This document discusses the production of a media product combining film and animation. It supports conventions like targeting a young audience and comedy genre. It also challenges conventions by combining formats and sending a serious message. Feedback found audiences preferred unpredictable twists. During production, media technologies were used for research, planning, construction and evaluation, including iMovie, Adobe Flash, digital editing suites and Final Cut Pro.

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

2. Our media product supports the conventions in the following ways...The target audience is the younger generation which is typical for an animation film.

3. Our animation is of the comedy genre which typically all animation films are.

4. The language that we use in our film doesn’t challenge the conventions because we use very simple language.

5. The ideology that we try to communicate is for younger people which all animation films try to do. Our media product challenges the conventions in the following ways...Our film is a combination of both film and animation which doesn’t happen very often.

6. As well as it being a comedy film that many would enjoy, it send out a serious message to the audience.

7. Our main character is a man who is child-minded which you don’t usually find in animation films.

8. Whilst other films target a specific audience our media product target a wider range. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

9. Film posters are used to advertise a film. They can be very effective as it can invite audiences to watch the film at the cinema/theatre/on DVD. We decided that we would use bright and bold colours to try and attract our audience. We also had big animated text and had a mixture of real life and animation on the poster to reflect our film.It follows the conventions of a real poster as it contains the classification, release date, title, company name and main actor etc. These are all very important details that need to be included otherwise the public will have incomplete information.

10. This is our finished film poster

11. A radio trailer is short snippets of a film. However it only contains sound - not images. Therefore in order to have an effective radio trailer you need to choose the sounds you use very carefully in order to obtain your audiences attention . For our trailer we decided to use the conventions of a real radio trailer. After listening to some radio trailers online we decided to put in our theme tune which the public may already recognise as it is similar to that of another famous movie – Mission Impossible. We also added voiceovers which are snippets of the actual dialogue from the film. This added to the dramatic tension of the trailer. The voiceovers also shows that the film will be of the comedy genre.

12. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

13. We used survey monkey to distribute our questionnaire because we wanted to get as many responses as we could get and also because our audience were young people and it is young people who are most like to use the internet.

14. We used opportunity sampling to distribute our survey . However we still found that we received a low response rate. This could be because the survey was only up for a short amount of time or because we did not distribute it to enough places e.g. We could have posted it to onto facebook and bebo which could have boosted the response rate.This is what our audience survey looked like

15. We learnt that the highest response rate was from the 16-20 age band. This may be because they are more likely to use the internet. Whereas the older age group may do surveys elsewhere e.g. On paper.These results show that people of all ages enjoy watching animation. This could be for a range of different reasons e.g. Educational purposes or entertainment.

16. The highest score was 58.3% for unpredictable/twists, these results show that people prefer to have the element of surprise in films rather than watching films which contain the same structure all the time as it brings a sense of uncertainty and excitement to the film. Question C received 0%, which shows that no one likes to watch films that are predictable. There were a lot more questions which were asked to the audience which helped us gain a better understanding of what the audience want e.g. Unpredictable twists.

17. During the final stages of editing. we decided to get some students in from different classes to let them view our film and give us some feedback.A lot of the feedback was positive e.g. They said they liked the music and the idea of animation and film being combined etc. However they were confused as to what happens in the end. We took this feedback and decided that we needed to change the ending so that it is clearer for the audience.

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

19. To produce our short film we used technology in all aspects of our research, planning, construction and evaluation stages.

20. Research and Planning: we used the internet to watch short movies and animations so that we were able to get a good idea of how much we could include in our film so that we don’t try to include huge story lines.We posed our audience research surveys on survey monkey because the younger generation are more likely to use the internet. We used a digital camera to take pictures of possible locations for shooting.We used video cameras to practise some of our different angled shots. E.g. One of us would act the scene and the other person would film from different angles and then we could decide which angle looked best so that we were prepared when we started the actual filming. For our posters, we looked on the internet and also got some free poster posters to look at from Richmix cinema.We used emailing to communicate with each other and our actors to plan filming sessions. we also had to email other people e.g. Dave Harding for the minivan etc.

21. Production and evaluation stageswe used imovie to produce the animatic and posted it on YouTube to get feedback. This gave us a good idea of what our film would be like with sounds.To create the animations we used Adobe Flash where we learnt techniques such as shape tweening and motion tweening. We then had to save everything on an external hardrive– we also lost some work during this process because one of the external hardrives broke which meant we had to redo some of the work.For the radio trailer we used the digital editing suite - Where we used the microphone to record the sounds and logic pro on the computer to create the sounds and the theme music. We used final cut pro to edit our film and put all the scenes together using transitions in between the scenes. We also changed the lighting of the scenes to enhance the picture quality. We then use logic pro to create the theme tune, do the dubbing and create the sound effects.