Project Evaluation question two - Erol Akin

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

The combination of our main product, review and poster have all been effective in terms of what type of product we have attempted to create. We have used many techniques which are used in the in real media products and this research is presented in different forms on our blog. We researched into a variety of real media products from posters, short films and also film reviews which helped us all to create products which were of professional quality. Our target audience was 18-35 both male and females who enjoy scary films. We believed this to be the most appropriate age audience group based on the fact that a lot of scary films are certificated 18 and above. Using this age group allows us to target the majority of people who are likely to watch this type of film.

Our poster was designed with the intention to suggest our genre - which is psychological thriller. These types of films are iconic for dark colours, lighting and mysterious characters. The combination of these three products will help to promote our film and give the audience a good idea about what it may be like for someone to have a psychological disorder. The Faceless Man challenges the theme of mental disorder and gives the audience an insight to what it might be like to have schizophrenia. Although it is never mentioned throughout the short film about exactly what type of illness Alex had it suggested that he may be imagining things which are shown through flashbacks, character expression and body language. We attempted to make the film seem almost paranormal at times, however it was never suggested that The Faceless Man was actually anything supernatural.

The main product itself (the film) is a psychological thriller. Something which helped to suggest genre throughout our main product was lighting. Lighting played a vital part in showing the more dark side to our film which also helped to create a good atmosphere for the audience. It was important to us that we created a realistic atmosphere which would make the audience feel scared at times which is something that is common in a psychological thriller. The typical conventions of a psychological thriller are shown throughout our film through post production, for example jump cutting was used to create a high level of tension and to show The Faceless Man up close. The reason behind us keeping his face covered up throughout the duration of our film was also to create a high level of suspense for the audience, allowing them to be guessing of who he is - this is a common technique used to create enigma in these types of films.

We were given the feedback that our film was effective in the way it delivered tension and atmosphere but someone mentioned the screaming added in at times were even comical, which is obviously something we did not want. However we understand how this may have been comical due to perhaps over using certain sounds or even using them in the wrong place. The sound was something which also played a vital role in making our film atmospheric, which is commonly seen throughout psychological thrillers. I believe sound is so useful in films like these because sound is something which can not be seen which allows our brains to make up what that sound might look like or even imagine who is making the sound. Our poster was carefully designed with a clear idea in mind. We knew we wanted something which would be striking to the eye but simplistic in design, which I believe we managed to achieve. Our poster is effective in the way that it stands out due to the layout of the poster and the colours used, although we only used three main colours I still believe this is effective in making it stand out amongst other posters alike.

The review is accurate in terms of the comparison between our product and other films which share similar ideas and a similar narrative. It follows a similar structure to that of a Little White Lies review. The style of writing is professional and gives the reader a good idea about what is to be expected of the film and has an overall accurate description of the short film. The layout of the review is professional-looking as we created a template on Adobe InDesign following the same layout as the well known magazine 'Little White Lies'. Little White Lies magazine uses a lot of mature media language which suits the audience they are aiming at. We have attempted to create the same level of sophistication throughout our review and have attempted to create their level of uniformity to their simple yet effective layout which is aimed at their demographic.

Audience Feedback evaluation question - Erol

3.) What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

Audience feedback is essential when creating professional quality products. Audience feedback has helped us to make decisions about our film which would benefit us in a number of different ways. Although we lacked a certain amount of audience feedback there is a certain amount which were useful. We decided that our audience would be between the ages of 18-35, which I believe is a good age range with plenty of variety. Thriller films and psychological thriller films are the most popular with this age range and this is why we decided to aim our shortfilm at this demographic.

As a group we carried out a number of questions in order to gain some valuable feedback on our film, research and planning ideas. As a result we only managed to get feedback on a small number of people however it was enough to give us an idea about what we would have to make adjustments to in general. This feedback was enough to give us something to work from and improve our product so that it would be even more appropriate for our target audience. Jacob cleverly put these results into a series of pie chart (shown below). These help to explain our findings although they are not particularly specific it helped us to gain a good idea about what people thought in general about our film. The pie chart below directly shows how over 87% of people agreed that our story worked well and fitted with our theme of psychological thriller (which was very important to us). Whereas only 12% of people had certain issues with the narrative especially at the end as it was perhaps confusing at times for the audience.

