Artefact Two Evaluation Draft 1

To start my second artefact I spent many hours browsing the internet looking for genres and the sub genres that fall under this category, after doing so I chose to do a Crime Thriller opening. This still wasn’t enough for me to fully understand what was required. I then decided that to get the true effect of a crime thriller I would have to watch a few to compare similarities. I watched 10 different film openings and noted down the similarities.

I used the idea of making my opening black and white (film-noir), this alongside the fact that I decided to film whilst it was raining I thought gave a dark, gloomy and unexpected feel. Another thing that I noted down whilst watching the openings was that there was either minimal speech or none at all and I also noticed that the openings often had a song playing over the background. I chose to use Digetic sound because I thought it gave an over all better effect, plus the lyrics express the storyline because the song is called pain. I feel that my media product represents the young crime social group, this is because I planned the storyline on a teenage murder. This idea first came into my head whilst I was watching the news and a young person was stabbed to death. I feel this way it shows how worrying things are becoming in society due to teenage murders.

Once I uploaded my filming to the computer I noticed that certain parts were very slow and almost boring to watch. So, what I decided to do was to cut small sections out during certain shots, use the transition called cross fade to give the effect of time skipping. I liked this idea because it gave the long walking shots some interest and it looked effective. In the last shot (storyboard 12) where person A turned around and screamed it all seemed to happen a little too fast. So, I split the clip just where person A shuts the fridge door and slowed the second part of the split clip down. This I feel made the scream have more significance. Even though whilst I was filming it was raining, once I had used the effect of black and white you couldn’t notice that it was raining anymore, so I used a special effect that was on the Macintosh computer which was meant to look like rain. I thought this effect was very lifelike and it made the atmosphere a little more gloomy.

To attract my audience I made my opening scene plain. Person A is walking and talking on her mobile phone, person B however cannot be seen until person A walks of screen. To find out what people thought of my work I asked 5 people to watch it and give feedback on my work. The general response was that my work was good (I will upload my questionnaire) but in some places the lighting changed and this affected the continuity of my work. Unfortunately there was a little jolt to the filming which was obvious (between storyboard numbers 9 and 10) I had to cross fade the two clips therefore there’s a small skip in the position of person A. The audience that viewed my work also commented on the fact that I had given lots of hints as to what genre of film my work was set as in the way I had asked people to act e.g. person B keeps looking around to see if anyone’s watching, this gives the effect of someone being a shifty character.

Before I started media studies I had never used a camcorder before, so artefact one was a little poor. However I feel that my second artefact was a lot better. Over this period of time I have learnt how to use the Apple Macintosh computers confidently. I now know how to upload film from a camcorder, how to crop certain clips, split clips, add credits, add audio, extract audio, add effects ,transitions burn my work to a disc and much more. Also I now know that I need to make my work flow better and keep the continuity of lights, sound, acting etc. keep on time and fit together.

Media is a subject where things must fall under certain trends or must be up to date with all the latest technology otherwise there is no point in wasting your time. This has been a working progress and overall I am very happy with my work, but obviously if I had more time, and if I had better equipment and a studio to work in, my work would be a lot better but so would anyone’s. It’s great to see what I have achieved with such little time and so little equipment needed.


: )