MISFIT

EVALUATION

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

camera work
As I used stop motion for my film, the camera work was slightly different compared to other short films that use a normal film camera. The idea of using stop motion was to create a situation that can only happen when using this technique and wouldnt be possible if just filming. Theres not really too much to mention about the way in which I used a camera as for stop motion its set the camera up on a tripod, make sure everything looks right and then continued to snap pictures. In my film I used a quick zoom in to represent something was about to happen to the red paper. In other stop motion films I didnt really see zoom used so I think here I didnt necessarily follow forms and conventions in this instance. There were points where I had to choose which camera angle I used, for example on the stairs I used a low angle shot at 3 different points. I also used first person shots at the beginning of the film which gave the character a bit of mysterious start and to grab the consumers attention so they would have to wait to find out whose eyes they were seeing from.

lighting
The majority of lighting that I used throughout my film was natural lighting. This was because I didnt want, or necessarily need to manipulate the lighting to change how the shot looked for most of the film. I shot it as if it was over 2 days, starting in the day time of one day and finishing in the day time of the next day. I basically shot it at the times I needed to, when it needed to be in the day time I took the pictures while there was still light coming in through the windows. The only part I used artificial lighting was when I took some of the photos at night, and there was no light in the hallway I was using at all. When I turned the main light on the room was too bright and very noticeably unnatural looking, so I took 2 lamps and rested them on the table which lit the shot luckily to just about the perfect light because you can tell its at a later time than the previous scene.

The forms and conventions of similar films to mine that are animated are generally done on a computer so they dont need to plan the lighting when they shoot the scenes because its all CGI anyway. But for many other short films I watched that were stop motion, most of them seemed to have artificial lighting so my film may not follow the majority in this case. 4

sound
Most stop motion films would normally include characters that would speak out loud but for my film the only thing I needed to insert for this sort of thing was the rustling of the paper. This was because there was no dialogue in the film unlike other stop motion films. One thing I did have to add in which was inevitable in a stop motion film was diegetic sounds such as the paper moving around or a door opening and closing. This followed forms and conventions of a typical stop motion film as with stop motion there is no way to capture sound that happened at that time as there wouldnt be any sound in a still. With the music I added in I tried to use relevant music at certain points so I chose a track that had many different emotions and feelings. For example when it was supposed to be tense Id use a part of the track that I thought fitting. Any films, not even just stop motion films, do similar to this as films without music do not carry as many messages as a film with music.

mise en scne
Place After deciding on my storyline, I needed to plan where I was going to shoot it. I thought about many options and what I could try, Id thought about going outside and trying something there but that would have been incredibly difficult with the problem of wind. I also considered not moving the camera for the entire film and filming the whole thing as a semi top-down view. After this I chose to do what I did, use certain areas of my home environment. I chose to keep each scene as clear as I could without much going on in the background to stop any distractions from the story. Colour The colours I chose to use were mainly all neutral colours except the red of the lone piece of paper. This made him stand out from the yellows as was the main idea of the story. The colours for the background were whites and yellows. Even though I wouldnt have changed the colours of my walls for this film, I think these colours in the background worked well as they were not distracting. Paper Instead of using real characters I chose paper. My reasons behind this were because it is a very practical alternative to something else that would give the same result but for much more work like plasticine. Also, its a very simple idea and very simple to use paper for stop motion.
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editing
When taking my shots for my film, I had pre-planned what I was going to shoot. In a way my editing was done before Id even taken the pictures as I knew what picture I was taking and what I was going to need. Also, for the majority of my film the images were taken in order which meant there was no need to edit between the SD card and the computer. Editing wasnt really a large part of the construction of my film because like Ive already said all I really needed to do was drag and drop the shots into Movie Maker. I then had to edit the clips durations and give it a few other minor tweaks but apart from this, by taking my photos in the order I wanted greatly reduced the time I would have needed to spend on editing.

