The Big Question

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

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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

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

Evaluation of A Piece of Happiness

The opening shot of A Piece of Happiness is over exposed and is slightly wobbly. The shot was over exposed because when filming we couldn't see the camera screen properly to be able to see what we were actually filming, because of the sun. In the future we need to bring something with us when we film so that we can shade the camera, allowing us to notice whether the exposure is too high. Then we can correct this by changing the exposure on the camera.

Our second edit was jumpy because we didn't find the join in movement and edit at that point. When editing shots together you should have a motivation to change the shot, this motivation can be a change in movement, but, we did the edit straight after the movement so Hannah went from standing straight to sitting. Next time we need to find the match on action so we don't lose any continuity and make the shots flow more nicely.

In the close up shots of my face the focus is on my shoulder and not my facial features, this detracts from the effectiveness of the shot. The audience's attention is drawn from the action (what is going on) to something irrelevant, making them loose concentration.

In some of our shots we need closer framing, random open spaces are distracting, this is apparent when Hannah is reciting her short motivational speech. Again the audiences attention wonders to the open space and expect something to happen like another character to walk into shot. To prevent this we should have included more cuts, so that the speech did not seem as long and we could have gotten more reaction shots.

Continuity was also a problem because I moved my arm from shot to shot, to correct this next time we should catch this and use that movement as motivation to change shot, match on action movement.

The sound lacking in quality because of the wind that added a distracting background noise. The classroom sounds were also annoying, next time we could film at a time when the classroom was not occupied or when school is less busy.

We couldn't film in our original location shot because the lawn was being mowed so the camera would not have been able to pick up any dialogue of a satisfactory quality. Next time we should ask house staff if the lawn is available or if there is something that could interrupt our filming schedule.