FINAL DRAFT

"I found the final product very mesmerising and visually appealing. The use of sound was also effective and fitted the imagery well. I really enjoyed watching your product and think that you've created a production to be proud of." - Hannah Louise Emery, 17.

"I thought that the product itself was of a very high qualty and was visually appealing. Not only were the visuals of a great quality, the audio was of the same calibre!"- Charlie James Razzell Gower, 17. 

"I thought the product was very well made, the cinematography was very effective and I found the use of lights and sillouttes really interesting. I also feel that the music went well alongside the visual" - Leanne Clarke 18.

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

Having come across The Words Of Bokeh whilst at a university open day, it inspired us to create an experimental film piece. We were inspired by the bokeh effect, and immediately wanted to learn more about it and how it is achieved. The film spells out a phrase "the time is now" using blurring of lights. This then became the narrative of our film, and we chose the phrase "not all those that wander are lost". A quote in which is personal to us. Finally we had an idea that we were passionate enough about, to put everything into. The shot below shows a screen grab from The Words of Bokeh (left) and a screen grab from our own film. As you can see, the blurring of the word 'now' inspired me to add a Gaussian blur, and a slight glow to our own use of the word 'lost'. The brighter the light, the clearer the image, brighter colours are more visually captivating, and it allows the audience to read the word accurately without any difficulties.

The Words of Bokeh takes this technique one step further to make it unique by blurring natural sunlight into words. We found this difficult to create as the brightness had to be prefect in order for it to blur into a distinguishable shape. Miranda captured the sunlight flickering on the waves (below right) and used a lens cap to create a bird shape. Filming during the day allowed the shot to be clear, creating a broad visual for the audience. The overall balance of night and day worked really well, creating a piece that flowed beautifully. 

Several YouTube tutorials helped us when creating something more unique. This one in particular shows you how to create the lens caps, set the aperture values and then goes on to show you some effective ways of using the bokeh effect. The merging of lights (below, left) inspired us to layer our footage not only in the filming stages but in the post production stages too. The colours did not clash, instead they creates something very visually pleasing, which our audience loved and the feedback we gained was outstanding. Our film does not have a conventional linear narrative and so it was important for us to capture them in other ways.

The last shot of our film, which features a pan of the pier- with simple bokeh lights was inspired by Bokeh Beautiful, which uses simple non manipulated bokeh blurs. The merging of colours and change in opacity, again became hugely inspirational for us. We wanted to use a simple shot for the ending to show that it is just as effective as those shots which have had effects added. The way it pans into the darkness was also a perfect way to introduce the credits (below right)

The opening of Love Bokeh (below left) shows a beautiful shot of a vehicle travelling in the rain. Bokeh lights shine through the window revealing rain drops. The main theme in our film is travel, so Miranda filmed journeys on various different vehicles and captured various lights on the way. The image on the right shows the raindrops on a train window, introducing another form of travel to our film. 

Our film challenged the forms and conventions of other Bokeh films through its cinematography. We decided we liked the effect of using the lens cap as a vignette. To achieve this Miranda zoomed right out so that the lens cap was visible (below). This became even more visually engaging as we captured a bird flying through the bird lens cap. Although we are very proud of this technique perhaps it would have been better if the lens cap appeared darker. We could have also cut out the shape to decrease the amount of smokiness in the centre. 

POSTER

Miranda came across the film poster for Martha Marcy May Marlene when researching into posters. We really liked how the image was only visible through the letter 'M'. We found this quirky and so applied it to our own images. Our audience like the use of colours, and they liked the use of different images, rather than just settling on the one. Martha Marcy May Marlene was a more mainstream film so it was important for us to combine this idea with posters from the art house genre. We looked at experimental film posters to see what kind of information was included. 

We found that most posters have who the film director/production team is, with no distribution or release information.  This is why we put little information on our poster.  If audience wanted to find our more about the project, they could look on our youtube/vimeo/twitter and facebook pages. 

If we were to improve our final poster we could put social networking and online distribution links at the bottom in smaller print.  This is so our audience knows exactly what website to go to instead of going through search engines like google or yahoo. 

REVIEW PAGE

Most magazines stick to the same layout and fonts because the reader will become use to this, and expect the same thing from each issue. Because of this, it was not necessary for us to change or challenge the conventions of the review page. We used Daze of Wonder because it came from the magazine Sight and Sound. Having researched into different review magazines, this was most suitable as others only focused on blockbuster, mainstream films. Sight and Sound promotes unique, experimental niche films. We liked the simple layout of the magazine and the fact that it was easy to read. the targets for our film were those who are passionate and share a deep interest of the genre. Adding a page number and date to the bottom of the screen would help make it feel more professional.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

When creating our ancillary texts it was important for us to maintain the quality we had been producing in our main product. Our film is very original, and the colours are very captivating. Our poster and review page both needed to reflect this originality and quirkiness of the piece. 