With only 12% of people saying that our story 'maybe' works shows that overall it was clear about what was happening during the shortfilm and what relevance each character had to the plot. We established together as a group that the plot itself was a good idea but our overall execution lacked in certain areas, for example the narrative may not be clear in certain places causing 'confusion' which is what some of the people surveyed had used to describe our narrative at times. This was the only reason for them choosing 'maybe' instead of 'yes'. However we did not expect everyone to agree that our film worked well as there is always room for improvement although we were pleased to see that no one voted 'no' towards the answer.

The pie chart below was using the same group of people but this time the question asked whether or not someone would go to see this film in a cinema. We were slightly surprised to see that only just over 60% of our audience would go to see this film in cinema as this is only just over half. However these people stated that they did not like category of film anyway which we were not too bothered about as this was something which was out of our control. However we still had a large number of people who voted maybe instead of directly 'yes'. We were disappointed to see so many people would were sceptical about whether they would go to see it in cinema or not, but afterwards we remembered that it was only a short film and not a normal film so we thought perhaps people might have thought that it might not have been worth going to see a shortfilm. 

However although we received slightly negative feedback about whether someone would go to see it in a cinema we found out that people found the screaming and some of the backing track in the short film more comical than funny. We understand from their point a view how this may have seemed but we decided to include this in as it helped us to suggest genre and keep within our psychological thriller theme.

Another pie chart below shows how many people agreed that our film was a psychological thriller or if they did not, what genre they thought it might come under. For example number of people said that our film was more horror based. I personally disagree with this as there are no iconic horror conventions used in our sequence. We attempted to carefully select conventions of a typical thriller / psychological thriller which would help to establish our theme. No one thought our film was anything other than a psychological thriller or a horror which was good to hear, even the people who said our screaming sound was comical said that our film was within these sub genres. We could understand why people thought it may just be a typical thriller film as we aimed to create out film so that it would be open to interpretation, for example whether or not The Faceless Man is supernatural is completely down to the audience. This is something which would make a typical thriller film into a psychological thriller.

Unfortunately even we knew that this would not be true to the storyboard as we had a lot of last minute planning and had to come up with a script due to a lack of organisation which let us down. We attempted to make the script as close to the storyboard in the short time we had however time management and communication let us down. 

We received a few other types of audience feedback such as comments directly onto our blog which were similar comments made whilst we carried out these questionnaires with similar group members within our class. These pie charts below are also other pieces of audience feedback which helped us to improve certain aspects of our film, poster and even review. 

Oscar Martin Evaluation Q2

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

Oscar Martin Evaluation Q4

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

Oscar Martin Media Evaluation A2 Q3

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback

Audience feedback is very important for improvements and to understand what your target audience really wants, I am lucky enough to have a large family so during the christmas period I asked for their honest opinions on the faceless man. To do this without confusion I wrote a survey with three questions to answer after everyone watched the film I gave them a sheet with these questions asking them to tick which answer suited them the most.
Our target audience was 18-36 years olds, therefore I only asked those in the relevant age bracket concluding in 25 people answering my survey across the Christmas period.
I told my family and friends that honesty is key in this survey so there could be no bias thoughts or feelings attached. As you can see above is the results of the survey.

Question 1 was a simple question just asking if they enjoyed the film and the results were mainly positive with 6/10 being the most common result appearing on the survey, I believe this is a good result if you take into consideration the zero budget and short time period to make this film but it does also show that there is room for improvement which leads nicely to question 2.

Question 2 was a question on how to improve our short film with seven available options to pick. As the survey portrays the confusing ending option was the most ticked option on the survey with 18 out of 25 people agreeing with a confusing ending 6 people saying better acting and 1 person wanting an improved soundtrack.
I'll start with the sound improvements, I asked why they wanted to improve the soundtrack and they said it was too loud and hard to hear people talk, I explained it was meant to be loud as it would drown out the dialogue making it seem only Alex really remembers the Faceless Man and the conversation was irrelevant but its a valid point none the less.
People who said improved acting is totally understandable and I was surprised more people didn't go for this option as no one who performed in the film were actors as it was a zero budget production we couldn't hire anyone. Therefore the six people who said acting needed improving are completely correct.
Eighteen people said it was a confusing ending and I can understand why to a certain extent. The film was always meant to create enigma therefore being interpreted in different ways but I can also see how this is confusing. The three main interpretations we thought we would have on the film is Psychiatrist being the faceless man and actually hunting Alex, The psychiatrist having a brother who is hunting Alex and he's in on it as well for an unknown reason or the real ending we wanted and hoped everyone would understand is that none of this is real and all in his head.
I spoke to a few of these people after and a lot of them understood it was to do with mental illness but felt it wasn't clear between the psychiatrist and the Faceless Mans connection.
This is something in the future I will definitely learn from and look to improve in the future as the ending to a film can be the most important part to the whole film.  

