Final Esting Evaluation (& questionnaire)

Our idea for an ESting is a live action stop motion animation space invaders game. We would be having a wide open space such as the college gym and then having students move around up the top as the bricks for the game. We would then have a student at the bottom for the turret of the game moving and firing students at the bricks at the top. When a student has been hit we will make them disappear into a piece of clothing. Once all the students are gone the game will be completed. For this project we would need many students to participate as well as a wide open space to film in and also the camera and necessary equipment to ensure the camera is focused at a bird’s eye view on the game. We will also have the students make sounds when they are shot or just add a space invaders theme song to the video.

E4 is a British digital television channel, launched as a pay-TV companion to Channel 4 on 18 January 2001. The "E" stands for entertainment, and the channel is mainly aimed at the lucrative 15–35 age group. Programming includes U.S. imports such as The Ricky Gervais Show, The Cleveland show, The O.C., Smallville, Veronica mars, Glee, Everwood, What About Brian, Desperate Housewivs, How I Met Your Mother, 90210, One Tree Hill, Ugly Betty, Scrubs, and formerly Friends. Other programming includes British shows such as Shameless, Hollyoaks, Skins, The Inbetweeners, Misfits and Made In Chelsea. Some U.S. imports, such as Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty are screened on E4 up to one week ahead of their Channel 4 broadcasts. Its most successful broadcast to date was on 11 October 2010 when an episode of The Inbetweeners pulled in over 3.7 million viewers Their target audience would be aimed at the elder teen generation e.g. 16-19 and possibly even early to late 20's.

In order to receive feedback, we had to send our work to others via the internet. We used various other social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. We then used all 20 results and made a table on excel then wrote the following results up on Microsoft word;

Excellent              3

Good                    5

Average               8

Bad                      3

Terrible                1

Analysation

Good feedback

Good camera movement used, E.g. when Alex gets punched the camera does a 180 degree spin, this created more “tension” in the short film.

There was good “continuity” in your short. I enjoyed the small but sweet story line.

Timing seemed to be spot on I couldn’t see much wrong with the timing.

Bad feedback

The camera was too jumpy.

I couldn’t understand much because of the jumpiness of the camera.

The E4 logo could have been created better.

these results wheren't just off of the internet we also had paper questionnares these helped out immensley
in reviewing our work we could formulate an action plan and start to ammend our action plan, this could also be done with an oral presentation of our work to the public and then get results off of the general public

These results helped out immensely as we could use them to better our production further.

from this we learned what people loved most, this would be the 180  degree spin that I added into the production to create more of a fight scene feel, not only this but too also add on some extra time, this is also accompanied by the "good timing" response we see that as a good thing because of the jumping Alex did, if our timing wasn't correctly done we would have Alex all over the place but because it was done perfectly it did not make much of a difference to our film, obviously with the good news, also comes bad. We find out that our camera work is a little too jumpy even after using the tripod that was given to us, but also because the E4 logo was a bit too rubbish, we had a lot of technical difficulty when trying to put the logo on the lockers, not only this but it seems a little too squared off. This seems too help us even further if we didn’t have any problems with the logo in the first place, unfortunately we did. Without feedback there would be no way to know what people liked and disliked about our production.

We had a little bit of feedback about our genre, some said that it was either “comedy” or “action”  none thought any different, it was about 16 for action and 4 for comedy. This was fairly odd as I hadn’t thought about any sort of genre, we just made it in the hope that it would tick all of the boxes needed for it to be an E4 esting. Prior to making the punch video we had a separate idea, this was to make a space invader themed esting, this went wrong after half of the cast decided not to turn up, so that obviously hindered us in our efforts to make an esting.

The narrative behind our story would be the fight between our two characters; this can make people want to believe something bad has happened between the two of them. In the film itself we see the two characters (Alex and Zac) bump into each other this was the reason for the punch in our production but we do see some comments by others that say “what is the back story” and other stuff along those lines, this even then connotes that people didn’t understand the whole bumping into each other, this just shows the inaccuracy of the whole reviewing of our esting.

We chose to do a stop motion action styled production instead of a clay mation comedy that the rest of the class did. This obviously affected our style, e.g. we couldn’t do as much impossible stuff as others, such as being fired out of a cannon or have our feet detach and dance around on their own, but however we can do things like making Alex fly or even get punched!

The technical quality that we were working at could have been better to be honest, but there is only so much you can do with equipment that you are given at college, we were given a film camera to take photos with, which just goes to show how the quality could have been made greater!

The brief we had to work toward was for our film to be 10 seconds long, include and E4 logo and then also be appropriate for the demographic group that would watch E4, this would be a teenager in a middle class family. We then double checked that we had done so by putting our videos on various social platforms such as social networking sites, viva voce’s , focus groups and written reports on the subject at hand. We used others feedback to help us reach this, for that we used questionnaires. Not just on paper but on survey monkey too!

During the planning to our film we had to think about copyrighted material, when we could use the sports hall for our original idea, when this backfired we had a lot less to worry about, we did have to make sure that we could film in the college corridors and what time they were least busiest to make our video even better (or just less disturbance) The equipment we used needed little planning or organising as we were just using handheld cameras and a tripod, but for our first production (space invaders) we had to use a jib, this was obviously going to be more difficult to get the equipment we needed to use. Other issues we encountered was not having enough talent release forms for our original production that then went wrong and we had to change the video that we were going to finish off.

We managed our time fairly well, we only had Wednesday mornings free to use the gym when doing “space invaders” this then obviously overlapped with talents lessons and other stuff involving cast and crew, so obviously a certain amount of time keeping was needed for our video to run smoothly. The work load, however was another issue, we had only got half the video done in a little under an hour, this was because of the amount of people we had to organise for our space invaders video, but on top of that we were still on top of everything that we needed to be, e.g. being allowed to use the sports hall when we did, what copyrighted material we couldn’t use and also what OFCOM and ASA would and wouldn’t allow us to do in our Esting. The space invaders unfortunately did not pull through and we had to change our idea at the last minute, that’s when we came up with the idea of “punch” this was when Alex got punched by Zac then flew back into some lockers and somehow spawned an E4 logo from no were. This was basically the same as the last video in terms of a stop motion animation, Time keeping was both less and more of an issue, on one hand we had to be careful of how long we actually had to film but at the same time it was only two people who had to be filmed so it wouldn’t be too hard to film them both in a short amount of time. The appraisement we had received off of our teacher was both about the camera movements that I had taken, this was the 180 degree spin when Alex had gotten punched by Zac this then was followed by Alex jumping in every shot this then looked like Alex was flying from being punched so hard. On the other hand we did receive feedback about the camera being a little jumpy from time to time.

The feedback we received of the public was mostly positive, mostly about the various camera angles and the different techniques we had used, even the almost none existent storyline came up once or twice. On the other hand we had received more comments about the jumpiness of the camera, not only this but another complaint about how they couldn’t understand the story line; this was somewhat annoying as we had earlier received a compliment about the story line, so now do not know what to do about our story line.

If I did go on to work in the media industry I would probably make sure that I had a good repertoire of actors I could trust before trying anything that would require more than a few actors, not only this but I would also keep an eye on the time I had to film and edit and publish certain videos.