Main Task: Film

Film Poster and Review

Poster:

Film Review:

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

https://www.emaze.com/@ACTOCQRO/how-did-you-use-media-technologies

How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary texts?

Our group made a film poster and film review to go along with our film.
There are numerous benefits to having posters and reviews for films:

• to help give audience information about actors
• to help give audience information about directors, producers and film companies
• to help explain the plot of the film
• to help the audience decide if it's a film that they would want to watch
• to help the audience know whether or not the film is of a high standard
• to attract an audience of people interested in knowing more about the film

Below is a Prezi explaining the importance of our poster and film review and just how effective they are combined with our main product:
http://prezi.com/w6k8xj__-wrh/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge from and conventions of real media products?

I made two videos explaining how our media product used, developed and challenged forms and conventions of real media products.

This is how we developed them:
https://youtu.be/GkUc-v51BpI

This is how we challenged them:
https://youtu.be/NGAq2kcNB1c


Overall our media product developed forms and conventions of most short indie films however, it also challenged forms and conventions of most feature films.
Our poster and film review both develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We got feedback from audiences before we added in soundtrack or voiceover. Then we got the same audience back to see it again once it was finished. Our intention in doing this was to show them  how we developed the film throughout the course of editing and the small changes that needed to be made to accommodate the voiceover and soundtrack.

Our group handed out feedback forms at the end of viewing so that the audience could write exactly how they felt about the film. We also filmed groups of people and asked them specific questions about how they found our film.

https://www.emaze.com/@ACTOITIL/what-have-you-learnt-from-your-audience-feedback

Re-draft of Script - Final Script

During the production of our film we realised that there were a number of ways that we could improve the script and helped the story be told better. We had a change of plan and decided to make the dialogue more informative. It was also at this point that we had the thought to change the story and have Dylan be a schizophrenic. This meant that we would have to change a few lines in which Dylan talks about happy teenage life and turn it into dialogue of him talking about his schizophrenia struggle.

We chose an extract from a poem that we found very striking called 'Aubade' by Philip Larkin. The stanza below stood out in particular. The plan would be to have this right at the beginning before the story kicks in as an intro/ prologue:


These few lines in particular:

"...No sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round."

Below is the very final version of the script:

FADE IN - EXT.

Dylan, a young man of 19 years old and wearing dark clothes stands on the shore of a deserted, isolated beach. The sky is grey and the waves are calm. He looks out to the sea with an expression of desolate hope.

An internal monologue (VOICEOVER)

Montage one:

(with building intensity throughout) 

It's been one hundred and nineteen days since I last saw another human being...

Sometimes I wonder if this is just a nightmare that I’m forgetting to wake up from… Or maybe I’m in a coma and unconscious to the world around me. I feel lonely and I feel scared. Maybe that’s a blessing because I used to feel nothing. Once upon a time, I had a family. People said we were the perfect family. I remember my mother and father. I remember playing out in the garden with my older brother in Summer. We were young. The warmth from the sun soothing our skin. The smell of freshly cut grass and the vivid colours swirling around us. I remember our brightly illustrated books and comics. They gave us the belief that we were invincible. I think that’s as close as you can get to pure happiness.

Montage two

I should probably introduce myself now. My name is Dylan and I am Nineteen. I’ve never been very good at the whole social convention thing. You see, at the age of thirteen I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. My parents passed away in a fatal accident which I don’t want to talk much about. Firstly, I suffered from PTSD and then it developed into something completely different. I completely lost control of my own head. By then, my brother was eighteen. He had to leave school, abandon his hopes of a normal life and take care of me. He did a great job, considering what a burden I was. I was going to university in September to study astronomy and I could even stretch so far as to say, the future was looking bright. I had a girlfriend. She made me feel something. Love? I’m not sure it was that, but it was something. I told her I loved her and I felt like a fraud. I just couldn’t keep it together and I wrecked it like everything else in my life. I felt distant and thought I didn’t need her anymore. Never ever lose sight of the important things in life…

Montage Three

***’Nothing Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear - No sight, No sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with

the anaesthetic from which none come round.’

Hindsight is a funny thing and somehow, no matter how much control I clawed back from my schizophrenia, I was fighting a losing battle. And so, I left. Ignoring everything my heart was telling me and fully submitting to my head. Everything went grey and I lost sight of what I had. The schizophrenia came back with a vengeance and the more I suppressed it, the more my head contorted. I was paranoid and couldn’t silence my thoughts. All I could think was death would be easier and no one would even care. Selfish old me. I think of how I felt back then and that was easy in comparison to this. This Hell… This middle ground… This purgatory. 

What’s really strange is that I find things long lost from throughout my life. Memories wash up on the shore of this abyss like pieces of puzzle that I’m supposed to connect together.  Am I supposed to make some kind of self discovery to buy me a ticket out of here? Some kind of realization to get me out of this prison world?…When I first came here, I liked being alone, the peace, the solitude. Eventually I became confused about what was happening as a thousand rational and irrational thoughts flew through my head. Did anyone know I was here? After a while, it didn’t matter what this was but I couldn’t handle it. I was sinking deeper and deeper every single day. My chest confined like the waves above it, unable to breathe or reason. Then it became clear to me that I didn’t get out of the bath I took four months ago. That I had taken too many of my meds that night….

Montage four

(Whispers) This is my afterlife.