Dead Mans Love -The Film

Magazine Review

Dead Mans Love Poster

Question 4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

EVALUATION 3 What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout the process of creating our ancillary tasks we often asked for audience feedback in order to improve our designs. The people we asked were not part of our target audience and were friends that worked in our media studies group. This was always a risk because we could receive biased feedback which may have leaded to our ancillary tasks being poor quality. Thankfully the feedback we received was honest and benefited us rather than hinder us.

First we started to think about where we would expect our film to be reviewed. We thought about the popular film magazine ‘Empire’. We started to design a template for the basis of our review.

The feedback we received from our audience was encouraging through the stages of designing our magazine review. Near the end of finishing our review we asked for lots of feedback to help finish a quality piece of work that would reflect the quality of our film.

The feedback we received for this draft was positive however changes were suggested by some
People whom would not necessarily be in our target audience

Sally Paskins said 'I like it. It looks professional however I feel the white writing is lost in the back ground'
Jack Arnold Suggested ‘I think you should change the amount of stars you have given the film. 5 seems too much and is giving the intention your film is brilliant and amazing. Ask yourself if your film is truly that good and if you were reviewing it where would you place it’

This feedback was useful because it made us look at our film in detail and then give an honest view of our film. We also edited the content of the review as well. When this was finished and after some other drafts we had a final draft we showed to some people who would most likely be our target audience.

This final draft of the poster was shown to people in our target audience. Dylan Mason said 'He liked the red font. Although in places it was still illegible it gave the connotation of rage and death and the obvious blood', some themes that ran through our film.

Our poster was a very tricky task to try and perfect. Our original idea was to have our character ‘Luke’ as the focal point of the poster. Where half of him was normal the other half was ‘zombiefied’. The first draft we came up with was good however it was suggested that maybe the face was a bit too dark and the eye didn’t look right. We brightened up the face and changed the eye however we decided the eye didn’t look realistic enough. Justin tried to change this to make it realistic however because we couldn’t perfect this we decided to speak to a photography student who helped us design a new poster. We concentrated on a new idea and when we finished we posted the poster on Facebook. We received lots of positive feedback. Sam Tyler said ‘The colour suggests possibly dark themes, its ambiguous nature connotes mystery and leaves you wanting more, yet font suggests a comedic element – as it is in bold and the red liquid (assume its blood) reinforces the zombie genre’ this feedback was rewarding and encouraging however our teacher pointed out that this was familiar to the poster of ‘Dead man’s shoes’ and even similar to its DVD cover. This was purely coincidental as we didn’t use ‘Dead man’s shoes’ to influence our production work. We then received the feedback on how to improve our poster so not to make it too similar to ‘Dead man’s shoes’ ‘Change the font, maybe don't have red and black as your colours (you could try using the blue you have used in your titles) Perhaps think of a more comedic tagline’ We worked on these point to produce this poster. My friend Andy who would be in my target audience said ‘I like this poster however maybe there is too much blue. Make the silhouette black’ by changing this we have produced a quality poster that reflects our target audience which is what we intended.

During the process of our film we always asked for feedback in a bid to make sure we could produce a slick, upto date film. Jack Arnold said to me that he didn't like the long shot between 'Luke' waking up walking to the bathroom and the shots of him getting changed. I then looked at shortening it. I produced a scene where sam walks into the bathroom, then walks out fully clothed. This was an effective jump cut that showed the passing of time but also saved a big duration of the film.

EVALUATION 2. How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?

EVALUATION 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

EVALUATION 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? on Prezi

Final filming session

We finished the last of the filming on Tuesday 8th. This was the office scene. We decided as a group to try and incorporate more comedy into this scene so we could justify our genre of comedy. We did this by adding a couple more deaths but made them comedic, we structured this by having the boss, who in the end was played by myself the main focus point and in the background Sam and and Pete who played an extra were out of focus.

