EVALUATION

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


Through the use of of new media technologies i was able to i feel succesfully gather research and and construction of my products. Whilst completing my research i used the site Youtube.com enabled me to view trailers of previous successful films of the horror genre, and be able to analyse them and gather information i needed about codes and conventions within each film. I also used Google Images in order to help me view some of the many promotional film posters availiable, it also allowed me to view images of popular film magazine covers such as 'TOTAL FILM MAG' and 'EMPIRE MAG'.
Through the use of these media technologies, i have been able to notice that theses sites also acted as a successful way of gathering high level publicity and many companies use this a method enabling people to be more aware of their products. I beleive that in order for our group to have gained more publicity and made people more aware of our media products, we should have posted our trailer onto a widely known social networking sites such as Facebook.com and Twitter.com or even we could have posted it onto youtube.


When constructing my media product i was introduced to many new computer programmes, the main reason for this was due to us using an Apple mac for the production of our trailer rather than the windows computers we used previously. The new programmes i encountered where Final Cut Pro, IMovie and IDVD.In the actuall production and editing we used Final Cut and IMovie, but due to these both being new programmes to me and my group where given a small task to help us get used to the programmes. We were ask to construct a small trailer style film using clips and scenes within the film 'The Omen' , as a group we done this by first watching the full film and then selecting and extracting the clips we felt would make for a good trailer. By completing this task we were able to grasp a feel into how the programmes worked and through this we were able to used these both in the production of our main media product.
When our main media product was complete we used a programme called IDVD which helped us produce a dvd with our film trailer on, we also added our marketing products which contained our poster, magazine cover and a commercial billing block we had created, all of these marketing products were created using the programme 'Adobe Photoshop CS3'.
When completing the evaluation of my product our team used the site Blogger.com to create an interactve blog, this blog contains links, images and questions i have added to help show my research, planning of making, making and evaluation. My team also added the URL's of our blogs to our DVD's inorder for people to view the methods and processes it took to create our products.

EVALUATION

What have you learned from your audience feedback?


In order for our team to obtain some valid feedback we created a questionnaire, this allowed us to gather feedback for both our ancillary texts and for our main product. In order for us to succesfully show our products to an audience and allow them to give us some feedback, we set up a preview screening. This allowed us to both gain valid feedback and gave us the experience of promoting our media product to an audience.
Our target audience for our preview screening were a group of students aged 17-19 and we also had some teachers aged 25-40. We had used the students as they where our main target audience and some teachers as we felt it would be beneficial for us to make comparisons in the views of our products for diffrent age groups.
What i have learnt mainly from our audiences feedback is that our product had room for improvement, i feel by learning this we were able to adjust our product and make any minor adjustments that our audience beleived needed to be improved.
One of the main critics we had was due to the length of our product, i also believe that our trailer is abit on the short side yet this has a few pros and cons. A good point of having a short trailer is that we can keep it short a sweet and our able to captivate the audience in such a short space of time, i feel that this would help to draw our veiwers into actually wanting to see the full movie rather than just being satisfied with a trailer.
A strong peice of positive feedback we gained was from the soundtrack we used for our trailer, mainly through the use of the music used for the house scene entrance which worked well to set the tone and the atmosphere, we was also praised on our good use of  effects such as dark contrasts bringing out murky colours.
The feedback in relation to our ancillary text was very positive and viewers felt strongly that by veiwing these they would be enticed into watching our main product.
Here are a few statements we obtained in our feedback.

