The Theory of Media

Throughout the practical production process, Tom and I have tried our best not just to research areas of media that are practically relevant, such as cinematography, semiotics and the methods of targeting an audience, but we have also tried to cover a range of theoretical ideas by distributing research tasks in areas of interest between ourselves.

Since starting the blog, both Tom and I have covered Genre Theory and Auteur Theory, and I have looked into issues of Representation. 

Most recently, though, Tom has written this detailed post on Narrative Theory.

All of my posts relating to theory can be found here.

Production Photos

The actual process of directing and shooting a scene is very demanding, and it can often be quite stressful, so the documentation of the process for our blogs is easily overlooked. 

Luckily though, over the most recent days of filming, Tom has been ready with his iPhone, taking snapshots of anything and everything that we feel is important, and he has since compiled them, along with written explanations, in this post.

I think the photos do a great job of illustrating the work that goes into filming a scene, and the way in which Tom and I go about it.

Production Progress Presentation

A while ago, in a media lesson, Tom and I were asked to talk about our production in front of the class. Our teacher asked us questions to find out what progress we had made, what stage of production we were at, and what we were still planning to do.



Above is a video of the presentation. Unfortunately, because someone decided to record on a high-definition camera with a relatively low storage capacity, the available memory ran out at around 3 minutes, meaning that only about half of our total presentation was captured. Still, the video gives an idea of the stage of production we were at.

On-Set Organisation

Planning and research are all well and good before a filming takes place, but you can't put what you've learnt into practise unless you're organised during the actual filming. 

When watching film or television, it's easy to forget the amount of work that goes in to producing a single scene, or a single shot, even! Obviously, seeing as Tom and I don't have the money (or, frankly, the authority) to be able to command a team of experts in fields of makeup, costume, set-design, lighting, cinematography, continuity, etc, we have to organise these things ourselves, to whatever extent in manageable. 

Here is a link to a post Tom has helpfully compiled about the different roles allocated by filmmakers. (Not all of these people are always needed on-set, but they all help in the overall organisation of a day's filming)

Here is Tom's post showing our 'call-sheet', which he drew up for use as a way of keeping track of dates and the exact tasks we were going to be carrying out.

My role in the organisation for filming has been to maintain the tripod and the camera, the latter involving:

• Ensuring batteries are charged, and that spares are ready.
• Freeing-up space on the memory card, so that we do not run out of storage whilst filming.

Also, for each day of filming, I have written lists of each shot we need, for the same reason as I did for my AS Media production: so that we are never wasting time wondering about which shot to capture next during filming. They are not laid out perfectly, and they are not presented neatly and tidily, but they do serve their purpose as a simple way of reminding and keeping track. Tom and I could have spent time and effort writing a pristine screenplay, and we did consider it, but the pay-off would never have been worth it; we are not selling a screenplay, we are making the film, so all we need is something practical, efficient and convenient that serves the purpose of a script. These shot-lists are shown below, some used, some yet to-be-used. 

Poster Production

As can be seen in my plans, the original ideas Tom and I had for the poster revolved around a 'school yearbook' kind of look; either with faces of students simply staring out of the poster, or with faces staring out of the photos within an actual yearbook laid upon a desk. The central concept was in showing the absence of a person by having one photo that doesn't contain a subject; one photo that shows the background alone, with no face. The purpose of this was to convey the predicament of our protagonist; he is always around, putting others before himself, but never receives any recognition or praise; he goes pretty much entirely unnoticed.

Whilst Tom liked the plan including the actual yearbook, I kept pushing the first plan, because, not only was the grid of photos clearly going to be simpler, I believed it would be more effective; the faces staring directly out were going to catch people's eyes and draw their attention straight to our film. So, with this in mind, Tom and I used part of Tuesday's lesson to take volunteers into the library and photograph their head and shoulders against the quintessential school photo backdrop: a bookshelf. Pleased with the amount of photos we had taken, I went home, slipped the SD card into my laptop, and started editing away with photoshop.

I placed all of the photographs onto the canvas in order to get an idea of what the final poster was going to look like. That's when it dawned on me: THIS LOOKS REALLY AWFUL.

 
All of the volunteers couldn't have been more helpful, and I want to make clear that the abandoning of this idea is no fault of theirs. The problem is, it just doesn't look like a poster. Good posters jump out, grab your attention, and refuse to leave your mind until you walk into that cinema and purchase that ticket. What you see above is banal and bland; more effective as a sedative than a stimulant. Our quantitative audience research revealed that what audiences most looked for in a poster was an eye-catching image and images of the characters or actors. So, not only was this poster not performing its general role, it was not performing the specific roles required for it to appeal to our target audience.

Being entirely unhappy with this design (as you can probably tell), I went away thinking deeply about new possiblities and variations, keeping in mind the criteria set by our by our audience research results. I began to reconsider what it was that stood out to me most about our film. The predicament of the protagonist is definitely at the core of our film, but this is difficult to convey in a single poster, and besides, our target audience would be more interested in watching the film if they were yet to discover the nature of the protagonist's situation. Finally, it occurred to me: what gives the film its identity on first impression is the title - PENUMBRA (click here for an explanation).

So, last night, with the title of the film at the forefront of my mind, I began to construct an entirely new poster. I explained the idea over the phone to Tom, and from this he drew his own mock-ups of how the poster could look. The first two images below show the initial experiments carried out in photoshop yesterday evening, and the rest are all from different stage in the poster's production today. Below each image is an explanatory caption.

