The Stranger Draft 3

After extra editing and a few changes I have produced a third draft for my short film 'The Stranger'. It is embedded below:



Reflective Comment:
With the film now getting closer to being finished, my next plan is to get some feedback on it which will then mean I have feedback on all three of my tasks making my evaluation questions easier to talk about and moving me further forward. As a whole, I am very happy with my film and as you can from my previous drafts on my blog (here and here), it has come a long way and many things have been changed and edited to bring it all together.

Magazine Draft Questionnaire

Now that I have created a completed draft for my magazine review, I have decided to do exactly what I did with the poster and begin getting some feedback on it so I can decide if anything needs to be changed with the help from other peoples opinions. Below is the embedded survey along with the draft of my questionnaire.

Create your own user feedback survey

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/LG5CH27

Reflective Comment:

As with the poster, this post shows how I've created a questionnaire to collect results on what people think about my magazine review at first glance, and after reading it. This will help me understand what needs changing and also give me a variety of view points with ideas I may not have already considered. To improve this, I could have included more questions within the survey but I feel that it is best to keep the questions brief and to the point to increase the chances of people doing it.

Magazine Draft 3

Now that I have done a few drafts containing the text of my magazine review, I've decided to take it a step further and format it as a the website I based it on, which is IndieWire. As you can see, I took the basic layout of Indie Wire and changed the titles and pictures to help fit my film. This is draft 3, and may turn out to be final draft after I have gotten some feedback on it.

Reflective Comment:

I have moved myself forward massively by creating a third draft for my magazine review, and I am happy that I have formatted it the right way to match the website I decided to base it on. I think that this review works well and looks believable to any readers. To make it better as whole, I could possibly add more photos or change the text slightly, and after I have received my feedback I plan to act on what is said.

Film Poster Questionairee

After working on my poster for a while, I've decided that the best idea now is to create a survey to get some feedback on it so that I can get an idea on what people's opinions are when they see it. I've embed the survey below, along with the poster that they reviewed:

Create your own user feedback survey

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/SRK5FS6

Reflective Comment:
My next steps with this is to share the poster and survey through all of my social media to ensure I can receive as many as responses as possible. I am also going to ask my family and friends to fill it out to give me as many responses as I can get. I think that with the results I will be able to see what people's initial reaction to seeing my poster is, which will help me to improve it and make it stand out even more. On the other hand, I may find that the results are all possible and very little needs to be changed.

Film Poster Draft 2

Today I spent some more time working on my film poster and have created a second draft to move me forward with this part of the ancillary task. I did some quick research online to see what my poster was missing to make it look more conventional. I used this poster below as an example just to notice some of the general conventions a poster has. As you can see from my first draft here, the poster I have already created follows the conventions of having the actors names at the top, the background image as the general location, and the main actors/actresses edited onto that background. My title is also in large font and stands out. The one thing my first draft didn't have that this poster and most poster do have is the small text at the bottom which is hard to read as it is squashed together to fit. This text normally goes through the studio names and distributors, as well as mentioning all the actors in the film and everyone who worked behind the scenes to help produce it. This was something I decided to add to my poster, as well as changing around with the font to help create a second draft.

The second draft for my poster is below:

Reflective Comment:

I think that I am making good progress with my poster and I think that the next post of it is likely to be a finished version as there isn't much else I can do to improve it. Obviously I will need to continue to play around with things like the font and size to ensure that it looks as good as it can, but generally it is nearly finished. My next steps with it are to get some audience feedback so that I can see what people think of my poster and if they see it as looking real and believable.

Magazine Review Draft 2

With the ending of my film altered slightly, I now need to change the content in my magazine review because I wrote it before I'd decided on changing anything. I have already made a first draft of the review which can be seen here. Below is my second draft, I haven't changed many things because I am happy with most of it so far, I've just altered the end of the review so it makes sense with the end of my film.

'Stranger' Review: Short budget thriller grips audiences to the mystery created.

Films with low budgets and short durations are a common thing amongst young students either looking to break into the film industry world, or simply creating a piece for their classwork. In this case, Josh Coe's short film 'The Stranger' relates to his classwork. This modern story about a girl who spends all of her time online, hating and ignoring her Mother, and speaking to random people will be more relatable to a younger generation as the film adopts a more modern theme.

Heidi Cooke's character of Clare, the typical teenager who hates her family and locks herself in her room all night is portrayed very well, and young viewers may be able to see themselves in this particular character. Her mother who is never actually named is played by Mandy Coe, and is a character every parent will hope to never end up like. We see her very briefly throughout the film doing nothing but sitting around drinking what we assume is something alcoholic with a tin of opened biscuits in front of her. Her lack of care and love to her daughter is clear throughout and we can easily see the broken relationship these two have.

As the films goes on, Clare attaches herself to a boy she meets online going by the name of Tom. They soon arrange to meet up in a dark alley where we soon realise that Tom is either not who he has made Clare believe he is, or just a complete murderer. As soon as we see the dark alley, as an audience we begin to predict that whatever comes next is not going to be good. What we don't predict is that the person who stabs Clare isn't in fact Tom, or so it seems. The scene of Clare's dead body fades out to reveal her laptop receiving messages from Tom telling her he couldn't make it, so as a whole we are left wondering what is the truth.
Perhaps what stands out as the film comes to a close is the clear regret we see on Clare's Mum's face as she stands over her grave. Their broken relationship is even clearer to us now, and we feel mixed emotions of sympathy for her Mum with losing her daughter, but also anger that she neglected her so much.

Reflective Comment:
Changing the ending to my magazine review was something I needed to do in order for my new scenes of my film to make sense. My next step is to add a third draft for my film with these new scenes included, and then this new draft will make sense with the plot.

Extra Filming

After watching back my two drafts and talking to some fellow students about it, we've all arrived at the conclusion that my film is missing some kind of twist toward the end, and as a whole it could be seen as quite predictable. Because of this, I've decided that the film would benefit more from an extra scene that created some kind of twist for the audience to think about. My plan was to do that piece of extra filming with my actress, Heidi, tonight, but due to circumstances beyond my control this can no longer happen. The scene we were going to film involved Tom coming to find Clare's dead body, and therefore meaning she had been killed by someone else other than Tom which would confuse the audience. Instead, I am going to shoot a quick scene of Clare's laptop sitting on her bed receiving constant messages from Tom telling her not to leave and that he couldn't make it. This will then make an audience wonder whether or not that was actually Tom who killed Clare and add a twist at the end of my production.
By changing the end of my film slightly, it means that the first draft I did for my magazine review no longer works because in the review I've mentioned how the film is quite predictable with the ending. Because of this, I now plan to compose a second draft for my magazine review that brings in this new scene.

Reflective Comment:
I think that adding this scene into my film will help boost it up in terms with the grade due to the development of the plot. Although I would like to film Heidi (Clare) down the alleyway again, this is not possible right now so I will use the messages coming through on the laptop as a substitute for this.