Misfit

EVALUATION

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

camera work

lighting
The majority of lighting that I used throughout my film was natural lighting. This was because I didnt want, or necessarily need to manipulate the lighting to change how the shot looked for most of the film. I shot it as if it was over 2 days, starting in the day time of one day and finishing in the day time of the next day. I basically shot it at the times I needed to, when it needed to be in the day time I took the pictures while there was still light coming in through the windows. The only part I used artificial lighting was when I took some of the photos at night, and there was no light in the hallway I was using at all. When I turned the main light on the room was too bright and very noticeably unnatural looking, so I took 2 lamps and rested them on the table which lit the shot luckily to just about the perfect light because you can tell its at a later time than the previous scene.

sound

mise en scne

editing

similar media

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

poster

10

double page

11

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

feedback
After completing my film for the first time, I showed it to various groups of people; my friends, family and youtube. The general consensus among my friends was that the paper sounds werent accurate and detailed enough which I agreed with to an extent, it was difficult for me to get my sounds perfect whilst doing everything else for the film. This may have been because I had the whole workload as I worked on my own and it may have been better if there was a team of us. After receiving these comments I changed some of the sounds as best as I could but it took so long to edit again and get everything in the right place so I couldnt actually change too much. Another friend said that the duration of shots seems quite slow in some places but I ignored this as I spent quite a while trying out different lengths of time for the shots to the point where I didnt actually use the same duration for every shot in the film. I had made some points last longer than others, and others to be over quicker. My sister after watching the very first draft of it that I produced said that she didnt quite understand the story fully. This was something I felt I had a problem with myself as well, even though Id spent so long planning what I was doing and getting the story sorted, after Id finished it and watched it myself I did wonder if others that didnt know anything about the film would understand what was happening. A friend of mine commented after I asked him to watch it and tell me what he thought was going on said it looks like the red guy is getting turned against by his men which wasnt really correct. But after spending over 24 hours in total taking over 2500 photos, I felt it was too late to spend more time taking more photos and trying to make it more clear for the viewer. I considered adding a narrative of some such as an intro like how the Star Wars films start (obviously not in space) but then it just didnt seem fitting for the film at all. After all the negative comments, there were a number of good comments as everyone that Id asked to watch it said it it flowed nicely or something similar to this, which was nice to hear as this was

13

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

research

15

For the actual putting together of my film, I used Windows Movie Maker. The reason I chose to use this over other film making alternatives like iMovie and Sony Vegas was because this program keeps things basic and simple. If Id have used another program I think the process of putting the film together would have been more difficult and overcomplicated as there are too many tools and options to choose from that I just wouldnt have needed. For the majority of my work, I just needed to transfer my shots from my SD card into the correct place and change the duration of each one which Movie Maker was perfect for as I could change all 2300 images durations at the same time. When I first started putting the movie together, I tried using iMovie HD but this made things so difficult for me as there are known issues with iMovie when trying to make clips shorter than around half a second. I also didnt like its interface as it just seemed to perplex me. The upload directly to youtube feature in Windows Movie Maker made the process of getting my clips onto youtube very easy. Instead of having to save the clips, go to youtube, log in, then find your clips to upload like usual, I could directly upload my film from the Movie Maker interface in full quality.

windows movie maker

There were a couple of issues I found with Windows Movie Maker which made things slightly difficult for me. When I tried adding the title Misfit in with a fade in and a fade out effect, it just didnt seem to want to agree with me, so instead of using the normal fade effects I had to copy and paste the word in about 20 times and make them play consecutively, but then I had to slightly change the fade manually on each word. For something like this Im sure would be where other film making software would excel, but fortunately for me it wasnt too much of a time waster and this was the only word I needed to add in. Also, when adding sound effects and parts of music tracks in the program doesnt like you dragging and dropping these where you want. When I added the sounds and music after Id finished putting the shots in the right order I then had to add all of my music 16 and sounds in chronological order otherwise all of the sounds would be budged forward about 10 seconds every time which ruined the syncing.

Although I didnt use Sony Vegas for the actual making of the film (for reasons mentioned in the previous slide) I did decide to use it for editing my sounds and music track. This was because I was familiar with the program for this sort of thing as Id used it before and I find it simple to use. Im sure there are other alternative music editing software but as I already had this on my laptop and find it simple enough to use I thought itd be useful to use it. My process for editing the nondiegetic noises like paper rustles and the doors closing was generally drag the mp3 into a timeline, add a fade inset or offset and loop it or add another rustle effect onto it. Once Id got the correct sound and was happy with what Id got I needed to render it as an mp3 file then insert it into Movie Maker at the correct point. For the editing of the music track I used, I cut the song up into sections that I knew I would or wouldnt be using. I then removed all of the cuts that I wasnt going to be using then started on the pieces I needed. For these I did quite a similar thing to the paper noises where I had to add in fade in effects at the correct points otherwise it would sound jerky and surprising. When the fades were added it made the song sound more fitting and like it was meant to be there rather than just a song that

sony vegas

Sony Vegas was very good for what I used it for, but there were a couple of issues I had with it. When I was using very short sounds e.g. 1 or 2 seconds, it made it very difficult to get the mouse in the right place and add in the effects that I needed because it makes the sound rectangle so small. Also for some of the longer tracks it took a very long time to render the sounds as an mp3 file, I still never really understood why it would take longer to render a 30 second sound than it would to upload the whole film itself, but nevertheless it still worked and did what I wanted it to do.

17

cs5

18