Evaluation by Freya

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
   In this question I will be looking at how our short 'Polly' develops, challenges and uses forms and conventions of other shorts I have looked at, such as Bro, Colour Bleed, Modern Life is Rubbish and Barry.  The thing with short films is that they're all so diverse; including such a massive range of themes, genres, ideas, styles and characters that it's hard to pinpoint their exact conventions, as each vignette seems to have its own.
   So we decided to pick a genre, in our case drama, and try and develop some of the conventions of the short dramas we'd seen.

Our use of shallow depth of field

          1. What I got from ‘Bro’ was the great use of depth of field.  In this shot shallow depth of field is used, the basket in the foreground is sharp, whilst the character in the background is out of focus.  We used this within our film, occasionally changing focus in shot to direct the audiences eyes to specific things in shot.  This is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also gave our film a more '3D' effect, having some objects out of focus and some very sharp really pulls people into the film, as it looks like they're really there.  In the example I've shown where we've used shallow depth of field, the focus changed, the sharpness almost meandering up Polly's body, to reflect the boredom in her days.  

          2.  We challenged the convention of stereotyping main characters in short films, because we wanted to characterize Polly as an individual, not a microcosm of teens but a very separate entity, which was part of keeping her an all round lonely character.  Part of this characterization was her costume, which we tried to keep basic.  Jeans and plain clothes really reflected the fact that Polly is not part of anything, she's in no particular subculture or anything to reflect with her style.  Color Bleed used close ups of the main characters clothes to show her punky individuality and we copied this convention to show Polly's plainness.

Our shots that show off Polly's costume

          3.  This birds eye view is a very interesting shot.  In 'Barry' the shots are hugely varied which I really noticed when I watched it, and wanted to use this diversity in Polly.  Since our film has quite a closed narrative which all takes place in one room we made sure to use a variety of shots that kept the film interesting within a small space. 

           4.  A drama convention that struck me with 'Modern Life is Rubbish' is the use of music to show emotion.  In this particular shot very low acoustic music is played to reflect the mood.  We copied this so when Polly realizes that Thomas has got the wrong person the music becomes very sad, as certain chords are struck that emphasize her devastation. 

Extreme Closeup

          5.  Extreme close ups were used a lot in 'Bro', a short film form which really creates a bond between the audience and the characters, as the closeups show such vulnerability and forces the audience to empathize with the characters.  We used these extreme closeups whenever Polly had intense emotions, for example for the first time we see her happy.  This stressed the importance of her feelings, which we felt worked so well through out 'Polly'.
          6.  Although the character in Barry goes outside, whenever she's in her house just one shot is used into the cramped area, giving the impression that her life is very restricted at home, and she is isolated.  We used this aspect of Barry to create a similar situation but heighten it, as Polly never even leaves her bedroom.  

          7.  Our narrative organization was in chronological order, although we  wanted to skip through time at some points, which we did by showing an image of a clock fading in and out.  This idea was developed from Modern Life is Rubbish in which they use establishing shots of the building as day turns to night. 
          8.  Both Color Bleed and Barry include small bits of animation like editing that add aspects of fantasy genre conventions to the short, bringing both interest and originality with it.  In Polly we developed this idea and used two Stop Animations.  One was of Polly's food disappearing as she ate it, which showed how time to her just seems to drift by.  The other was of the unicorns that Polly is playing with, which we used to reflect our characters sparkling imagination, and to bring a bit of fun to the piece:

          9.  A typical feature used in short films that inspired us was the use of props in 'Modern Life is Rubbish' which really helps the narrative along, as they convey certain themes.  'Polly' almost relies on props to denote boredom whilst keeping the narrative interesting.  We used a book, a photo album, the laptop, a slinky, an iPod, a deck of cards, false teeth, food, toy unicorns and a watch all as objects she uses in a desperate attempt to defy loneliness.   

Prop shots

Poster

• Before creating our own I looked at the posters for Made in Dagenham and The Kids are All Right, taking in the genre conventions of a drama poster.  
• All posters are formed to be eye catching, to make someone look at it in the first place, which we did with a very bold title, big main image and bright colours.
• Like the Made in Dagenhams poster we used a main image of the protagonist, in a pose with facial expression, hair, makeup and costume that reflects her character within the film.  
• The Kids are All Right have the background of their poster of the setting we see the characters in, and  we've taken this convention into our poster for Polly.  The background is pink and green, the same as the walls that are always surrounding Polly, as her only setting is indoors.
• We have the prop of the slinky stretched under the title, a key feature that Made in Dageham had-having props somewhere in the image as a kind of icon.  
• We developed Made in Dagenhams eye catching, original font idea as the title by doing a similar thing, but making it even bigger.
• But we did challenge a few poster forms.  For example we did not include an actor name, as we thought that it was unimportant as 'Freya Murdock' lacks star quality and would not make our demographic of young adults want to watch Polly any more, so we just left it out.