Question 3 was simply asking if they would ever choose to watch it from looking at the Poster, This was the most positive question where 22 of the 25 people said from looking at the poster I made they would watch the film. This is good to reflect on the positives and tells me that the poster was something that was a huge success.

Then as a group we asked other groups if they would write what they thought of our film on the blog allowing us too take their feedback and further improve.

This is from another group in our class where they are listing positives and negatives, the positives show that we took time to think of filming location and that we spent a lot of time in the post production of editing too but here they talk about the title where they say the title sequence looks as if it was used to fill time. We did indeed make the title a bit longer just to fill time but we tried making it still seem watchable with the numbers counting down before the title appears on screen but yes in the future we should of planned everything more precisely so the audience don't have to sit through a long intro. They speak about how the ending is confusing but effective. I believe this is a positive as that was the idea of the film all along to confuse people into thinking multiple alternative possibilities for what the ending means.  

This group like the others gave some positives and some negatives about the film. They start off by talking about the Soundtracks which they thought were excellent, which is nice to know as it took a very long time for me to find the appropriate soundtracks and then layer different ones over existing sound to emphasise a specific scary moment in a certain scene. Its good to know people understood this was about mental health and insanity and like the way we showed that with the editing and that they appreciated the storyline as that is a very important element. 

Here they also spoke about how the dialogue in the first scene was unclear this was possibly because during production we realised our voice recorder wasn't working so we had to use the camera's mic to pick up sound. We know this isn't very good so in the future we will check the mic the day before and also bring multiple microphones if possible but under zero budget that can be quite difficult.  

The scary laughter being funny is a point I was surprised by but none the less I have tried to find out why, I believe it could be interpreted as funny because it was a scream from garageband and not done first hand but we will next time watch over a scene excessively if we included a scream as laughing ruins the whole feel and eeriness of the film and thats the main aspect.   

In this feedback the group tell us how they found it interesting throughout but like the other groups the dialogue contrasted with the sound was their biggest issue. How it was originally intended was to be like that on purpose as during the flash back Alex is so consumed by fear and can only think about the faceless man everything else becomes a blur hence also with the disorientated filters but because multiple groups have picked up on this we will not use that technique again. 

  The Last post from the last group was a positive one and spoke about how they liked the soundtrack and editing because of the tension it formed as well as the concept behind hiding the psychiatrists face which is a major concept of our film so I'm glad it paid off. 

Overall My family Members and friends found the ending the part which needed the most improving and my classmates overall decided the dialogue most needed to improve.

I Believe my family chose the ending and my class mates didn't is because we are media students who are taught to dissect films so its easier for us to understand. The media students could tell we didn't use a microphone for our dialogue so made that one of our biggest negatives because they can tell the difference just like we can. Both points equally valid and further proves how important audience feedback really is. 

Oscar Martin Evaluation A2 Media Q1

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

Originally The faceless Man was to be a short film designed to develop and combine traditional forms and conventions of real media products. In the end we didn't use many of these conventions as we agreed the best way to create a good film in the short amount of time given to us was to construct it from a diverse range of other short films, therefore looking at the elements which already exist in other media products. The narrative of our short film is organised with a non-linear platform with certain elements of circular narrative, mostly driven through our diverse imagery. A good example of circular narrative is the blurred face of the Faceless Man through out the whole short film then concluded by the final shot where we see the faceless mans face revealing his true identity. 