"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” - R.PAVEZ (teacher)

“The music really set the dark atmosphere in your horror trailer” - B.DAVIES (librarian)

“The choices of your music is superb, with great visual effects that helps reinforces the genre of a horror film” - STUDENT (aged 18)

EVALUATION

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

I believe that the combination of both our trailer and ancillary works incredibly, i feel this because we have worked hard to put across the fact that the ancillary text our group has produced, has been created for the sole purpose of marketing our product.
In creating our magazine and poster we came up with a theme that we felf worked well in cohesion with our main trailer. The main 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. I feel something that worked well was the way in which we have included the distorted picture in the both poster and the magazine cover as it keeps our theme present within both texts.
Our audience’s feedback gives me reason to believe that we had done a good job to intergrate the theme and genre of our trailer into our promotional texts. I believe this due to the feedback of our ancillary texts being very positive, i feel we achieved this by our audience being able to instantly identify that our ancillary text represented a horror film.
When asking for feedback one of the questions asked was;

  “Will our poster and magazine attract you and make you want to watch the film?”

We aquired 100% positve answers from this question due to all of our audience stating yes our ancillary text would attract them into wanting to watch our film.
Our audience really liked the idea of having the slogan “Make Yourself At Home” this acts a sort of tongue-in-cheek method as it is adds friendly welcoming phrase but however when placed above a quite frightening image you begin to feel that something is not right adding to the horror genre of our products.

EVALUATION

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

I personally fel our media product does well to both develop and challenge common forms and conventions. I feel this due to the fact that in my research i was able to view some existing trailers availiable on the internet through the use of Youtube.com. Through watching these trailers i was able to notice the similarities and diffrences between each of the trailers and also identify how our team can ad some of these conventions and similarities into our own trailer. The use of Todorov's narrative theory plays a very large part into the creation of a succesful teaser trailer and is used a way to give the audience a vague idea of what the film is about without having any major give aways. In our trailer we were also able to build a crescendo, this is a very common aspect i had noticed in real trailers from films, a crescendo is where you would use a range of slow calm shots gradually speeding up, this generaly would go along with music or some sort of up beat song. Our trailer also incorporates some very traditional conventions which are seen in typical horror trailers. These are things such as;

• A dark and scary house used for the setting 

and

• A young small venerable main character who would ultimately becomes the victim.

In the creation of our film poster we collectivly decided on using a large image of the mask used in the trailer is used. This is the main image on our poster and is situated in the centre of the poster. The image used is of a blood stained mask and is pixilated with a distorted colour. This gives the viewer the impression that the image is being displayed on some sort of screen like a television. The idea of it being percieved on a television screen ties in with our trailer and the distortion is shown in both, this method of creation is also used in films such as 'Saw' and 'The Ring' whereas an untuned tv depicts a killer or another type of scary image. We decided to use the same image we had used for our poster when creating our magazine cover. I had noticed in my research that the majority of succesful magazine covers had a main image or picture relating to the film in the centre of the page and a mag title just above this image, therefore in the creation of our magazine we incorporated this idea. By using an image in this way we have been able to develop rather than challenge the conventons seen in common mag covers. Yet we have used three bold main colours for our cover rather than just focusing on one or two, this has enabled us to create a bold and refreshing cover page yet we have also added some horror into it with the use of fonts and images. Our chosen colours in our magazine cover RED, WHITE and BLACK. Our chosen target audience would have an age range of around 16 through to around the ages of 30, this would work well i believe to help distribute our media products throughout the film industry. I have also noticed that in order for our products to sell well we must have a large age range.

FILM TRAILER REQUIREMENTS

When editing the film trailer these are the requirements that must be amended and applied to the film trailer :

- Name of the Film - To show the audience the title of our film

- Institutions - To show the audience what production company was involve in the film


- Small Critic's reviews - To show reviews of our film which will help the audience decide if they would want to watch the film

- Music relating to the genre - Music can finalise the finishing touches and can tidy the scenes which will set the atmosphere. A fast loud music will go well with our horror trailer.

- Billing Block - The Billing Block will provide information to the audience which companies were involve, actors, directors, producers and other members that are involved in the production company


- A Date or "Coming Soon" - This will show when the film will be released in cinemas

- Todorov's Narrative Theory - Our film trailer will use Todorov's Narrative Theory for structure of our film trailer, which the start of the trailer will show the equilibrium which then a disruption will occur and will finally show a small clip of the character attempting to restore the the disruption. The use of Todorov's Narrative Theory will give the audience a vague idea of what the film is about without revealing any spoilers.