Bokeh is the main technique within our film,and for our audience to understand, or be intrigued by our poster we needed to introduce the uniqueness of our film.  Miranda selected both "untouched" bokeh (lights just blurred with no word/symbol) and two of our most eye-catching shapes (the stars and the people).  She chose the stars, because they are our brightest image, and will capture the audiences eye, and she chose the people because it is our most intriguing and thought-provoking image.  The main aim of the film is to intrigue people, and make them want to find out about the technique.  These particular images will certainly intrigue audience members to watch our film, and captivate them from the beginning.  

She decided on a dark grey background to introduce the surrounding dark area around the blurred lights.  Most of our shots are filmed at night, so we also wanted to introduce the way we present the bokeh lights in our film.  The grey background was also used to bring out the colours from the images further.  All the colours that are in the pictures are very appealing and attractive colours.  By contrasting them with a dark background they will become even more attractive.  
Miranda had been inspired by the film poster for Martha Marcy May Marlene when creating these letters. She also decided on this stencil idea because it is much like the lens hoods we used when filming. Suggesting to the audience that they too could achieve this technique themselves. 

Our poster became linked to our review page as we wanted to maintain the thoughts that were being represented in our poster. When looking at the film magazine Sight and Sound it was obvious that the majority of the page was dedicated to text, and a small part to the images, as most pages often only had one strong image to support the text. We chose the image we liked best- the one taken during our research stages as it showed the bright lights in the bokeh effect. The blurred lights of the cars suggest travel, and a sense of wandering which became the main theme to our film. Much like the poster, the bright lights were against a dark contrasting background. 

We used the same font throughout all products so that they could easily be linked together.

I think the products work well as a as a combination because they all maintain this 'house-style' and we have made sure we maintain the same feel, and professionalism throughout. Although each piece is strong enough to stand alone they work well together due to the connection in colour, font and strong memorable images. They all grab the audiences attention with their intriguing design. 

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our teacher thought many of the shots from 'The Story of an Hour' were clumsy and not well thought out. She also didn't feel as though they wee best to our ability. It was obvious that we were not motivated or passionate about what we were creating, and so because of this our film suffered. It was then that we decided we needed a new challenging idea. 

We continually asked our teacher and target audience for feedback when creating 'Blur'. We used networking sites including Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter to gain feedback, which was very important as it helped us progress and develop our products throughout the duration of research and planning. 

Facebook. 

Facebook has been our main platform when communicating with our target audience.  Facebook has allowed us to embed videos from youtube, post screenshots from the film and pictures of our review page and poster to gain audience comments, whether good or bad.  Not all of my friends on facebook/people who commented and gave opinions are passionate about film.  Some had a general interest, others more passionate.  This gave us a wider scope of opinions on our products so that we could really develop our film

Above is an example of a post Miranda posted on facebook when creating our poster. The comment posted suggests we change the background colour as it makes the smaller text hard to read. We however felt as though this colour suited the letters but agreed that the text had become difficult to read and so we went away and changed the text colour. It becomes hard to judge your own work, and so this feedback was vital for Miranda to make any changes and to make sure we were keeping within our target audience. 

The first draft of our film also gained feedback from facebook. Below is a screenshot. 

Although our first draft had patches, our audience generally seemed to really like it. They loved how the editing flowed smoothly and the calming effects the footage had on them. Their only criticism was that the music became a little repetitive. When creating the second draft we took this feedback into account and focused on gaining the extra footage and re-drafting the music. From this feedback we were able to improve what we already had, and it taught us that our audience want more of the bokeh effect, and to keep the professionality of the footage. 

Although the feedback from Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr was minimum, we were able to post regularly on these to create interest and promote not only our film but the other products too. As Facebook seemed to have more interest we decided to post as much as we could here. 

While it is important to gain a wide range of opinions from people with different passions and backgrounds, I also asked my teachers and class colleagues.  I was gaining some general statements of "I like this", which are non-detailed responses.  From my teachers and colleagues, I could get detailed criticisms which focused on "what worked" well and "even better ifs".  This helped us to keep on track, and to continually develop our products.  

From our first draft we have made the following changes to our products due to audience feedback:

• Soundtrack - we have made the music less repetitive, and more uplifting, yet maintaining the flow and rhythm of the piece.  
• We made sure that the theme and style of our film was maintained throughout our piece, and that all the shots were at the same level as each other
• We also posted screenshots from our film onto facebook, and asked them to vote which image would be perfect for a poster.  We then used the images that the audience picked and used them on our final poster.  
• We changed the font colour on the poster so that the audience can read the text. 

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

How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages? on Prezi

Final editing touches!

I was coming close to the end of finishing our film-with 30 seconds left to fill i was finding it difficult to scrape together enough footage. I didn't want to put footage in that i didn't like just to fill the time gap. 

To overcome this i took some of my favourite bits- the round bokeh lights- and i changed the colouring and the saturation to create something new and interesting. It was whilst i was doing this that i though i could create a series of colour changing bokeh lights. Either this or layer them up so that the colours are overlapping. 

Final Poster and feedback

Once we had a poster we were happy with Miranda posted the poster onto Facebook to gain feedback. 

After receiving this feedback Miranda went back into Photoshop and changed the font to something lighter, making it easier to read.