This document contains a candidate's evaluation of their media project for an A2 Level Media studies course. It includes summaries of how their short film and ancillary tasks used and challenged conventions of real media. It also discusses how effective the combination of the main film and ancillary texts was. The candidate learned the importance of gathering audience feedback throughout the project using tools like questionnaires, discussion, and social media. New media technologies were used extensively in the research, planning, and evaluation stages, including websites, editing software, and tools for collaboration and sharing work.

1. The Waiting Room EvaluationMatt Duval Candidate number 4468

2. #1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?For our A2 Level Media studies final project we decided to create a short film. For the ancillary tasks we chose to create a film review page and a poster for our film. Both of the ancillary tasks and the main film needed to be closely linked so that the audience could see that they are all related to each other.I believe that all of our pieces go together very well. We have used forms and conventions of real media reviews, posters and short films. In some cases we have challenged the conventions of films and media texts.

3. How we used conventions of real media productsOur film also has a clear message which is reoccurring throughout the entire film. The message is that there will always be someone bigger and better than you. While researching other short films we have found that lots of other shorts contain a similar message. For example “the bulling effect” contains the message “you never know what your bulling might lead to”. This is one of the examples of our film using the conventions of real media products (short films).

4. How we challenged conventions of real media productsOur short film has a slight humorous element to it which is uncommon in short films about bulling. This is one of the ways that we chose to change/challenge the conventions of real media products. The main focus in our short film are the two characters that sitting on the small black leather sofa. These two characters change one at a time throughout our film. The shorter of the two is always replaced with a noticeably taller person. This happens 3 times during our short film. It is uncommon that the actors will change so regularly during a 3-5 minute short film. We have chosen to challenge this convention to put emphasis on our message.

5. #2 How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?I think that my ancillary tasks look good together because they use some of the same elements in all 3 tasks.One of the ways we managed to tie all of our projects together was to include the logo at the start of the film and on the poster and on the review page.

6. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?(continued)We also used a house style consisting of fonts colours and symbols. We used the same fonts and colours for our logo, blog, film, review and poster. This helps us with continuity between the film and the ancillary tasks. The stars in the review are also the same as the ones on the poster.Stars

7. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?(continued)The Poster and Review page both contain a still image that was taken from the actual film. It is of a large black clock on the wall. This clock is there for two reasons, to link the two media texts together and to represent the title “The Waiting Room”. Clock

8. My poster (left) is a simple design that was inspired by another short film poster (right). We decided to use a still from the film. We used the coloured corner from the professional poster in our own poster.

9. What have you learned from your audience feedback?At every major stage of my project I have been gathering audience feedback in order to improve my work.I have used a variety of web 2.0 such as Facebook, YouTubeand Twitter.

10. my using whole A2 project i have definitely realized the importance of audience feedback. I feel this year that I have used my target audience to create a much more effective piece of work. Having the use of Web 2.0 has improvedmy questionnaire techniques dramatically, i used google docs to enable me to send my questionnaire out via the facebook and blogger group. I have evaluated google docs as a programme itself in my "The use of media technology in the pre- production stage" post. As well as using google docs I also received feedback from facebook and youtube as we allowed our viewers to comment on thevideo and ancillary tasks.Our comments overall have been very positive and also provided us with a lot of useful feedback. We made a lot of changes throughout our project and it was here I felt the full impact of how helpful and essential audience feedback is.

11. Our final feedback was again collected through the use of google docs and again posted on facebook and our blogger page. By clicking onto this link you can see the questions posted to our target audience. We didn't receive as much feedback as i would have liked however it was enough to give a final conclusion to the project. Here is a screenshot of some of the feedback:One of the most difficult pieces of pre-production research was learning how to establish a genre into a short film, we therefore decided to focus on an emotion. As you can see from our final feedback everyone said that they felt happy and excited at the beginning but sad come the end. This gives me confidence that we have succeeded in portraying a clear and strong emotional message. A lot of our important feedback about the short film and ancillary tasks came from a class discussion, we all had the opportunity to present our work to our teachers and classmates and the receive feedback on this. One of the most controversial points of feedback was about the ending of our short film, we had one teacher saying she liked the ending as it is as it allows the audience to make up their own mind on the ending, and the other teacher saying he found it too confusing. However after looking at all our audience feedback we collected we decided to stick to our final edit. This was mainly due to different people giving different ideas about what the whole film was about which i believe is an effective way to get people talking and discussing our project.Looking back at both projects over the last 2 years i have realised the importance of audience feedback after each major decision.

12. For example one of our comment on YouTube said that “the opening scene was too long”. When we showed this to our classmates in school they said the same thing. We then reviewed the footage and agreed with the comments. To resolve this problem we speed up the shot and cut part of it out.

13. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?Throughout our research, planning, and evaluation stages we used a variety of new media technologies.For example during our planning we used lots of web 2.0. We used the internet to research current short films from professional and amateur film producers. Websites we used include:http://www.youtube.comhttp://www.futureshorts.com/http://www.indiemoviesonline.com/free-movies

14. Looking at real short films give us a good idea of the codes and conventions of short films. Being able to view thousands of videos online follow. Having the technology to look online made the whole process a lot quicker and enabled us to look at a lot more examples. This was defiantly helpful when it came to our final influence of the short film 'Now', this turned out to be the most helpful bit of research we carried out. Using google docs allowed us to send out questionnaires to our target audience and gain oorganised feedback. It turned out much quicker and more effective than conducting it in paper form as we didn't then need to convert all the information onto the Internet. Using Google Docs also allowed us to send our questionnaire out to our target audience and target our specific audience. We then left our questionnaire online for two weeks and set a deadline as to when we would go back and collect the answers.