Bloopers Insomnia

iNSOMNiA Evaluation.

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

One way we challenged forms and conventions of our media product is, in the beginning of our film the use of camera is very conventional because of the establishing shots used of the surroundings such as shops and passing cars and the location of the house after that, following with the entrance of the main character entering that house which crosscuts between him and the 2nd character, this gives the audience a sense of realism and shows that these two characters are connected.The way we used the camera unconventionally is when the older brother is about to slap his younger sibling the camera is at a low angle which makes him look like the bigger man who is in control this makes the audience take sides with the younger brother as it makes the older brother look evil and domineering.

For example when the older brother is about to slap his younger brother and puts him back in his place.

The narrative of our film is used conventionally as we have used the conflict between the two brothers to create realism in the storyline as the climax of our film; this makes it obvious to the audience that these two characters are related and don’t just live together.
Our narrative challenged the conventions, giving the ending of our film suspense by making the brother miss his exam with his phone in his hand ringing; this gives the audience a cliff-hanger feeling, making them think that there is more to come, also feeling sorry for him and finding out the true colours of the younger brother.

Our editing was used in a conventional way because it was very fast paced and linked very well with the storyline, for example the beginning of our short film had a lot of fast editing between the house and the two characters, but also was linked very well and this also introduces the two brothers as well.

The sound was conventional because we used diegetic sound like dialogue between the two characters no foreign accents were used, the audience can also tell who is the more mature character by the tone and of their voices also sounds like the TV in the background were also used to make the audience feel the realism of the film being set in the house.

The mise-en-scene was conventional because the characters wore normal house clothing as they were dressed casually and simply also props like the TV, the radio and the laptop, the bag used by the older brother was also very useful because this is where he gets his exam paper from and this is an important scenario of the film.

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

Our image on the poster is what creates the brand identity of our film, the image shows the younger brother in the foreground looking over his shoulder at his brother, and this is the first thing you see that attracts the eye, the way he is positioned shows that he is always on his brothers neck and always looking for ways to disturb him. The older brother is in the background sitting on the edge of the bed looking frustrated this shows that he has struggles in life. This film shows the contrast of two different personalities and how they can be incompatible.
Language is another way that you can notice the brand identity of this film, our tagline “Worse than your nightmares” this tagline makes the audience associate the film with a horror film because the word “nightmares” gives connotations of darkness and fear, and this is what the audience will pick up from our tagline.

The brand of a film can also be identified through its design for example the colour scheme for our magazine is red, black and white, the use of these colours are conventional because this is the colour scheme most magazines like ‘film review’ use this gives the audience the feel of being in possession of exclusive information this is because the colour and the layout make the page look complex in a way that it attracts the eye of the audience.

The way our magazine feature enhances the audience understanding of the film is through the language. In the magazine feature the plot explains the film in more detail also the image that is used from our film purposely uses the beginning scene where both the brothers are together, this makes the audience anxious to know what is going on in the film and this enhances the idea of the audience that this is a realistic film of what happens between two brothers in life.

The language used in the magazine feature enhances the audiences understanding of the film by talking about the characters more in depth, also by showing the history between the two brothers and what their motives are this will get the audience interested because it talks about how good the film is and also gives hints about what happens in the film and what the characters are getting up to.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The use of a blog to talk about the work my group and I produced is very helpful, the advantage of using this internet software is that you are able to insert pictures and videos.
This is good because it makes it easy to explain why you have used certain things in yourpictures, why you have the characters in the pictures in a position and why they have posed in a certain way, videos are also helpful because they can show what process you went through to get your video clip done, we can also upload videos from youtube to show what we watched toget our ideas. You can also access the shared information easily, also the speed of uploading is very fast as well.

The disadvantage of having the blog,is that when you uplaod a video from youtube it doesn't show the full size of the video box on your blog page, therefore you would have to make the video smaller in order to see the whole frame and sometimes you have the problem of moving pictures around when you're in the process of making a post, its hard to place the image where you want it. This affected my creativity by helping me to improvise with with the blog page and making my blog look presentable.

Adobe Premier is a very useful softyware when trying to edit the film, the advantages that this software brings is that you can upload clips that you have recorded easily. It is also easy to place the clips in the order of your storyline and cut unneeded parts of a clip for it to make sense. The best features of this software is the fact that you could use transitiozns to create illusions to the audience such as cross fading this helped my group and I alot because by using this transition we were able to shorten our film and make certain parts of the film look like time had passed by, another feature that I liked was the fact that you could add music in the background without interfering with the original sound. this helped me to be creative with the sound aspect of the production as I could manipulate the volume of the sound by either increasing or decreasing it depending on the scene that was showing at that pointof time.

The disadvantages of using this software is, when adding any new transitions it had to be re-rendered. Old transitions along with the new ones and this could take time depending on how many transitions have been added to the clips or film; this was the only disadvantage.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our film was shown to an audience to see how they would respond to it and these were the ratings that we got from the audience that watched our film.

The audience that watched our film consisted of a large group of 13–14 year olds

The figure above shows that the majority of our audience thought that our film was excellent, which is a good response for our film, since nobody thought poorly of it. The scene which most of the audience liked was when the establishing shot went from day to night, this gave an illusion that time had passed by, it was even said by the audience that 'there should be a youtube series', also the choice of music used in our clip was liked by the audience as well.

We also asked a few people whether they understood our storyline the majority of the audience did but quite a high number of people did not understand the story line.

This bar chart helped me to understand how the audience viewed our film, in turn it also developed my creativity in a way that if we had another chance to make this film it would be produced in a way that would satisfy the audiences curiosity instead of confusing them.