A2 Media Evaluation for 2014

1. Evaluation
A2 Media Studies
Robert Gough

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge
forms and conventions of real media products?
In the film the use of fast jump cuts allow the appearance on the mystical being B.A.S.E.
to appear to be moving around the scene to aid or scare the other characters.
When shooting the office scene we used a multi camera set-up, allow us to both give a
sense of conversation as well as a a wider shot of the speaker, this challenges many
films in the genre as this type of conversation would use reverse shots in mainstream
films.
When cutting to dream/remembering sequences an electronic fuzz sound was used to
emphasise the cut and make it sound more aggressive, this is a trope of the industry
and seen on many feature length and short films.
The film was shown in black and white this conforms to industry conventions, in terms
of a horror film. Using a red, black and white filter has connotations of the ‘spooky’
theme. Therefore the filters that we used in our film follows the forms and conventions of
a horror genre film.
The music used in the film tension building as used in nearly all films in the horror/thriller
genre. The music used is almost a trope of the movie soundtrack arena for
horror/thrillers it has a quiet, building, bassy tones with quick changing elements of
sound .

3. How effective is the combination
of your main and ancillary texts?
My ancillary text was a poster, I had originally hoped to take forward a dual poster
campaign similar to the dark knight system of original and the joker edited versions of
the posters. My posters were reversals of each other highlighting the differences
between the good and the evil in the characters, despite this I took considered feedback
and reduced the posters to a single venture.
The primary colours used on the poster is black and red the same at the film its self, I
have also incorporated the same font for the title as it is in the film itself.
I have the main characters in costume they wear in the film. I have B.A.S.E. stood
behind Brian looking over his shoulder very much how he is presented in the film, this
combined with the phrase on the poster ‘Haunting You On 25.3.14’. These two factor tell
the audience that it is a horror, thriller or something tied to those genres

4. What have you learned from your audience
feedback?
Using quantified data, I was able to deduce where the weak parts of the film were and
that gave us stimulus and a direction to go onto address them.
We can see that the sound on our rough cut was the weakest, with many pinning
the blame on the office scene which we went on to balance the voice levels. As
many people found the Professors voice was a substantially higher volume than
Brian's
When conducting this research I decided to use a questionnaire format opposed to
video interviews, as the data is more useable and can help my team go further.

5. How did you use media technologies in the construction
and research, planning and evaluation stages
For the planning stages such as storyboarding, I used the 500 year old media
technology the pencil, as it allows me to easy show my ideas for set design and
character direction, although there are computerised drawing technologies such as
Google Sketch up and 2D Design, none of them allow the user to be as creatively
boundless as pencil and paper.
When filming we used digital Camcorders For the filming as they have the features we
require such as large removable storage and a large zoom. We used different cameras
for different shooting days, we gained footage in different qualities , file formats and
frame rates for instance we have got 576p 25 FPS in .MOD format along side 1080p 25
FPS in .MTS. This results in not only obvious differences in film quality and aspect ratio,
but also issues with editing where we had to convert the file formats to .mp4 to suite our
editing software which took up swathes of our time.
For editing we used the Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 which very successfully handled our
video once we had converted it.
The first time we shot the office scene we used a boom microphone and external
recorders, to edit the sound we used Audacity a audio editing software with a wide range
of features. We re-shot the scene in the end without the boom and recorders due to
issues with the sound on the first attempt and it didn’t seem to have that many

6. How did you use media technologies in the construction
and research, planning and evaluation stages continued
For the posters I made initial drawings on paper for the same reasons as I did the
storyboards on paper.
I shoot stills on my Canon Powershot SX160 compact camera as it has a high enough
resolution and enough zoom for the distance I was looking to have my subjects away.
I used mainly two programs being Adobe Photoshop CS3 & CS6 and Microsoft Paint.
Photoshop for its ability to manipulate photographs, in terms of cutting and colour
editing. I used paint as a canvas to move and place images before doing advanced
editing in Photoshop.
For my double page spread I wrote the article on Microsoft Word and then transferred
the text in Adobe InDesign CS6 & CC to arrange the images, text and titles.
I have also used imgur.com to host my pictures and youtube.com to host my video
(For album of pictures and screenshots: http://imgur.com/gallery/SsPsP/new)