Evaluation

Evaluation Part 1:

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

My main media product was the film teaser / trailer, where as the ancillary texts where the poster and the website. I produced the trailer and the poster and I shall talk about the ways in which my artifacts use and developed forms and conventions of similar products.

The trailer me and my partner produced was for a film called "Secret Alphabets" which we decided to categorise in the horror genre. It's a shaky-cam style, horror movie set in an unknown location in a forest on the south coast of England.

The conventions that we used were followed from existing media products that we researched into and analysed. An example being the use of a cliffhanger at the end of our trailer. Here is a separate trailer from REC that uses this technique.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeaUokzE9fI

Here is an example where a cliffhanger is used in a trailer to dramatic effect that will give our audience an active reading. They have the choice to either take it or leave it, rather than be prone to mass media consumption. It gives audiences the option to make up their own mind on whether our film is good enough to see. Because our audience is predominately teenagers to young adults, it is probable that they would respond better to a an active reading than a passive one, as this then creates a position in which the audience can then go and search further into our media product. And this can be done because of the choice of choosing to create a website, as a young audience chooses a computer as a medium of finding out about the latest films.

The trailer I put together is intended to go hand in hand with the website my partner has produced. Continuity is kept, with the film title and its specified font present at the end of the trailer, the website is then stated at the very end. The website has kept the brand image up, with it having the same Secret Alphabets title on every page.

I followed convention guidelines from several trailers based along the horror and thriller genre. Such as the fact the trailer is relatively short. My final version sets a time of 1 minute 20 seconds. Compared to other film trailers, I found horror trailers to be relatively shorter in length and generally serves as more of a teaser than a proper trailer. Also some horror trailers, rely heavily on external endorsements in order to create some sort of reputation for their product. I used this to my advantage, and included a couple of endorsements from film publications so then this acts as a passive reading for the audience, showing that our product is deemed to be a great piece of entertainment. I did this between edits and clips in order to keep the audiences attention, where as the filmed clips, are left by themselves as they serve as an insight into the film. With the sound, I dubbed over several sound clips that serve to heighten viewers attention. For example the beginning of the trailer has several bits of text that would have not grabbed the audience by itself. So several sound clips were used to draw viewers into the trailer, as the first few seconds are crucial to whether you can keep the audience interested. Finally the back story at the start also serves as a means for the audience to want to find out what the film is about. A small back story is presented at the start, and that is all that is given away in terms of plot details, then at the end the website address is given, giving viewers the chance to find out more.


With my poster I did the same thing. I looked at existing texts, and based my creation of them and their conventions. I stuck to analysing one genre of poster, which was horror. Throughout the research process, I started to realise than all the posters had one convention in common. The image. All the posters I looked at were centred on one particular image, be it with the Blair Witch Project with the woman's face, or the paranormal activity poster, with the single shot of the couple looking at an unknown object. These pictures raised a number of questions for the audience, so I did the same with mine. My shot is a photo of a tunnel that I took in a local forest. This is something that will allow our audience to start to draw up ideas of what the film could be about, and encourage them to again look further, with the use of the website an
d trailer. Another convention was the repeated use of endorsements on horror posters. This I can understand, as the genre itself is fairly saturated, and audiences will be looking for something unique and different. Endorsements will encourage viewers to go and see the film as it has been highly rated and may offer something different from the norm. The colour scheme I used was fairly simplistic with white and black being the two dominant colours (the website address is a red font) it may be fairly mundane and not very colourful, but its premise is to be eye catching. The logo of the film is white on black in every part of our promotional package, and need to be carried on throughout every text. Finally other parts I have included are the tag line, directors names and a small sentence beneath the logo saying "based on true events" The tag
line is there to give another basis on what the film is going to be about, the font is fairly simplistic so it can be taken seriously, and doesn't take focus away from the rest of the poster. The directors names are in place because I believe when you have critically acclaimed directors being mentioned on a poster, audiences will expect something completely unique, or impressive given the quality of their previous projects. And finally the reason I put the sentence underneath stating "based on true events" it acts as a hook for our viewers. If people know that the following film is base d on real happenings then it makes it much more interesting, than something that was entirely made up out of fantasy, its good to have some truth there, to make it much more interesting.


