Final Postcard

Evaluation Question 5

 VIDEO

1)From the opening scene, what can you deduce about the short film?

2) can you see an immediate difference between the two characters? If so,what? And how does that make you feel towards the short?

3) do you notice a change in music from jeppe’s scene to abduls scene ?what affect did that have on you?

4) if you have any previous knowledge on diabetes can you add anything on to the information given through this short film?

5) on a scale of 1-5 how important  did you find the statistics at the end of the short film? And why ?

6) after watching this short film, do you feel you have more knowledge about diabetes? any specifics?

WEBSITE

7) Is the website easy to navigate? Would you feel confortable using this as an ‘every day’ website

8) do you like the colour scheme of the website? Is it easy to understand and read? F not give examples of what you don’t like.

POSTCARD

9) in terms of synergy, do you the postcard and website match as a campaign? If so what stood out to you the most? If not,why?

10) what was your overall view of the postcard? Does the information on it want to make you watch the film? If so/ if not why?

Evaluation Question 4

For this questions we all contributed to the final video.

Me- i discussed how we used Final Cut Pro and also editing the whole question on Final Cut Pro

Jeppe- jeppe discussed how to use six to create a website and also talked about how we used blogger to present our work.

Abdul- Abdul talked about what equipment we used such as cameras and dolly's.

Maya- lastly maya discussed how to use Photoshop where she is showing you how she created the postcard.

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 2

Question 2 from Taylor Brooks

Evaluation Question 1

For this question jeppe and i collaborated on it. For this Jeppe wrote the script and we took it in turns to read out different conventions for our film, website and postcard. I edited the question on final cut pro.

The script:

Short Film:

Narration- A lot of short films have narration; this means there is a speaker which is not necessary visible to the audience. This voice is usually very clear and sophisticated, this is the general convention of voice overs. We chose to use two narrators; these were not professional speakers with an excellent voice but instead we used our own actors. We felt this made the film more personal, we were trying to reach our audience on a personal level. The reason for using narration is that it allows us to cut out certain parts of the film to make sure it fits the allocated time limit and still have a clear story because details can be explained by the speaker. It also helped the editing process as we just removed all sound from the clips and re did the voice overs. Using a voice over we are able to approach the audience in a settle way, they become more familiarized with the actors which allows them to feel their emotions more, this makes the piece more powerful in showcasing our message which is diabetes isn’t a joke and it needs to be treated.

Interviews – A very conventional aspect from our genre which is educational films is to use interviews. We originally planned to use multiple interviews of both doctors and patients. This idea we quickly got rid of, we were very limited in time and the interviews were taking up a lot of film time. We completely scratched the idea and used text facts instead to help promote our message throughout the piece.

Characters – this is one of the more obvious conventions, short films tend to only use one or 2 main characters. This is down due short films, literally being short therefore there is not a lot of time to establish a deeper story behind multiple characters. We followed this convention in our piece, we only used 2 main characters and the whole story was based around them too. This worked out really well as people were able to understand their backgrounds through a combination of clips and narration. 

Twist- Short films usually have a twist in the short time period, this is similar to normal films where you get a twist and a resolution. The reason for using a twist is that it makes the production more interesting for the audience, films use them because no audience wants to watch someone in their regular lifestyle, they want to see the lifestyles be challenged. We establish equilibrium by introducing the two characters, the twist then comes in when one character’s health is endangered. The resolution then comes after, for our film we followed this convention and media theory a lot.

Situation – Similarly to the twist short films usually take an everyday situation that the audience is able to relate to and then flip it on its head is some way. We do this by establishing our actors in their everyday lives, their lives then coincidently conflict each other which helps the film move to its resolution. It allows the viewer to relate to the issue which is promoted in films and at the same time intrigue the audience.

Postcard:

Color Scheme: Postcards conventionally follow a color scheme of 2-3 colors to generate a cohesive and pleasing text for the audience. Our color scheme is a calm purple essence, we continued this color scheme throughout our products to create a sense of branding. The colors on our postcard are not complicated to look at, most of the attention is lead towards the actor who is the main subject.

Star: By featuring a well-known person on the postcard, audience members who are familiar with the ‘star’ I’ll be inclined to see the film, acts as a persuasive device. We are using one of our main actors as the so called star on our postcard to help the audience be familiar with it and relate it to the film.

Image: Instead of using a ‘star’ you can use an image and have the subject displayed as a silhouette or participating in an indirect mode of address, a mysterious atmosphere is generated which may intrigue the audience and persuade them to see the film. We did not follow this convention as we felt we could not use an image to represent or film well enough. Our production is not focused around something materialistic, it focuses on the lives of two individuals and therefore we felt it was important that the emotional connection was made with a person.

