Main Task - Evaluation draft

Questions:

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

Mentality; a film about family, relationships and death is based around the conventions of thriller as it enables the audience to connect with the characters and attempt to relate to what they are going through. It does this by enticing a “thrill” through allowing them to question the truth behind the plot and then empathise with the storyline. Thriller has many conventions with the main being the ability to keep the audience “on the edge of their seat” through confusion and giving them the urge to seek more, but at the same time it has a strong convention of only one protagonist. Mentality develops this through not fully showing the direction at which the story is heading but also through only have James Watson as the main character.

However in an attempt to challenge these conventions I wanted the film to have more of a family feel rather than drama and confusion so I decided to only really develop the thriller side towards the end of the film thus making it slightly different to what has been done previously.

What do you think?

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

 I personally feel that the main product is reinforced through the use of ancillary texts, such as the poster and magazine article that I produced as it enables the audience a slight “inside view” to what the story could be about but essentially on whether they would be interested in the film as a whole before they saw it.

What’s your opinion?

-          What have you learned from you audience feedback?

Overall what do you think of Mentality?

From that feedback I guess there are areas that could be improved, particularly on making the film clearer in terms of displaying the thriller side at the end. I feel that the shot of the folder in which holds the information needs be a great deal clearer as it withholds all the vital information that the audience need to know in order to understand the storyline of the film as a whole. Therefore I will work on this, and attempt to correct it in the future.

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

For the process of my product, I had to use a variety of media technology which ranged from basic to advance. Firstly I use Adobe Premier Pro in order to edit my film, which helped to add effects, fix the sound and to put the clips together in order; this was fairly basic as I had used previously doing other media products. Other products that I have used before include Photoshop (for the poster) and publisher (for the magazine article).

To display all the work that I have done over the course of this project I uploaded it all onto my blog which was very easier, through converting work into images such as poster analysis or using a website called Scribd which was an easy method of uploading documents such as the script. I was also using YouTube to display some relevant videos in which used or produced, for example; the interview with my actor.