4) How did you use Media Technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

iMovie Editing Software: This was the software that we used to put the whole product together. This program was available at school via the apple mac's and we used it to edit and construct our movie. This software enabled us to put the clips in the correct order (as we wanted them to appear in the movie), edit and cut the clips at certain points (if there was something we were unhappy with or if we wanted to cut something out of a clip the software enabled us to do this easily), we were also able to upload music tracks to the program and fit these into our finished film (our theme music was uploaded to iMovie and we edited it and placed it where we wanted it in 'Second Life'). iMovie also enabled us to add effects, both visual and aural, to our movie (we added a glow effect to the montage section of our film to enhance the 'dream like' quality of this section), we also used the software to add transitions to our film thus making the shots flow seamlessly and improving the continuity of the movie. Our titles and credits were also added using the iMovie software. We not only used iMovie in the construction stages of our project, in the inital planning stages we made a short animatic using the software in order to get a rough idea of what the final product would look like and we also used it in the evaluation stages when creating our director's commentary and editing our video footage for questions 2 & 3.

Panasonic Video Camera HDD:  We used these camera's to film all our footage included throughout the project. When we were filming the actual film, the camera's enabled us to record our film at a reasonable quality while also enabling us to zoom in on action if necessary. In the evaluation stages of our work, we filmed some audiences opinions on our work and also used the camera's to record our director's commentary then we extracted the audio using the mac's. The camera's were very practical to use - they were rather small and this proved handy when moving around to different locations when filming. They were also easy to use with a tripod and the batteries enabled us to work for long periods of time with the same camera.

Blogger:  Blogger played a massive part in the planning and evaluation stages of our project. We used the website to keep track of what we had completed and what still needed to be done throughout the practical. The website enabled us to store all our research, planning, evaluation etc. in one space (our blog) rather than having endless sheets and files. It was also a great way to chart our progress throughout the project. Using Blogger, we could upload 2 or 3 versions of one piece of work, clearly showing the changes and improvements we have made in order to get to our final product. Blogger also enabled us to make our evaluation, in particular, extremely interactive and interesting. Its extremely easy to upload various photos and videos to your blog and this is much more interesting for viewers than constantly reading text. Blogger also makes it extremely easy to look through your entire project in a small amount of time as its much easier to look through posts on a blog than it is to look through sheets and sheets of paper.

YouTube:  We used the site YouTube to upload our videos to the internet, in order to either get feedback from other people on our work or as a means of posting the videos onto our blog. We posted our final version of 'Second Life' onto YouTube so that people could watch it and leave their comments. This was a way of gaining feedback for question 3 of our evaluation and also easier than getting people to fill in feedback sheets. Also, YouTube is accessible for people all over the world, so by posting our film on there we hoped we would get a variety of different opinions on our work from people of varying age, gender and background.

Photoshop: We used this program to construct our ancillary tasks (film review, poster and magazine). Photoshop enabled us to edit images and text in order to make them look more professional. Photoshop lets you add many effects to pictures and we used this to make our film magazine and poster exciting visually.

Cyberlink Power 9: This software was used to edit and construct the music we used in our film. To record the song we used various music recording equiptment such as microphones, headphones, syntheisers and the cyberlink software.

Evaluation: Audience Feedback

This clip shows our classmates giving us feedback after watching our short film 'Second Life'. We asked them to answer honestly and talk about specific parts of the film that they enjoyed. (Thanks to Nicole Walton, Sam Horsley, Musonda Chola and Monica Polak for their comments)

2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

Here we are responding to the evaluation question: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks? Here we are discussing our main product 'Second Life', our film poster, our magazine front cover and our film review. We discuss elements such as characterisation, design, costume, setting etc.

Second Life Theme Music (Opening Sequence)

This is a song we recorded for the opening sequence of our film. It is a cover of the 'Kids in Glass Houses' track: 'Saturday'. We really liked the song and thought it suited the romantic comedy genre and lent itself well to the style of our film. Vocals are provided by Eleni Gerolymbou (writer and co-director) and the track is produced by Sam Horsley.

