Evaluation Questions 3.

Creative Tools

1. How did digital technology enable you to develop creatively and are there examples of the technology obstructing or preventing your creative flow?

During the course of the year, we learnt how to use different software such as Photoshop, Premiere Elements and how to use a blog.
We began with a preliminary task and we had lots of feedback telling us things that we could improve on. During the process of making our main task opening, by getting constant feedback from peers and teachers, we were allowed to use trial and error in order to make our work the best of our ability.
By using internet search engines like Google to find information and YouTube to find trailers and movie openings for inspiration, this widened our knowledge of movies in this genre and really helped us progress to make our film.
In this project, it was the first time we had used a web blog. By posting constant updates of our progress and documenting everything we did, we were able to receive constant feedback in order to keep our film to the best standard. We learnt how to upload videos onto a blog and how to embed them into posts so that they would appear on the blog homepage.

We had to find non-copyrighted music on the internet to accompany our film. A large problem occurred because we couldn’t find appropriate music that didn’t have a copyright on it. We spent a lot of time experimenting our clip with different songs that we had found and eventually ended up with 2 different songs.


Thinking About Audience – making meaning


1. How did you respond to the initial brief with the audience in mind?

When we were told what our task was, we wanted to either go for a teen romance genre or horror, as these two most appealed to us.
After talking about it and writing down a lot of notes, we decided that a more interesting genre would be horror as we found it easier thinking of a story for a horror genre. We tried to add twists in our story, with hints of different genres such as thriller and teen romance, in order to expand our audience.
We also had to decide on which age group we were directing our film to. We decided on a middle sort of age, of 15 because of the storyline.
However, we had to keep in mind the rules of our school and this restricted us in a few areas of things we could and couldn’t do. We couldn’t have any nudity, sex or drugs etc.


2. How did your analysis and research into the type of film you selected impact on the creative process in pre-production?

We looked on the internet to find ideas to help us work on a film with the genre of horror. By researching famous horror films and watching the openings of them, we had immediate ideas of how we wanted to lay out our film.
Obviously, there had to be certain limitations of what we could and couldn’t do. We couldn’t use that many special effects as that is quite advanced and we do not have the resources to do that. Also about locations, we had to make sure we had the correct permissions to use certain places around our school campus in order to film. Also, we, again had to take into consideration the school rules of no sex, drugs or nudity in order to keep our film as respectable as possible and also to not get into trouble!
When we were storyboarding our film, we had to take all of these things into account so that we didn’t have to change much if we did encounter some problems further on in the project.

3. In filming and editing, how did you ensure that the meaning would be apparent to the audience? What creative decisions did you make in planning, rehearsing, filming and editing that were influenced by your sense of the audience and possible layers of interpretation?

The first cut out of our film was a little bit unclear to the audience, as we heard from the constructive criticism we received. By choosing a complicated storyline which has flashbacks in it, we had to make sure that this was very obvious for our audience so that they could keep up with the story.
For example, the speaking parts at the start and end of the clip were initially unclear and didn’t really make sense as the dialogue was quite vague. After getting feedback, we made this better and changed the speech and we think that now it makes a lot more sense. In ways, now it is a little too obvious and gives away the story, but as an opening 2 minute sequence, it is easy to interpret.

4. How did the audience respond when you trialled aspects of your film? Are there a variety of possible interpretations of your opening sequence that will depend on the cultural situation of the viewer?

When we received our criticisms from our class/teachers, obviously there were a range of different opinions. Realistically, you can never have a room full of people who all share similar interests and like all of the same things, so we had to remember this whilst looking at the feedback and not get too offended by some comments.
For example, teachers are a bit older than students, so they may not be that interested in horror genres to do with teenagers. But the teachers are interested in the technical levels of our piece so we made sure it was to the best of our ability.
We also had to take into account that there are many different religions and cultures so some of these people might not agree with our storyline, which is completely understandable.