Evaluation

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


Media Trailer Evaluation



Ancillary task conventions



With our media products we have produced uses, develops and challenges the conventions of real media products in many different ways. Our media product follows the standard conventions within a teaser trailer, it shows to an audience the main characters that will be in the actual film, it also distinguishes to the audience clearly the antagonists and protagonists which is also a convention of the Horror Genre. Throughout our media products; the teaser trailer, teaser poster and magazine cover also show continuity which reflects upon real marketing campaigns that use continuity to produce an effective advertised marketing campaign in order to attract an audience. Teaser trailers are commonly used in advertising to attract and 'hook' an audience before the product is actually released.


Conventions of a real media product: Teaser Trailer
  • Teaser trailers are usually short in time length - between 30 seconds to 1 minute.
  • The purpose of a teaser trailer is not to tell the audience the film content but to inform and 'tease' an audience that a new film is coming soon to the cinemas.
  • Shows short clips within the film and less narrative as a theatrical trailer.
  • Typically the short clips are not shown in chronological order the film is in.
With our trailer, we have based how to develop a teaser trailer by following these simple conventions with the influence of other teaser trailer examples. Following the conventions, our teaser trailer time length is 1:03 keeping it no more than a minute and 30 seconds. We believe that the length of the trailer is ideal and long enough to 'tease' and attract an audience but at the same time informing them lightly the film content and plot.


The narrative to our teaser trailer relies on written titles for its narrative structure. The use of written titles are effective when creating a teaser trailer as it only hints to what the plot of the film is, by not including diagetic narrative in the trailer gives the audience a sense of mystery to what the film is actually about and leaves them 'hooked' to find out what the whole film is actually about.


The use of music used is ideal to portray the Horror genre and creates a strong role in evoking the audiences' emotions. The eerie music used is to help build tension and creates a dramatic atmosphere thus reinforcing the other uses of conventions to portray the Horror genre.


The editing used in the trailer is significant as most of the trailer was created with the use of editing techniques, in the beginning of the trailer, we used as a strong influence The Strangers teaser trailer editing technique with the slide show effect to help build strong tension. Using a similar technique as a real media product portrays that we have used conventions of a real media product to relate to our own work. The slide show montage of houses and the narrative title underneath the images are very important to the trailer as it tells a very brief introduction to what the plot of the film is, the houses shown are also used to help 'draw' an audience into hook of the film which is that the antagonists in the film are also 'drawn' to these houses as a setting for their killings. The pace of the slide show speeds up as the written narrative of the teaser comes to an end, also the use of blood over these photo slides and titles is used to show iconography to the horror genre.


Continuity - Like many real life marketing campaigns for films, there is a strong use of continuity to help create effective and successful products throughout the different types media products used to advertise a up-coming film. For example the horror film Scream, produced an effective marketing campaign by showing a strong continuity between their products using an iconic horror antagonist figure. This was effective and the outcome of this was that the products created a franchise, the Scream antagonist is now recognisable to any sort of audience. With our media products, We have tried to do a similar technique as the Scream products, using only a strong image of the antagonist which is also a masked villain and used it throughout my media products.



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



Audio Commentary





What have you learned from your audience feedback?


Audience feedback question










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

Throughout all the research and planning, one of the most commonly used media technologies was the Internet; more specifically Windows Internet Explorer. It was used to access Blogger as well as other useful websites such as Youtube and Google. There have been some problems using this technology such as it freezing at peak times which will lead to delays in the coursework draft deadlines. On Blogger, it even deleted all of Ashley's work causing him to start over again at a crucial stage when the coursework was supposed to be completed within the month. It is set backs such as these which will lead to us questioning its reliability. However this technology has proved to be incredibly important in the modern era. British media theorist David Gauntlett introduced the theory that modern day Internet has caused us to be more creative; going from Web 1.0, when it was purely for informational purposes, to Web 2.0, where it lets us be more creative and become a prosumer. We believe that this theory is correct as without the Internet we couldn't have produced our work so efficiently. We also believe in Alvin Toffler's idea of prosumerism as it allows us to produce and consume media in a digital age; Blogger itself is a perfect example of this. Throughout the A2 course we have learned to use Blogger more efficiently than we did in AS by using pages to seperate work and generally improving the layout of our work so that it is easier to be viewed.

The Samsung Flash Memory SD
Camcorder




During the construction of the trailer we mainly shot the film using a Samsung Flash Memory SD Camcorder with a tripod provided by the school. The camera proved to be very good however we had to edit the settings as the image was much clearer compared to the shots done with the school camera, so we had to edit the lighting settings. Personally, we believe the camera work was much improved in this film compared to that which was done in the AS coursework. Using the experience from last year we were a lot more creative with the camera work which we did. However some of problems we did have whilst filming was getting clear images whilst filming in the dark.