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

I believe that the combination of a Trailer, Poster & website is an effective combination, partly because of the range of mediums that are used for them (computer, cinema / television, poster) our audience has access to at least one of these products we have produced.


The hybrid of these products allows for us to create a strong brand image. This means that then our audience will be more suspectible to our film through the promitonal campaign, and is apparent through continuity. By this I mean the repetiton of the films logo on each part of our project. The will help it stick in the minds of our audience and be immediatly recognisable as a film called "Secret Alphabets". Big production companies such as Disney or Warner Brothers will do this to try and also have the same effect we want.

Having different products allows for different purposes for each. For example, our poster is there to increase awareness of our film (this can be proven with the use of several external endorsements and one single image symbolising very little) our trailer is in place to increase audience expectations and speculation. Finally the website acts as the final product our viewers would look at, and it serves to inform.

Continuity is kept throughout with the use of our Secret Alphabets logo, and the same colour schemes, and general tone as it was kept the same. Little plot details are given away in all of the texts, which will encourage audiences to invest in our product and go and see it for themselves. We wanted viewers to be enticed by the amount of messages and information they gather, such as the information on the website like, the back story for the film premise, small actor biography's, and location shots. As well as this, the several clips that are featured in the trailer, and the single shot in the poster, along with the endorsements.

We did equal amount of research for each type of text, with myself handling the poster and editing, and my partner the website, and filming process. Our findings were applied to all texts, with us following conventions and stereotypical traits set by each type of product.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?


During the production stages of my artifacts I gathered feedback from students about their interpretation of my poster and a trailer. I looked at the response I got and applied it to my products. This some of the feedback that I received:

Here is a small interview I carried out with a student that viewed my products, who viewed my trailer:

What did you think of the current version of my trailer?
"I thought it seemed good so far, I understand no sound is added at the moment, but it would make me want to see your film. Music & sound I believe will make it a lot better, once added."


What were the highlights of it?
"I thought that the parts that you filmed were really well thought out, especially the ending scene. The title coming in at the end also looked really professional."


Anything that could be improved?
"Some of it seemed pretty fast, some of the filmed clips seemed to short and the edits made the trailer sometimes seem a bit hard to follow. Also maybe you should lengthen the time of the intro with the back story."

Based on what you have seen, what type of genre would you have thought this film is?
"Either thriller or horror."


Finally, based on the trailer you have watched,
would you see the film?
"I would purely because it looks like such a mysterious film, I'd like to find out what happens to the characters shown in the trailer."


The interview was conducted with a 17 year old student, which is our target audience. From this I started to add the suggestions to my trailer, and began to produce the final version which can be viewed on the main page.

As for feedback for my poster I conducted a mini questionnaire to find out how my audience interpreted my poster.
The questionnaire was taken by ten people, and here are my results:

Yes: 6 People

No: 4 People

Image (Tunnel): 4 People

Film Logo: 3 People

Tag line: 2 People

Colours: 2 People

Other: 1 Person

Image (Tunnel): 2 People

Film Logo: 2 People

Tag line: 1 Person

Colours: 4 People

Other: 1 Person

This is the feedback that I got from the presentation of my poster to my audience. From this I see that maybe I should have used a move vibrant colour scheme to make it more bold, but because this was the finished version I shown, the colour scheme for the website, as well as the trailer, would have to be changed as well because of continuity. Other than that I wouldn't have changed anything.

Overall I understand the importance of understanding your audience in order to produce sufficient pieces of text. From audience research you can gather facts about audience expectations and

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

It is apparent that the media world is changing through the use of new technology that allows people to create their own peices of media through the use of specific peices of software. Examples are the website Youtube, where users are free to upload content and is allowing a more diverse range of media to hit the mainstream. There has been a recent boom of fan made films and videos hitting the internet. This is proof of Here is the programs that were avaliable to me through the production of my media coursework.

Windows Live Movie Maker

This was the programme that I used for the editing and construction of our trailer. I decided to use this rather than the original movie maker, because it had a number of better functions and features than its predecessor, and I had some experience with it, so it came as an easy process.

