A2 Media Studies Final Short Film
Friday 28 April 2017
Thursday 27 April 2017
Evaluation Question 3
First Brief
As a group we were set the task of creating our own narrative idea for our short film. We all needed to aim for at least one film idea which we would then discuss with the rest of our group. In total we created 5 individual ideas.
My first short film idea was about a man who purchased the same lottery ticket, with the same numbers for multiple years however nobody knew why he chose the numbers until the day he wins. The winning of the lottery ticket made him the new suspect in a murder case for his beloved wife. Each of the numbers had a link with the murder and police are seen working very hard to link the clues with the known and the unknown.
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| Screenshot from a part of my short film script idea. |
My second short film idea was a film named ‘Karma’ about a couple who decide to get revenge on people, but in the most disturbing ways. They tattoo every bad word on the culprits which have hurt them throughout their life. This was an idea i thought of as i believed that it was a good concept to show to demographics that they need to be weary of the words they say to people and to imagine if every bad word they said appeared on their bodies.
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| Screenshot from a part of my short film idea. |
My third and final film idea was discussed between me and Elliott until we perfected it to how we liked it. We thought that the name ‘Polaroid’ was perfect as it had a high significance throughout the film. This film is about a man suffering with a mental illness after loosing his daughter Lily. He lost all the photos of his daughter too therefore his hobby is taking photos of other children with them not knowing and offering them to their parents for a keep sake. Obviously, most people would refer to him as a pedophile due to what he is doing and one character takes action. There is also a hidden twist that the polaroid camera is haunted and when children are pictured they go missing. Could this be what Chris has invented in his mind after loosing his child as a coping method or could the polaroid camera have a hidden secret?
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| A screenshot from my short film idea. |
Because my film ideas were very complicated to film we decided to discuss the positives and negatives of each film idea and finally came to the conclusion to use the film idea ‘Saving Grace’ by Jade. This film’s narrative follows two young girls going out on a night out with unexpected events taking place. We felt as a group this would be perfect to film as it was relatable to our age group. Because of this we felt that we were able to portray to our demographic the dangers of drinking and what can occur if you are not careful or are careless with it.
Our Film and Audience
Within our film the narrative follows two best friends going out for their first night out together. They are very excited and are careless about their own safety. Within the film, the lead protagonist Grace gets separated from her best friend Becky after having her drink spiked. The film then progresses into unfortunate events where Grace is taken and abducted by a stranger. She is then seen waking up in the strangers bed with the impression that she has been raped. Our soul intention with our film was to warn our target audience about the dangers of drinking and that they should be extremely cautious when doing so because in reality, anything could happen when under the influence of alcohol. Because under age drinking is a growing problem in Great Britain we decided to have a target audience of 12A, this allowed us to spread our film to a wider demographic and in some ways, prepare the younger viewers to be safe when they are the legal age to drink. Because we decided on our target audience before writing our film, this made it a lot more easy to think of a storyline that would appeal to the target audience of 12A and therefore allowed us to use our time a lot more efficiently.
Audience Research
Individually we all researched into target audiences by using the BBFC website mainly and Google as from this we were able to gain all the information needed for our chosen film certificate of a 12A. From looking into the BBFC we found that 12A was the appropriate certificate as alcohol consumption was going to be shown within our film and this would not be suitable for any younger. Despite debating on our film to be a 15, we came to the conclusion that if our film was a 12A it would allow us to have a larger demographic, meaning we could forward our message of safe drinking to a larger amount of people. Our audience is not gender specific and does not change due to the occupation however we believe due to our storyline our film will apply to students due to the protagonists and also the nature of the film linking with the ‘ Intellectual Puzzle’ as referred to by Rick Altman.
Understanding the storyline
In order to see if our film was understood fully and made sense to audiences, we created a questionnaire including a brief description of our film along with questions following. We filmed each of their responses and uploaded it onto youtube for evidence. The questionnaire included a mixture of personal questions, allowing us to connect to our audience and also questions that linked with our film such as “ What genre do you think this film is?” and “What do you think happens next?” From doing this questionnaire we learned what we needed to change within our short film and what we needed to keep, this task was very valuable for us as we were able to connect to our audience and understand what they would like to see in our film.
Rough Cut
During the production of our film we decided to do a rough copy of the club scene we would include in our film. We then created a short rough cut and uploaded it to Youtube. Following on from this we created a questionnaire to understand which parts we should consider for our short film and which parts we should remove.
- Within the club scene what did you particularly like?
- What do you think we should change?
- Do you think the club scene should be edited to the music used?
- Should we add music effects in the editing process?
- Do you like the fast paced editing used?
- What was your favourite part of the clip?
- Why was this your favourite?
- What length do you think that the nightclub scenes should be?
- Are you male of female?
- What is your age?
Analysis of results
Because we received multiple responses from our demographic we took these into consideration when finalising what we would use in our final film. 63% of people said that they preferred the style of editing used within our short film therefore keeping this in mind we decided to edit the final club scene in a similar way. 0% of people said that they liked the music, therefore when finalising our film we conducted further research into types of music to find the perfect one to incorporate into our film.
Many people liked the lighting used within our film and we were fortunate to have been able to have professional use of strobe lights and moving heads from Devils Event Lighting. They kindly allowed us to use a Martin Atomic 3000, Showtec Indigo 4500s and Acme Butterfly Spiders. This made our club scene look very professional as we had high-tech lighting that added to the mise en scene and atmosphere. From this we ensured we included various shots of the lights as we felt it enhanced our film.
Final cut questionnaire
When our final film was completed we then decided to create a final questionnaire in order to receive feedback from our demographic. This was in order for us to understand what the audience liked and disliked about our film again and to see if they could understand and grasp the ending of our film.
The first thing that we asked in our questionnaire was the age of our respondents. 79% of these people were age 16-24. This was our aim as we felt that the film would be interesting for people within the same age range as us. This was a positive as we had got our film to the target audience we were aiming for in order to pass on our message of safe drinking.
The second question which we asked our audience was “What is your gender?” We decided to include this as we wanted to know which gender would prefer films within the same genre as which we used. As a group however, we felt that this would happen as our lead protagonists that have the most prevalence within the film are females.
We then asked if the audience enjoyed our film overall. Although this question is not specific in what our audience liked and disliked, it was still beneficial for us as we were able to know if our target audience liked the film as a ‘whole’. When looking at the results we discovered that 80% of the demographic liked our film, 5% didn't like our short film and 15% was unsure. When looking into why they did not like or film or were unsure results stated that they “did not understand the ending”. We knew that this would be a problem with the final cut of our film as we wanted to leave it open ended for our viewers.
With our final film we asked our audience what they think was the best in our final film between the editing, lighting and the music. From this we got a mixture of results however every one of them were positive and we learned they complimented our film extremely well.
We then asked what genre our audience thought that our film was. Our film was advertised as a thriller drama as it has aspects from each genre in. When asking out audience what they thought our film was, the response was positive and allowed us to understand that we incorporated the correct aspects needed to create a thriller drama short film.
We then asked them what they would give our film out of five. This was to gain a greater understanding on if we succeeded within the creation of our short film. Thankfully, most of the respondents gave our film a 5 out of 5 and this made us feel very confident that we used the correct codes and conventions.
Wanting to know if there was any improvements that our audience thought we should make, we decided to ask this within our survey. While three quarter of the respondents said that they felt nothing could be changed within our film, some did. They said that rather than leaving the film open ended, they would have rather found out the truth about what happened to Grace. Unfortunately, we could not do anything about this as we wanted our demographic to try and piece together our film themselves and therefore we left the film open ended.
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