What elements of your text would attract the target audience?
I feel that because I conform to the codes and conventions of the zombie genre, I feel that my use of prosthetics and gore help bring in the mass amounts of viewers. I also feel that the dark nature of my movie also brings audiences in especially when it is set in places which have a scarce amount of guns. Looking back at the Audience research I am projected perfectly into the target audience, for this reason I feel that the themes I added to the movie are enjoyable for these audiences as I too enjoy the work that I have created. For this reason I think the target audience would be attracted to my movie as I conform to the themes and settings that they have grown to love, using inspiration from previous titles in the methods and storyline of my movie.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of making this product?
I feel that I have learnt many new techniques from creating this media product that will help me in the future for more productions to come.
Filming Techniques
I learnt the importance of focus within a scene, a few of my scenes within the first draft were blurry so I recreated them to ensure that they are less blurry and more movie quality.
Another thing I learnt was the importance of light intake in a camera. Night scenes are a pain in the backside to film as not only is focus a hard thing to notice if it is wrong or right but also how much light is being captured by the camera. without properly being set up for nighttime recording, an effect called "Film Grain" is found, this is where the light is imperfectly recorded causing little dark colored particles to be found on the footage. This is something that is not seen in Movies and tv shows at night time as they have equipment specific for nighttime filming to take place and even film nighttime shots within studios with correct lighting.
I also now know techniques to record amazing scenes via the use of camera positioning alongside movement to condense more information into a scene. Many of these techniques I was not able to use within the movie due to my limitation of nighttime recording (due to the time required to apply makeup and prosthetics to actors when filming in winter.
Throughout the entirety of the production period, I learnt how to analyse information in a shot and how to add meaning into a sequence all by how I edit the scene , be it with special effects or increasing or decreasing the speed of a shot.
I also learnt some crucial skills about practical effects and how to amplify their meaning within editing. Before the creation of this media text, I did not know how to create prosthetics nor how to apply makeup to characters to create such monsters like zombies. I created 3 zombies throughout the entire period and I became better with each one, ending up with one final zombie which looked so real with my now advanced use of fake gore to make a yellow prosthetic look like an open, exposed wound.
Throughout a few scenes in my initial recording, I had audio errors due to the microphone not properly functioning, this caused me to have to recreate the audio in said scenes to make it more realistic and evolve my skills as a media producer. For one scene in particular, it shows the characters walking in grass and then walking onto gravel. The audio of these scenes were corrupted so I had to recreate them. To do this I took a sample of me walking around in gravel using a high quality microphone and used that as a sample for the walking of both characters. I then used these samples to recreate the sound of not only one of the characters walking, but both. This involved alot of dubbing and fading of audio gain to create a more realistic sound for the characters walking. This is a professional technique used in every movie and TV show to create high quality sounds and improve the media text, this technique is called "Foley Sound". This is a technique I will be using in future media productions to increase the quality of video I produce.
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
alongside everything mentioned in the previous question, I feel like I have also evolved my skills as and editor, an analyst and a producer, I feel that with my future productions I can take everything I have learnt from this (being my first production ever) and evolve my skills to hopefully create movie-quality productions. I now know how to use software I have never used before (like Adobe After Effects) to make fake guns look more realistic by recoloring sections of the gun to give them a more gun-like appearance. Overall my ability to edit recordings into a final production like a movie have vastly improved alongside my techniques to record footage and mistakes I should look out for in future recordings.