The Reunion

Tuesday 26 February 2013

Evaluation 1


 

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?



The title of the film: We used stop motion to write the title on the letter as he receives it. This is done to create the effect that it looks like its being written and coloured in. The title has been written on the envelope is because this is suppost to represent an invitation to his schools reunion, we used colours to give it a young feel this is suppost to resemble the beginning of the film when they were young also to help keep the movie upbeat.
The setting: The first setting we have is suppost to represent a school playground set 20 years ago, the setting is very simple however does have a very countryside, romantic feel to it. We wanted to represent this as this is the place where young gordon falls in love with Heather. The second setting is an outiside setting as old gordon walks to work, this setting is suppost to represent a business area in the early morning this is shown by the bright sun rising and the car park setting, you can see by the fact that he is walking by himslef he is still not very populair however he is successful as he is getting out of an expensive car and has a secretary working for him.   
Costumes: The costumes in the first couple of shots are representing gordons past life back when he was at primary school this is why we used school uniforms to represent them being kids playing in a playground. Then when gordon is walking to his office in a suit this then represent his proffesional occasion this could also mean that by the fact he is wearing a suit he has become very successful.
Camera work and editing: We used a tripod in most shots to make sure our shots would not be effected by our shaky hands and to make it look professional we also used a variety of different shots including close up shots and over the shoulder shots. 
Font and style: The font we used throughout our movie was kept the same we did this to try achieve and continues flow, we also hand wrote titles but we tried to match our handwritten titles to the titles we manually put in.
Story/narrative: Throughout the opening titles the narrative gives the main background information to the viewer and introduces our drama/comedy story.Our story was humorous but at the same time we tried to bring in the fact that bulling is a massive problem in many schools and is a serious topic into our story as well. 
Genre and suggestions of it: We tried to show what genre we are using through the fact that we used a voice over this is a very common thing within drama/comedy films. Also the fact that older gordon is explaining about how he used to get bullied is another suggestion of the drama side of our genre and this is a very serious and upcoming problem within youngsters these days. The fact that Older gordon later on in life looks all professional but by the fact that he drops his papers can be seen as humorous as he is still clumsy.
Characters:  Our main character is focused on throughout the opening scene, his appearance only changes due to age, however we still know he is the main character because of the narration. The use of the scene with younger Gordon is to see the contrast between what he once was and what he has become, which is very successful. We wanted the audience to feel sympathy for him but also to see his determined character of becoming a successful man.
Special FX: We used a fade to black effect to show the separation in time, between younger and older Gordon. This was just to break the filming so the audience could adjust to the jump in time. We also used a cross dissolve in the playground scene to also show the jump in time. In grid shot eight, we used a stop motion effect, although it is not very smoothly put together, it creates a childish effect to the film, which is relevant considering its a school reunion.

Wednesday 20 February 2013

Changes we made to the rough edit

Once we recieved feedback we made the following changes,

  • Our titles were moving to fast and were not big enough for the audience to see them properly so we decided to slow them down and make them larger.
  • We had numerous shots of Gordon walking up the staircase which we decided to cut. This shortened the sequence as we found it was not necessary in the storyline.
  • The narration was read at a steady speed however our playground scene was still to long, so we decided to change the speed at which is played to fit the narration better.
  • Our film is an independent British Indie film so we thought that Studiocanal would suit the feel of the film better than Eon Productions, which is known for producing James Bond.
  • We decided to fade the music out instead of cutting it off as it made it less noticable to the audience.

Tuesday 19 February 2013

Changes to be made to our final draft:



Having recieved feedback on our final draft version of our opening titles the following things have been noted to change in order to make it even better:
· The name of our production company needs to be on screen about 2 seconds longer.

· Capital and lower case letters need to be consistent across our titles.

· No sound after our title appears.

· Our title card needs to be on for longer.
These changes now need to be made as soon as possible