Evaluation

We were given a specific set of evaluative questions to answer. They are as follows:

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

1. After watching a variety of classic Film Noir and Neo Noir movies as part of our research we decided that we wanted to recreate the feel of the classic 1940s black and white film noir movies like, for example,  Double Indemnity. We felt that if we did it in colour it would be more difficult to establish the film noir atmosphere and authenticity, therefore we quickly made a unanimous decision to make the film in classic, conventional black and white (or at least convert the film from colour to black and white at the editing stage).
Whilst wanting to achieve the visual feeling of the original film noir period, we didn't want the plot to be like those of the originals as it would've felt dated. To solve this problem we took inspiration from another film we watched called Brick which is a Neo Noir about drug dealings. After much deliberation we decided that a drugs theme would bring a fresh, modern-day twist to what we hoped would feel like a classic film noir short movie, therefore developing upon the conventions of both film noir and neo noir movies.

2. As far as ancillary texts go I was rather pleased with my movie posters which I have shown and analysed in a previous blog post entitled 'Film Noir movie posters'. My favourite poster that I created had a landscape layout with an image of each of the three main characters (Detective John Carter, Bobby and Bonnie) and the title of our film, Lustful Injustice, in red and white in the bottom right corner. We decided to use the same colouring in the title on the actual film as we felt it held really strong, clear symbolism of the themes of our movie. This link helps to tie the film to it's advertisement poster. We knew we were going to do the film in black and white so we decided that it would make sense to also do the posters in black and white is this would get a stronger positive reaction from audiences (if the poster was in colour it wouldn't represent the film properly and audiences may be disappointed if they had seen a colour poster and were expecting a colour movie).

3. The feedback we received from our audiences was very useful in picking out the key problems with our film and determining what we would do if we had the opportunity to do the project again. I have listed some of the main problems in a previous post which included difficulties with audio and visual quality, a lack of creative camera angles, and a slightly rushed ending to the film. Having uploaded the video to Youtube we have been able to receive more than 100 views and some people have left feedback in the comments section which is really useful as it allows us to see what people who haven't studied media think of the film. What we've learnt from the feedback is that we should have perhaps spent more time editing as we may have been able to fix some of the audio and visual problems. However, this would have been a near-impossible task because after working through the difficulties and overcoming the obstacles, we simply didn't have enough time. Therefore if I could do the project again I would defintely put in more effort in the planning and research stage in order to quickly establish what exactly we wanted to achieve in the end, because I think we wasted far too much time on planning and brainstorming this time around. I would also try to get access to better quality equipment as this would allow us to explore a wider variety of angles, settings and environments without sacrificing audio and visual quality.

4. We watched a variety of classic and neo film noir movies in our media studies class as a form of research but I also watched a couple more at home on TV/DVD (like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, for example, which is a neo noir with a comedy edge to it) and viewed clips and trailers for film noir movies on Youtube. Youtube is an excellent tool to use for research because when you're watching a video it makes suggestions that you might like to watch that are similar/related to the video you're watching, this was very useful because it helped me find other film noir movies that I hadn't seen and I was able to incorporate styles of those films into my own ideas and draw on them for inspiration.
Another form of media technology that we used was of course, this: Blogger. I have suffered many technical difficulties whilst trying to create this blog, the main problem being that for about 2/3 weeks after upgrading to the new updated version of Blogger I was unable to upload or edit any posts. This naturally caused a lot of problems. Other difficulties were things like the organisation of the posts which was frustratingly tricky especially when dealing with multiple images and texts.
Perhaps my most extensive use of a single media technology would be the use of the photo editing software, Photoshop. As I am a photography student I already had plenty of experience working on photoshop, therefore when it came to the designing of the production company logo, the film title and still images and movie posters I was confident that I would be able to produce good quality work, which I believe I did. However, that is not to say I didn't encounter any problems. The main struggle I had was that, being a photography student, I don't tend to do any work that involves applying text to an image so I was relatively inexperienced in this area of expertise, although I was able to draw on experience from last years media project in which I used photoshop to create the front cover and contents page of a music magazine - that experience did help a lot.