1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
After analysing and researching on the horror genre, i was able to understand the conventions used within the genre, helping me to create a film trailer, poster and magazine cover. By following the conventions of the genre of horror i feel it has allowed me to create a successful horror trailer. Our trailers music follows the conventions as it slowly builds up and then becomes faster paced heightening the tension of the storyline. This is typical of a horror trailer as the music connotes what is happening as you watch it, when the music becomes louder and faster, the audience knows that this is what the film has been building up to. The editing of our trailer also saw us sticking to the conventions, the trailer has slow editing to begin with fitting with the music, and when we wanted to speed up the editing, we made the music faster to make the audience tense and excited. This all builds up to the climax of the trailer with out giving to much away to the audience making them anxious to see what happens, which i found to be very typical of this genre. Like many horror trailers we have used captions and dialogue in our trailer, we feel that by having done this the audience can be guided to further understand the concept of our storyline and also see exclusive footage with the protagonists speaking. The magazine cover has one main image of from our film with the characters and locations used. Having analysed movie magazines it is very typical of them to use one main image as the background and it stands out of the cover and tells the audience that this is the next big film to see. This draws in the desired target audience and lets them know what film is exclusively featured in this particular issue. We have also included other interesting cover lines on the magazine cover we also achieves drawing in the target audience. Similar to our magazine, we used one large image for our promotional poster, i found this very typical of film posters. As the poster is there to advertise the film it seems obvious just to have the image of the film you our promoting and therefore becomes the main focus. The title of the film is at the top of the poster so the audience instantly know what film they are looking at, comments and the release date of the film are displayed at the bottom which is generally the main style of film posters. We have also used the same font for the film name on the poster as we have in the trailer, this gives our promotional package a house style and the audience will recognise it.
2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
We used the same text,colour and font size for the in the trailer the poster of the name of the film. We have also used a constant colour theme with all of texts on all three pieces of our promotional package, this is red, white and black. These colours are all related to the horror genre. We also featured footage from our trailer in the photos, all of these features help the audience to make links with the trailer and this is important as it will keep our trailer in their minds. Also by having similar feature on all the final 3 products it broadens our trailer to a wider audience as they will recognise these features.
3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?
After showing our film trailer, poster and magazine cover to our target audience, they gave our group some feedback with their opinion on what worked and what didn't. A vital element in creating a horror trailer is getting the genre across to the audience, we did not get questioned on the genre and 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. Many of our target audience members that we asked commented that they liked the shots used in our trailer as well as commenting on the good acting skills. It was vital that our characters were believable and that the male character (Jon) was obsessed with the female character (Grace) and this came across to our audience which we were please with. We were told that the music was good as it builds up rather than just the same pace throughout. 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. 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.
4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
After analysing and researching on the horror genre, i was able to understand the conventions used within the genre, helping me to create a film trailer, poster and magazine cover. By following the conventions of the genre of horror i feel it has allowed me to create a successful horror trailer. Our trailers music follows the conventions as it slowly builds up and then becomes faster paced heightening the tension of the storyline. This is typical of a horror trailer as the music connotes what is happening as you watch it, when the music becomes louder and faster, the audience knows that this is what the film has been building up to. The editing of our trailer also saw us sticking to the conventions, the trailer has slow editing to begin with fitting with the music, and when we wanted to speed up the editing, we made the music faster to make the audience tense and excited. This all builds up to the climax of the trailer with out giving to much away to the audience making them anxious to see what happens, which i found to be very typical of this genre. Like many horror trailers we have used captions and dialogue in our trailer, we feel that by having done this the audience can be guided to further understand the concept of our storyline and also see exclusive footage with the protagonists speaking. The magazine cover has one main image of from our film with the characters and locations used. Having analysed movie magazines it is very typical of them to use one main image as the background and it stands out of the cover and tells the audience that this is the next big film to see. This draws in the desired target audience and lets them know what film is exclusively featured in this particular issue. We have also included other interesting cover lines on the magazine cover we also achieves drawing in the target audience. Similar to our magazine, we used one large image for our promotional poster, i found this very typical of film posters. As the poster is there to advertise the film it seems obvious just to have the image of the film you our promoting and therefore becomes the main focus. The title of the film is at the top of the poster so the audience instantly know what film they are looking at, comments and the release date of the film are displayed at the bottom which is generally the main style of film posters. We have also used the same font for the film name on the poster as we have in the trailer, this gives our promotional package a house style and the audience will recognise it.
2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
We used the same text,colour and font size for the in the trailer the poster of the name of the film. We have also used a constant colour theme with all of texts on all three pieces of our promotional package, this is red, white and black. These colours are all related to the horror genre. We also featured footage from our trailer in the photos, all of these features help the audience to make links with the trailer and this is important as it will keep our trailer in their minds. Also by having similar feature on all the final 3 products it broadens our trailer to a wider audience as they will recognise these features.
3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?
After showing our film trailer, poster and magazine cover to our target audience, they gave our group some feedback with their opinion on what worked and what didn't. A vital element in creating a horror trailer is getting the genre across to the audience, we did not get questioned on the genre and 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. Many of our target audience members that we asked commented that they liked the shots used in our trailer as well as commenting on the good acting skills. It was vital that our characters were believable and that the male character (Jon) was obsessed with the female character (Grace) and this came across to our audience which we were please with. We were told that the music was good as it builds up rather than just the same pace throughout. 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. 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.
4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
I have used various media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation fr my A2 coursework. For my research and planning I used numerous websites such as YouTube to find harrow film trailers to analyse. By using YouTube it was easy to upload them to the website blogger (other media technology) using the embed code which i copied into a post, so the trailer i was analysing could be viewed by other people. By analysing current horror trailers it gave me an idea of the typical conventions used. I have used YouTube previously and so it was very easy to use and helpful to add our final horror trailer onto my blog. I also used the apple website to find current film posters which i could analyse and again further my knowledge in the horror genre for film posters, which was very helpful when planning our film poster. I used Google to find images of film Magazine posters which was similar to the apple site, where i gained knowledge of the genre. Both these sites were very easy to use as i have used them many times before.
For the construction of our film trailer our group used a tripod, video camera and lighting equipment which were provided my the school. We had a lesson on how to use the equipment to the best of its ability, our group were fairly experienced with the camera and once we had a play the tri pods we knew what angles we could produce from it. We also used mac computers to edit our footage once we had uploaded it. We used our our cameras to take the pro mo pictures for the poster and magazine cover, as we knew how to use the camera this was fairly straight forward. 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. 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. Also it fits in with media as the Internet is the future.
