In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
I believe our media product does manage to challenge and develop forms and conventions of real media products in several ways. For instance, after looking at a number of existing film trailers we noticed a great similarity. Most trailers would be structured in near enough the same way. This would be with the trailer starting with the equilibrium at the beginning. The use of nice slow shots which would then speed up forming what is known as a crescendo. This structure proves to be very popular and also very effective which is why we also used this structure in the filming and editing of our film trailer. Our trailer also uses very traditional conventions of a typical horror trailer. These are things like, the dark and scary house and the young small venerable main character that becomes the victim. When creating the film poster, a large image of the mask used in the trailer is used. This is the main image and is in the centre of the poster. The image is of a blood stained mask and is pixilated with a distorter colour. This gives the viewer the impression that the image is being displayed on some sort of screen like a television. This effect is also used in films such as ‘SAW’ or ‘the ring’ with a distorted television screen displaying the killer or a scary image. The same image used for our poster is used for the magazine cover we created. Due to the majority of existing film magazines having a main centre image of either a figure or someone’s face, I thought this would work perfectly. Also a majority of these images are from the film being advertised on the cover likewise with our magazine advertising our film. We also used and developed the use of visual elements when creating our trailer. Things such as the use of low key lighting for the scarier scenes and the use of heavy bold fast pace music towards the end which is commonly found in film trailers building up with the crescendo. Our film trailer also challenges horror conventions by using British Hip-Hop music for our final part of our trailer; the British Hip-Hop music gives an urban, underground appeal to our target audience which they are young suburban audience. Our target audience’s age range from 16-30 which will sell our movie otherwise if the age range is small then our film will be difficult to sell.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text?
All of the ancillary text my group has made were created for the sole purpose of marketing our product. This is the film. All of the texts and products we created has a similar continuity and theme to them. The reason for this is to create a strong sense of brand identity in all our work such as the same logo, colour schemes and fonts. This will help the audience and viewers relate our work and recognize they are all from the same brand. Although our film trailer could have been improved in some areas I belive the effort and work that has gone into making our film poster and magazine cover so professional reinforces the trailer. I am happy and some what proud with the groups effort in creating these texts and their attention to detail which adds a lot of authenticity to the work. I particularly like the way we have included the distorted picture in the poster and the magazine cover as it keeps the motif present in both texts.
Our audience’s feedback of our ancillary text has been positive and they instantly knew that our ancillary text represented a horror film. One of the questions we asked for our audience to answer was, “Will this poster and magazine attract you and make u want to watch the film?” and 100% of them answered yes. This was great news as this proves our work was effective and achieved its main goals. The young audience really liked the idea of having the slogan we used in our poster which was “Make Yourself At Home” this is tongue-in-cheek as it is a friendly welcoming phrase but however is placed above a quite frightening and scary image of a bloodstained mask with a knife.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
For our group to obtain feedback we created a questionnaire for an audience to answer, who was our audience? We invited a group of students (16-18) and a few teachers to participate in a group activity to watch our film trailer, what was good about the selection we picked was they match our target audience criteria. A few members of the audience that participated was teachers, although they weren't our group main target audience we just wanted to know what they would think from their perspective compare to the students.
What I have learnt from our audience feedback? I have learnt that although our audiences enjoyed watching our media products there was room for improvements that could enhance and excel our media products even better. One of the comments from our feedback was that the film trailer was a bit too short, I 100% agree with that statement because our trailer doesn't pass the two minute point and it would of been better if it did. How could we resolve this problem? We could re-look our storyline and amend it. However I wouldn't personally say all of our feedback was negative, there was positive feedback as well such as the music for the house scene entrance set the tone and the atmosphere, good use of the effects such as the dark contrast bringing out the murky colours. Our Film Poster however had a massive hit to the audience, they've really like the design and the composition with the use of unilluminated (Dark) colours and the mask that looked eerie and petrifying with blood slick around the mask's mouth. An interesting feedback we obtained from one of the teachers was - "Your film poster reminded me of a Japanese Horror Film (The Ring) with the use of a face of the mask with a sinister look coming out from a television screen” – which “The Ring” style became our motif. The librarian said “The music really set the dark atmosphere in your horror trailer” and finally a student aged 18 said “The choices of your music is superb with great visual effects that helps reinforces the genre of a horror film”.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Media technologies gave me the upper hand when using it for research, planning and evaluation stages. Before I started the film trailer project I started to look at examples online using YouTube as my aid to watch film trailers so I could analyse them and see how the film trailer is being presented, the structure of storyline etc. I also noticed that how film company such as Marvel has uploaded their own work (Film Trailer) to seek publicity and attention, perhaps it would of been ideally to upload our media products online but not only using YouTube but other websites that involve a socialising such as Facebook, Twitter etc. When researching, looking at film trailers was not only in my researching list. I looked at many examples of film posters and film magazines preferably horror considering it was my chosen genre, I've used Google Images to search for horror film posters. Going back to YouTube, not only it was helping me looking at other film trailers but I looked for tutorials that could possibly help me for example I looked at a tutorial that shows how to create a 3D Film Strip which I used for our group's Film Magazine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhLbGleU-iY - (Evidence)
To boost our knowledge of using Final Cut Pro and iMovie, our group did a small project before the film trailer project, which was to get familiar with two software’s we never encountered before. Since our group decided to pick the horror genre, we watch the horror re-make of “The Omen” and had to try and convert it to a film trailer style. Because there was no need for filming any scenes, we had to apply own choice for music and editing effects such as the build up towards the end showing a crescendo which trained us to develop our use of editing technology and in how to apply narrative theory to a film trailer.
Another way our group members contacted each other, was we all each had every members URLS to their blogs meaning that we could share information with the rest of or production team.