The Conventions of a film are key for success and we knew this well, therefore for genre we really tried hard to include an eery psychological thriller feel towards the film as well as include some scary post productive non-diegetic soundtracks and filters at the end to really emphasise this effect, but we didn't want to be stereotypical making the mise-en-scenes settings dark and fearful we believed the biggest fear of mental health is 'insanity during normality' with the concept that schizophrenia could happen anywhere anytime. 

None the less we still decided to use darker lighting with disorientated and low key post production effects on the flashbacks to emphasise the fear for our target audience.  

With our short story its hard to find time for character development therefore to try and tell the whole story we relied mainly on flashbacks and visual effects for people to understand the character and what he is dealing with.

Frame Analysis

As a group we decided these were the most important frames during our short film as each frame has an individual role essential to the idea of the Faceless Man.

The first frame is the title of our film and the title is important for the obvious reason that it tells you what the film is called but it also does more than that, straight away even without hearing sound the white font combined with the black background creates an eerie effect along with the slightly crumbling letters at the end is a convention of horror, furthermore linking with a fragment of someone's face straight away gives the audience an idea of the sort of film The Faceless Man will be. 

The second frame shows us the main character called Alex as he starts fidgeting whilst spinning the globe in front of him. For this specific scene we decided to use the technique of low depth of field as well as a focus-pull in order to pull the attention of our target audience towards the globe. We chose to use a focus pull in this scene to demonstrate the fidgeting that 'Alex' is doing. For Alex's costume we decided to use smart clothes complemented with a nice watch to show that Alex is a wealthy young man and not some stereotypical rough looking gentleman as we thought this would be good as it shows mental illness can happen to anyone including the rich. The room we chose to film this scene in was deliberately laid out to look like a psychiatrists home office with the big comfy chairs, wooden table and book shelves as the décor of the setting. Even the globe prop was designed to look like it would belong in a psychiatrists office. 

The third frame is showing us the faceless man during one of Alex's flash backs, the reason why this scene is so important is because it shows how Alex is seeing the faceless man. This frame and overall scene from the short film is demonstrating that the Faceless Man can be seen anywhere at any time even during the day and even with someone else. During this frame we used jump cuts to make the scene distorted as it shows fear and confusion. We also implemented filters with the whole flashback scene making it darker in lighting and almost blurry so people know its a flash back, we used the same technique throughout each flash back. During this scene we layered non-diegetic soundtrack over the scene drowning out a lot of the sound, its easy to understand the dialogue but the idea was to use the music to almost erase the dialogue in order to show that in Alex's flash back the faceless Man sighting is the only thing he really remembers. 

The Fourth frame is a subtle image of the Faceless Man. This same frame features in the short film multiple times at random points whilst talking to the psychiatrist. This shot uses the same filters as the flashbacks but has an added reddish filter. The same sound an eerie squeal happens every time the Faceless Mans face comes onto the screen, this can be interpreted in two ways that its added effect for the viewer or the character is hearing this in his own head due to his mental health, either interpretation makes sense but to create enigma the viewer can decide for themselves. The reddish filters and short duration doesn't indicate another flash back but insanity which is what the short films about.

In this fifth frame You can see the protagonist Alex's hand on the arm of a leather chair. We decided to use this leather chair as a prop in our film as it suited the psychiatrists décor. This yet again is a demonstration of Alex's nervous and fidgety nature showing he is constantly on edge. The Background for this scene is the same as the second frame. The constant in the setting and costume shows the audience its the same day and they haven't moved from this spot. 

The sixth frame is from the second flash back. It features all the appropriate flash back techniques we maintained throughout our flash backs including the filters to make it distorted, dark lighting and layered non-diegetic sound to emphasise the fear but we also used a technique of using camera movement and timings for our actors to make it seem as if the Faceless Man disappears once Alex walks past. This technique along with the new crescendo non-diegetic soundtrack makes this flash back eery and one of my personal favourites to film and edit. This whole shot is trying to show that The Faceless man is all in Alex's head as he simply disappears once Alex turns around. 

