CRITICAL EVALUATION A2

Syeda Begum

1) IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

Our media product supports the conventions in the following ways...

The target audience is the younger generation which is typical for an animation film.

Our animation is a comedy which a majority of animations tend to be.

The language that we use is very simple. Since its a British animation the characters also have a British accent.

The ideology that we try to communicate is for younger people which all animation films try to do.

We used the idea of the Mission Impossible title and theme song and developed it to create our own title and theme song to match our film.

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.

The film is a comedy with a serious message behind it. Usually animations a for pure entertainment.

Normally animation characters are young, energetic healthy children. Our lead character is a 30 yr old man with a child-like mind.

Whilst other films target a specific audience our media product target a wider range.

The sounds and dubbed voices which we then changed to sound very different and comical.

2) HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE COMBINATION OF YOUR MAIN PRODUCT AND ANCILLARY TEXTS?

POSTER Effective with the film because it’s eye-

catching and colourful as a kids film poster should be

Focal image is that of the actor surrounded by purple (instead of green) Funny looking aliens draw attention, intrigues the viewer

Attracts the target audience as this kind of wild imaginings are their area of expertise

Actor on the poster is an adult and not a child with aliens behind- unusual and attracts attention

Title is big and bold, un-missable Easily suggests the film will be some kind

of spoof/comedy simply from the title ‘mithon impothible’

It follows the conventions of a real poster, as we also have a tagline, logo, production company info, etc

RADIO TRAILER Trailer does not give away too much of the

story Unlike other film radio trailers, our film is

better than the trailer because the trailer was the last thing we made and so we were not able to spend enough time on it.

The trailer is very comical and jokey, it sets the mood for the entire film before anybody has seen it

It starts slow and speeds up as it goes, with a few sudden stops and starts, which only add to the pace of the film

Includes theme tune and voiceover

3) WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?

We used survey monkey to create our Questionnaire.

www.surveymonkey.com

This is how the survey looks.

To distribute the surveys we used email and put a link on our blogs.

•majority of participants of our survey were between the age of 16 to 20.

•Could be because this is more likely to participate in online surveys than any other age group

•From this we learnt that how we distribute our products will have a big impact on the size of our audience as well as the type of audience we have.

This question showed us that animation is not just for young children. Whether its to keep in touch with a persons inner child or for education or just for entertainment, everyone enjoys watching animation. This is one of the reasons why our film is suitable for everyone and we hope everyone will enjoy.

This shows the audience’s preferred genre is comedy and fantasy. We chose our film to be a comedy/fantasy too.

Question 8 was ‘How do you think the animations produced by this institution represents young people of your age?’ Most people said young people are represented positively others said they are represented as ‘funny, stupid, rebellious and bullies’ , some said there could be more teenagers in animations than young children.

We had a young man in the film part and young child in the animation part of the film who are both the same age so there is a mix of age in the film.

This question in the survey shows that all audience would like to be able to relate to the character whether it’s appearance, social class or age wise or even intellectually.

We thought that whether it’s through the humour, age of the characters or the characters ideas and imagination, a lot of the audience would be able to relate to the film and characters.

After the editing for our film was complete we gathered an audience of our target age group to watch our film and give us feedback. This is what they said:· sound effects worked well with the nature of the film, created suspicion which was good as it reflected the mission impossible theme.· The animations were funny; it allowed the character to do things that he wouldn’t be able to do in human form.· The end was slightly confusing because it was unclear what was happening.· The story flowed well e.g. the part where there was a swirly dream effect to show that we were going into his imagination.· The idea of film and animation combined was great - the transitions between both film and animation were good.· The music was good.· The dubbing of the voices had very good•The voice dubbing also made it very funny.After hearing the feedback we decided we needed to work on was our ending so we cut out a clip off the end of the film but kept the alien sound which played while the screen was black. This made the ending much clearer and looked better too.

4) HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH, PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

We first did our questionnaire, we did it on paper. But we then changed it to online using survey monkey as we thought this would get us a higher response rate

We used imovie to make the animatic film using the photos we took of our storyboard. This gave us an idea of how the film will might look.

put up some of our videos on YouTube.

When we were thinking of our locations, we went and took pictures using the digital camera of possible places we could film. We also used a camera to take pictures for the blogs.

We used a professional video camera for the filming so the sound can be captured well as well as the filming. However the sound quality still was not good enough so we dubbed the voices.

We used power point to put up our research and evaluation on our blogs which you cannot do directly through Blogspot so we used Slideshare to upload them.

We used BlogSpot for blogging all our work

We used Microsoft word to write up the scripts for the trailer as well as the film. We also used it for the agreement contracts etc. We used microphones to record voices in the studio.

Any other research and planning was done on the internet; using websites such as Google and YouTube.

We made the poster using Photoshop.

The software that we used to make the animation was ‘Adobe Flash which taught us different techniques of animation such as ‘motion tween’ which we actually used while animating.

Any of the work we did, we had to make a copy on an external hard drive as backup but we still lost some of our work and filming due to one of the hard drives smoking up and getting damaged, which slowed us down during production.

When we talked to our actors, we would try to do it face to face as often as we could.

Decided that emailing the actors would make it easier to communicate to them faster for things like filming schedules.

Also, to make the radio trailer, we had to use the digital editing suite

Final Cut pro, Logic for editing

We even had a go at using Live Type for the title but then decided to animate the title ourselves using flash.