Evaluation Question Three:

Evaluation question three: What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Evaluation Question Two:

Evaluation Question Two: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Question One:

Evaluation Question One: In whats ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Media Platforms:

YouTube:

Like many short films I premiered by short film on the video sharing platform YouTube. This website was created in 2005 and brought by Google in 2006 and is an extremely popular platform to share with its estimated one billion users per month. This website is also very popular with the younger generation with 67% of the US views coming from people aged 18-34, therefore making it the best platform for me to upload my work and reach as many of my target audience as possible. The website is also very developed through ways you can share media through the use of functions such as likes, rates, subscribers, views and shares, therefore the media product can be shared by viewers and then go on to reach even more members of my target audience. The comment section of the website was also helpful in the development process of the short film as anybody watching can comment on my work giving me valuable and effective audience feedback easily. YouTube is often used in large blockbuster film campaigns to upload trailers and sneak peaks to build a hype for a film as the website can be accessed by almost anybody. YouTube is often used by independent film makers to upload their products as the website is a free and extremely popular service so therefore I used it to upload my short film.

Vimeo:

Another platform we could have uploaded our short film onto was the website Vimeo, this is often used by filmmakers to upload their work as it preserves the quality of the film. We decided against uploading our short film to this platform as it isn't used frequently by those within the age range of our target audience. The platform also doesn't offer as many share and social options as YouTube therefore we felt it would limit the number of people who viewed our product. However as this platform is popular amongst independent film makers we have flouted this common convention.

Blogger:

To present my film poster and my double paged magazine review I used the platform blogger. This flouts the conventions of these media products as these would usually be physically printed, however due to our small budget by uploading these to the internet it makes them more accessible to our target audience as they can reach larger audiences. On the other hand it could be argued that we are conforming to conventions as it is becoming more common for movie posters and magazines to transfer from printed copies to online versions as these can reach a wider audience without the larger cost of printing.

Conventions followed within my short film:
The video below displays conventions that my short film conformed to as media product. All the clips used in the video are from short films I have previously looked at or analysed within the process of making my short film. I chose these short films to compare with mine as they each have a narrative similar to mine for example I Miss You follows a relationship and my short film follows the protagonist's friendships. 1500 Words follows a character on a journey as he comes to terms with his inevitable death, Growing Up follows the protagonist on her journey growing up. Youth follows real teenagers over a period of time through a montage format and Bottle is based upon the protagonists journey to finding a relationship.

• I Miss You - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F5oD7G40ng
• 1500 Words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOOdrvZpCfU&t=2s
• Youth - https://vimeo.com/19900368
• Bottle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mVEapKnS1c

Titles:

When designing our titles for our short films we decided to stay conventional by using a black background with animated white text, this design can be seen throughout many of the short films I analysed. This creates a sophisticated title, also allowing the back background to then transition into the beginning of the film.

Narrative:
It is common for films within the genre coming of age to follow a character on a journey, this can be either psychologically or physically or can sometimes combine the two making the narrative a 'double journey'. We followed this convention within our short film as we follow our protagonist through her life physically as she ages as well as through her psychological journey of growing up and becoming an adult. We demonstrate this through the '15' and '19' candles displayed during the birthday in the opening of the short film. We chose to focus our short film on realistic issues and elements everyone can relate to such as a breakup, exam stress and friendship, this is a convention of the coming of age genre. However one convention we did flout was the way we focused elements of our short film on the protagonists relationships with her friends, where as typically romance is a key element of the plot.

Voiceover:
Another typical convention of the short film we included was the sense of the protagonists personal journey and happy conclusion. To present this we added a voiceover to our short film of the character speaking from the age 21 looking back at her teenage years explaining what advice she would give her younger self. This is a common convention used, especially within short films as it is an effective way to introduce a complex narrative in the little running time available. 

Props:

We included props such as mobile phones and alcohol within our short film thus conforming to the stereotypical conventions of the genre. 

Short Film Final Draft:

Improvements for Second Draft:

One improvement we recognised for our third and final draft is the fact that at 3:40 the voiceover 'Go on road trips' is quieter than the rest of the voiceover and is hard to hear over the soundtrack. Therefore for our final draft we will adjust the audio to make it more clear when viewing. We will also check other elements of the audio for similar issues.

Second draft of short film:

Post-Production: Recording the Voiceover

Fortunately, one of the teachers at our school, Miss Montague agreed to record the voiceover for our short film. We initially asked her as we both agreed that she had a very peaceful voice that would fit our short well well. Initially we recorded the voiceover in a separate quiet room with the microphone on a Macbook. We asked her to record it fully through twice and then record her saying the opening and finishing sentence a few times at different speeds. We also got our media teacher, Mrs Dixon, to record the voiceover as we could then compare the voices and see which one fit our short film best. After listening to the voiceovers we decided that we would use Miss Montague's version as we thought hers fit our film best. However after listening to our voiceover we noticed that her voice on the audio was too quiet that it wouldn't be heard over the soundtrack. It was also quite fuzzy and unclear, therefore we decided to re-record the voiceover the next day on a different microphone. 

This time we used a separate standalone microphone to record the voiceover. This microphone also allowed us to listen to the audio in real time through a set of headphones, this allowed us to check the audio was clear at the time of recording, therefore avoiding any technical problems when it came to editing. We used the same technique as before by getting our voice actor to record the voiceover the whole way through twice and then record the first and last sentences a few times at different speeds. This was the finished result of one of our takes:

We exported our finished film from Premiere Pro and imported it into iMovie to add the soundtrack and the voiceover as this was the platform we thought would be the easiest for us as we had previous experience using the programme and understood it well. We then edited our voiceover making sure each segment word with the visual pairing to do this we cut the audio clip and moved it to the correct time. We used the best version of each segment of the script from the different takes we got to make our voiceover sound as professional as possible.