Evaluation 7

Evaluation 6

Evaluation 5

https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-JB9JTHSG/

 

Evaluation 4

Target Audience Transcript

Weekday Runup with Frank Schnellhammer: Chain of Memory

Frank

Hello and welcome to Weekday Runup, I’m Frank Schnellhammer and on tonight’s programme, I’m with Stephen Lawrie. He’s here to talk about his new film ‘Chain of Memory’. Stephen, Welcome.

Stephen

Thanks for having me, Frank.

Frank

So, Stephen, we’ve all seen the hype around ‘Chain of Memory’. People of all ages are talking about it. Yet, who do you feel is your primary audience following the production of this film?

Stephen

I think we probably had the over 30s age bracket in mind when developing the piece as the film covers rather sensitive subject matter that some young people may not be able to directly connect to. Y’know, the loss of a child is something many people within our target audience haven’t experienced either first hand or through friends so it’s likely that those over 30 will be able to relate to the main character more.

Frank

Yes, I see what you mean, that’s an entirely valid point, Stephen, on the other hand, have you thought about how your heavy promotions on social media may attract an alternate audience as the demographic of people on social media tends to be a lot younger than your intended audience. What’s your insight on that?

Stephen

Yeah, of course, we had that in mind. But, I mean, as social media begins to grow and develop, many more people of a variety of different ages are – branching out to join sites such as Facebook and so I think our branding on such sites is warranted. I’d say we’re always open to consider a wider audience in future productions, yet I feel uhm, with ‘chain of memory’, well [.], we always wanted to connect directly with our audience. I feel creating a, a rather niche film, we capture the interest of a much more specific audience type.

Frank

I see exactly what you’re saying, it’s interesting you say that – as a viewer myself I would expect someone with the intention of producing a multi-million dollar movie – you would want to appeal to the widest audience possible

Stephen

Yes

Frank

And I find it rather humble of you to produce something with the intent of connection – direct relation to the movie, would you say the project was more of a personal journey for you and the rest of the production team, or that of a commercial challenge?

Stephen

Well as I say we worked extremely closely with the writing team – to the extent they took on production roles, and thinking about it now I think it became something much bigger than originally intended, an expression of some sort presenting the emotions of not only the characters and scenes in the film itself, but how the writers truly felt when in production.

Frank

Well, you’ve enlightened me and our audience alike. I think that concludes tonight’s Weekday Runup, thank you so much Stephen Lawrie for joining us, and we’ll see you next week. Goodnight.

Evaluation 3

Evaluation 2

How does our product represent social groups?

We represented social class and groups well through mise-en-scene in our task. During the time period it was a common thing for men to wear suits showing that he was not of a higher class which is what we were aiming for. Men of this class were often not that rich which is also what we were going for, we wanted to show that all classes and social groups lost people in the war and we showed this by choosing a quite regular mundane family that were religious. We based our opening in a church to further show they were religious. We decided to use a fairly old church for it to fit into the times. A lot of men were religious back then which really fits in with your idea of a normal every day family which shows the effects of war on all social groups, often movies will have either very poor or very rich families as the protagonists but in our case we wanted to use a half and half to further show our message.

 

Evaluation 1

Camera
The camera we used was something we had to thing long and hard about as we wanted both good quality and a good frame rate. The default cameras provided were not even near up to the standard we were looking for so we had to look for an external source. Eventually we found one of our peers had a very expensive modern camera in which we were able to record our piece in 1080p and 60fps. The main reason we waned this is because it gave our piece the best quality and didn't degrade from our overall project by being bad quality

 

We have finally finished our film opening, here it is, we want to thank you for sticking around but don't go anywhere as there are still more posts come
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JRsgYt5L6Q

Camera Angles

Camera angles were a very important part of our filming as it really shows how a character is feeling and their importance, for example a higher angle on a character will make them seem less important to the viewer whereas a lower angle would make a character seem more powerful and more important. For ours we wanted to keep a mid angle shot other than a few shots to give the impression are protagonist was just the average man and nothing too big. We did this to show other effects of war on normal mundane life as apposed to more modern films where each protagonist is something special.

Animatic
We used this in a regular way, looked at how well the shots fit in with the music and how long the actual clips would last for as we were on a 2 minute time limit with 10% each way making the timings very important. We found it very useful to find out the timings as it helped us cut down on certain clips and extend on others to try and make the intro the best it could be. For the animatic we used Serif rather than Vegas because it was a lot easier to use. We took pictures of our storyboards and uploaded them before pasting them into Serif as still images then placing them next to each other to see how long it would last.

Sound track in depth
This was a difficult one, we needed something that fit the movie and the time zone as the movie was set in. We played around with two different soundtracks before finally deciding on Fantasy by the XX which we managed to fit perfectly in time with our intro which we feel has greatly impacted how well the intro works.

Risk assessment

This was something we needed to think a lot about as were did some shots in a quite dangerous area, this being the bell tower so we needed to find a way in which we could safely record from the top. My group did this by staying behind the low wall in the bell tower. Another risk was slipping on the icey paths in the mornings. We countered this by walking very slowly across them and walking across the grass when we could, this was a big issue not because we could hurt ourselves but the risk of breaking our camera equipment.

