Evaluation

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

Trailer

We chose the genre of horror when deciding what we were going to film for our trailer. We thought about all of the different conventions of a horror film and then included that in our trailer. There are many different aspects to the conventions of horror films, such as the setting, characters, technical codes and iconography.

Setting:

Horror films are usually set in a secluded place, where help or safety would be difficult to reach. It is usually in a dark and run down area, that suggests danger or the feeling of being alone. Depending on the film, the setting of some horrors would be a place with a history, partially relevant to the film such as a prison, abandoned house, mental asylum or woods. Some of the best horror films have very memorable settings, for example:

House of Wax – is set in a stranded, run down ghost town with only a gloomy wax museum there. It is surrounded by woods and no one lives nearby. The setting has a lot of relevance to the film as the wax museum is where the majority of the film is based and what the whole film revolves around.

Amityville Horror – is set in a house, the Amityville house that was the site of a horrific murder a year before. This setting also is important in this film as the story line is based on the horrors that happened in the house the year before and how it is now haunting the new residents in the house.

Paranormal Activity – is also set in a house. The house is relevant to the film as it follows the life of members of the family who are being haunted and followed by what they think is a spirit. Cameras are set up around the house, and near enough all of the film is filmed on a home video camera inside the house.

We took these aspects from the different settings conventions of normal horror films and portrayed these in our trailer. We set our trailer in a wood, which is a secluded area, away from more public areas and help if it was needed. We chose this location as it represents horror, and also because setting it in woods would make using a home video camera to film with more realistic and this is how we wanted to film it all. We also chose the woods as we were trying to roughly base it on The Blair Witch Project’s story line, which is also set in woods. This film is a very popular, well known horror film, so we thought that if we could try to portray a similar theme in our trailer, it would be more effective as horror.

Characters:

In every horror film, there are always clear distinctions between the different roles of the characters. In a typical horror film there is:

- The main protagonist, who is often portrayed as the victim or hero throughout, or at the end of the film. These are usually always the ones who survive or end up killing the villain and are normally attractive and build a strong relationship with the audience. For example the two characters that play Carly Jones and Nick Jones in House of Wax both survive and end up killing the murderer.

- The villain/monster/killer etc., who is normally dressed in clothing/make up to clearly show the status of this character and the danger of their role. They are usually male and commit a series of murders/crimes throughout the film. They sometimes will be masked to hide their identity, like the villains in Saw, Friday the 13^th and Scream.

- There sometimes is a character who is thought to be good, such as a police officer, helper, younger person who is seen as more innocent, girlfriend or boyfriend or family member, who in the end turns out to be evil or the cause of the events that happen in the film. For example, Jill Roberts who is played by Emma Roberts in the horror film Scream 4 was portrayed as the victim throughout the film, however in the end the twist of the story line is that she is actually the killer. Twists like these are done at the end of films to add shock, tension and effect and make it less predictable.

Another film that uses this ‘twist factor’ is Orphan. In this film, a little girl is adopted by a new family and comes across as innocent and vulnerable due to her horrible background. At the end of the film, the little girl is uncovered as a murderer and her real life background is brought to the audience’s attention.

- There is also usually a naïve and immature character, usually a teenager or one of the youngest characters who always end up walking off on their own, isolating them from the others in the film, normally resulting in being killed or captured by the villain. For example, Lisa Hines who is played by Dana Davis in the film Prom Night, separates herself from her friends and wanders around a hotel alone looking for her boyfriend, and ends up being captured by the killer.

We took all of these into consideration and used some of these character conventions in our trailer. We included a killer who, although isn’t masked, they aren’t revealed and their face isn’t exposed. The only time you see the killer is right at the end of the trailer and even then it is in the dark and he is hidden behind a tree. We did this to try and build up the suspense throughout the trailer. We used a male to play the killer as using a male will add more danger as they are perceived as being stronger and tougher. We have also included a naïve teenager who ends up separating herself from the group of friends and wanders the woods alone. She does this out of bravery which is how the other naïve characters in horror films do, but she ends up being found at the end by the killer. We used a female to act out this character role as being a woman will make her seem more vulnerable and less able to escape the murderer. We have also included two other friends in the trailer, as in horror films a group of teenage friends are usually the characters used. One of the friends in the woods is male, and comes across as quite relaxed about the situation and doesn’t fuss over Sophia too much when she walks away. There is usually a character like this in horror films, however they usually end up dead too due to their attempt of bravery. Lastly we included another girl in the trailer. She is the typical scared and frightened one who questions the motives of the others in the group. This character normally ends up surviving usual horror films as she is cleverer and thinks about what she is doing more than the others.