FILM TRAILER....... PLANNING

For my film teaser trailer I will use many of the aspects of Mise en scene and other noticeable features of my research in order to create a film trailer that will be worthy of competing with the popular trailers that are available to view nowadays. The aspects I will use are;

• Using dark dull colours and low lighting to create atmosphere for the viewer.
• Using sharp harsh sounds so that the attention of the viewer is grabbed and they are pinned to their seats.
• By using close up camera shots and mid view shots to make the viewer feel that they are watching the film first hand.

MAGAZINE ..... MAKING

When making our promotional film magazine front cover our team would have to consider similar codes + conventions we had come across in our research of film magazines. 
Our film magazine front cover is part of our ancillary text which markets and advertise our film product.
Our film magazine also incorporates the distorted theme of our poster, due to this we have used the same image and felt it would be the most effective way of promoting our media product.

Our promotional magazine is called Front Row, the reason for this is that the title 'Front Row' gives a sense of the audience sitting at the front row at the cinema. Also we have added a small image of a cinema seat in the middle of the title incrporating the cinema theme and giving the whole sense of being a premier mag.

The title has been created with a green and white glow on the typography which gives it a sense of a horror and fear.
We include images from the film trailer on the magazine cover, we added these in order to make our film magazine look exlucsive and set apart from other mags availiable also it creates the effect of teasing the audiece into wanting to see our media product. The text around the main image are all relvant to the film industry, and creates an understanding for the audience into what is actualy inside the magazine. This also creates a want more thought for the veiwer and will help to push them to buy our mag.

This is the first draft of our Promotional film magazine cover we produced.

As a team we felt that our mag was not as conventional and needed to be improved in order to be seen as competition to other magazines which promote the film industry, such as 'TOTAL FILM MAG' and  'EMPIRE' mag.

This is the second draft of our promotional text.

This cover is very similar to our first design yet we have edited it in a way that will stand out more in the market for film promotion.

A large bold title has been added to the bottom corner of the page and is a good promotional method to draw consumers into buying our magazine.

This is our third and final promotional magazine design and will act beside our poster we have created as the ancillary text used to promote our overall media product.There are alot of changes in this magazine compared to our other two. The use of bold red film titles above our main mag title act as a ploy to catch the eye of the consumer, the use of the colour red plays in with our main image which dipicts blood being wiped onto a plain white mask, this is also used throughout our

promotional merchandise. Dramatic and eye catching quotes such as 'WORLD EXCLUSIVE' and 'FIRST LOOK' give our magazine an edge in the fact that these words simbolise that our magazine will have imformation and images that no other mag will, this is a good way of drawing consumers into purchasing our mag rather than one of the many other titles availiable on the market. 

MAGAZINE ..... PLANNING

When creating my promotional film magazine front cover, I will use common codes and conventions such as;

• Having contrasting text colour to the background colour.
• Having a large bold magazine title at the top of the magazine cover.
• Having a large foreground image which will grab the attention of consumers.

POSTER ..... MAKING

When making our promotional film poster we had to consider the common conventions we had come across prior to completion of the poster.
Many of these conventions have been put forward by our whole team when producing this poster. As a team we discussed what the layout, colours, fonts, slogans and images would be on our final design.
We carefully worked our way to a conclusion of using a still image we had taken from the film trailer itself. By using the computer programme Adobe Photoshop CS3 we were able to edit and filter a screenshot from our trailer into looking as though it was an image on a scrammbled television screen in order to follow the idea of distortion which is also put across in our trailer.
The next aspect of our poster which our team were pleased to come up with was the creation of the slogan " MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME " . When creating this slogan i felt a sense of irony and creating a question in the viewers mind, as though everything in the film is good and pleasent yet its the total opposite. The font that we chose to use for the "Housebound" title is a little rugged and distorted suggesting and following the idea of the fuzzy television in our trailer, this method also adds to the feeling of a haunted house or a occult possession.
Our team collectivley  made sure that all the key  of a succesful film poster are being presented on ours such as the logo, billing block, a bold, strong image and a slogan.

