The Waiting Room Evaluation

Matt Duval Candidate number 4468

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge

forms and conventions of real media products?

Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions

of real media products? For our A2 Level Media studies final project we decided

to create a short film. For the ancillary tasks we chose to create a film review page and a poster for our film. Both of the ancillary tasks and the main film needed to be closely linked so that the audience could see that they are all related to each other.

I believe that all of our pieces go together very well. We have used forms and conventions of real media reviews, posters and short films. In some cases we have challenged the conventions of films and media texts.

How we used conventions of real media products

Our film also has a clear message which is reoccurring throughout the entire film. The message is that there will always be someone bigger and better than you. While researching other short films we have found that lots of other shorts contain a similar message. For example “the bulling effect” contains the message “you never know what your bulling might lead to”. This is one of the examples of our film using the conventions of real media products (short films).

How we challenged conventions of real media products

Our short film has some funny parts in it which is uncommon in short films that show bulling. This is one of the ways that we chose to change/challenge the conventions of real media products.

The main focus in our short film are the two characters that sitting on the small black leather sofa. These two characters change one at a time throughout our film. The shorter of the two is always replaced with a noticeably taller person. This happens 3 times during our short film. It is uncommon that the actors will change so regularly during a 3-5 minute short film. We have chosen to challenge this convention to put emphasis on our message.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary

texts?

Question 2

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

I think that my ancillary tasks look good together because they use some of the same elements in all 3 tasks.

One of the ways we managed to tie all of our projects together was to include the logo at the start of the film and on the poster.

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

We also used a house style consisting of fonts colours and symbols. We used the same fonts and colours for our logo, blog, film, review and poster. This helps us with continuity between the film and the ancillary tasks.

The stars in the review are also the same as the ones on the poster.

Stars

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

The Poster and Review page both contain a still image that was taken from the actual film. It is of a large black clock on the wall. This clock is there for two reasons, to link the two media texts together and to represent the title “The Waiting Room”.

Clock

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

My poster (left) is a simple design that was inspired by another short film poster (right). We decided to use a still from the film. We used the coloured corner from the professional poster in our own poster.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

At every major stage of my project I have been gathering audience feedback in order to improve my work.

I have used a variety of web 2.0 such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

and

Throughout my entire A2 project I have been gathering feedback from a my target audience using a variety of methods.

I used Survey Monkey to create an online survey. I then shared the link to it on:

The Front Room Films Facebook

and Twitter page To get the most amount of

feedback.

For example one of our comment on YouTube said that “the opening scene was too long”. When we showed this to our classmates in school they said the same thing. We then reviewed the footage and agreed with the comments. To resolve this problem we speed up the shot and cut part of it out.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and

research, planning and evaluation stages?

Question 4

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

evaluation stages? Throughout our research, planning, and evaluation

stages we used a variety of new media technologies. For example during our research we used lots of web 2.0

based websites. To research current short films from professional and amateur film producers we used a variety of different sites. Some of the websites we used include:

http://www.youtube.comhttp://www.futureshorts.com/http://www.indiemoviesonline.com/free-movies

New Media Technologies – Research

Being able to look at real short films over the internet gave us a good idea of the codes and conventions of short films. Because of the internet we were able to view thousands of short films online for free online for free saved us lots of time and allowed us to view a larger range of videos from all types of producers.

New Media Technologies – Planning

To plan my work I used a website called Toms Planner (http://www.tomsplanner.com)

This website is a great tool that lets you make and share a Gantt chart. Using this online software allowed me to share the chart with my media partner.

It helped me to keep on to make sure that all of my work was completed and that I hadn’t missed anything out.

I could of made a Gantt chart in excel or on paper this would of been harder to share and edit.

This planning tool is a great use of new media technology.

New Media Technologies – Construction

We used new media technology in the construction of our film. To film our short film we chose to use Canon MD 205 digital video cameras. To edit the video we used Apple iMovie software.

Digital videos can be edited and transferred much easier than traditional film cameras. They are also much less costly and simpler to operate.

The videos are already in a digital form so can be easily uploaded to YouTube

New Media Technologies – Construction (continued)

We also used Compact digital stills cameras to take pictures for our poster and magazine review. To edit the pictures and media texts we used adobe Photoshop CS3

Because the photos are digital they can be edited and transferred easier than traditional 35mm cameras.

Another benefit of digital photos is that they can be uploaded to photo sharing websites like http://www.photobucket.com – this means that the images can be embedded on to our

blogs.

New Media Technologies – Evaluation

For my evaluation piece I decided to use Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007. I used this because it is easy to split the document up into slides, add pictures and make internal and external hyperlinks.

I then used SlideShare to embed the presentation onto my blog.

Ancillary Tasks

Film Poster

This is our Film Poster.

Magazine Review Page

This is our Magazine Review Page.