Evaluation

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

We used an image featuring all of the the characters in the same location as the trailer was filmed in. The image also resembles one of the shots in the film. As well as this, we have used the same style of font for the title on both the trailer and poster. We have however challenged conventions with our poster by positioning our film title at the top of the page. Usually the title of the film will be placed at the bottom of the page, however this set up did not work well with our poster image. I think that challenging this convention has paid off as the arrangement of the poster works really well and helps it to stand out amoungst others. We arranged the page so that the masthead was at the top, and the majority of coverlines occupied the left-hand third. This arrangement is often seen in conventional magazines, as the left-hand third is the area of the page that is visible when the magazine is stacked on a shop shelf. For this reason it is important that this section of the page contains information that will attract the target audience at point of sale. When researching and analysing film magazine covers I found that the
masthead often stretched across the width of the page. Our masthead only stretches across half of the width of the page, so in some ways it could be said that we challenged this convention. However, I have seen covers of other types of magazines, such as 'NME' and 'Q',
that also have mas theads that do not stretch across the page. Other conventional features that out magazine cover possesses include, a pug, barcode, date and price.
The image on its own is very powerful and is clearly the focus of the page. This was also the case for the two magazine covers I analysed previous to production, for example Empire with megan fox on the cover.
The way our trailer builds up is conventional to that of a typical horror trailer. We also used intriguing captions throughout to help 'tell the story', which is another convention of movie trailers. When analysing the trailers for 'Pans labyrinth' and 'Eden Lake' I found that the use of captions completed the trailer. They were particulary key in the Pans labyrinth trailer as there was no dialogue or commentry. As our trailer would have little or no dialogue we decided to use captions to 'explain' the storyline. Each caption is in the same font style and colour helping the trailer to flow, something that is also commonly seen. I believe that our horror movie trailer is very conventional. The trailer follows Freytag's triangle theory, beginning with the exposition, followed by, rising action, the climax and falling action. The rising action occupies a larger proportion of the trailer, as this theory states it should. We have used longer shots that portray normality at the beginning whilst the trailer remains in a state of equilibrium. The trailer gradually builds in intensity as the mysteries unfold. The pace increases not only through the use of shorter shots but also through the use of sound. We arranged the soundtrack so that it would effectively accompany the editing. The way our trailer 'builds up' is conventional to that of a typical horror trailer. We also used intriguing captions throughout to help 'tell the story', which is another convention of movie trailers. When analysing the trailers for 'Pans labyrinth' and 'Eden Lake' I found that the use of captions completed the trailer. They were particulary key in the Pans labyrinth trailer as there was no dialogue or commentry. As our trailer would have little or no dialogue we decided to use captions to 'explain' the storyline. Each caption is in the same font style and colour helping the trailer to flow, something that is also commonly seen.


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

The images that we have used for our poster and magzine cover have been taken in the same location as the movie trailer was filmed in, and feature the characters as they appeared in the trailer.Most of the text on the page is in red or white/grey font and there is no solid black background. Although this differs from the other two products the same red/white/black theme is still relatively present. It is common for the magazine cover advertisement of a film to differ fairly significantly from the film's trailer and poster.The images actually resemble 2 of the shots that feature in the trailer.

We altered the brightness and saturaion of the images, something that we also did with many of the shots in our trailer. We have used the same font style and colour for the film title on both the film poster and trailer, which is conventionally seen.We have used the same font style and colour for the film title on both the film poster and trailer, which is conventionally seen. This allows the viewer to immediately link the two. The magazine cover still features the film title however, not in the same recognisable font style. .

3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

When we showed our horror trailer to the people who we felt was out target audience we got some feedback on what they felt was good and what they would improve themselves if it was their horror trailer. our target audience could instantly recognise the genre by the music, captions, footage, clothing, make-up e.t.c. Also the dark lighting in the trailer reinforces the idea that it is a trailer of a horror genre. We had excellent comments for our film poster and how we used the lighting and shot angle, this told our group that no changes needed to be made to the trailer or film poster.We learnt that by including captions as it helped then gain an idea of the story with out giving to much away, also we had some slight negative feedback about the fonts on the cover of the film magazine, we've taken these comments into consideration and have changed the fonts to a better suited style for our audience members. Some of our feedback was about to music and acting, this was very important to us as this was a vital part in the horror trailer. without good acting the tariler would not look belivable and would not be taken seriously. They liked the music as it builds up and is not just the same paced throughout. This is what we learnt on our poll, that people like a buld up. Without our audience feedback from ou targt audience we woul not have been able to correct the mstakes to make everything better as a whole.


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

I used numerous websites such as YouTube to find horror film trailers to analyse.

By using YouTube it was easy to upload them to the website blogger using the embed code which i copied into a post, so the trailer i was analysing could be viewed by other people. It wasnt too hard for me to figure out how to work youtube as its not new to me, i have been using it for a couple of years now so i knew how to use it. To edit our footage we used premier pro, our group had no experience in using the software, although we had a lesson on how to use it I found it a difficult piece of software to use in the beginning, however after a few lessons editing i began to learn how to use it and eventually my skills using the programme developed well. Similar to my AS coursework I used Adobe photo shop to create the poster and magazine cover, as i had previously used this, it was easy to pick up how to use the software again. I also used google to search images to analyse, it was very useful to have google and also the apple wedsiteto find film posters and further my knowledge in the horror genre. We also used equiptment to create out trailer, such as a tripod, video camera and lighting equipment which were provided my the school. It was pretty simple on how to work the equiptment by we did have a lesson on how to use it, once we had the lesson and played around with the tripod and camera we were confident on how to work it and what angles were best for our trailer. Before we edited the footage we filmed we had to upload it onto the mac computer, this was simple and easy to workout. All of the planning our group did has been logged on blogger.com, rather than using folders all of my coursework is put online, this is useful as if a mistake is made it can be changed quickly whereas if a piece of work is handwritten you have to write the whole thing again.We also had to use Adobe photoshop for the second time, this timeit was used to create our magazine cover and film poster. It wasnt hard to create these pro mo pictures as we used it last year and gained experience from that.