The seventh Frame is another nice scene. The red filter and distorted effects shows its another demonstration of insanity except this time its of Alex himself. Before this scene we used some small second clips of the same frame throughout the sequence but they had natural filters and no non-diegetic music. We did this because we wanted to show constant insanity, that throughout every situation and everyday that short frame is how Alex feels in his head. The reason that didn't make the top nine frames is because the longer filtered variation of this frame (the one shown above)has a darker meaning. 
It still is a symbol of constant insanity but now it consists of not just filters but non-diegetic soundtracks and a possibly diegetic or non-diegetic scream. We wanted to reveal that the Faceless Man and Alex are the same person in the sense that its all in Alex's head; The end shot revealing the psychiatrist to be the Faceless Man is the conclusive finale of our short film but if you look into the comparison of this frame and the Faceless Man red filtered frame you will realise they are identical further explaining even the psychiatrist isn't real as he is the Faceless Man, therefore concluding in Alex talking to no one in reality showing he is well and truly insane. 

The Eighth Frame is a tracking shot from the third and final flashback this flashback consists of the same techniques used in the other flash backs with filters and non-diegetic sound but in this flash back its set at night and in his own bedroom. The fact its set at night makes it even more scary as night time is associated with fear and the thought of the unknown. During this shot we see the protagonist wake up about to open up his window. 

The Ninth frame happens straight after the end of the eighth and features the last part of our film, in this scene we see the Faceless Mans actual face as a new crescendo of non-diegetic soundtrack plays over the original flash back soundtrack as it jump cuts closer towards the Faceless Man, it then cuts out of the flash back instantly to reveal that the Faceless Man is the Psychiatrist. This then causes people to think that the

psychiatrist has been hunting Alex all this time when in fact as I said in frame seven its not quite as it seems. 

The Smiling Man Influences         
        

The Smiling Man is a short film our group took inspiration off, we thought the sense of fear in normality (just walking down the street at night) is one of the aspects of this short film we really liked, I researched some of my own short films but they have no relevance to our actual film. It was when we all watched this last minute did we decide we wanted to go down this route.
The Smiling Man is about a man who dances towards a random teenage boy whilst constantly smiling its a basic yet excellently delivered short film which concludes with the smiling man catching up with the teenager coming face to face with him just like you see on the photo above.
The things we took from this short film was the use of just two actors we thought it was effective just having two actors on screen as it maid in feel as if the protagonist is well and truly alone as that in itself can generate fear on its own.
The second inspiration we got was the feeling of when the Smiling Man disappears as we thought the feeling of the un known is also very powerful and for a psychological short film like ours that can effect someone severely as the anticipation can drive someone insane (our character Alex is a good example of that.)
The third emotional influence we got from The Smiling Man was confusion. In the Smiling Man we are unaware to why the Smiling Man has chosen to chase this teenager and that's shown in our short film with our protagonist Alex being confused to why he is being 'hunted' by the Faceless Man, confusion is an emotion that can drive people mad and we thought with Alex's schizophrenic health condition this could increase the effect of his schizophrenia.

The Faceless Man LWL Review

For our review we copied the layout and the way Little White lies is written perfectly. We used Latinate Lexis in our review to make it sound more sophisticated and formal whilst also hoping that it reaches beyond our target audience of 18-36 as an older generation may read this and therefore entice more people to watch the short film. We all developed and produced this short film so it was difficult to write a review as someone watching it for the first time so we used this review as a good way to talk about what we thought was good about the film and what could be improved for example the insight into mental health was a good aspect of our film but the acting didn't justify it as none of us who made this film are actors so it wasn't easy to portray the characters in the ideal way we intended.  We included techniques Little White Lies used in their review with comparisons to major films like Fight Club where brief millisecond frames of the faceless man pops up throughout the film just like in Fight Club. We also spoke about essential things outside of the actual films like our zero budget and time to make this film and how that has potentially damaged a great short movie.
Because we thought the flashbacks were key to our film we spoke a lot about how the narrative of the movie is used through the use of flashbacks and without these flash backs it would be a very confusing and boring film for the audience.


My Film Poster

This is my finalised film poster that I made for my film. The black and white theme of colours makes it seem more eerie and dark. The patchy background and hood of the Faceless Man gives a representation of the disorientated and almost crumbling reality of Alex's life.

I used Photoshop after I did a photo-shoot in order to create this poster. Its a simple poster with a unique title at the bottom left to make its stand out and with the patchy contrast of white to black background it shows a sense of good versus evil or in this case sanity versus insanity. The Faceless Man is slightly bigger than Alex to show that he is controlling is life and consumes Alex's identity, his face is rubbed out but looks distorted, this effect was to yet again show the direction in which this film was heading.  

