Reaping what Lauren Showed

Here is the audience feedback from Laurens Focus group (Alternatively Lauren has also posted them on her blog ). All in all, again really positive responses with all enjoying the film whilst the same key critisms popped up (hard to understand plot, Bad acting). That said the main feedback was that the lawyers that sue advert was brilliant, which was really good to see.

(Will be posting full analysis very soon in the form of the prezi link)

Audience feedback

So far for post production Lauren and I have sent out various feedback requests to certain avenues. Firstly Youtube.com - where our film is hosted. In this instance we didn't get back any feedback that was credible, which is a shame but understandable considering how large a site it is.
Considering that we couldnt rely on youtube for comments and feedback lauren and I took seperate routes about how to gather feedback, so that we could combine the findings in the end. I asked several people on MSN, a social networking site about the film in an informal interview style approach. Heres the feedback I got:













For informal feedback, they raised some really credible points such as Problems with sound, Colours and the acting. I am planning to ask more people (Ive sent out similar requests on facebook but so far have no replies so will push the boat out on them).



Laurens Post production feedback work is also going really well. She sent out a request on yahoo answers for feedback and got a brilliant reply:

''I did find amusing if a bit disjointed. I loved the ambulance chasing lawyer skit, and was laughing at the 'gag reel'. A nice touch that.'' - Mr_ R_ Swipes




Additionally she is holding a focus group for media producers, around our age (the target age group) and will be posting the questionaires up soon. To do my part for it, I asked two people that were slightly outside the target audience age.

Questionnaire


Did you enjoy the film?
YES

Which areas influenced your decision?

. . . It was different

What improvements could be made?

. . . .acting skills and dialogue, (storyline maybe?)

Did you understand the plot?

NO


Could you tell that it was a parody?

Of what?

Where could you see this being shown?

On a laptop, you tube?

If this was a series, would you watch the next episode?

YES
Might help me understand it

Thanks for your time.
Your welcome.

(Age: 22)

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Questionnaire



Did you enjoy the film?
YES NO



Which areas influenced your decision?
The fact it was a comedy parody made it interesting and funny to watch.




What improvements could be made?
Clearer speaking from the actors


Did you understand the plot?

YES NO



Could you tell that it was a parody?
Yes


Where could you see this being shown?
In a film festival or on a television programme


If this was a series, would you watch the next episode?

YES NO Maybe

Depends on the quirky lines and plot story.


Thanks for your time.

(Age 15)
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With these two, there was a vast difference between the responses. The 15 year old had rather positive responses, saying that while it lacked 'clever lines' it was still enjoyable. The 22 year old was less positive. There was no understanding of the parody and the acting was highlighted as the key problem in the peice. The positive was that if it was a series, the next episode would be watched - but to help understand the storyline. All in all it was mixed when it came to the questionaires, which was interesting. It will be great to be able to look over Laurens findings and summerising it in my Exciting 'prezi' Evaluation. Will be posting the link very soon

We've hit the tube ...no not literally!

Hey heys! After much waiting by Lauren (3 hours to upload! O.o), shes managed to get our film on youtube. Its quite good quality, I would say though that our visual editing has maybe degraded the films overall visual quality so blowing it up to full screen will probably be a bit painful (anyone say pixelation?).

I've got a handle on the review page after looking at some examples in the empire magazine. Using the template as the basis, I created the fictional 'Shorts review' section of an empire mag. Heres a screenshot of what it looks like

Obviously some of this is difficult to see because of the quality of picture but I took key elements of the empire layout (Look Closer - Using actual film facts from our film , Caption on the image that has a thinnly veiled joke, large quotation from the review, star rating, and some of the smaller graphics I attempted to recreate (red/ orange bar , small circle with arrow in it at the start and end of the review ). I put my own spin on the overview mast head (In Cinemas) and changed it to On Line as our film is intended to be a low budget internet based film. I also included the website and page numbers on the base of the page.

Initially my draft was critised due to the uneven textbox sizes and the fact the default size (A4) isnt actually the size of normal magazines as they are normally wider and slightly shorter. After a quick refresher of publishers features (my year 11 gcse ict teacher must be weeping!) i remembered most of the key tools at would rectify the criticism originally got. After all this it looked much improved. I would say that I learnt from my feedback and maybe next time i should do more research on magazines before making my first draft to adhere more to conventions.

Writing Block Appeared!

