Question 9 - What was your contribution to the process during the planning, production and post-production stages?

I participated in the different stages in our group, from planning to the finish of our work.
During the process of planning, same as other group members, I did the location research, including taking photos and drawing pictures for demonstration. After we decided the location and the story of our horror film, I also take part in the story board produce and I drew part of the story board along with other group members. Meanwhile, I did the research on the former students' works in order to gain some experience from them.
During the process of shooting, the job was finished by the effort of the whole group and the work was fairly shared by each member of the group. During this stage, I completed some useful shots for our group.
During the stage of editing and soundtrack making, I did part of the jobs from both sides. With Ashley and Martin, I made two soundtracks which can be used in our film and I did some editing mainly with Martin to make our raw footages become a fluent clip.

Question 7 - What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During the process of the constructing we used different types technologies and media.
Internet was often used as a very good tool of searching materials, for example, our idea of title came from the picture we saw online. Blogger is a platform on which we keep our record of how the whole product developed, and it is displays the work we finished. Imovie is the major and necessary software we use during editing. We found it very suitable for us as primary learner to use as it has a lot of functions which are very easy to operate. This allows us to make the most of raw footage and turn them properly into complete work. Also it helps us to make the work more creative, as a lot of special effects are provided in the software. Garageband is another apple software we apply to create the soundtrack for our film. Even though we cannot use the mature artists' music as soundtrack, we use garageband to compose our own soundtrack without much difficulty. Garageband contains a variety of basic music elements of which we can link with each other to create our unique soundtrack, for example, we mix the distract of church bell ringing and the sound of footsteps to make a soundtrack which goes along well with our church theme.
Therefore our process of constructing the work is based on a series of technologies in different stages.

Question 9 - What was your contribution to the process during the planning, production and post-production stages?

For our film I worked in a group consisting of 3 boys, myself, Ashley and James. During the planning stages of the horror film project I had a very hands on approach and came up with core ideas that were then followed up on by the other members of the group and together we created very strong ideas for our film. My main role in the planning stage was research and location finder. I think I did an excellent job in finding and gaining permission to use St. Matthews Church, Pentrich as our church location as it was a perfect setting and created the mysterious mood and atmosphere that we as a group felt was needed. For the research jobs I did a lot of research on IMDB on existing horror film and watched a lot of scenes from existing horror films on YouTube to find out what type of scene or certain action was liked the best by the audience which would be from a film that was a psychological horror film. In the production stages of our horror film project, when on location all three of us filmed scenes by ourselves and when we weren’t filming behind the camera we were in front of the camera directing our actor and actress on the script and continuity. Once we had filmed everything and got back into the MAC suite, I did a lot of the timing editing by ‘stitching’ everything in time and making sure everything. I did a lot of the editing and also helped with the soundtrack on GarageBand. My role was more based towards the editing role, with James targeting the soundtrack and Ashley doing titles and credits.

Question 8 - Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

The main difference between the preliminary task shoot and the actual project was that we had a location to film on. After we brainstormed our ideas initially when we first started thinking about producing our horror film I knew exactly where we would film and I was quite insistent on it. The other members in the group were soon turned to my idea for the location and we all agreed that it was brilliant. We learnt a lot from our preliminary task, one of the things we learnt was to film a shoot from many angles and get timing along with continuity absolutely bang on so when we get to editing it, the editing stage become much easier as the shots fall into place easier without much editing time wise. We learnt about camera movements while shooting the preliminary task. After looking through our footage it was very apparent that we either moved the camera too little and created a jump cut or moved the camera so much that when played back the scene looks very dodgy. If I were to do the production for our film again I think I would try to film as soon as possible even if we don’t use much of what we film on the first shoot. I would organise everybody in the production team and allocate each one a precise job that gives them a specific detailed job to do each week so we don’t just come to class then make a plan of what we are going to do in the class time. 

Question 6 - What kind of media institution might distribute your media project and why?

After looking at films that are similar to our group’s film, the distribution companies appear to be small independent companies but when they are traced back to the parent companies it is more than likely that one of the big companies owns them for example Sony, Universal, Fox Entertainment Group are some of the big parent companies. Looking at a British film, ‘28 Days Later’ the production company is ‘DNA Films’ with the distribution company being ‘20^th Century Fox’. As DNA Films is a relatively small company it means that they would concentrate more closely to the production of a film. If our film was to be produced professionally I think that choosing a smaller company that has links to bigger companies is key as to become successful you need ‘a door to the next level’ and having good relations with multinational distribution companies like Fox Entertainment Group is a big pull to going with a company like DNA Films. I would like to think that DNA Films would use our film as they do ‘proper’ British films that you wouldn’t get a foreign production company taking on a project. To produce a successful film is no good if you don’t have a great distribution and marketing company behind you as you need the expertise in marketing to draw in the box office revenue. By using a big distribution company the film would already have a head start on other films that aren’t being distributed by a big company as it wouldn’t have the reputation or pull power to close deals.   

Question 5 - How did you attract/address your audience?

• We think we targeted our intended audience quite well as the actor we used was relevant to the research we did and the setting and theme of the clip also fitted well.
• The soundtrack that we have made suits the film and will attract the target audience as

Update 21/03/11

Today, we have scanned in a lot of work from our folder and continued to edit our clip.