Evaluation Part 4

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

We the project by creating our blogger sites which we used throughout to store our work, research, planning and anything else to do with the project on. Blogger is very useful and easy to use. Best of all as its online it can be accessed form anywhere so i can work on it at home and in school which makes life easy. It is simple to add both images and videos onto blogger along with text and arrange their sizes and positions so it looks good. There is also a way to follow other peoples blogs so you could see what they had done and be alerted to any updates they have made to their blogs. This made it easy to check when our teacher put new information on the blog and easy to follow my partners blog and see what updates i was making or vice versa. At the start of the project we also began making podcasts each week; recording what we had done that week and then puttin it onto the blog. This did not last long however, as we gave up on them after 3 weeks because too much time was wasted getting a good podcast done. To record these podcasts we used one of our phones which had a good quality sound recorder and had bluetooth making it very simple to load onto the mac and blogger.





When researching and evaluating our production we used both camcorder and camera to save shots which we could use on our blog as cast, props and location images. We also used certain stills from our trailer for our poster and frontcover.



In the actual construction stages we used two different programs to edit and refine our trailer to the best of our abilities. We started off loading our footage onto iMovie which we were both experienced with through our AS work last year. We used this program to do the simple editing and selecting the shots we wanted to use but that was about it. After that we put what we had done onto Final Cut Express 4 (this was easy to do) which had alot more controls and ways to enhance and improve our trailer it was however more complicated to use. We did a short morning course on final cut basics at the bradford film festival and we also recieved help from our media technician john. We added the music we intended to use in the trailer onto final cut and found it extremely good to work with once we new what we were doing. For example we found a way to low the volume of the music at certain parts which was useful as then you could let the audience hear things in the background or not depending on the circumstance. This was very easy to do.





Below is a video showing us working on some of the various software we used through our A2 production.

Evaluation Part 3

What have we learned from our audience feedback?

We have been told that we have got some good shots so far in our film. We had a shot in which we do a panning shot at the bottom of a surrounding cliff in which it ends with a quick cut to a puddle of water, but from the feedback our media teacher gave us we found that if we zoomed into the cliff face at the end of the shot then zoom out of the puddle it would look better. We also learnt that our shots were slightly too long and we would need to edit them to make the trailer more effective. Another issue we had to address was the lighting. i went up to the moors to test out the different types of lighting we would need to film at night. first of all we found that the moonlight was nowhere near enough because you couldn't see even a few feet in-front of you. the second lighting we tested was a torch, we found that the torch light focuses to brightly on one spot and so we couldn't use it.

As we have decided to switch to doing a trailer quite later on, we are no longer using most of the footage we took for the short film so the first paragraph is no longer relevant. I thought i would leave it in anyway as it may be worth some marks.

Some critical feedback we have recieved from our teacher is the addition of a voice over to the trailer, we intend to get this done this week commencing (monday the 26th). Some positive feedback we have recieved from our peers is how well we have intercut various scenes, we were pleased to hear this as some of the inter cutting were done as changes towards the end of the creation of the trailer.

Below is a video from a couple of our peers giving us some audience feedback for our trailer on camera.



In answer to the specific feedback mentioned by Toby and Theo in the video, some of the things they mentioned we were unable to do better. For example we could not afford to hire an expert to do the voice over for the trailer so I had to do it my self. As well as this we attempted a couple of other methods for the final scene with the knife slashing down but the results were not very good so we decided to go for the one in the trailer. If we had more resources or financial backing then we could have spent more to try and get a more a realistic noise for the knife slash at the end. Finally, about Theo's comments on the audio, we were restricted through copyright laws so we struggled to find acceptable music we could use and although we thought about making our own we did not think it would be very good.

There was also some positive feedback in the video about a couple of things like the grey scaling effect we used at the start and our peers also picked out how we had related our trailer to some codes and conventions we had seen in other horror films with them specifically mentioning Halloween and Dead Man's Shoes which were two films that we did look at.

Evaluation Part 2

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

I feel that the combination of my two ancillary texts ( A Poster and A Front Cover) are very effective in terms of marketing our film. The target audience is 15 - 30 years old male horror fans.

Poster


This is my poster and I feel it is effective in what it's ment to do. It will catch the attention of passers by with the powerful looking silouetted figures standing out in the centre of the poster. The way the figures are siloutted denotes that there is a hidden meaning and creates a form of narative enigma in a picture.

At the top of the poster i have put reviews from "The Sun" and "Empire" The Sun frequently does reviews for new films which I why I chose it, and Empire is a prominent, well known film magazine so I decided to it for my second review.

