Media Evaluation

Evaluation

For our film trailer we created a horror film trailer, a film poster and the front cover of a film magazine.

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

Our media product both uses and challenges the forms and conventions of real media products. At the beginning of our media product our group brainstormed together ideas of what a real film trailer would typically have or what we think a film trailer should typically have. After brainstorming these ideas together and researching online for real film trailers, film posters and film magazines, we could then apply this to our own things. 

Some of the conventions we came up with for the film trailer were:

• Lasts between 1:30-2 minutes
• Includes key sequences from the film - Does not the whole story away, but gives away the main story without revealing the ending
• A secluded location – Generally horror movies place the characters in a location where they are the only ones there, for example, the woods, a ghost town, a summer camp, an abandoned building
• Characters forgetting about the threat or not knowing they are in danger – Something commonly used is making the characters aware of the threat and the danger, but continuing on the journey or doing it anyway
• Power is cut – At the scariest shots and tensest moments, instead of carrying on with the shot, it cuts to black
• Investigation of a strange noise – 
• Young/teenage characters - The use of young or teenage characters to make it twice as scary and playing on the fact that young characters are naive and vulnerable
• Distorted diegetic sound - Distorting the sound in the film in order to portray the fact that something isn't quite right
• Extensive use of close up - The use of close ups to portray the characters emotions
• The use of low lighting - The use of low lighting to reflect the vulnerability and add to the spookiness
• A hero - A strong individual that saves the targets
• Death/murder
• Fear of the unknown
• White flashes
• Build up music

In our film trailer, we do use a lot of the conventions for our own film trailer. In our film trailer, the female detective is typically the strongest and the main character in our story – Stereotypically women being emotional, she takes it personally to find the girls, knows about the incident in 2009 and realises that their time to find the girls is running out, making her the typical hero in this film trailer. Like other trailers, our film trailer uses multiple white flashes, especially at the flashback with the fridge scene, this makes it a lot more action packed. 

In regards to the stalker/kidnapper, we have used a man, mainly because of the fact that men are more stronger and it wouldn’t make as much sense using a woman because of the voice and the body structure. Our trailer reveals the stalker, but no so much that you can see the full man behind the stalker as we only reveal extreme close ups of the mouth in order to make the audience ask questions. The girls kidnapped do comply with the typical horror film trailer convention as they are young, vulnerable and are teenage girls – We used teenage girls because they are generally naive and vulnerable and this therefore adds to the tension and will hopefully engage the viewer and make them relate to the trailer. We have gone for the horror film trailer location convention, this is because in one set it is based in a dark/big house and a deserted car park with no one around and the second set is based around an empty/deserted car park – This makes it more scarier as they are by themselves and there is no one to help them.

Some of the conventions we came up with for the film poster were:

• A clear photo that makes the audience ask questions
• A clear film title at the top or bottom of the page to stand out in bright colours
• The credits at the bottom of the poster in grey writing
• The text of when the film will be released, e.g 'Coming soon' or 'December 2014' etc
• A catchy phrase that addresses the audience

For our film poster we have tried to use a clear picture, because there is a man in a mask, it would immediately make the audience ask questions like - Who is the man behind the mask? What is he doing? We made sure the film name stood out and gave it a mist around the text, similar to what 'The woman in black' film poster does. Not only this, but under the film title we added a catchy phrase which says 'Ever wondered who is watching you?' that addresses the audience and includes them into the poster.

Some of the conventions we came up with for the film magazine were:

• A posed clear photo at the centre of the page
• The main film title in big bold writing and a bright colour to stand out
• Catchy phrases to grab the audiences attention
• A specific house style to compliment the magazine
• A barcode at the bottom right of the page
• A 'PLUS' at the bottom of the page

Our film magazine uses a posed photo of the kidnapper or stalker with his hands around his mask making it seem as if he is going to take his mask off. We have make it so that the photo blends in with the background and the colours are used throughout to make it consistent - Yellows and whites. We have used a variety of catchy phrases like 'find out what could happen if you're home alone...' and the other films they could find inside the magazine with the 'PLUS' at the bottom.

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

Based on the feedback that we have had on our main product and ancillary tasks, I do think that they are fairly effective in advertising the film trailer as a whole and doing the job they were made to do. It is clear that they would be most effective all together, rather than on their own. With the film poster, we made sure we spent time to research what recent film trailers have done and how they have made their film poster effective. The film trailer does not give an awful lot away, meaning it may be hard for some viewers to grasp the concept of the film altogether and this could therefore mean that it brings down how effective it is. I do think the fact that our film trailer has three main build-ups and is intriguing from the very beginning – The extreme close up of a mans lips on the phone saying “You have 24 hours or the girls all die” immediately makes the viewer ask what is going and will therefore hopefully encourage them to carry on watching till the end. The fact that the female detective says “an incident like this happened in 2009” and “what was the outcome?... There wasn’t one.” It makes the viewer ask questions – What happened to the killer? Is he the man at the beginning? Will he be found? In my view, it is the film trailer that is noticed the most and makes the viewer want to see the whole film. I do think that the main product and ancillary tasks compliment each other 

What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

The audience feedback we gained help guide our film trailer in the correct direction. At the beginning stage of creating the film trailer, it was very difficult to get the shots as snappy and as fast paced as they are in our film trailer now, something feedback helped us do. We especially learnt a lot from our teachers and gained advice of how we could make the trailer more intriguing and interesting and link the stalker in with the victims and make it more into a story than a film opening. The feedback we gained both during and after creating our film trailer was very helpful, at the very start the feedback we received was very much a long the lines of there being no real direction/story line of the trailer, their were too many girls and too much going on (originally we was going to have three kidnappings), the trailer lacked tension or a build up and we needed more narration in order to give a message to the viewers without giving too much away. Because of the feedback it gave us some more ideas on the types of shots we can have at the very end in order to make it the final build up, for example quick paced shots of the mask, a hand on the door handle, a knife dropping and a girl in the car being trapped. Feedback also meant that we had to change the shots around, for example, in the shot when the girl is in the boot, we originally had that at the very end of the trailer as a build up, but after verbal feedback of them saying they thought it would link better after the girl has been kidnapped in the car park, we then changed it to after this so it would link better. Some of the feedback we gathered online include: 

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

We have used technology throughout to research, plan, construct and design our film trailer, film poster and film magazine. We used the apple macs for a variety of software that include iMovie, iPhoto and Adobe Photoshop 3. For the research we gathered videos and film trailers from Youtube and kept all of our research on Blogger.com, a blogging site. From the very start of shooting and trying to upload the footage we had a lot of trouble uploading it as the macs would not read the SD card or the type of file (avi) and because of this we had to figure out how to convert the media clips from avi to mp4 which took a considerable amount of time. After figuring out how to do this, it then allowed us to upload the clips successfully onto iMovie. We used the apple software iPhoto in order to upload the photos from our SD card by using a card reader or directly from a camcorder. On iPhoto it allowed us to store all of our photos that we had taken (in date order) and from there we could then edit them. For both the magazine and poster, we used the software Adobe Photoshop, none of us was very familiar with this, so it was more or less trial and error and playing around with the different features. We also used horror sounds from youtube that we had to download, we did this by using the website www.keepvid.com. by using this website you then had the option to copy and paste the link of the Youtube video you wanted to download and then choose which file type you wanted to download it with. We encountered a lot of problems with the Apple Macs in general and the technology that we was using, because we had so much footage uploaded it meant that trying to edit on iMovie would become very slow and take twice as long, meaning we would have to delete any footage we knew we definitely wouldn’t use - One disadvantage to using iMovie and the Macs.