Inspired by this poster for Inception, I put the title at an angle spanning most of the poster, and gave it the signature glow of our title (important because A- it looks cool, and B- it relates to the definition of penumbra as a part of a shadow). Then, using internet tutorials, I learned how to mask layers in such a way that images can appear within text. Our lead-actors eyes can be seen peering out from the forth stroke of the M.

Here, I was trying to see if it was possible to have an image show through more than one piece of text. Luckily, this process wasn't as difficult as I had expected.

This morning, in Media, the first thing I did was to create lots of text layers which i then transfromed and arranged to make an interesting collage.

I then grouped the text layers appropriately, then rasterized them and merged them so that different images (either from our film or relating to it) can be seen in different peices of text.

Deciding the images within the text were too busy with detailed colour, I made them all black and white, and this definitely had a positive effect in drawing more attention to the title. After discussing things with Tom, we decided it would be a good idea to have an outline of our protagonist in the bottom right-hand corner. I set about cutting a blurred image of our lead-actor out of a frame from our film, and once this was in the poster, both Tom and I agreed it looked better in full colour than as an outline alone.

Next, in an attempt to make the poster stand out more, I experimented with different hues of different intensity for the images in the text. Eventually, I decided that red was most attention grabbing, and most fitting for the theme of pain which is important in our film.

Finally, here (at full resolution, provided you click on the image) is our new poster! In this final stage, I increased the vibrancy and brightness of the colours in the image of our protagonist from the back, so that he is more visible against the solid black background. I also added some text (in the same font as the title for conguity) to specify that the poster is advertising a short film, and some other text to credit Tom and I as directors. (For the crediting font, I searched online to find fonts similar to those used for crediting in actual film posters, and then downloaded and installed one called 'Rothman' from this website)

Because I have literally just completed this poster this afternoon, Tom has yet to see it, and I have yet to ask anyone besides my parents for feedback on it. Therefore, this is by no means our final poster. Before we reach that stage, I will look at the poster with Tom to see what variations we can create - perhaps of a different style, or perhaps in the same style for different modes of exhibition - and we will show the poster to a lot more people in order to get some detailed qualitative feedback.

Quantitative Audience Research: Analysis

Although the questionnaire has only been live for 4 days, the results are already revealing enough for me to begin considering them and applying them to our products. 

Poster
In order to know what size and shape of poster we should create, we first need to know where the poster will be displayed, so we asked people where they thought film posters were most effective. As the graph below shows, there were three options that stood out:

1. Outside/within a cineama.
2. In a magazine.
3. On the internet.

This indicates that, if Tom and I want to advertise our film in what is deemed to be the most effective area, we should produce a poster for display in and around cinemas and multiplexes. What the reasonable spread of data across all choices suggests, though, is that film posters are always somewhat effective, no matter where they are displayed. It may well be worth producing three different versions of the same poster for the three most-selected options. 

The next question was concerning the features of a film poster. The summary graph shows that there were two main features people wanted to see: an eye-catching image, and images of the characters or actors. Although our current plan for the poster is certainly 'eye-catching', with lots of faces staring out at viewers, the entire point of it is that the protagonist is not seen, so that a sense of mystery is created. According to the results, however, a sense of mystery is not so important. Tom and I will certainly have to consider either changing our poster design, or producing a number of posters which will appeal to different tastes. 

Review
The first question of this section asked people what they look for in a good film review, and the answers were pretty much as expected, with images from the actual film, the film release date and a clearly defined rating of the film all ranking in the top answers. Interestingly, two other popular selections were comparisons to other films and an unbiased perspective. The former three factors I mentioned were already going to be included in our review, but the latter two are both aspects we will have to consider including. The unbiased perspective will be the most challenging, because it necessitates an impartial writing style, which may be difficult to acheive considering we are the ones making the film.

The other two questions in this section were asked so that we could determine the placement of our review page; in what magazine, and in what section. The pie-charts below are very useful in summarising the results.

What they tell us is that large, in-depth reviews are favoured slightly over small, concise reviews, and that, overall, people would like to see short-film reviews as a new feature in an existing magazine such as Empire or Total Film. We are currently aiming to have two reviews of short films on our review page, with one being a review for our own film, and i think our plans will stay this way. There is not enough of a difference in the first pie-chart to push us into writing one large review of our own film, because this would not be read by those looking for shorter reviews. At the same time, however, a review filling half a magazine page is not as short as reviews go, so we are striking a compromise to try and satisfy both types of reader. Moreover, these reviews are going to have to look as if they belong in a real, new section in an existing film magazine, and, realistically, such magazines would only be likely to dedicate half a page at most to the review of a short film.

General
The general questions we asked relating to film were included simply so that Tom and I could confirm we were on the right tracks. 

Out of thriller, mystery and drama - the three genres that our Short Film aims to combine - thriller is clearly the most popular; perhaps more popular than mystery and drama than we expected. Although we're not going to turn around and re-write our film to cater more for thriller-lovers, we can alter our poster (or one of our posters, if we produce more than one) to make the film appeal to these people on first impressions. 

The question about how people discuss film was included solely to confirm the legitimacy of the two-step flow audience model, and this is exactly what it has done. What it also shows, quite interestingly, is that, despite the popularity of social networking, people are still more likely to talk to one-another about film in face-to-face conversation rather than via the internet. All the more reason, then, for Tom and I to produce a poster and review that are interesting and engaging enough to provoke discussion.