Film Evaluation Questions and Guidance Notes
(As recommended by OCR chief Examiner)
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 1
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)
You might remember when you looked at ‘Art of the title sequence’ website many of the film openings showed 9 key frames from the sequence. Well now it's your turn to do the same with nine of your frames.
You should go through the final version of the project and select nine distinct frames which you screen grab and drop into Photoshop in the same style as the website. You will be using these to write about how typical or not of opening sequences your particular design is, so choose them carefully.
Once you have the nine frames neatly in Photoshop, screen grab the whole thing and post to your blog, then write an analysis of how you have used such conventions.
The aspects we would like you to consider across your nine frames are:
The title of the film
Setting/location
Costumes and props
Camerawork and editing
Title font and style
Story and how the opening sets it up
Genre and how the opening suggests it
How characters are introduced
Special effects
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Pick a key character from your opening. Take a screen grab of a reasonable sized image of them. Think of one or more characters from other films with some similarity to them (but maybe some differences too!), find an image on the web of that/those characters and grab it as well. Drop the two into Photoshop, as a split screen. Export this split screen image as a jpeg then drop onto your blog and write about the similarities and differences in terms of appearance, costume, role in film etc.
So for example if you have a lone cop type character, look for other lone cops to compare him with...
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 3
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
For this question, you are going to do a 'director's commentary' style voiceover explaining some of the key features of your opening
You will need to script the voiceover, which deals with institutional issues to include:
Discussion of your production company name and logo and the role of such companies
What does a production company do?
The idea of a distributor and who that might be and why.
Where the money might have come from for a film such as yours
Why the various people are named in the titles- which jobs appear in titles and in what order and how have you reflected this?
What your film is similar to 'institutionally' (name some films which would be released in a similar way)
You need to refer to actual company names and processes so you will need to go back to the early posts on film companies and maybe do a bit more research
When you have scripted, record the voiceover using Adobe Premiere Pro on a new audio timeline, then export and embed on blog.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 4
Who would be the audience for your media product?
You should have an image of your target audience member and an explanation of what kinds of taste they might have- where they would shop, what music they would listen to, what their favourite TV programme would be, etc.
Make sure you have taken a photo, post it on the blog and write a few notes on why they would watch your film.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 5
How did you attract/address your audience?
You will use YOUTUBE's annotation tools to add NOTES, SPEECHBUBBLES, and LINKS to your video:
These annotations will highlight the ways in which your Film Opening links to other similar films in order to attract the particular Audience you have previously identified.
Your annotations will refer to genre conventions, use of music, similarities with other movies and what you have identified as the Unique Selling Point of your imaginary film.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 6
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
In pairs, take a picture of each other holding the kit you have used. This might just be the camera and tripod, and your Mac but there may be other things you want in the shot.
Drop the image onto your blog and annotate it, adding all the programs and other technology you have used as screengrabs and what you learnt about it/from using it. Your written text need only be minimal. You could include reference to all the online and computer programs you have used such as youtube, flickr, blogger, Adobe Premiere Pro, photoshop,vimeo garageband, etc.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 7
Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
Concentrate on editing and camerawork.
Grab some frames from both tasks and put them on the blog and show what you know about shot types, edit terms and techniques.
Make sure you mention the 180 degree rule, match on action and shot/reverse shot
Below are some examples of student blogs and approaches to the evaluation process. These should be used as examples only and NOT merely copied.
Candidates will evaluate their work electronically. The evaluation MUST contain audience feedback and candidates are expected to present their evaluation to the group. This should last no longer then 10 minutes for each student.
The date for your Presentation is Monday 17/01/11. Students who fail to make this presentation may be penalised on their marks for this part of the coursework.
To help each other with the evaluation process you be critiquing each other’s films. We will do this via class discussion and by commenting on each other’s blogs
