Evaluation

 For my first post i had to research into the client, it taught me a lot about who sunderland culture are and what they do, i learned about what the exhibition was about and how it fits into the brief, i also learned what was expected from me for this project and how i was going to execute this project, making it as creative as possible while sticking to the brief to please the client and the audience in the process.

For my second post i had to come up with an idea for my project, i looked into many different ideas for what i could do for my project while keeping it relevent to the Sunderland culture brief, after coming up with a few different ideas i finally settled on one that could be enjoyed by the client, the audience and enjoyable for me to make in the process, i chose the horror theme as thats the genre that introduced me to media and what started me on my media path so i thought that i would enjoy writing, filming and editing my own horror film with the same enjoyment i had as i watched the movies with when they first inspired me to choose media as my educational and career path.

 My third post was my audience research, i learned a lot about the local population in terms of the variety of age and gender of people, i learned a lot about how many people enjoy horror and how many people have seen found footage horrors, this helped me to be sure that the found footage genre is still a relatively unique style of horror as not many of the people who took my survey had seen or could name many found footage horrors.

Next was the existing product research, i looked into different found footage horrors and learned a lot about different types of horrors and the way different directors made their found footage horrors unique and how i could execute mine in the same way to make mine seem as unique as possible as i wanted to do something different and new without inventing a whole new sub genre of horror. I did have some technical errors and some loss of work as mentioned, but i got around that and finshed my existing products research

After the existing product research i moved on to writing up my pitch presentation, i wanted to include things like what my idea was, what the budget would be, possible locations and just really explain what my idea was, how i was going to do it and what equipment i'd be using to do it. After writing the pitch i got a focus group to present my pitch, i explained what i was doing and how i was going to do it to the focus group, they gave me feedback on my pitch as well as giving me the green light to move forward to the next step of making my project.

I then had to move on with the scriptwriting and story boarding for my project, as metioned before i had loads of trouble with location and scheduling issues leading to a few different re-writes and a few different versions of the film where some strictly followed blair witch's style of filming and some where it was shot in a style not related to found footage. After many problems and a few re-writes and fixing scheduling conflicts i ended up with 3 different versions of the script before i ended up with the one that ended up being the finished product.

I drew up some design ideas to go alongside the film, i sketched up some posters with the same horror theme as the film and recieved feedback on them, this helped me narrow down which design i would be using for the final product. However after the feedback i decided that i was going to make a final version of all three designs and use a focus group to find out which finished design would be best to use.

With the script finshed i was ready to start production, but before that i needed to do some location scouting, after exploring some options and trying out those options before all the scheduling issues and some footage loss, i settled on the college as hours of occupancy weren't as limited and it was easy to get to and with it being a public space i didn't need special permissions to use it, after the location scouting and filling out the location release form i had to fill out a risk assessment for the area i was using to ensure the safety of both cast and crew. After i finished that i had to get the actors i had chosen to fill out the contributor release forms. While i did find the logistics and the paperwork tedious and repetative, i learned about the importance of their role in the media industry as it provides safety and organisation when making any sort of project/film.

I started my production initally following the second script but due to scheduling conflicts and running out of hours to use the location and basically all the issues mentioned before, i had to re-film using another script with limited time. After finishing the filming my final product for the first time, i lost the footage so i had to reshoot leaving me with even less time to both edit and make the posters. I learned from this experiance to be more cautious and have backups of my footage and to delete footage if i'm 100% its an outtake

During post production i had a lot of issues importing footage from phone to pc then having issues with getting it to work with the editing software, the only fix for this was to use the phone to edit meaning i was limited as to what i could do, luckily through all this i managed to learn about and use some new and different editing software, i recieved feedback on a few drafts and made my product as good as i can make it with the limitations i had, i had some editing errors with the final draft which i quickly fixed thanks to feedback. When editing the posters i used an editing app on my phone meaning i was once again limited as to what i could do with the software, luckily i picked it up quickly and made 3 drafts, a focus groupt picked what they thought was the best poster to be my final poster to go alongside my film, despite some errors and some limitations i still ended up with a finished product and some new skills.

If there was one thing i would change about the whole process of making my product, i'd be more organised and sort out scheduling issues before the became a problem, this would prevent the issue of multiple script drafts and multiple attempts of filming, despite that i still solved all the problems i ran into and learned some new skills.