Technical codes:

Camera shots are very important in horror films. Many point of view shots are used as the audience will constantly want to see what can be seen from the characters pov. These shots are used both from the villain’s eyes and the victim’s, as both sides of the story are as important as the other. High and low angle shots are important in horror films as they can represent fear. A high angle shot of someone will represent the status of the character looking down on them, and the fear of the person who is being looked down on. If a character is down on the floor or on their knees etc. it shows the weakness of that character, making them an easy target for the villain. Close ups on particular characters will show what role they play in the film. A close up of a killer or villain will add shock and horror to the film. Alternatively, a close up of the victim, whilst the villain is out of the shot, will add suspense and tension and will create a sense of fear as the audience cannot see what is going on, but knows it is something bad. The soundtrack and music used is just as important as the image on the screen as the music creates tension and fear. If the music has a high tempo, the audience will know that something is about to happen or something is about to jump out, or if the music becomes slow and eerie, it suggests to the audience that someone is hiding or trying to be quiet for a reason, also adding suspense. The lighting in our trailer is quite dark. Some of the shots we have included can be quite hard to make out what is in the picture but we thought that added to the scariness of the trailer. Also, as we were filming it on a home video camera, the picture should come across more blurry and dark, which just adds to the realism of the film. When we were getting audience feedback on the trailer, people said they liked how some scenes were much darker as it makes it feel more like a horror film, and also because it was filmed in a wood at night it would be un realistic for there to be any artificial light just to make the picture clearer to see.

Here is where we added in the universal logo, after we had an image of a green screen. We included this to make the trailer look more realistic and like it had been created by one of the most well known film institution. We also put a zoom on it as this is what we had seen other film trailers do, again just to make it look more realistic.

Here we included some text in between some of the clips in our trailer. We used text several times to explain the story line a bit more to the audience. As we were basing our trailer on The Blair Witch Project's trailer, we looked closely at things they had included and saw that the broke up some clips in the trailer with text. We kept our text plain block white on a black background, like in theirs, and had eerie music playing as the text appeared on the screen. We also looked at the trailer for 127 Hours, and looked at what text font they had used. We saw that they had used a bolder font for the bottom line of the text, and we thought this looked effective nad made the text stand out more, therefore making it seem important to read.

Film Magazine

When creating our film magazine we tried to make it look as realistic and similiar to a real film magazine as possible. We looked at many other film magazines in shops, on the internet and in college to put together a simple but effective layout for our cover. This Star Trek magazine is one of the magazines we based ours on. We placed our image behind all of the text, yet still made sure all of the face of the image could be seen. We also kept our text bold and block colours. Our masthead is along the top, with 'agazine' written within the 'M' of 'FILM' as we thought this similar idea looked good in this 'Total Film' magazine. We also included some red text along the top of our magazine cover, like in this magazine, to promote our trailer and also promote offers within our magazine. We made sure our text was a different colour to the colour of the masthead to make sure that they both stood out against eachother. We also noticed that many magazines included a coloured circle on the page, promoting something inside the magazine, so we took this idea and adapted it to our magazine. We used all of these features similarly to make our magazine look more professional and realistic.
From researching other magazines, we saw that many of the images used were of just the main character in a film, and it was usually just a close up of their face and some are not even in costume. We did this for our image, as we wanted to keep the focus on Sophia. We kept her in casual clothes, like in the trailer, and put some make up on her to link the image to the story line in the trailer.

Film Poster

Our film poster was the one product that we changed and edited the most in order to make sure that we had the most effective image and layout possible. We changed the poster from portrait to landscape as the image that we took for the poster looked too stretched out if we tried to fit it into a portrait layout. We used this image mainly because of the positioning of her arms and head once on the page. Her hand coming out towards the front of the poster gives the impression that she is being dragged backwards, and is the most eye catching piece of the image. We changed the colour and contrast of the image to make it black and white and have a sharper look to it. We wanted to keep the whole poster black and white, so that when we edited the blood on her head to make that red, it would stand out more as it would be the only colour on the page. We thought this would be an effectve thing to do after researching other film posters and looking at the poster for The Dark Night. In this poster, the image is in a dark black/navy colour and the back ground is plain grey. However the writing 'why so serious?' is written in red blood. Therefore the writing in the image is what the audience's attention is drawn to. The colour being blood red also makes the audience think of gore and horror, as as our poster is trying to portray a horror film we thought this would be an effective colour to use. We used the same text for the font of the text 'The Woods' as we did in the trailer, in order to link the two products together. This font also conveys woods and danger so we thought we should include this to make the audience think of horror when they saw it. We also included some film credits underneath the film title, as we saw that this is what most other film posters included. However we kept the credits in black in order to make them not stand out as much as the film title or the image as we felt they weren't as importand as other aspects on the poster.

