Preliminary Evaluation

1. To what extent have you adhered to the brief? Explain.

The brief set for our short film was to create some representation of british youth culture. I decided to tackle this brief by not making the short film solely based around British youth culture, but to simply include elements of it as our culture is too broad and general, therefore choosing one element to bulk out an entire story seemed pointless and boring. So, I decided to choose an exciting story line (a girl goes missing) which I then give further meaning to by basing it around British youth culture. I believe that I have adhered to the brief because despite not making British youth culture 100% in your face obvious, I dropped in several elements of british youth culture such as including actors who are in fact young people, representing young people being consumed by technology in our culture of today and setting the short film in a very British area.

2. How effective is your main product?

I think that my final product has a very strong message -  a message of the young people of today being consumed by technology that they become almost 'lost' in it. However, due to a tight schedule I wasn't able to produce the hard hitting ending that I wanted to, leading to slight confusion about the 'Jane' character being missing. Jane was suppose to be found in a completely pitch black room with only the light of her laptop shining on her. She was going to be hypnotised by the technology and the social media. The main male character 'James' was suppose to find her here and close her laptop - the lights would then turn on as the laptop was shut, and Jane would have vanished, leaving the 'Where's Jane' poster behind on top of the laptop. Despite the confusing ending, I still feel that the core message behind the film is strong, and represents british youth in a nicely subtle way.

3. How did you use media technologies in the production and post production stages? What have
you learnt about these technologies and how have you used them?

During the production stages of this short film we used a standard Sony digital video camera, a tripod and a glider. Regarding the camera, we used it on the tripod to achieve steady shots and we used it handheld to get a slightly more rough and almost natural feel to the footage in order to reflect the conventions and plot of the story. When we used the glider for the opening credits, it was the first time that we used it - we basically positioned it where we wanted it and did a practice run by putting the camera on the glider, moving the camera across the glider and looking through the viewfinder on the camera so we could position it on the angle that we needed it on.

For post production we simply used Final Cut Express - we decided to experiment with this software a little more because me and Alex had both used it before and wanted to see if we could really take advantage of what it had to offer. So, we both decided to include transitions that we hadn't used before, mash shots up (at the beginning when 'James' tears down the missing person poster) and we also slowed down and sped up footage to create a faster or slower clip but to also make the clip look overlapped because the software creates a unique effect when you slow or speed up a clip if you haven't used a camera that captures a lot more of frames per second than the camera that we used. Overall from using these technologies I have learnt that I can take advantage of what they have to offer and really play around with how i capture footage and how i can edit it.

4.What have you learnt from this preliminary video task?

From making this short film, I have learnt a lot from my mistakes. I learnt that when it is time to capture footage to do it as soon as possible because problems can arise that means you may not be able to film certain scenes till a later date, meaning that some footage may never be shot if filming is left to last minute. I also learn't that sometimes you have to go back and re-do clips if the original clip didn't look how it was suppose to or other clips were needed to bulk a scene out of if some clips were simply forgotten about and not shot at the initial shooting. As well as that I learnt that it is better to have more clips than not enough, so when I shot and re-shot clips I made sure I had a lot of the same scenes in different angles so that I had plenty of options when it came to editing it all together. Regarding editing, I learnt that it is okay to experiment in Final Cut Express because you can always just save different copies of the clip after you edit it so that if it ends up going wrong there will be a back up of what you previously edited.