Update and filming schedule change

Editing seems to be going really well. We have finished editing the footage of the car scene with sound to be edited. We had a slight problem with that scene. During Justing checking to see if Luke was alive there were some Lucazade bottles we had left on the side of the road. We didn't realise till viewing the footage at school we had left these there. Gareth a friend who has helped us with the filming stage suggested we masked the bottles. I got a tutorial and used Adobe after affects to help mask the bottles. This was fairly simple to do, I first had to track the bottles in order to mask them, a tip I got was to start at a middle point and either track forward or backward then vice versa. I then used the pen tool to select an area of the pavement I wanted, this duplicated the area in order for to place it over the bottles. The piece I had chosen was very obvious to notice because of the sharp edges so I had to use the feather tool to lighten the edges. Final to make the pavement the same colour I used the effect RGB curves to lighten the pavement and make it blend in.

We have one last scene to film which we will finish after half term and in the meantime continue editing.

Film Shoot Day

We filmed yesterday (Sunday 6th) at ........... We arrived at location at 11:00 this was later than intended however we had no access to the premises until Lucy our actress arrived. Filming went well. I mainly directed that day giving camera shots and directions to the cast and crew. Sam helped to slate things and do a bit of sound and camera work and Justin did a lot of sound and camera work.

We changed the script slightly that day due to fact we had trouble with some props which meant we had to cut out the scene where Luke's hand gets stuck in Caroline's hair. We also accidentally missed out the end of the bathroom scene. We were going to add an additional scene however this didn't fit in with the rest of the plot and would of looked out of place possibly ruining the feel of the film we were creating.

We didn't really have any problems yesterday however because we were filmimg for about 5hours+, battery started to get low on both cameras. Luckily we did have chargers for both cameras during scene set up's so we charged the cameras to get them to last for the day.

Since arriving back at school today we have managed to select the best clips of the 7d and have yet to convert and match the sound from the panasonic. The quality of the footage was really good and was increased by lighting. We took some before and after shots to witness the difference. (input picture) I have started to edit together a few clips and add colour grading. This has made a huge improvement to the overall quality and has increased the prossional look we are after.

We have one more shoot left which plan to do shortly. We are now just focusing on editing and finsihing of the poster which we will organise a photo shoot for.

First day of filming

We filmed on Sunday 16th as we had planned. I called everyone the night before to confirm that filming was on it was dependant of whether the weather would force us to cancel. The next morning I woke and saw that there hadn't/wasn't any rain as of yet and that there wasn't any heavy rain as fore casted, I did check the weather on the Internet again to get an update. It stated that there was a chance of rain this did make me very optimistic for the days filming and I proceeded to confirm that we were filming.

I think the days filming was a success, we used the script and a storyboard to help decided shots however we were inspired by our surroundings to devise some creative shots, such as a high angle shot (taken from up a tree) and a low angle shot where Sam walks into the care it goes black and we see him walk away from the same low angle shot.

The quality of the footage and shots was very good. We used two cameras the Panasonic AG-HMC71E and Cannon 7d with 24-70mm 2.8l -18270mm -50mm 1.8. We had some problems with the two cameras. I didn't check the battery power on the Panasonic camera and only had twenty minutes of footage however we had the other camera which we managed to play with focus to produce some good shots however the majority of the time it only captured 3secs of footage. We managed to get past this and carried on. Another difficulty we faced was setting up the green screen, we had no rain however a high wind ment that the greenscreen kept flying away. We held it down and managed to progress.

After uploading the footage I think I am happy with the shots we captured. I have started to colour grade my footage which has added a huge improvement and makes it look a lot more professional. I will start adding soon.

Filming Dates

We have discussed as a group dates for filming.


Proplems we may have with the gap, which we plan to solve, is that people change physcialy and haircuts. Obviously this will be a problem for continuity but it is only Samuel White that we will need to keep the same.

SCENE	DATE	TIME	ACTORS NEEDED
Car Scene	Sun 16th Jan	10-12	Justin & Sam W
Office Scene	TBC	3:45-5:30	Sam W & Mr Kirk
House scenes	Sun 6th Jan	TBC	Sam W, Sam P, Ed, Lucy