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

How do your three products work together (consider the relationship between them)?

Our three products work together by using the same colour scheme throughout, similar fonts and the same main character on the front of the poster and magazine. On our magazine, we used the three colours, white, black and red. The image on the magazine was in colour, which was different to the poster, but we wanted to have a strong, classy image making the magazine look as realistic as possible. On the poster we also had white and black and font. The fonts where white with black outlines sticking to our colour scheme. The image we used for our poster we changed to black and white, making it look stronger and editing the contrast to make the image just that bit better. We tried to make the image dark, to work with our trailer which also dark, but were we edited the contrast, it made it slightly lighter, yet, still works together. On Photoshop we edited the blood on her head, allowing the red to show through, therefore showing how our three products work together. On our poster and trailer, we used the same font spelling out the title of our film, ‘The Woods’, we thought by adding it to both of these it continued to show how our three products went and worked together. We originally added it to the magazine to, but after reconsideration we realised that without putting it on the magazine, it still showed how our products worked together, and also looked better without it, and made it look more realistic.

How have you used codes and conventions to portray the genre in all three products?

The codes and conventions of our genre we believe are portrayed in all three of our products, the magazine being the least, as we believed it was the best way to keep it realistic. So instead of using a scary image to portray the codes and conventions we opted for a more strong image that we believed suited the magazine more. Although, in the image on the magazine, the main character had blood on her in the image, which portrays some of the codes of conventions because as an audience, people expect to see blood when it comes to horror genre. The conventions are also similar in our poster, we used the image with blood on her head, portraying the same conventions, which horror genre audiences expect and want to see. We also had the image of the main character looking as though she is being dragged away, but with the image cutting of her feet, leaving a mystery as too is dragging her away. Which we believe is part of the codes and conventions that horror genre involves mystery and blood. I believe that we also used codes and conventions to portray the genre in all three products, because in our trailer, we used many. We filmed in a woods, making our location the woods, which is an eerie, scary place automatically using a convention of horror. The lighting was very dark, creating the scary, tense atmosphere that already started to make it slightly thrilling. Adding another code and convention, and the way we tried to make the trailer build up without giving too much away, trying to create tension, which I believe is another code and convention we portrayed in our product. Therefore portraying the codes and conventions of our chosen genre in all three of products, slightly portraying them more in some products then others.

How is the film genre suggested in all three products?

Similar to the way we portrayed the codes and conventions of horror, we used bits of the genre horror that are target audiences expect to see, and put them in to all three of products, which we believe showed our genre. Our magazine could be confused for a thriller, as the image isn’t as scary as the trailer or the poster, the reason being we wanted to keep it realistic and not the same as the poster, therefore distquingishing the two. The poster suggested horror, because of the image and the eerie font, that we used in our trailer too, the image is of our main character being dragged away, and from the location in the image and the look on her face, instantly our poster suggests that its horror. The trailer, you can also instantly see that its horror, because straight away it suggests horror. The trailer starts off with home camera style recording and eerie, heartbeat music that straight away, sets the atmosphere and creates the tension. Throughout the trailer, the genre horror is suggested, from the lighting, the characters in it, the location and the way we chose to film a lot of it, in a home camera style, which is similar to ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Paranormal Activity’, both horrors and was our inspirations.

How have you represented the characters in all three products?