The poster
 With the poster, magazine and the Bald Eagle Productions logo we used Adobe Photoshop. The first couple of experiments on photoshop concerned our ideas for a poster, where experimented with various white mask designs and used the "smudge" tool to smudge them into obtuse shapes. However we never did this with the final designs, instead we decided to smudge the lettering which we believed looked more effective as smudging the masks would have been irrelevant








Construction - With the construction of the media products, the construction relied upon the use of a video camera, tripod and the use of two different editing softwares - Power Director 9 and Photoshop. For the filming we mainly used 1 video camera at first, but then in the second half we were able to use 2 video cameras. The use of 2 video cameras was very useful as we used 1 camerea for hand-held shots and the other for steady tripod shots, we were also able to 2 cameras shooting the same scene but from 2 different perspective so then when it came to editing, we had a choice of 2 different shots and to chose which was best for the finishing product. For the editing part of the construction, I used the editing programme Power Director to add in video slips, photos, music, titles and transitions to create our finishing product. For the still images of the houses, I edited the photos using an application on the iPhone from the AppStore, this application is called 'LO-MOB' which is a photo/image app which adds vintage and retro effects. We chose the effect that added a film over the photo and changed the tone of the house images giving it a more vintage and old look to it, this made images look as though they were still images on a film-reel.

For the magazine and poster, we used a still camera from an iPhone 4. We chose to use the iPhone 4 camera because it is a 5 megapixel camera with 5x digital zoom, an optional HDR setting, and auto-focus. (click here for iPhone 4 camera spec) For the editing phase of the development of magazine and poster, we used the editing programme photoshop to edit the photo images we took. Also we used photoshop to add in backgrounds and titles.

With the poster, magazine and the Bald Eagle Productions logo we used Adobe Photoshop. The first couple of experiments on photoshop concerned our ideas for a poster, where experimented with various white mask designs and used the "smudge" tool to smudge them into obtuse shapes. However we never did this with the final designs, instead we decided to smudge the lettering which we believed looked more effective as smudging the masks would have been irrelevant. We also used Adobe Photoshop when making the magazine, this took a bit more effort to make than the poster as we had to make seperate images to added to the bigger image such as the puff. However, the only problem we had was that we had spelt the date wrong on the magazine, writting "20011" rather than "2011". The final thing we made on Photoshop was the Bald Eagle Productions logo to go onto the teaser trailer. There were no issues concerning this image as we had learned a lot from using Photoshop from creating the poster and magazine cover. The strengths of using Photoshop is that it doesn't involve the internet which means it wont freeze at peak times and there are a large selection of tools to create very diverse images. Its weaknesses are that you can't do certain things with the image like we could with the iPhone application called "LO-MOB", which enabled us to make photos look like they are on a slide show.



Music - We made the music to the trailer using Cubase, which is music software which can record, develop and arrange music. We have used this software before and we had no issues making the music. The strengths of Cubase is that everything is so organised that its unusual to make mistakes on it, there is also a large amount of instruments to choose from when creating a piece of music. However when Cubase is in use the sound to the rest of the computer doesn't work and some things like the internet can be slow occasionally.

Editing - We edited the film using Cyberlink PowerDirector, which is a very recent piece of film editing technology; being released in November 2010. This piece of editing software is similar to Windows Movie Maker and Pinnacle, but it is more advanced allowing us to make movies more efficiently. However, when trying to upload videos onto Blogger it was difficult as the M-PEG4 files were over 80,000 MB, so in order to get them on we needed to trim the megabytes which has a substantial effect on the videos quality. We had to change the video into a Windows Media Player file which mean't it was around 4,000 MB but the quality wasn't that good. This happened with the draft of our video which we had to put on Youtube in order to get it onto Blogger.


Research -  I used many different website sources for my research into teaser trailers, teaser posters and magazine covers. Websites such as YouTube, IMDB, Official movie websites such as Inception and Empire's official website that displays the magazine cover of many issues.


Planning - The technologies used with the planning, was done with the use of Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint. Microsoft Word was typically used for the script and the call sheets, Microsoft PowerPoint was used to create the shot list and the shooting script, using PowerPoint was ideal because we were able to create tables and using different colours to keep the lists clear and easier to read. For planning I also used photoshop to help create initial plannings for the teaser poster and magazine cover.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)