The whole interface made adding captions, music and clips an easy task, as shown in my production, its set out like a time-line and was very easy to use. It also had a host of film effects, some examples of which can be seen in my trailer.

Overall it allowed me to manager my time effectively, as it came to me as an easy process, allowing time for me to continue with my poster, as well as updating my blog.

Page Plus X3

I have had much previous experience with this software, using it over the course of my AS media coursework, for the construction of a magazine. I find it extremely easy to use, and I would have used Photoshop, but in the end I felt more comfortable using this piece of software.

I was happy with the final result that I ended up with for my poster. Page Plus offered a wide range of fonts and editing techniques that I found very useful and enabled me to try lots of different fonts and layouts for my poster, to see which one worked the best. Its relatively simple, but can be time consuming, the end result was worth it.

Photoshop

I used photoshop briefly for the editing of specific images. An example being the main image of my poster. I had to darken the photo I took and also start to trim it, so that it blended in with the background. If I had not done this, the end product would have looked unprofessional.

I have had previous experience with this programme, and used it on my home computer for the photo manipulation process. If I had more knowledge of this software, I would have used it for the production of my poster, but It would have been time consuming teaching myself how to work around it.

Paint & Excel

Paint was used for the print screening and uploading process of several images you see on my blog. Paint enabled me to print screen in the middle of my production processes for both my trailer and poster, and allowed me to upload my progress to the blog. It's fairly easy to use and was a good tool for me to track the development of my products, just to see what I should do / add next.

Finally Excel was used for the questionnaires that were carried out. I produced several pie charts showing results that were recorded during my research and feedback periods. It was very easy to produce, and allowed my partners and I's results to be viewed in a much easier and attractive format.

Evaluation Part 2:

The trailer we produced was for our film 'Secret Alphabets' it is a shaky-cam style, horror movie set on the South Coast Of England in an undisclosed location in a forest.

In terms of conventions we simply used existing media products for convention guidelines and applied them to our artifact. For example, in a lot of trailers, whether horror genre or not, endorsements from external review sources are included to let the audience know that the product is of a high quality and they will enjoy it. This gives the audience a passive reading because it tells them how good or bad the film is, it doesn't allow them to decide for themselves.

As well as this we made good use of close-up shots in the trailer, this is a typical convention of horror films as it is an effective way of portraying the fear or terror of a character and effectively portrays to the audience the feelings that they should have about the text.

The website we produced as part of the promotional package, has a dark black/grey colour scheme and is title "Secret Alphabets" it has the same logo that is on the trailer and the website, this improves the continuity of the products and helps all of the artifacts we've produced link together and give the audience a clear brand image so that they remember the film.

In terms of conventions I followed the basic website principals for any film promotional website, have around 5 pages that give the audience information regarding things like back story, cast, directors, endorsements and the trailer.

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

In terms of the construction the new technologies we used for the filming of the trailer was a 'Samsung' video camera that had a USB interface allowing us to transfer our footage directly to a computer for editing.

This was incredibly useful as it saved a lot of time by not having to go through several tapes to find the best shots. Instead they were all readily available to be viewed at the same time on one computer allowing us to piece together our best shots and which shots worked well with others.

When it came to the website new internet technology was hugely influential in this project, I used a program called 'Serif Webplus X2' that allowed me to create from scratch the secret alphabets website. It contained features like the ability to embed our trailer into the website so it can be viewed by the on-line community helping us to reach a much broader audience.

To get the website on-line we had used a 'host' called 'Hostgator' who offered us a monthly online web hosting package that allowed us to have our own domain name (www.secretalphabets.net) this technology was vital in allowing us to have our own interactive medium through which we could communicate with our audience.

For our research of existing media products we used mainly the internet, this allowed us to look at pre-existing professional products and gave us the direction we needed to successfully present our products to our audience in the way that these successful professionals did.

For example, when I carried out the website research I came across websites like the one for the popular 2009 hit horror film 'Drag Me To Hell' without using internet technologies readily available at home and at my 6th form college I would never have been able to view these and come up with ideas that I applied to the creation of the website. For example, the idea of having the trailer as the centre-piece of the homepage came to me after seeing it used so effectively on so many previously successful film promotional websites.

