The document discusses how technology was used at various stages of creating an animated short film. It describes using online surveys and posting animatics on YouTube for feedback. Photos were taken with a digital camera to scout locations and footage was filmed with different angles. Animation software and video editing software were used to create the animation and edit scenes. An external hard drive was used to back up work but broke, losing some files. Email was used to communicate with actors when meeting in person was difficult. A digital editing suite was used to record and edit audio to create a radio trailer for the film.

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

3. Simple language.

5. Our main character is an adult. This is however made more

6. conventional by giving him the mind of a child.

7. The film does not have a typical happy-ending.

8. Audience feedback

9. Distribution We used survey monkey to create our questionnaire This is what our survey looked like. We distributed the questionnaire by email. We had a low response rate. Perhaps we should have also distributed it on other websites such as Bebo and Facebook. This could have possibly increased the response rate.

10. What did we learn from the survey? Most people that took the survey were aged 16-20. This may be because they are more likely to use the internet, whereas others may find other ways better, such as paper. These results showed us that not only children like to watch animation. Reasons why they watch animation vary from entertainment and education, etc.

11. These results showed us what our audience would like to have in the short film. Unpredictable twists was the most popular with a rating of 58%. This possibly means that they like to watch a variation of things rather than it having the same structure all the time. Having the element of surprise attracts an audience as they want to know what happens next. For answer C, it got a 0% rate. This is because having a predictable story is pointless if they already know what is going to happen. We used some of their preferences in our planning, such as an unpredictable twist.

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

13. POSTER The poster is effective for many reasons. We tried to make it bold and colourful like most children posters. The bright colours will attract a younger audience. The main focus of the poster is the image of the boy and the main title. We did this by making the font size very big and making the image big as well. Mithon Impothible read out loud sounds like someone that has a lisp. This suggests already that this film will be a comedy. The other thing that makes it quite comedic is the expression on the main characters face. It follows the conventions of a real poster, as it includes, title, classification, company name, etc.

14. TRAILER Our trailer has our theme tune and some of the voiceovers in it. This gives us a motif and also people will be able to recognize what film it is, just by hearing the theme tune. The voiceovers are like slight peeks at what will be shown in the film. We did this as it is a convention and also because we wanted the audience to want to watch the short film. It is very dramatic and therefore adds to the dramatic tension. The voiceover slips also show that this film will be a comedy. Both show elements of comedy and aims at a younger audience which is our target audience.

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

16. -We did not have to only use technology when making the film, but also for researching, planning and evaluating. For example, when we first did our questionnaire, we did it on paper. But we then changed it to online because we realised that the youth are most likely to go on the internet. It would be cost-free and would be a quicker way to distribute it. -We also used technology for our animatic. We used imovie to make the animatic and we put it up on YouTube to get feedback. Making our story board into an animatic would help us see how the film would go with sounds. It gave us more of an idea of how we would make it. Putting it on YouTube is supposed to get opinions and views from people. We would ask our friends and other people to suggest ideas.

17. When we were thinking of our locations, we went and took pictures using the digital camera of possible places we could do this. When we had selected our places, we then filmed how we would shoot the scene. We would try different angles and after we got all of our footage, we decided which ones were the best ones. Any other research and planning was done on the internet; using websites such as Google and YouTube.

19. We made the poster using Photoshop. We found the font on the internet and the rest of it was a mix of cut outs from the animation and film. This was relatively easy to.

20. The software that we used to make the animation was ‘Adobe Flash’. We first learnt techniques such as ‘shape tween’ and ‘motion tween’, etc

21. -Any of the work we did, we had to make a copy on an external hardrive. Of course this became a problem when our external hardrive broke, so we had to gather all the footage, work again. It also meant that we lost some work. -When we talked to our actors, we would try to do it face to face as often as we could. But this became a bit of a problem and we decided that emailing the actors would make it easier. We would not only talk to actors but also people we would ask to use the van, etc.

22. Also, to make the radio trailer, we had to use the digital editing suite. We used the microphone to record and the computer, using the software, logic pro to create the sounds and theme music, etc. We used final cut to edit our scnes and put them all together. We changed the lighting to enhance the quality and added transititons to make it more interesting. We also used logic pro to do the sounds. That varied between the theme tune, sound clips, dubbing, etc.