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

poster

poster
I decided upon using a landscape poster rather than a more commonly used portrait poster. This was because the idea I had did not look right when I drew it up as a draft. After then fiddling around and making it landscape I thought it looked a lot better when even if you couldnt see any more than when it was portrait apart from a wider view of the room and more of the skirting boards. I did continue editing this poster after this draft but something went wrong on the computer after putting in another good couple of hours of work and it crashed, so I lost the whole thing. In the newer poster I had moved the title to the top, made the title text a lot larger, added a few production notes and made the colours more noticeable and brighter. I used the red paper as the story is based around him, and put a lamp behind it to give it a shadow. I then cut the shadow out and changed the colours of it to create a yellow shadow; the colour of the other pieces of paper which represents they are similar to each other. I didnt particularly like this poster too much which was the reason I had edited it again before. If I were to redo this poster Id probably just end up doing what Ive already mentioned that I did do but lost. I took inspiration from the Quantum of Solace poster (picture in my blog), even though the film is nothing similar at all to mine I liked the idea of using a shadow in an in-film environment and thought it would work well.
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double page

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double page
The general colour scheme of my double page was red and yellow, the colours I used for the paper in the film. I felt this was appropriate rather than just using black or white as it creates an association between the page and the film. I used thick black lines around the edges of each text box or picture box which I think worked well and looks quite good. Many other double page articles used shots from within the starred film, but I used 3 photos that werent from in the film at all. I think the photos I chose were of a high quality and fit in well on this page. I also added in a caption to each photo on the right page, where the captions sort of mirror each other by being next to each other which was something I picked up on when looking through a number of other magazines. One thing Id change about this if I were to do it again would be the text, as I maybe chose a wrong colour and/or font because it seems too blocky. Id also add in a callout or something to split up the repetitive text to make it seem less of a chore to read.

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I personally see my product and ancillary texts to be quite effective in combination together. I think the strongest way in which I see it as effective is the red and yellow colour scheme continuing throughout each piece works in a positive way for the whole production.

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What have you learned from your audience feedback?

feedback
After completing my film for the first time, I showed it to various people. The general consensus among my friends was that the paper sounds werent accurate and detailed enough which I agreed with to an extent, it was difficult for me to get my sounds perfect whilst doing everything else for the film. This may have been because I had the whole workload as I worked on my own and it may have been better if there was a team of us. After receiving these comments I changed some of the sounds as best as I could but it took so long to edit again and get everything in the right place so I couldnt actually change too much. Another friend said that the duration of shots seems quite slow in some places so I spent quite a while trying out different lengths of time for the shots to the point where I didnt actually use the same duration for every shot in the film. I made some points last longer than others, and others to be over quicker to hopefully prevent comments like this. My sister after watching the very first draft of it that I produced said that she didnt quite understand the story fully. This was something I felt I had a problem with myself as well, even though Id spent so long planning what I was doing and getting the story sorted, after Id finished it and watched it myself I did wonder if others that didnt know anything about the film would understand what was happening. A friend of mine commented after I asked him to watch it and tell me what he thought was going on said it looks like the red guy is getting turned against by his men which wasnt really correct. But after spending over 24 hours in total taking over 2500 photos, I felt it was too late to spend more time taking more photos and trying to make it more clear for the viewer. I considered adding a narrative of some such as an intro like how the Star Wars films start (obviously not in space) but then it just didnt seem fitting for the film at all. After all the negative comments, there were a number of good comments as everyone that Id asked to watch it said it it flowed nicely or something similar to this, which was nice to hear as this was something I was aiming for especially from something like the stairs scene.

Others that watched it said that it was enjoyable to watch and they liked the use of paper rather than actual actors for the story.

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

research
Before Id made my film or had ideas on what I was going to do, I looked at PESfilm, a Youtube user specialising in stop motion animation short stories. I really liked how creative his stop motion ideas were and how well they were put together. His videos were what inspired me to make a stop motion film instead of a typical film shot with a video camera. Even though most of his Youtube videos were based around simple ideas, for example a peanut drowning, they were just so fun and interesting to look at as it created an alternative reality that wouldnt be able to be achieved from actual filming.

http://www.youtube.com/user/PESfilm/

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research
As well as Youtube, I browsed around the internet and found Virgin Media Shorts was a good place to look for ideas and research on short films. There were a huge amount of short films on here that I watched to see if there was anything I was interested in attempting to make something similar. 99% of the animation films I watched were all created on a computer which was something Id originally planned on looking into as this is something I am interested in, but after realising how much work it is for someone that knows what theyre doing, I ruled it out as I couldnt imagine how difficult it would be to make something that looks half decent for someone thats starting with no experience.