Titles is something we had to do very quickly in order to meet the deadline. Our first problem that we encountered with the titles were the amount of time they spent on screen which we feel really took away from our final piece. To resolve this we moved two onto one shot which we feel worked a lot better. The other issue was trying to make it not look like a movie trailer which we didn't think about until it was almost too late, to fix this we had the titles roll back quite quickly.

Colourisation.
For a lot of our shots we wanted to show and give a cold feeling to them to fit in more with the times. The genre of the film also allows this to link in very effectively because its meant to be a sad looking film and the protagonist spends most of his time sad and upset in it which allows the colder colours to be more effective and be almost overused. We wanted to go for a more of a cold feeling in this because it reflects how the protagonist is feeling.
We needed to experiment with this feature for a while as none of us knew really how to use it correctly, our first idea was to just look at Youtube videos on how to do it but we wanted to learn how to use it together rather than watching tutorials on it. Eventually we worked out to correctly use the colourisation tool and we went right on our way. One of the main problems with this was we needed to colourise every clip rather than just one which made it a very long process as we needed to do it to each clip separately as some clips didn't need colourising. Eventually we managed to do this and are very happy with the end result.

Market research, this is something we did quite a lot of as we wanted to see how what our audience would look like. We started off by asking simple questions to those around us and then further moved onto sending out emails with small surveys so we could understand how our potential viewers would feel about this movie. The main part of our market research was our survey. We made it using a website called Survey Monkey which allowed to make our survey with ease and then send it to multiple contacts making it very easy for us to find out a lot of information in a short amount of time.

Mise-en-scene in depth.

One of the hardest things about our project was the mise-en-scene. As we based it in the 1940-50's we needed to have clothing and props that fitted the part. In one of our scenes we show the protagonist's son unwrapping a present which means we needed to have wrapping paper to fit the time period, to do this we used brown paper and string rather than modern wrapping paper so it fit the time period better. For clothing we used an old looking pinstripe suit for the protagonist and a small jumper and old grey school shorts for the son which we feel worked very well and looked the part.

In depth location.
We spent a lot of time looking at various different places. We needed something that looked very 1940's or around the time era which was very difficult in modern times. Eventually whilst just browsing Google earth in our local area we came across a small church slightly hidden away from the road which is perfect as it hid cars very well meaning we could keep it looking like its from the correct time.
Once we had chosen our location we needed to confirm we were allowed to film there so we got into contact with the staff there and they allowed us to record inside and allowed us access to the bell tower where we filmed our high angle shots.
For our second location we needed an old looking house which was very easy as one of our group members has this and an old fire place which made the mise-en-scene fit well with the location.

Another major problem we faced whilst doing this task was the editing software. We used a program called Sony Vegas pro which was quite intimidating at first as it all looked so alien to us. Eventually we learned to use the program with help from Youtube videos and help from our peers who knew a bit about the program. One of the main problems in Song Vegas we came across was the stabilization of the camera. We didn't have a tripod so some of the shots are extremely shaky meaning we needed to stabilize them but this made the frame rate drop dramatically so we needed to find a perfect balance between the two.
Another thing we struggled with was the colourisation. We wanted to try and make it look very cold, colder than it actually was to really set the scene, this was by far the hardest thing we had to do as none of us knew how to use the colourisation and we couldn't find a very clear video. Eventually we powered through and figured out how to use it and successfully colourised our video.

More in depths with  the shots and why we wanted to use certain ones. At the start of our movie we wanted to experiment with shots we haven't used in the past such as one from above or from a high place. To do this we needed to use the bell tower of the church which required me to email and ask for permission to gain access to the tower. Once we had access we needed to set up a tripod to try and get a steady shot but the tripod was very unstable and we had to use a lot of stabilisation in Sony Vegas to fix this. We also wanted some shots from above inside the church so we used the stairs on the altar and se the tripod up in a similar way, we used a different tripod this time which meant the shot was a lot steadier. We wanted to use these high shots as it typically shows a character is quite weak which is what we wanted to show in our protagonist. We aimed to show the effects of war not only on those involved but the families of them too. Showing the father is now weak and worn from mourning the loss of his son was far easier by using these higher shots than through mise-en-scene which was our initial idea to show this.

Editing has finally come to an end. We have worked very hard on the editing side of things. We decided to use a program called Sony Vegas Pro so we could have the video in 1080p at 60fps for the best quality.
Firstly we needed to make sure all of the clips were in chronological order, we didn't film this way so this took a while. Once we had all of the clips in order we needed to trim a few so it reached the 10% either way of the two minute limit. In total we were 0.5 seconds off the 10% over which was quite lucky. Next we needed to work on transitions and fades from each shot to have it in sync with the music, this by far took the longest out of everything we did. Keeping the music in sync with the video was an extremely frustrating task but was worth it in the end. One early viewer described getting "Goosebumps and a shiver down my spine" because of how well the music fits in with the video. The final parts were titles and colourisation. We wanted the movie to have a very cold appearance as the film itself is quite a sad one we needed to set the scene. Titles were quite difficult to fit in without filling a large amount of our film with them but we worked around this and put two on the same shot making things look a lot smoother.