Review Page

For one of our ancillary tasks, we had to produce a magazine review page for our short film 'Second Life'. The Review follows the same design as our magazine front cover (colour scheme etc) and includes an image of our film poster. We are really happy with our finished product and feel it really carry's on the sci-fi theme running through each of our ancillary tasks.

'SECOND LIFE' - Final Product

This is our finished complete film entitled 'Second Life'. It follows two geeky teenagers who embark on their first date together. The film finishes at 5.16

1) In what way's does your media product use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media products?

This is our Director's Commentary for our short film 'Second Life'. In this we are answering the evaluation question: "In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media products?" Commentary provided by Jake Mitchell & Eleni Gerolymbou.

Final edited film poster!!!

This is our final completed film poster for 'Second Life' and we are very happy with our end result. We made some slight changes from our previous draft after getting some feedback from our tutors and peers: we decided to put the tagline 'love is loading' back into the poster as we felt that the poster really needed a tagline as every single poster we've looked at during research has had one of some kind. We also made our black box slightly smaller in order to make the text 'Second Life' bigger and more eye-catching. We also changed the font of our credits to make it smaller and look more realistic. We have also changed our certificate to a 12 as this is the most common certificate rating for the romantic comedy genre.

new idea for film poster

After evaluating our film poster we decided to completely change our design and go for a much more simplistic look. We looked at some other poster designs and the poster for the romantic comedy 'Knocked Up' really appealed to us and inspired our new design. We decided to just have the two protagonists heads in the centre and make this the biggest image on the page - this connotes comedy and the loving look that the female character is giving him communicates to the audience that this is a romantic film. We made the film text much larger and moved it into the centre of the page and we also changed the colour and text of the actors names and used much more basic colours and this looks much more professional. We got rid of our tagline: 'love is loading' as we felt it made the poster look a little crowded and it wasn't really necesary to include it. We replaced the keyboard and put our credits inside a black box which looks really neat and modern. Finally, we changed the certificate of our film from a 12 to a U rating as we realised our film had no offensive elements in it and it was suitable for young children.

'KNOCKED UP' FILM POSTER

This was the design which we based our own film poster on.

film poster with male protagonist

This is the 3rd draft of our film poster and we're still not happy with our product. We have tried to make the poster look cartoon like and animated but we feel it actually just looks rather unprofessional and bare. There is far too much blank space on the poster and the central image still isn't big enough on the page. I really like the idea of putting the protagonists in the computer screen but I'm just not sure it looks right with a white background - it makes it look extremely unrealistic. Also, (its not clear on the image) but the green background doesn't go with the rest of the text - we're definitely going to have a rethink and post our edited poster on asap.

film poster progress

We decided that the central image needed to be much larger on the poster and we also thought that the other smaller images were taking the attention away from the main image and also made the poster look messy and too busy so we changed it. This version is a working progress and still needs a lot of work and also the image of the male protagonist needs putting into the computer screen.

fillm poster first draft

This was the first intial draft that we did of our film poster for our short film 'Second Life'. We put the two names of the actors portraying the protagonists at the top of the poster and made the colour of the text connote the actors genders. We were both very happy with our logo as the green links back to the sci-fi element in our film and the font is bold and attractive. We experimented with the idea of having the main image within a computer screen, and also having the credits in a keyboard - after putting it together we felt the poster was far too cluttered and messy and there were far too many areas of blank white space and therefore we decided to make changes to our work.

magazine front cover

This is our final draft of our film magazine cover: 'Take 3'. I am really happy with our final design and think it is extremely effective. We have tried to make our magazine cover conventional of similar texts: our main image (showing the two protagonists in 'Second Life') is the largest image on the cover. We then have smaller text at the sides advertising other features included in the magazine.