Iona's Evaluation:

As a group we all agreed to try and create the best film introduction that we could and in order to do this we have done a lot of research into the typical conventions that one might find in a 2 minute introduction sequence. After scanning several popular, modern films on “YouTube” we could identify and transfer some of the conventions to our film; such as how the producers, the cast list and the title are made obvious in the first few moments as the scene is set. We were careful to look at films that were particularly relevant to our chosen genre which is thriller/horror. We noticed that many of the beginnings to these films were punchy and made an impact and this influenced us greatly in that our opening sequence is a fast and slightly chaotic chase scene.
It was not only in the visual aspect that we kept with generic conventions; the soundtrack is also very efficient in setting that sinister atmosphere that we all hoped for. To gain the maximum effect of tension we chose to keep the dialogue to a minimum to begin with so that the audience has to discover what has been, and is, going on.

The film itself is set in a school and therefore the characters are all representative of young school pupils, both male and female. In keeping the age of our characters as young adults we agreed that it would create more of a connection with the viewers as our target audience is in fact the 15 to 25/30year olds bracket. In our group we discussed what we felt would be the best way to promote our film whilst still attracting the correct audience. The most suitable methods of advertising would be on the television after 6 o’clock as most people are home from work and school at this time. Also appropriate would be advertising in men’s magazines as we could easily pick out the magazines bought by the majority of our target audience.

The kind of media institution that would most likely distribute my media product would be a small cinematic company or even more accessible would simply be a well known website such as YouTube. However, if the film were a success then it could be possible that more reputable, larger companies would be willing to associate themselves with the production.

My peers and I had were given a tripod and a camera to capture all of our footage, with this we then transferred everything onto the apple computers where we had to cut and re-manage every clip in order to make it play continuously well. In order to produce the soundtrack I had to use a programme called “garage band” which I did not have any previous experience of but I found it extremely useful and actually quite simple to use. In this application we could use ready made sounds and put them together to create a whole track and from here we could synchronise the track with the film introduction perfectly.

During the filming of our prelim we found that there was a slight mishap with the video camera in that it had a white fade in and out on all of the clips that we filmed so we had to adapt our filming slightly as we were aware of this for the filming of the actual film introduction. Also in the preliminary task we were keen to experiment with many different camera angles and shots to give us more footage to work from. This really did make the editing and the general creating of the film sequence a lot easier. I think that the idea of having multiple shots to work with was possibly the most important lesson that we took with us through to the progression onto the filming of the introduction.

I also had my peers assess my work and they were really helpful in giving constructive feedback such as making specific scenes longer/shorter in order to achieve the maximum desired effect.