http://www.virginmediashorts.co.uk

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For the actual putting together of my film, I used Windows Movie Maker. The reason I chose to use this over other film making alternatives like iMovie and Sony Vegas was because this program keeps things basic and simple. If Id have used another program I think the process of putting the film together would have been more difficult and over-complicated as there are too many tools and options to choose from that I just wouldnt have needed. For the majority of my work, I just needed to transfer my shots from my SD card into the correct place and change the duration of each one which Movie Maker was perfect for as I could change all 2300 images durations at the same time. When I first started putting the movie together, I tried using iMovie HD but this made things so difficult for me as there are known issues with iMovie when trying to make clips shorter than around half a second. I also didnt like its interface as it just seemed to perplex me.
The upload directly to youtube feature in Windows Movie Maker made the process of getting my clips onto youtube very easy. Instead of having to save the clips, go to youtube, log in, then find your clips to upload like usual, I could directly upload my film from the Movie Maker interface in full quality.

windows movie maker

There were a couple of issues I found with Windows Movie Maker which made things slightly difficult for me. When I tried adding the title Misfit in with a fade in and a fade out effect, it just didnt seem to want to agree with me, so instead of using the normal fade effects I had to copy and paste the word in about 20 times and make them play consecutively, but then I had to slightly change the fade manually on each word. For something like this Im sure would be where other film making software would excel, but fortunately for me it wasnt too much of a time waster and this was the only word I needed to add in. Also, when adding sound effects and parts of music tracks in the program doesnt like you dragging and dropping these where you want. When I added the sounds and music after Id finished putting the shots in the right order I then had to add all of my music and sounds in chronological order otherwise all of the sounds would be budged forward about 10 seconds every time which ruined the 19 syncing.

Although I didnt use Sony Vegas for the actual making of the film (for reasons mentioned in the previous slide) I did decide to use it for editing my sounds and music track. This was because I was familiar with the program for this sort of thing as Id used it before and I find it simple to use. Im sure there are other alternative music editing software but as I already had this on my laptop and find it simple enough to use I thought itd be useful to use it.
My process for editing the non-diegetic noises like paper rustles and the doors closing was generally drag the mp3 into a timeline, add a fade inset or offset and loop it or add another rustle effect onto it. Once Id got the correct sound and was happy with what Id got I needed to render it as an mp3 file then insert it into Movie Maker at the correct point. For the editing of the music track I used, I cut the song up into sections that I knew I would or wouldnt be using. I then removed all of the cuts that I wasnt going to be using then started on the pieces I needed. For these I did quite a similar thing to the paper noises where I had to add in fade in effects at the correct points otherwise it would sound jerky and surprising. When the fades were added it made the song sound more fitting and like it was meant to be there rather than just a song that had been cut up into pieces.

sony vegas

Sony Vegas was very good for what I used it for, but there were a couple of issues I had with it. When I was using very short sounds e.g. 1 or 2 seconds, it made it very difficult to get the mouse in the right place and add in the effects that I needed because it makes the sound rectangle so small. Also for some of the longer tracks it took a very long time to render the sounds as an mp3 file, I still never really understood why it would take longer to render a 30 second sound than it would to upload the whole film itself, but nevertheless it still worked and did what I wanted it to do.

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adobe cs5
I used Adobe InDesign CS5 to create my double page article. As this software is used for creating documents similar to this it was perfect for what I needed to do. I positioned everything where I wanted it and then copied the text in from Microsoft Word. Also as I have the software at home it meant I was able to transfer documents and edit them at both school and home without compatibility issues. When creating my poster I used Adobe PhotoShop CS5. This program is the leading program in creating documents of this style so I had no reason to use any other program considering I can use it at home and school like InDesign. I edited my photo quite a lot for my poster, as I had to spend a long time cutting out certain parts and shadows so I could change the colour of the shadow to yellow using the levels, colours and saturation tools.

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MISFIT
EVALUATION

Josh Springett