You only see all four characters in one of our products, which is the trailer, and for our other two products we chose to stick to just our main character, which we thought was best and looked better on our poster and magazine. One of characters we didn’t represent well, as you don’t really get to see them much in the trailer either, ‘Peter Simkin’ you only hear and see him a few times, this was because the best, tense and thrilling parts we recorded didn’t always feature him. But he was represented as just a teenager, with his friends trying to find out the mystery that was in the woods. He didn’t really mind whether he was there or not. ‘Nick Blackwell’ was represented as the mystery person, not quite finding out in the trailer whether he’s a murderer or just a kidnapper. But he’s represented as scary, thrilling, and horrifying as we see him at the end slightly hidden behind a tree. We chose to represent him this way to keep our genre horror thoroughly presented throughout. ‘Maddy Urban’ was represented as not wanting to be in the woods, she keeps questioning the reason why they are all there. But she won’t leave because she doesn’t want to seem like the scared one in the group, or be left out, but she’s terrified. ‘Sophia Wenzler’ the main character is presented as brave, outgoing, yet naive, stupid and childish as she wonders off into the woods on her own when she becomes stroppy. The main character is represented differently in all three products, in the trailer, she’s portrayed as stubborn, brave and then towards the end of trailer scared and then terrified. In the poster, she’s shown in an image, being dragged away, so you can just see the terror in her face as she’s showing one emotion. In our third product, the magazine, she is shown not acting, and posing for a proper photo, showing the non acting side of her.

How have you targeted the same audience? 

In all three of our products we aimed for the same audience, being the audience that most enjoys our chosen genre, horror. We used all the codes and conventions we could possibly use in all three products to target the horror audiences, and to show them what they would expect to see, but yet, not making it predictable. We also tried to keep the horror theme in all three of our products, constantly meeting and target the same audience. From our audience feedback questionnaire we made observations and decisions to change certain aspects of our products to directly target the same audience.

How have you created a theme between them all?

In all three of products we kept the same horror theme running throughout, by using the same character who starred in our trailer and on our poster , magazine, and we used the same fonts and colour schemes. The theme is exactly the same in our trailer and poster, as we created them the same way. Trying to use similar lighting, using the same font on our poster and at the end of the trailer representing our film. Also the horror theme is shown clearly in our trailer and poster, although the magazine is slightly different yet still has a clear theme similar to the other two products. The magazines image is different, the font is different, but the colours are the same and the main character is also on the front portraying the theme clearly. We chose to do this because we wanted to keep the magazine as realistic as possible and from audience feedback we decided this was the best way to do it.

3) What have you learnt from the audience feedback?

From our audience feedback we have learnt who our target audience are, how to make our trailer, poster and magazine front cover the best it can be. We took audience feedback on our trailer production, asking the audience what font looked better in the trailer, whether the music fitted the script, whether we could make it better by cutting out more or less and whether overall they like it. For our trailer, we did two types of different font, we used normal plain font and showed the audience, the feedback we received was that it was a bit plain and unrealistic and could be better. We researched into more teaser trailers and found a font in one of the trailers that we liked and adapted to our own trailer, the audience feedback was positive and received better reviews and more people liked it. As we filmed our film in the dark, we had problems with the lighting, making our trailer quite dark. We tried lightening it up, but from our audience feedback, we learnt that the majority of people preferred it dark and thought it was a convention of horror and worked with the theme and genre. We got audience feedback on the font at the end of trailer, when I’ll title appeared, the majority of people once again liked it and said it fitted in well. We kept this like it and also adapted it to our poster, showing how the three productions were linked.

For our poster, we sent the final image round and had people write down there opinions anomalously on a post it note. From this we learnt how to make the poster better. We got positive and negative feedback, giving us both good and bad criticism, which we used to edit the poster and make it look more realistic and fit to more of the audiences tastes.  First we had the credits in black, which from the audience feedback we learnt that it was hard to see, so we changed it to a more see through colour, which then the audience said was much easier to see. We also learnt that the red blood coming through on the main characters head on the poster was good and the audience liked it, as it stood out above the black and white background. The audience feedback also told us that the image we used was strong, and the black and white was a good choice making it stand out from some of the other posters around. We also learnt from the audience feedback that the font we used for our title, same as we used on our trailer was good and made it realistic as it made it stand out from the rest, and you could see straight away what film it was, also linking it to our trailer.