Key Features of all Posters

• We also made our release date huge, as we thought it would make our short seem so much more important if we brought attention to when our audience could go and see it.
• As well as this we challenged the usual way in which a poster taglines are written.  Instead of writing a long sentence such as Made in Dagenhams '1968. It's a mans world, but not for long.' we changed the form slightly to just read two words 'NonSocial Networking', which we felt gave less of our short away but still added enough interest.

Review

Key features that we used from 'Little White Lies' reviews.

• After reading from Little White Lies we had a sense of the house style and tried to use the particular conventions that the critics do.  
• We tried our best to use film terminology, opinions and specific language such as similes and adjectives in our review like the ones we'd studied.
• We didn't try to develop or challenge the conventions of the reviews as we wanted our review to look and read as if it was straight out of a Little White Lies magazine, so we just tried to use those forms.

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

3.  What have you learned from your audience feedback?

• Our audience demographic, 15-20 year olds, were easily targeted through facebook, where Holly posted our film to ask for opinions.  Over all we had very positive feedback, but we learnt a lot about certain aspects of our film, and how we could improve it if we did it again.
• Although appreciating our variety in shot angles and size to keep the content interesting during Pollys boring days,our feedback suggested that maybe we should have shortened the dull bits and introduced Thomas earlier in the storyline, as it all happens in a rather rushed way at the very end.  



Two comments suggesting a slowness to our film

• Through the comments something that I think was very successful was the empathy that people felt for Polly, the film genuinly making them feel sad.  I was thrilled with this feedback, that our audience responded to Polly on a very emotional level that I didn't think we'd be able to achieve.  (see comments below)

I think this positively reflected on a few things we did well:

1. Narrative:  A thorough plot idea of this lonely girl that has no friends, that our demographic really understood.
2. Music:  The music really helped people to connect with what she was feeling, particularly when at the very end when she finds out she doesn't have a friend.   
3. Certain shots:  The closeups and extreme closups we used to help the audience sympathize with Polly.

• A few continuity errors were spotted, which we were really disappointed in.   At one point the audience can see that it's light outside when it's meant to be dark, at another bit the blind is already half done up when it's meant to be closed.  In some of our verbal feedback we received from our peers someone pointed out that on the closeups of Pollys watch you can see she's wearing a black shirt when she's mean to be in a green top.  Also, after Polly is finished talking to Thomas she gets straight into bed in her pajamas, even though when she started talking to him she was in her regular costume. 
• From this I learnt that you have to look so closely at every shot to insure there are no mistakes.  Even though it felt like I knew our film back to front from editing it turns out I really didn't.  If I had to do this task again I'd make a few other media students watch the film before finalizing it, as others might catch the mistakes I've missed.

• Our stop animation of the unicorns was met with great approval as it added such interest to the first low beat half of our film.  We were a bit worried that it would actually put people of as stop animation is definitely not a form of kitchen sink drama. This reflected that there's nothing wrong with adding a bit of a fantasy genre convention into a drama, that mixing genres isn't necessarily a mistake if you do it carefully.
• Although our unicorn stop animation was successful our food scene had a few negative comments.  I felt that people thought we were maybe trying to hard to interest our audience instead of staying true to our genre and narrative.  Maybe we should have just left out the food scene, as it 'didn't quite fit in' which is a comment I agree with.  

Poster

• Holly posted our poster of Facebook as well, to get constructive criticism from our demographic.  Again, overall we had positive feedback with some pointers.
• A lot of people thought it looked very professional, particularly the basic layout and the block font for the title.  The colors were also commented on a lot, I think people really noticed the links between the setting in Polly to the background of the poster.

• Our poster does come across slightly too fun though, people were almost expecting something more like Juno or Freaky Friday rather than our downbeat drama.  I think this is because the colours, although reflecting Pollys setting and being aesthetically pleasing, make our film seem very lighthearted.  If we were to do it again maybe keep the colours but make them a different shade, one that reflects a darker mood.  Maybe just by tinting the edges of the green and pink with black would give the whole thing a much darker effect.

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

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