it is the most well suited genre to my theme of basing my short film on the online game Slenderman: The eight pages. I was challenging for my to think of the right direction to take my horror short film, but I am glad with the choice of a chase sequence as I feel that this strikes fear into the audience and also gives them a bit of a thrill. 
As my short film is a horror there was certain things that I had to do to make sure that this was clear to the audience, such as having the Antagonist, who is the Threat, the villain and the overall bad guy, this was played by Slenderman, the character who was hunting down the others, his character seems even more scary I feel as he doesn't speak, so this takes the humanity out of him, making him seem even more like a monster, with no morals, this gives our protagonist  Max who is the 'hero' of my short film, the main character who is the good guy nothing to reason with, setting Slendermans character up to have no remorse and no mercy. The protagonist job is to give the audience someone to root for, someone who they can connect with and with the enigma, this is the mystery these things can all create a very scary short film. My short films enigma is that nobody knows who Slenderman is, what he is and most importantly what he actually does with his victims. This gave me the perfect opportunity to have an open ended ending, this means that after my short film ends, the audience will sit there and wonder what has happened to Max, they may even worry about him, this will encourage them to talk about my short film and therefore advertise my short film through word of mouth. 

5.Editing

I was the head editor of my short film and I feel that I did this very well. It helped me to develop hugely from my last project and I think that I made a very successful and flowing short film. As I was making a short film I understood from the start that it would have to be fast pace and it would need to develop through the story. This gave me the idea of having the fast pace chase scene, this is made up of a lot quickly cut shots, I chose to use clean cuts as with the occasional black fade in Slender as I wanted to keep the attention on the scenes themselves. This short film also gave me the brilliant opportunity to expand my skills in special effects, the static effect that is in my short film I created using a bad TV tool on Final Cut Pro, This will the colour correction filter to add the green/grey colour over the night vision shot and a static non diegetic soundtrack overlayed allowed me to create the effect that Slenderman was near. 
There was a lot of non diegetic sound edited into my short film, pretty much all of the sound that you hear is Foley sound effects, everything apart from the dialogue. I found that finding the exact sounds could be very frustrating at points especially the atmospheric crickets that I felt needed to  be there in the background. The non diegetic music soundtrack that is overlayed on the chase sequence was actually one of the first tracks that I looked at, but it didn't seem perfect until I had finished everything else to do with the editing, but when I tried it layered on after everything else it fitted perfectly, I really feel that this adds to the spooky and jumpiness of the short film, giving the audience goosebumps. 
I also used the colour correction tool to take the saturation down , I did this as I felt that it made the short film seem colder and less inviting, it also gave it that spooky wash, it also makes the forest seem more isolated and I feel that it makes Slenderman stand out more as the white mask he wears really stands out against the darker toned colours. 

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


I feel that I did well to make sure that our poster was very much connected to our short film, 
Choosing a selection of poster designs that I felt gave the best Idea to the audience to what our short film was all about, This first poster I fell works very well as it is very simple, graphic and straight to the point, you can see the two main characters, Max and Slenderman, as Max is holding a tourch you know that its going to be dark,
I also like the way that in this design Max is 'trapped' inside of Slenderman, this could suggest that Slenderman has already caught Max and there is no escape. 
The design is very basic with little colour, this also connects to the Design of my short film as the short film is very low in saturation as well.
This second poster was designed to really show the setting, with little colour this poster again connects well to my short film,
You see Slenderman the main character who seems to be standing, waiting. I think that this is good as it gives the audience a good idea of what the short film is going to be about. The low key lighting in this poster also adds graphic effect as it is making only some of he setting stand out, such as the tent, Slenderman, the note and the trees. 
I chose to use the same type of font through out the poster and the titling on the short film, this is so that it becomes recognisable to the audience as part of my short film. 

As my short film is targeting an audience of 15-25 the posters really had to attract and catch the eyes of people in this age range, this was why it was so important to make them look twice, especially in the second poster I feel that this is successful as there is small details in it that will make the audience look again and come closer to see what it is all about, the poster is mysterious but also gives of the chilling theme, so the audience will want to see the short film to see what it is all about.






What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We put our short film on three websites these were: Blogger, Facebook and Youtube. We did this so that we could get as much feedback from our audience as possible.Our Youtube account showed that we reached to our target audience  this was older teenagers, but surprisingly I found that we attracted a much older audience that were men. I am not sure why this has happened but I take it as a positive thing and gives us room and a better idea to if we were going to develop the short film that we could perhaps target older men as well as the teenagers.
From the statistics from Youtube and Blogger I can see that my short film connected to people from all over the world, I feel that this is because of the awareness of the myth of Slenderman, it also shows how much the game must have been played around the world, but especially in the UK and the USA I believe that this is because they are very similar countries and they will be into the same thing, the internet is also a huge convention in these countries and this is proved here, I can see that many people view our blog through different types of web servers but mainly with a PC or an Apple Mac, this shows me how online distribution is a very good direction to take my short film as it is the cheapest and easiest option to get my short film viewed by a lot of people in a lot of places that if I had used a different form of distribution such as burning my short film onto disks I would have no been able to reach.

I have filmed our friend Katie who is one of the people from our target audience age range and our main actor Max to see what they feel about the final outcome of Slender and how they feel that it all went.
I feel happy with the feedback I received from Katie and Max as i feel that they gave good honest answers, I feel proud as they both thought that I had managed to create a very good tense atmosphere, this would have been all through the editing and as this was my main role i was very happy with this.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

For this question I have decided to use a Prezi to show my interactive answer, please click Here to view it or the link below

http://prezi.com/pt_40xcsefrq/untitled-prezi/