This is the edited screenshot taken from our teaser trailer.

 
 
 
 

Here is the final poster we created using the edited image shown above and incorporating all the common codes and conventions we had identified in other succesfull posters.

POSTER... PLANNING

For my poster I will incorporate many of the design aspects I noticed in my research. I will do this in order to grab the attention of my audience and to be able to compete with the conventional film posters available . These consist of ;

• Having text centrally at the bottom the poster.
• Having a large central image in the foreground.
• Placing the film title in the centre of the page.
  
  

INSTITUTIONS

When completing my research i looked into institutions in order to see whether the diffrence in institution caused a diffrence in the way in which the media product was put across. This is what i discovered from the four institutions which had produced my five chosen trailers for research.


VERTIGO FILMS
This is an independent UK film distribution and production company, which was founded in 2002. vertigo films has been behind hit movies such as football factory and Shrooms. This is a British company which bases its values on creating home grown film making talent by having a programme, whereas young people can enrol and become hit movie makers. Vertigo films like other British film companies have the same typical codes and conventions. These consist of the producers wanting to create movies that can appeal to Brits and also make a change to the current imbalance of Hollywood films against home grown British films.


ROGUE PICTURES
In 2004 rogue pictures was launched with goals to create suspense, action and thriller in there movies.

Rogue pictures is a small scale film making company which is a division of universal pictures with goals to appeal to mainstream movie fanatics and to have potential to franchise, yet at the moment stays as a ‘stand alone’ division of universal pictures . This institution currently holds more than 25 films in its libraries with hit films such as; The Unborn, Shaun Of The Dead, The last house on the left and Hot Fuzz. Rogue pictures being an American based company has produce two films with UK film institution Working Title Films, this is an indication of the small scale of the company.Rogue has also produced some large scale films of the horror genre such as; White Noise 2, The Unborn and The Hitcher.


LIONSGATE FILMS
Lions gate films is an American based film and television company which was formed in 1995. The first box office success for this company was a film called ‘American Psycho’ in 2002.This film was the start of a range of controversial films produced and distributed yet could not be produced in many major American studios due to the controversy. Other notable films from this film company are Saw IV, Affliction and the hit documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Which was the studios highest making films.



20th CENTURY FOX
Twentieth Century Fox is an American film and news company which was founded in 1934. 20th Century Fox is one of 6 major American film studios. 20th Century has many major film franchises which have become extremely popular over the years, these consist of; X-Men, Star Wars, Home Alone and the Predator Series. 20th Century has a very high tendency to produce animated films such as their production of the ‘Ice Age’ series yet do also produce a high range of non animated films such as 28 Days Later, Home Alone and Die Hard.

Similar and Different conventions within the trailers

Similarities
- They all tend use the same range of camera shots, this tends to be mainly close ups.
- Most of the trailers tend to use the same lighting and colours, predominantly low lighting and dim/dull colours.
- The most common convention i have noticed is to have the setting to be somewhere at the night, i feel this is used to create more suspense for the audience.
- Typically text comes to the end of the trailer. Yet there are also sometimes small quotes added in between shots. 
- All of the trailers seem to have a similar duration of around 1:30-2:30.
- They all use similar transitions and methods of cut scenes as forms of edits between scenes.

Diffrences
- All vary in length, yet are no longer than 2:30 minutes.
- They all use different sounds some opting for music soundtracks, others just tend to use natural sounds to create an effect.
- 28 days later has the main part of its trailer set in the day and others are set prominently at night.

- Saw IV shows text throughout the trailer rather than just typically having it towards the end of the trailer.