For the evaluation stages of the product we were able to get feedback from the audience via email from members of our target audience who were able to tell us what parts of the texts they thought were good, what parts that they thought weren't so good and how we could improve them, this will help us in the future to make superior products and please our target audience more.

What Have You Learnt From Your Audience Feedback

I chose at random a member of our target audience who we carried our audience profile research on to fill out a questionnaire on what they thought of the products I had created.

Do you think the website gives off a professional feel?

Yes I believe that it looks like a typical website with the sole-aim of promoting a film, it has familiar aspects of these types of websites like endorsements on the homepage, pages including back story, information about cast and directs all came together to give an over strong impression.

What areas of the website do you think need to be improved?

The only areas of the website that could be improved are the aesthetics, I feel that on some pages the text is maybe a bit too large, thus taking away, ever so slightly, from the professional impression the website gives out. As well as this the background images are slightly blurred and look like that have been stretched too big, they have an excellent colour scheme mind, but are a bit blurred looking and once again, every so slightly, takes away from the professional impression that this website gives out.

These two questions allowed me to first of all know that we went down the correct path with what we had chosen to include in the website e.g. trailer, commercial endorsements, back story to the trailer, cast info, director info and a photo gallery of the filming location. All came together nicely and were presented effectively enough to give the audience a professional, high quality impression, which I believe to be the most important reason for creating a film promotional website.

As well as this it showed me where we had gone wrong in this particular product, in reflection had we done some more testing and viewing the website with members of the audience we might not have published it with such large text and blurred background images. However these two aspects don't damage the product too much but are good things to reflect on when creating future texts.

After asking this member of the audience about the website I also asked them about the filming of the actual trailer:

What was your impression of the way the trailer was filmed?

I felt that the actual scenes that were filmed of the characters in the trailer were very good, it gave of a real hand-held style to make you feel as if these events were real and you were seeing them through a pair of human eyes rather than the lens of a flash Hollywood special effects camera.

How do you feel the way in which it was filmed could be improved?

I feel that the at the end of the trailer when the male character is running the camera looks a bit too rigid, making it obvious he is filming himself and thus taking away from the realism effects that had been portrayed earlier in the text. I also felt there was too long of a gap between the dropping of the camera near the end of the trailer and the actual ending, it left a strange silence that seemed out of place considering how loud the rest of the trailer was.

By looking at these two questions I once again learnt that we had gone down the right path in the style of filing we chose for our trailer as the hand-held style gave the audience member the impression of realism we had hoped to capture.

However it also outlined a flaw we had in the trailer about continuity, at the end of the trailer it does look slightly too rigid the way the character is holding the camera and doesn't gel well with the rest of the style, but it was the only way we could film that shot and it was the best middle ground we could find without having the camera too 'shaky' and not having it too rigid, however in the future we will have to bear that in mind if we were to use the hand-held style again for another product.

I also agree that the camera sits on the floor before being picked up for too long but maybe only by a second or two and that it doesn't have too much of an effect on the impression that the trailer is giving off.

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

Our main product is our trailer it is the centre piece of the entire project and the purpose of the poster and the website is to back it up and leave more of an impression on the audience.

I believe that the website combines very well with the trailer for two reasons:

The first is that the trailer is used as the centre-piece of the homepage (the most important part of the website) this helps provide continuity across these two products and leaves a strong image in the mind of the audience and helps with promoting the film, it is also a very typical convention of any film promotional package and leaves a more rounded professional look to the website and helps connect with the audience better as they will take our media products more seriously.

As well as this the website contains further endorses the trailer from third party critics and hopefully this will entice the audience to want more, thus successfully promoting the film, which is the whole point of a film promotional package. They also combine very well as they follow similar themes in terms of colours and the logos used and the style of text and the way the back story is written links in very well with the themes portrayed in the trailer.

I also used similar texts and colour schemes when creating the website which allowed a greater continuity between the products thus once again allowing them to seamlessly combine and thus allowed them to work together.