Our film magazine front cover also got positive and negative feedback, allowing us to edit and change our magazine, making it better and gain more positive feedback also meeting more peoples tastes.  From our audience feedback we learnt that our title was bold and clear and looked good. The red font around the magazine front cover was hard to read we learnt from the audience feedback. We tried changing around the font and text trying to make it easier to read, but because we was using a colour scheme, trying to keep all three of our products linked we couldn’t change it to much. We learnt that the magazine front cover image was strong, but the blood could have been brighter, but from other feedback too we learnt that it also looked very strong the way it was as it was a magazine front cover and wasn’t a poster image. So we decided to keep it the same. We also learnt that layout looked professional ad had aspects of a real magazine in, but also kept different so it wasn’t copied. The audience feedback also told us that the light on the magazine front cover was to bright for our horror genre, but other feedback said that were it looked slightly artificial, it looked realistic as magazine front covers are generally posed. We didn’t want the light dark, as the poster and trailer are dark and we wanted the magazine front cover to be different, but at the same time, still showing the link between all three products.

Overall, we gained mixed feedback on our products and tried to edit them to the audience’s tastes and to the best we could. We couldn’t edit them to everyone’s tastes so we chose different parts to change and kept some things the same.  From gaining audience feedback it helped us get other people’s opinions and perspectives and allow us to make the best three products we could. We learnt that not everybody was going to like our three products, but from the audience questionnaire and feedback, we tried to create and edit them to aim and exactly meet the expectations of our target audience. Which we believed from all the audience feedback, we managed to do, to the best of our ability.

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

For our teaser trailer, we got the idea of filming in a home camera style from watching different media’s. We watched ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and had seen ‘Paranormal Activity’ both filmed in home camera style. This was the construction part, where we came up with the idea using new media’s. We then started filming with the video camera, using it to film our trailer, using a variety of shots, panning and tracking, and point of view shots. We used very little media technologies to actually film our trailer, as it was home camera style, and using new media technologies would have taken this affect away from it. We used a tripod to film the parts where our main character past, to catch panning shots. We also used the tripod film still shots, were we tried to keep the camera steady, to give a professional shot, showing that the whole film wasn’t going to be in home camera, making it more exciting and watchable. Also making it more realistic and believable as it feels like the footage we are showing is real.                                                                                                                                

For our research we used new media technologies, the most important one being the internet. As we researched and analysed our teaser trailers, magazine front covers and posters. We used the internet to give us idea’s and inspiration for our trailer, poster and magazine front cover, but doing more research into making them different to everybody elses. We used questionnaires as a form of new media, as this is one of the most productive forms of finding out audience feedback, from this we learnt who our target audience was, and who we was aiming it at. We also used find your tribe, a new media technology, but this didn’t help us much.

For our planning we also used a range of new media technologies, we created a diary as such, so we could write down when all the actors were needed to film, to help us with the organistation of actors, we chose to do a diary, because this was a different way of organising things and made things different, but yet still easy to understand and worked best for us. We also used a camera, to take pictures of the location, and the location we were planning on using. We did this to present the research and planning we did and to show the places we thought about filming. We used a storyboard as a new media technology, we used a storyboard to plan out everything scene by scene to start showing what was going to happen when, so we had written justification. This helped us get organised so we knew what to film where and when. So we had step by step outline of what was going to happen in our trailer. We made a few drafts of our storyboard as throughout the filming, we slightly changed scenes and reordered things during the editing stage, so we kept an up to date storyboard so we always had it written down.  We also made a shot list as a new media technology, we used this to show what camera angles we used, how long the shots were, the shot distance, movement of the shot, the subject and the location. We did this so once again we were organised and had everything that was happening in our trailer on paper, showing exactly what was happening. We also made a shooting script, which can be seen as new media technology, as this we kept redrafting as we was filming, the actors said different lines to what we had originally scripted. We also kept redrafting the layout of the script, to make it look more like script and to lay it out correctly. We also used sound, we researched sound tracks and looked through many to try and find the best sound track that fitted perfectly in to our script, trailer and genre. This was hard, because as it’s a new media technology, some of the files the sounds were saved in were incompatible with some of the computers and couldn’t be opened, making It difficult and limited us to a certain file type. We also used a variety of software’s also, also using new media technologies. We used Photoshop to edit our poster, we used premier pro to edit our trailer and create the best trailer we could. We also used the common software’s, publisher, to create our magazine and poster, paint to edit and upload certain things into our trailer and also PowerPoint.

For our evaluation we generally just used the new media technologies we had already used, and the pictures we had already used to add into our evaluation. The new photos we added we got off the internet as they were already photos other people had created. We used a variety of new media technologies through the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages, using media’s that we have never used before, media’s that we use regularly, and medias that we never thought could be classed as a media technology. But all the new media technologies we used, we believe helped us to create the best three products we could.