Blog Closed

Evaluation Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

On the left are three screenshots of me in our film opening and on the right a picture of the main characters of the movie 'Mean Girls'.

What they all have in common is that they are very girly.

• They're really into make-up, shopping, fashion, parties and boys.
• They spend their days with their friends going shopping, reading fashion magazines, doing each others hair and talking about boys.
• They wear pink, short skirts and a lot of make-up.

The main difference would be that the Mean Girls are a lot worse and more extreme than the girls in our film opening. They do wear make-up, high heels and short clothes, but they're nicer and walk in a normal way.

Also, our opening was filmed outside in winter, so the options we had for costumes were quite limited in terms of wearing mini skirts and low nechlines, because it was freezing. And due to the dark it is hard to see how much make-up our characters were actually wearing.

Evaluation Question 6

What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Video Camera

We learned how to handle a proper video camera, which wasn't a hard thing to do as there's not much that you can to wrong.

 

Tripod

The tripod was helpful because it holds the camera steady. Without it our film would have been very shaky. The only problem we had with it was that we lost bits of it in the grass and it was hard to find them in the dark.

Photo Camera

We used a normal camera to take pictures of locations and we where going to take pictures while filming what we unfortunately forgot every single time. We didn't have to learn how to use our cameras as we had used before.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4

Premiere Pro turned out to be our biggest enemy in the editing process (see here). It really is quite hard to use in the beginning, it has loads of functions and it's not easy to find the ones you need, but we got help from Youtube video tutorials (e.g. this one) and the longer you use the programme the easier it becomes.

Adobe Photoshop CS4

Photoshop was nice, it created our logo (see here ). saved our screenshots and edited our pictures. We were familiar wih Photoshop before, so no problems with this one!

Prezi

We had never heard of Prezi before but it's a pretty good thing for creating presentations and it looks a lot nicer than Powerpoint. It's also easy to understand and simple to create things like we did for our ideas (see here).

Blogger

Blogger is obviously used for our blogs. I had never used it before but it is quite easy even though there are sometimes problems to place pictures where you want them in your post.

YouTube

We used YouTube to create an account (see here) for our movie company and to have the opportunity to upload our videos so we could embed them in our blog as well. No problems here either!

Evaluation Question 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

You already know the name and logo of our production company, Pieker Pictures. The name is just made up of our own surnames Piep and Iker, and as well as the logo, which was really just meant to look quite nice, it doesn't suggest a genre of movies the company might produce and distribute.

A production company, as the name suggests, produces the movie, which means it has to organise the crew, actors, locations, props, technology and everything else needed to make the movie.

Making our opening, we always had a special product in mind we were aiming for, which is the German series of crime films "Tatort". It's on TV at prime time weekly with different inspectors from different cities. We always imagined our movie to be part of a series like this and not like a huge Hollywood blockbuster.

The Tatort films are produced by local TV stations or small production companies working for them, so Pieker Pictures would probably be one of them.
The film are not promoted in a special way, the 'fanbase' knows when they're on TV, the only advertisement is on the respective TV station showing an advert saying which time the Tatort is on.

The money for the production comes from the TV stations producing the film and also from the German film funding company "Deutscher Filmfoerderfonds" which is about the same as the UK Film Council's Film Fund.

The titles in our opening appear in the following order:

• main title
• actor 3
• camera
• sound and music
• actor 2
• production
• actor 1
• editing
• written and directed

We started with the title of the movie and then the least important one and finished with "Written and Directed by", which for us is the most important one.

We left out titles like costumes or make-up, as those really weren't important parts of our opening and it would have been too many titles in the end.

The names appearing are only Joelle's and mine and two other actors, because we were only a group of two, so both of us almost did everything.

Evaluation Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full poduct?

We have definately improved our media skills and learnt a lot about pre-production, production and post-production over the last months.

When we filmed our preliminary video we only knew little about different camera shots, movements and editing and it was the first time we used Adobe Premier Pro to edit a video.
We had to include the 180 degree rule, match on action and shot/reverse shot. Other than that our video didn't have many various shots and movements.




So we started doing some research and the pre-production for our main task: the film opening. We analysed similar products, collected and presented initial ideas, made a working outline, a shot list and a storyboard and tested the cameras we'd use before we could actually start filming. We didn't do any pre-production for the preliminary task apart from researching those three things mentioned above we had to include.



When we then started with the production of our opening, we had a wider range of shots and movements we could use to make it varied and interesting. Right at the beginning of the opening for example we used an establishing long shot from the "hunter's" point of view.





                                                      To show facial expressions we've used close-ups in our opening which we didn't do in our preliminary task.

The post-production was a real challenge for us! Other than for the preliminary video, we now had to add titles and music for the background, too. Even though it became easier every time as we knew how to do it, we still had loads of problems with Adobe Premiere Pro itself. It also kept telling us that there wasn't enough memory to save it on the system but we managed this by asking the school's ICT staff for help.