Evaluation Pt. 1

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

When we went out to create the project, we had huge intentions to make it as big as possible for both the producers and for the acting. We wanted this to be a good day for everyone and have the best possible outcome. We went into weeks for preparing our product of a short film clip which was just 2 minutes and 56 seconds. 

The first 40 second entrance onto the sequence was that we had to establish the main character. This main character needs to follow the conventions of a typical post-apocalyptical so we lined out this character called David. We wanted him to be quite masculine but yet we wanted to ruin this by showing him to be damaged. We did this by creating the scene in a hospital looking room where he wakes up with wounds which look like he just got from surgery. We followed this storyline through because we wanted to allow the character to easily show the derelict interpretation of the Zombie Horror as everyone abandoned the public places in hope for safety. Obviously people left the main character, David, in the room on his own. The emptiness portrayed through the camera work shows his understanding of what the world has become. 

The narrative that we created was quite tricky because we wanted to go big on the media product. This included us looking at different horror conventions. We chose to do horror because of the complication that could be introduced. We made sure that the storyline within would be Linear as we wanted to incorporate the audience into seeing what the main character sees. We established our plot to be a zombie horror because of the group’s experience on watching this genre/sub-genre. The plot was initially made to be inside a hospital however we didn’t have an actual hospital to work to, so we made use of the college’s Hair and Beauty Salon. This looked very similar however some aspects weren’t good, as it had advertisements of Barnsley College on the wall. The script in which we created was mediocre. I didn’t think it was very good in comparison to what we could have done if we had more time. In the film we iterate a similar line twice in the project and this makes the film sound more mediocre than we intended on doing. However once we realised this was an issue we was in post-editing, just exporting the film.

The narrative was also based off The Walking Dead’s first ever episode. We found this to be good to show our realism to the project as this was perfect to show derelict environments. The other people were browsing the hospital, that’s when they intercepted the main character. We added these extra characters so that we could widen the plot and create more interest in the project. 

We had a camera which was also mediocre. We wanted to create smooth slow motion effects within the film however the camera wasn’t high enough FPS to slow down to make it look good, so we used a minimalistic effect. However we made the most we could with the tripod that we had, we allowed ourselves to have wide angle shots and good panning shots which introduced scenes. We also had a two shot in there which showed conversation taking place. We also had to include a lot of POV shots because of the small space in which we had to film. A lot of footage wasn’t good enough because of too many mistakes with the mies-en-scene which would ruin our film. However we made the POV shots look really good though because of the realistic eye movement and hand-camera properties of shaky and nerving footage. We also tried not to break the 180 degree line of rule, which we didn’t do overall. We had one or two clips which were breaking that rule but we didn’t put that in the final export of the film.

Continuity was also a massive issue within our short film. This was because of how intense we made the day set out to be. We wanted to make it so that we could have all of the zombies film on the same day because the people who helped our project out didn’t have time to do it again thereafter. We had noticeable issues within the scene such as having facial movement differences and slight action problems. With the characters, however these issues aren’t big enough for it to affect the quality of the film. We do notice odd props inside the scenes too being removed after a shot. An example is the fake blood; that was in one scene on the right table and then it was removed in the next, obviously on the film day we noticed and removed it straight away without noticing what that would affect in post-production. 

Sound was a big hurdle to overcome within the project. The film once sorted had literally no sound effects that sounded good that we created on the day. However, in post production we rectified that issue by creating our own sound effects. The sound made it look like it was diegetic and in the scene. We only added contrapuntal sound. The times that we had silence was at the start of the film. We had originally planned to do this like that but because of some aspects intended to be silent through that. We always had a sound effect which cut each scene, an example is from the news scene to the hospital bed scene. That had a white noise and a tearing of the screen effect. This effect was used in that way because it is the same effect that happens when a screen is unplugged from it’s source or if there’s some error. We wanted to do that to show an abundance of post-apocalyptical times. 

Mise-En-Scene was a very important value for the group. We wanted to make the most with what we had without making much change to the rooms that we had in the College. We made the main character, me, wear a hospital operation gown with multiple wrapped up wounds. This made him look like he got paused midway through an operation and left alone in hope that he’ll survive in the hospital on his own.  Everyone else wore what they would usually wear, they wore a normal black shirt with black jeans. However with the black clothing, one of the acting parts didn’t wear shoes which showed them to break the conventions a bit because I don’t think anyone would not wear shoes inside a zombie outbreak. We also spent quite a bit of money on the Liquid Latex and paint that we used for the zombies which made them look like they’re torn up and broken from brainless movements. We made scars and deep cuts and they looked realistic in the film. We did all of this to add to the effects of the zombie role.

Typography was not a big issue but with what Callum had got on his MacBook, we used a thin lightweight text with no sarifs on the text. We added a glow onto the Epidemic title at the end and we used a lot of features from Adobe’s After-Effects and Callum did this by learning tutorials on YouTube. The outcome was good overall.

Iconography was a problem for us as we tried to make do with everything we had got to make the environment as derelict as possible. With the iconography being so heavily based on a lot of mainstream films, we had to make it look good through post-editing to show what we attempted to do. I don’t think that the conventions that we tried to follow by weren’t efficient enough.