Underneath the review is the Title of our film "A Dark History" which I put in a very large and slightly sans-serif font commonly used in horror films. I did this to make it stand out so people would recognise that its the name of the film. Underneath that is my tagline "Sometimes the past won't stay buried" This is in the same style of font as the main title and connotes that something comes back from the past in the film, it is ment to intrigue people and make them want to find out what come back from the past.

At the bottom of the page I put all the common codes and convention i have seen in my poster research such as the billing block with the font being larger for the names and smaller for the jobs my production logo and web address and its release date. You can access my poster research from this link http://snowden-alexa2.blogspot.com/2009/10/teaser-posters.html One thing which i didn't see on all the poster i looked at but decided to add anyway was the rating for the film as i thought it was useful to include it.


Magazine Front Cover


This is my magazine front cover, We decided to name our magazine "End Credits" as from our research most film magazines seemed to have some relation to films e.g. Total Film. Some common conventions of film magazines I saw and used in our own magazine included having the main picture infront of the name of the magazine obscuring some of the letters, a tagline explaining the focus of the magazine, the issue number, bar code and price tag. I included all of these things in our Front Cover.

One area where we developed or slightly changed the common convention is in our main picture of the dark figure. In most magazines the face of one of the characters is seen but in our the whole person is blacked out which instead. I felt this looked good and created a sense of suspense as to who the masked person will be in the film.

Alot of the text I used on the front cover is in red connoting blood and gore giving people an idea of what sort of film genre the magazine focuses on. This is reinforced by the tag line under the title "Your guide to the UK horror underground"

I think overall the front cover is really effective as a promotional product for our film. This link below takes you to my research into magazine front covers.

Link to Front Cover Research


Below is a short video in which Ben and I talk through how the combination of our main product and ancillary texts work and how effective it is.

Evaluation Part 1

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

Our media product although not fully finished is intended to develop forms and conventions of real media products. We will be sticking to things which we have learnt from our research into the horror genre. Typically in horror film trailers the soundtrack either starts off slowly with long drawn out sounds, to slowly build up to the action, or it immediately comes into action with a impacting sounds to grab the audiences attention straight away. We have not completed a soundtrack yet but we are going to use one of the two types.

The influential film we looked at was Dead Man's Shoes and we intend to use and develop the codes and conventions we saw in the film. The Killer in the film who strangely could be described as the protagonist rather than the antagonist as he has a could reason to kill the men he kills and they seem to be nasty people anyway wears a gas mask when killing. This looks both scary and strange creating something of a narative enigma. We will adapt this in our trailer so the killer has a similar sort of mask covering his face which looks both scary and creates a narative enigma as to who the killer is. Unlike in Dead Man's Shoes we will not openly reveal the killer like they do through the film so as to get our audience guessing as to who the killer is. We also looked at Halloween and we have decided to use a similar weapon as to which is used in Halloween a large kitchen knife. This is quite a common convention in horror/slasher films, in a few we have watched a large knife of some kind is used for at least some of the killings. The link below will take you to our cast and props post where you can see the mask/hoody the killer will wear and the knife he will use for the killings. http://snowden-alexa2.blogspot.com/2010/02/mise-en-scene-props-and-casting.html

One area in which we will challenging forms and conventions of real media products is the cast. It is a common occurence in horror and slasher films to include a final girl who outlasts all the other victims of the killer and survives it is also common to have some of the victims as dumb blondes who are busty, sexually active die fast. We were unable to get any girls to act in our film as they had busy schedules so we had to choose not to include them. Although this challenges common codes seen in most horror films there are a few which don't follow the code such as Dead Man's Shoes. We understand that without having any attractive blondes in our film we may reduce the audience intrested in it as alot of male teenagers may not think the film is or will be good if it doesn't have scenes of a sexual nature.

Ancillary Text 2 (Front Cover) Final

Ancillary Text 2 (Front Cover) Research and Ideas

The Front Cover above was our initial front cover, but after feedback on it from both students and our teacher we decided to scrap this version and start afresh as their were so many things wrong with it. We had got a vital piece of our research wrong in that one of the posters we looked at we mistook the background to be block colour but in fact it was the sky and the ground. Also the red circle didn't look very good and the colours were a bit bland.

This next poster (above) was our second attempt and when we got feedback this time we had a lot more positive responses all round, however, there were still a few things pointed out especially by another group in our class who had had to make a few changes to their own poster. From their feedback we decided to make a few more changes to our poster. The main thing they said was that we needed to include some more pictures. So we set about making these changes to create our final front cover which you can access via the link below. http://snowden-alexa2.blogspot.com/2010/03/ancillary-text-2-front-cover-final.html

 

Ancillary Text 1 (Poster) Final