I had ideas off some other Posters that I looked at and the one that gave me the most inspiration was the short film The Pig Child, although it doesn't look anything like mine I took inspiration from the simplicity of it yet the pragmatic complex it implied was vast. Every detail on The Pig Child poster told almost the whole story in just one picture, even the Text font gave away the genre of the film which is why I copied it as we both had a thriller conventional film.

I liked the fact it had hardly any colour to it as dullness doesn't always mean excitement it can mean despair which for both The Pig Child and The Faceless Man wanted to imply.

Question 2 Transcript - Jacob Knowles

Media Transcript For Question 2

In this film, I am going to be talking about how the ancillary tasks (the film review and also the film poster) worked effectively with the main task to create a strong final product. This final product is essentially a complete marketing package which could potentially be used to market, distribute, and profit off of the short film that we have created.

The first of the two secondary tasks that I’m going to be talking about is the film poster. The audience that we were targeting with our short film is both males and females between the ages of 18 and 35; thus, the target audience of our poster is also the same. We primarily tried to target this audience through using similar genre conventions in our poster as we did in the film. Though the amount of these we could achieve was limited because of the limitations making a poster faces as opposed to making a film.

One of the elements of the poster that I focused on was the imagery. In the poster I included a heavily distorted image of the antagonist in our film, I split the image into it’s three different layers of colour (cyan, yellow, magenta), and moved each layer of colour so they were all slightly off centre. I then distorted this image further through smudging the edges. I think the distorted effect that I created is very effective at conveying the genre conventions that I wanted to when I started making the poster.

The font that I used when creating the poster is very reminiscent of the font seen at the start of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, I thought this was appropriate for the poster simply because it seemed to fit well when I first used it. I used a plain white colour for the font because it’s the most readable colour on the black background that I was using.

Apart from the array of colour that’s visible in the imagery of the poster, I chose to use simple black and white colour throughout the poster.  I chose to use simple colours because I wanted to include a lot of information and content on the poster without making it seem overcrowded. When I experimented with other colours in the poster it looked much more cluttered and unorderly, so I changed it to look the way it does now.

I also included relevant awards for British Independent short films on the poster. I made sure these awards were relevant because otherwise it would make little/no sense in the context of our film.

I decided that the location that the poster was set was unimportant for the effect that I was trying to achieve, this is because I wanted to isolate the antagonist from the backdrop. The place I really wanted to set the poster was inside the protagonist’s mind, and this is best way that I could find to represent that.

All of these elements that I have discussed are constructs of the psychological thriller genre, and I used them as effectively as I could in order to make the poster work well in combination with the main task. Beyond working well in combination with the short film, I also wanted the poster to be attractive and to work well when marketing the film and I feel as though I have achieved that. In marketing our film, I would spread my poster through both social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I would also try and inform people on its existence through simple, old fashioned, word of mouth.

The Little White Liars magazine film review that I’ve written for our film is primarily targeted at the normal target demographic for LWL magazine, which is both males and females between the ages of 26 and 35. Though not exactly the audience we were targeting with our film, it’s very similar and this means that the review is more easily effective at marketing the film towards our audience. The LWL magazine communicates with its target audience through two different ways.

The first way that LWL magazine communicates with its audience is through the language and media language that’s used in it. It uses lots of media language and more mature language which is appropriate for the audience that it’s targeting.

The layout of the review also heavily contributes towards the demographic that it’s targeting. All of the articles in the LWL magazine are set out in the same way, with the same elements being in the exact same places. This creates a level of conformity and professionalism that isn’t seen in other movie review magazines and articles. One of the features of the layout that allows it to effectively target the young adult demographic is the three-number based rating system, giving each film that’s reviewed three scores. The first of these scores is the anticipation, the second is the enjoyment, and the third is the rating of the film in retrospect. This system allows the film review to be summarised at a very quick glance, allowing people to understand the review at its core no matter how busy they are, as a working young adult or film student.

The magazine uses very professional fonts such as Algerian for the main body of the text, and Century Gothic for specific titles. All of the fonts used in the magazine are sans-serif to maintain simplicity throughout all of the articles.