Questionnaire Analysis

Questionnaire Analysis

When we made our questionnaires we had to display our results and I choose to create a biteable presentation which can be seen by on the video below.

As you can see in the analysis above the my Prelim task received an overall positive reception from the people who I showed it to. And the criticism I received was mainly referring to the acting and the music in the background. The acting in the Prelim was to test the people in my group to see who was the best at acting overall so when we do film our actual opening we knew who should be acting. And the music in the background was just a humorous placeholder as I needed some music to place into the background and I just had the file on my computer from another task so I made use of what I had. Also as this was the last thing added to the Prelim i didn't have as much time to edit it as the deadline was near so I had to make do with what I had.

Codes and Conventions

Codes and Conventions

My group have now finished the prelim task and we have been now told to research the codes and conventions of the film genre that we are final film is going to be part of. Our final film is going to be a chase scene and while these can be seen in a variety of different film genres it's most commonly found in the the Action film genre so that is where i'll be looking for codes and conventions.

The setting for a majority of action films is a large, busy city with many tall buildings. This is because when intense scenes are filmed in busy areas they are made more realistic by all of the people in area  reacting to their situation such as fleeing the area when fight scenes occur this makes the film look more realistic. Also while it can also include exotic locations (temples, ruins, etc) that is more commonly found in the action adventure sub genre. The setting of our final film is going to be the sixth form building as because of the buildings layout (stairs, elevators, corridors, etc) it heavily resembles a office building which are found in large cities. This means it we can film a chase scene in this location and it won't look out of place as the location will make audiences think that it has been filmed in a large city.

The music that is found in the action genre is used to create suspense and tension in certain scenes where the protagonist is being pushed to his/her limit such as being chased by the antagonists henchmen (main antagonist would make his followers do his bidding). This is so that the audience does not lose interest when watching the film as if the chase scene had no music in the background it would be very lack luster so sound is a key element to a chase scene. However the music those not always have to be used to create suspense it is also used to make scenes more intense and in some cases it will be the films themes song which is normally used in final confrontation against the films antagonist. This makes the viewers get hyped as we are about to see an epic fight.

Above is an example of music used to make film scenes much more intense from the film Star Wars The phantom menace (1999). The scene it is used in is the climatic fight at the end of the film where   Qui gon jinn and Obi wan Kenobi must fight the sith apprentice Darth Maul and this song starts even before the fight begins which slowly builds up the intensity until they start fighting.

The costume that the characters wear is a very broad as in an action film one character could be wear a shirt and jeans and look like a random civilian and then in another scene be wearing a shirt and tie and look like they have a very rich person. But when I think about chase scene costumes I mostly associate them with the chasers wearing black suits as it makes them look more ominous so they stand out among everyone else in the scene where as the person getting chased will be wearing clothes that fit with the setting around him (Wearing jeans in a city and work shirt and tie when working in a office) this way they blend in with everyone else which from the characters perspective makes them believe that they won't get noticed as they don't stand out.

The video above is from The Matrix (1999) where Neo must escape from the Agents. I show this video because it will help me to explain what I mean about costume. throughout the scene the Agents wear black suits which compared to everyone else's makes them stand out more. Now look at Neo's outfit a business suit while this sounds similar to the Agents outfits we can tell that they are different but compare that to all of his co workers clothes and they look almost identical but this only works in this scene as it's a office building so you expect to see people in suits whereas you'd wouldn't expect someone like Neo to wear in outside of his job. 

And one of the most common conventions of a Action films explosions. These are found in almost every action film including sub genres. They are found in scenes with lots of action in them such as a final battle or escaping a somewhere that is about to explode. This is such a popular convention that there is a theory (The Whammo theory) which states that every 10 minutes there should be a 'Whammo' or a explosion of some sort so that the audience is entertained throughout the film. However for are final film it may be difficult to add explosions to our chase scene as none of my group have any experience adding Special effects of that scale to a film.

Prelim Task Questionnarie

So I could get some audience feedback I created a questionnaire show I could find out what my classmates thought about the film below will be a version of the questionnaire

           1.   How well do you think the acting is in the clip?

Good                    Bad

           2.   If you choose bad how could we improve it?

           3.   How is the editing in the clip?

                Good      to fast       to slow    continuity error

           4. If selected continuity error where was this in the clip?

                                

           5.   How does the camerawork look throughout the clip?

                     Good                        to shaky      

      6. Overall do you believe that this was a good filming attempt?

        Yes                            No

            7.    How do you believe we could improve our film in the future?

       8.  What do you think about the music in the background?

             Too loud            Too Quiet

            9.    Should we include music similar to this in our final film?

       Yes                      No

      10. Anything you want to say about the film?

Prelim Task Evaluation

Prelim Task Evaluation

When we created our prelim tasks I was the director of my group which means that I was the person who was making sure that my group was performing their roles properly so that we were all producing efficient work. For example during filming I had to make sure that our cameraman was the filming the scenes in a specific way (tracking, shooting from certain angle, etc.). The briefing was to create a short clip which includes the editing and camera techniques that we had researched in the past. 

Overall I believe that we meet most of the briefing as we had a wide variety of different shots and editing techniques so that it didn’t the clip wasn’t boring. However, there were also times when we didn’t meet the briefing for example while we used loads of different techniques we still missed out a few that I believe we could have incorporated into our prelim.I think that we were very successful during the production of our clip as we followed a majority of the scripts and storyboards that we created so we always knew what we had to do. 

Also I was unsure of the difficulties we were going to have when using the film cameras as before this all of us had only used digital cameras but I was surprised how quickly are cameraman got the hang of using it which made filming go much quicker than we first anticipated. But there were things that my group was unsuccessful with the main thing were our teamwork skills. I say this because during our first day of filming there were times where we butted heads as we all believed that certain things could have been shot in a better way which lead to a few minor arguments however we eventually resolved all of these issues and filming continued. 

Also we had to re film certain scenes as we had a combination of digital camera footage and film camera footage which lead to noticeable quality drops during production but we managed to resolve it quickly.During our production I’ve learnt how to direct a small film group and multiple film techniques to make sure that our film is of high quality. I also learnt how to edit films using Final Cut Pro which includes cutting clips together, applying transitions (fade in/out) and adding background music to make clips more interesting. 

I will use what I’ve learnt to make sure to improve our main task such as new camera techniques to create more interesting shots and I’ll use my editing techniques to make the final film look professional.When looking at my groups time management I think that we could have done much better as to my knowledge we were one of the last groups to finish filming as we had to re shoot some scenes with the film cameras this meant that we had less time to edit than the rest of the groups. This was also concerning considering that my group had one of the shorter prelim clips just going over 30 seconds so we should have been one of the first to finish. So one my main goal for directing our final film will be managing our time so we can improve our film.