I have hit a bit of a writers block with the Film review. I have tryed to mix positives with negatives to not create too much of a scathing review. Here's what I have so far:


With Lost finally retiring into cult obscurity with the arrival of the final series, short film directors Lauren Edwards and Kyle Bamford have attempted to construct the same levels of confusion and obscure events— In 4 minutes. Waking up in the middle of nowhere, Jack (Jonny Ellis – Pirates, Ninjas and the Stone) soon finds 2 equally clueless teens in the form of the overly melodramatic John (Tom Bircham) and Matt (Darren Stapleton – Pirates, Ninjas and the Stone). Little known to them, while they stumble helplessly around looking for a way out, a much sinister evil has awakened…
Like its characters, the style of this film wanders aimlessly but bashfully through each scene. Happily this is a refreshing break from the oddly perfume advert smoothness of Lost, but in places the amateur nature is rudely thrust upon its audience with slightly off camera cuts slicing through that low budget charm. It might be that the directors have intended this to be a rebellion against the aesthetic focused cult television productions of today. Yet they have done so in such a vague way, to anyone looking for escapism, this will be taken at face value.
That would be a shame because Edwards and Bamford have made intelligent veiled jokes at the expense of various aspects in modern media that bloat our television screens. One such is the inclusion of the advert ‘Lawyersthatsueforgold’, which pokes fun at the plague of identikit daytime advertisements that circulate for months on end. But in the end the unfortunate thing is these jokes often are better than the more narrative driven parts of the film.

So far it isnt quite right so im going to think about it for a while

Its the Final Poster .. TBC

This is the roughly finished Poster. I looked at other posters including 300 to get a rough idea of the poster to credits ratio. Key ideas I picked up from the poster was the size difference between the Names of cast and crew with their job titles (Names are larger, meaning I made a seperate layer for some areas of text, halved the size and ran it on two lines to match the size of names.

Another feature I added were the Production company logos. They are pretty basic but i think they work well. Because we are parodying Lost, Lauren and I decided to parody their production company names (ABC Studios - CBA Studios (aka Cant Be A(censored)ed) and Bad Robot - Bad Reboot) so I based my designs around simple indicators of each thing. The lazy guy as if he cannot be bothered for CBA Studios and the computer on fire for a bad reboot. I also included the Lawyersthatsueforgold website as most films include their websites in posters and this is the closest to our film website.

I'm Going to speak to Lauren today to make sure that she agrees with my decision for film poster.

Freedom! and No we dont have to edit another 5 series!

We have finished editing our film!! We may make changes but to be honest this is a definate final template if any changes need to be done. Considering the Heroes link, we changed some of the colours to make them seem much more vivid, like a comic. This is what took most of the time as we were often staring at the slow red imovie editing bar to find that it was too bright or vibrant. However in the end it turned out really well. We included some outtakes at the end for the credits as this is twisting a conventional way a parody/comedy series presents its credits. In the film Airplane! and the serie's Allo' Allo' and Dads army they have a 'you have been watching .. ' title followed by clips of the different actors with their names. We incorperated the outtakes instead of serious clips for a comedic effect as other series have done similar. For instance the sitcom 'My Wife and kids' plays some outtakes from the episode as the credits play.



All in all, there has been an obvious improvement through the editing phase of production. The adding of music and sound effects in particular really created tension , and in the case of the advert, a silly but dated feel. Some of the effects and transitions work well to highlight points that weren't so well pointed out in the film (such as Darrens 'talk to plushie' power). We used letterbox and QT margin subtitles to convey the mental conversation between Darren and the plushie. Other special effects we included were the circular highlighting around the hello Kitty after Jonny says 'Oh No!' (Much like a poor japanese dub - not to say this is a bad thing!) to add to the whole comic book feel . Personally i think the editing has been of big importance to the success of our film, however if i had one criticism it would be that perhaps changing the colour values and contrast might make larger playback screens really pixelated.

Attention Duelists! My blog gives me the power to post about Parodies

One parody I know of is the Brilliant Yugioh: The Abridged Series. The maker of this series, Little Kuriboh, has taken original Yugioh Raws (Japanese episodes with no subtitles) removed the sound and recorded the sound for each character. He clearly knows the series well as he often redicules characters for their key traits (ie: one character constantly saying 'Attention duelist' in the actual series)and has worked hard to make sure the voices are similar to the actual characters english voices.
At times he also parodies various aspects of real life. A good example of this is Episode 17:




At 5: 15 LittleKuriboh parodies Mastercard Adverts in the context of the series using Kaibacorp as the basis. As a series he has also parodied various songs (This is My United States of America - Bandit Keiths catchphrase in the Abridged is 'In America , Brooklyn Rage - Copying Poker Face and Im on a Blimp - Lonely Islands Im on a Boat). Additionally he has created 2 Christmas Specials (1 parodying Charles Dickens Christmas Carol and the other parodying Dr Seuss's Grinch).
The Series is an interesting insight into how anime or cartoons are not free from the possiblity of being parodied (within themselves). It is also a testiment to how We- Media can generate popularity and whole new markets for user made videos, as Yugioh The Abridged Series has caused several others to create their own abridged series (Such as 'Team Fourstar'S ' Dragonball Z abridged and Naruto Abridged (Interestingly both of these have been referenced to in Yugioh the Abridged series, with Little Kuriboh making his own parody of the Naruto Parody and referencing Team Fourstar in later episodes of YOTAS)).