Evaluation

Here is the filmed evaluation on YouTube:

As usual there were some points I missed out on my two and a half pages of notes. I will explain them here.


When Ms. Parish watched the final piece she made a point about how there was a tension between it's retro elements and the very modern ones. This is a more academic way of pointing out our original intention to make a very conventional, very dated film with new technology and new film techniques. For the most part I think that was a success, the greyscale film effect, the noise effect and the dark gradient overlay all work to make the piece appear as if it was made a long time ago. The relatively new filming technique and the narrative events are the modernist aspects.
Another reason Orbital was picked as a filming location was because of it's unconventional art-deco architectural style, futuristic space-bases are expected to be full of wires, crates and defined angluar structures. Orbital challenges this and creates a new futuristic setting reminiscent of the curved upper levels of Coruscant in Star Wars. Our setting reconciles both retro and modernist styles.

There's an explosion which takes place while I'm speaking on the monitor. That explosion was originally planned as a way of visually showing that the base was also under attack. One of the downfalls of constantly re-shooting scenes until they are perfect was that I didn't want to re-shoot it a second time as it would have cost a disproportionate extra amount of time in editing (about an hour). The explosion was left, and in order to make it appear natural within the scene a sound effect of an explosion was added in. It's justified by adding to the atmosphere; apart from that it can't stand up to much scrutiny as little more than an odd occurrence.

The music begins early, this was the subject of debate between myself and Jonny, when it comes down to it the scene does have greater emotional impact with music than without music.

Elias correctly identified glitches in the frame rate when Nick is walking up and down stairs. These happened because the hard drive on my computer does not spin fast enough to write all the data to it in time for the video. Sometimes frames are dropped, although I was under the impression that because I was recording at sixty frames a second that wouldn't be a problem. Jonny taught me some things about de-interlacing video to get rid of a problem I'd previously had when recording in 60fps. I didn't apply that de-interlacing to this film, it's good to know for future projects though, if it's necessary.

As for the institutions which would distribute our film, I maintain that distributing it for money would be wrong, as it would needlessly restrict the audience to people who could pay for it. Television is ruled out because I don't watch it and dislike the fact that it locks the audience into a schedule rather than allowing them to watch when they choose. In my opinion the internet is the best possible distribution method, and the two platforms I mentioned are Machinima.com and Mininova. First to discuss Mininova, it is a peer-to-peer file sharing site so far I think this is the best way of distributing video online as the cost of bandwidth is shared, even the BBC iPlayer windows application used to run on a p2p distribution platform. I checked out the sci-fi category and the torrent with the most seeders in there is one called "Ghosts - A machinima adaptation of Nine Inch Nails' music", which is fantastic because mine is also a machinima. Mininova was restricted from distributing pirated content, so the site at the moment is quite bare, with only a few people willing to step forwards to distribute their works. I believe that given time and content the site could grow back to it's former glory.
Me and Jonny were originally wary of asking Machinima.com to host our content because they have a tendency to stick overlays on videos and play adverts to gain money from them. This can be seen as a win-win situation where the artist gets publicity/promotion of their work and Machinima.com get new content and advertising money. However it can more commonly be seen as 'selling out', and that is why I am reluctant to do it. It was picked because it was the most relevant institution I could think of.

The character on the spaceship (me) was named 'cosmonaut', this is because it sets them apart from the traditional 'astronaut' which I wanted to distance myself from. Somehow the  Less futuristic... retro.

What have I learnt?
How to deinterlace video using VirtualDub.
That uncompressed 1080p High Defenition video is too big to edit with the equipment I currently have.
That bluescreens work better with neutral bright lighting (the Drama studio was very useful for this and I will use it more in future).
That it's always better to save games on the Halo Theater even if at the time they might not appear useful.
Never to have two characters speaking at the same time.

EDIT01: Jonny kindly sent me the evaluation sheet we were given, so I will answer the questions on it here:

> How does the text use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of film/film openings?
As I've sort of explained the text challenges conventions of science fiction by using a new film technique to make an old film. The three conventions of the genre included were the alien saying "take us to your leader", the reference to the beginning of Star Wars: Episode IV with the hornet spaceship flying above the camera, and the last convention is that it's set in a future in which humans have developed spaceflight.

> How does the film opening represent particular social groups?
This is an interesting one because the Halo universe in general tends to see humans from earth as one species united without reference to their race. I was surprised when playing Halo 2 to suddenly hear some australian soldiers pop up out of the generic north american voices. The advantage of the spartans in halo is that they are effectively empty characters, their only distinguishing feature is their armour, which we modified to show differences. The Captain has totally white armour with a rounded left shoulder plate. Nick has a standard set of green armour with grey highlights (which you can't see because the entire film is in greyscale). I used our standard procedure of using a '5' emblem for Nick and a '6' emblem for the Captain (again, you can't see it in the video). Nick's armour consists of a Hayabusa shoulder with a Mark V helmet. The clue that the Captain is of higher status is that he's got white armour. The only other way of distinguishing his character is by his voice. The reason I'm talking about how to disinguish characters is because the empty character shell needs to be filled out with personality and background which begins with putting characters in social groups. I suppose the only stereotype we really set up from the start was the girlfriend who stays at home and worries about the brave male protagonist who's gone off to fight in space. From there we've represented women as 'housewives' who prefer to stay away from the action, and that men are action-oritented and full of macho posturing. The line 'baby, I'm going into space' is a form of bragging, a declaration of supremacy. Even the word 'baby' is patronising. These representations are very conventional, and I think looking back give a negative representation of the social groups involved.

> Who would be the audience for your media product?
As I explained in the video our audience was very broad and we had no specific target in mind. As a very general idea we thought 15-35 year old males would be the predominant audeince, partly because they are the target audience of most videogames and because the two realms of film and interactive media do merge a little bit with machinima. The idea that you can reach into the virtual worlds you live in and create a new adventure is quite an attractive proposal and would appeal to gamers.

> How would you attract/address your audience?
We started with the film technique/genre and then worked out what the target audience would be. Effectively we are a representation of our own target audience. So what we did was make a film that we would enjoy. Whenever we filmed there was some motivation to show something we knew we would want to watch ourselves.

> How did we progress from our pre-lim task?
The main task was technically more demanding and we were forced to use a more advanced editing suite than the ones in school. I can't really say we learnt a large amount of new things in filming as I had already done machiniuma before and know all the basics, I think it's really just experience in using the technique. Our pre-lim task was kept to 30 seconds and as I explained it had to be simple, oly include the necessary shots and no more. In this main task we experimented with adding shots which weren't central to the story but which helped 'pad out' the general atmosphere. For example there was more than one shot of Nick running, the extra shots did not help the progression of the story, but they did help to show off the setting.

Again if I've missed anything please feel free to ask in the comments and I'll reply.