Awards: A very simple and common convention that the short film postcards are to have the short films nominations displayed on the actual card. This is usually done through a small clipart of two feathers bending outwards, then the name of the nomination or the film festival it is being shown at is pasted in the middle. We followed this convention as it is very generic and basically necessary to fit the nominations onto there. It helps make the postcard appear more professional.

Social Media: To create a sense of branding through our products, we are sharing our social media links on all of our products. This is a convention that we follow from professional products as it allows for audiences to have a quick link to news about the film. Almost any level of production company is able to use social media to promote themselves, pasting the URL to promote the links.

Website:

Theme: We created the website using WIX which is an online tool that enables you too easily create websites; you start out with a template which you can chose. Here obviously, I searched for film themes and found one which was relative to films. This theme then outlined the website, from there we input all of the information relevant to our production.

Social Media: Likewise, of the postcard, the social media links were posted onto the website. These links lead to pages which were created for our film, this includes Twitter[JL1] , Facebook and YouTube. These links are the same which were pasted on the postcard, this creates a sense of branding for our products. 

Interaction: A successful website usual allows for the user to interact with the website, using certain features such as click videos and browsing galleries the user is not just reading information of the page but instead they are able to interact with it. This convention we deemed very essential, with the creation of web 2.0 it came really easy to hand as well. 

Text: A more obvious convention was to limit the text; users are generally not interested in reading large amounts of texts on pages. We limited the usage by incorporating more images and videos instead as it appeals more to the user.

Postcard Process

Originally we had an idea to fuse 2 photos together of both of our main actors together showing half of their faces. One of the actors was going to be in a healthy environment and the other in a fast food restaurant of some kind, showing he was unhealthy.
These are the 2 photos we were going to fuse:

however we decided not to go for this idea as it seemed like too much was going on in the postcard. Instead we decided on just having jeppe on our postcard, using the same image that we were going to use for the original idea.

We created our postcard on Photoshop as it was the easiest to use. First we imported the picture and then removed the background. 

We did this by using polygonal lasso tool and then once we removed the majority of the background we zoomed in and used the erase tool to remove the smaller areas to make it look more professional. 

Then we added the title which we got from fonts101.com using the 'Jeepers' font after trying out different fonts to see which one fit best. 

This is our final title that we decided on:

Once we decided on it we added the text that we wanted on our postcard. Text such as production company, the film awards and the names of the actors in the film.

Next we added in the background. We wanted our background to be plain and simple and we wanted to follow our colour scheme of pinkish/purple. So we added other layer where we added the colour and moved it to the back so the image and title overlapped the background.

Then finally we moved all the text and awards around to a position we felt was best and smoothed out everything else and that is how we created our postcard.

Website Process

For our website we didn't want to make it too complex but rather easy to navigate and fairly simple. We used a website called Wix which is a website that allows anyone to create their own. It is a simple website that guides you through the basics of creating a website, giving you various templates to work with.

For our website we wanted to create a constant sense of branding, so we wanted to keep the same colour scheme throughout our whole project. So we did this be finding a template with a pinkish/purple kind of colour because thats what we used throughout our project. 

We followed a short films style of website, the short film website we followed was 'Curfew' which was found to be very basic and easy to navigate. Exactly what we were looking for. All we did was change the colour scheme and move the title.

like most websites we also added information tabs to allow the audience to found out more about the film and its origins. We wanted to use as little text as possible and more images if we could because we wanted to make our website visually pleasing 

Film Festival Research

Tribeca Film Festival:

Tribeca Film festival is a festival available to amateur film makers and is held in New York. It is one of the most famous film festivals around and it allows people to show off what their potential in film making. This would be good for our short film because we have the opportunity to submit our film to promote it as anyone is allowed to sign up.

they even give you an opportunity to win free tickets which is good because it interacts well the audience because it involves everyone and draws in their attention because they are offering free tickets. 

they make it very easy and simple to sign up by just visiting their website and making a account, which is beneficial because it is free and allows you access to more information if you are interested and could also link to other potential film festivals.

Thimun Film Festival: 

Thimun Film Festival is a festival based in Doha, Qatar which is ideal for us because that is where we live so it was easy for us to apply. We were also lucky enough to have our teacher part of the festival itself so we were able to gain a lot of knowledge about the festival through him. 

The festival is easy to apply for by just simply visiting their website like most film festivals, but we sent in our application through our teacher because that was the easier option for us. The festival is open to anyone around the world, getting application from places such as the Philippines, Singapore and many more asian countries, and this is good for the festival itself because it allows it to expand world wide and make a name for itself and maybe in the future become a big film festival that many people will attend and apply to.