EVALUATION 2. How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

Script

What did you hope to create?
Jess; We always knew that we wanted to convey a moral message and deal with an issue is society.

Caitlin; We began by playing around with a few different ideas, and finally decided to raise the issue of homelessness.

Jess; We wanted to make the audience think, and question their own behaviour after watching our short film.

Caitlin; After coming up with our theme, we also decided that we would like to link our film to a charity, we chose The Salvation Army.


How did your research help you?
Caitlin; We used Virgin Media short films, the BBC, Channel 4's 3 Minute Wonder and websites such as Youtube to look at existing short films.

Jess; After looking through a lot of short films, we realised that we didnt want to use dialogue and could appreciate the use of silence as it made us focus on the action more.

Caitlin; After coursework in AS we noticed that dialogue can also look amateur and cheapen the film, instead of dialogue we used realistic sounds such as zips and coins.

Jess; As well as this we used a poem that we wrote called 'Am I Human To You' which ties the narrative together and makes sence of it.


How effective was your short film as a whole?
Jess; We think that over all it has worked well at the end.

Caitlin; We have executed binary opposites in the right way, by using accurate costumes, locations, cars and props. We also used good actors who looked realistic on camera.

Jess; As a group we tried to think about everything carefully, to make it as realistic as possible.


What did you hope to create with your ancillary task?Caitlin; We wanted it to have clear links with our film.

Jess; Firstly with the poster, the cardboard links back to the issue of homelessness, also taking the eyes our gives it an anonymous, less personal feel.

Caitlin; We chose 3 different messages to be written in the space where the eyes have been removed, as we knew the poster would be displayed in different locations, we felt that the most important slogan was 'IGNORE ME' as this is an insult to the business man as well as our society.

Jess; We followed the generic conventions of film posters by including the actors names at the top of the poster, as well as a magazine review quote and the name of the film, these were all things we noticed in our research into posters.

Caitlin; We chose to create a 4 page film review, after researching empire magazine.

Jess; We hoped to inform the audience more on our work with the salvation army, and the reason for making this film, as well as reviewing it.

Caitlin; It is realistic, as we have used numerous pictures to break up the text, which we took while we were filming.

Jess; The layout is very similar to the reviews we have researched in Empire magazine, however we have broken the conventions slightly by using a grey background. It was white originally however as a group we decided that grey was more effective.

Caitlin; The cardboard patches on the review give information, and make it aesthetically pleasing, as well as linking it to the message of the film, and the poster.

Jess; We chose simple and clear fonts such as tahoma, as these reflect the clear message we hoped to convey.


Is there anything you would change?
Caitlin; We are happy with our general product, however when making this again, our editing and filming process would need to change, due to numerous circumstances, this was the most difficult thing that we found when filming.

Jess; Another issue we found was when choosing actors, we didnt realise how difficult it would be to find realistic looking actors, another problem we had was that a few actors cancelled on us.

Caitlin; However in the end we managed to find two realiable and realistic looking actors.