Evaluation

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

Our media trailer follows many of the forms and conventions of real superhero trailers. We have included a production logo at the beginning of the trailer, which is usual in most movie trailers. We also started with an establishing panning shot which we found a very common feature in most of the trailers that we analysed. The audio that we used started off at a slow pace to begin to introduce the film, and then as the action got more intense so did the music. This accompanied the action in the trailer, as the narrative started off slower, but then as soon as she discovers her superpowers it gets faster, and the shots get shorter and the transitions become sharper. However, we used a narration to help retell our story, which was less common in superhero movies, such as Spiderman 4. In fact, when a narration is used it was normally obvious that it was the protagonist who was narrating it (such as in kick ass), however in ours it is a completely platonic character. We also don't include any dialogue in our trailer, as we felt that this was not necessary. Following the conventions of many movie trailers we used fades as the main transitions throughout our trailer, as we felt this helped to pace the story.

Teaser trailers are often described as being short, with only a small number of clips to tell the story. We stuck to this description well with our trailer, as it is a few clips that portray the necessary information to understand the storyline, whilst also showing off the highlights of action in the movie. However, we have not made our teaser trailer short. With our teaser trailer being of a massive 2:30 we challenged this common convention, because we felt it was impossible to contain all of the other forms and conventions that were required in a superhero trailer in the amount of time given.

We also challenged the forms of normal trailers by giving ours a feministic touch. In all of the other superhero films we looked at showed the main protagonist character as a male, and the helper, was female. However, because front he beginning we decided we wanted to put our feministic opinions across, we decided to make the main superhero female.

True to the conventions of normal superhero trailers, we used some special effects in our trailer, for example the invisibility cloak. We were going to contain an explosion as there was one in one of the trailers that we studied.

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

Our ancillary texts and main product would be seen together to create a professional promotion for our movie. Hopefully the combination of all of our products would create a range of positive promotional material, which would appeal to our target audience to watch our movie.

We anticipate that our movie poster would be seen on billboards around big cities, which would hopefully draw people in to explore our movie more. It could also be seen outside cinemas in which it would be played after the release date. We wanted to make our poster and film magazine very different, so as to create a wider range of promotional material. Because of this, and also due to our product research, we decided not to include a picture of the superhero in our poster. We decided that the best way to link our poster to our film without the main character on it would be by the use of the logo. This links in to common conventions of superhero movies, as they always have a logo which can easily be associated with the character. In the film magazine cover, we used a picture of the main character which was adjusted slightly to link in with the style of the magazine, with a black outline around the image. We included a freebie which linked in to the movie subject, which was a free mask.

Both of our ancillary tasks linked together by using the same colour scheme, which is mainly primary colours. We looked at other superhero film merchandise and discovered that most of the colours used were very eye-catching and would mean that when the audience look at it, they would link the colours and recognise them in the future as being part of the specific film. For example, we used all of the primary colours in our merchandise. This means in the future, hopefully people will see some of the primary colours and it will immediately remind them of our movie. The colours that we choose represent the simpler storyline and issues which are shown in our trailer. The genre of our movie can be seen semiotically through the signs of the superhero costume, which clearly represents the genre of our movie. Also, the continuum of the semiotics throughout all of our tasks easy relates all of the products together to gain audience interest. We want the audience to be able to see through the semiotics of reading signs and linking colours together that connote to superhero films. There is a message of light heartedness and humour which runs through all of our products which helps us to denote the target audience.


I would also hope that to gain some business from our target audience we could be advertised by certain companies to promote our film, using both our ancillary and main tasks. It is completely necessary that we use social media to promote our film, as the demographics we are targeting are the main users of the online social media. For example, video adverts are becoming more and more popular in the UK, with around 66% of the British population watching a video advert in the course of the month. One of the best sites to get a video advert on to in terms of promotion would be YouTube. YouTube is the third most popular website in the UK, (behind Google and Facebook) and dominates 70% of the video adverts watched online. We could of course also move to more traditional methods and promote the film using flyers, film festivals, and screening the film at cinemas. We would have to gain a partnership with a film production group, so that we could get some support and get our film shown to the masses in the cinema.

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

Throughout all stages of our production we used a wide range of media technologies, which helped to develop our production skills. During the research and planning process we used Internet search engines such as 'Google' to find out relevant information that we could use to aid our decision making. We also watched trailers on 'YouTube', which allowed us to not only watch and study industry based production trailers, but also other students work from up and down the country to analyse. We were able to use embedding to fix these videos on to our blog in an easy to watch format. We also embedded songs for our choice of soundtrack for the audience to interact with giving the option to listen to, from SoundCloud and GrooveShark. Throughout the whole construction, research, planning and evaluation we used this website, Blogger, to display our thought process in easy to post blog posts. This website also gave us the chance to join a central hub along with all of our class mates and also our teacher, which gave us the option to interact with each other. This meant that our teacher could post updates on what criteria we needed to be meeting by certain times, and also so that she could comment on individual posts and tell us of anything we could do to improve. We used other Internet based websites such as slideshare, which allows us to transfer Powerpoints from Microsoft PowerPoint straight in to embedding them on our blog. My favourite tool during our research, and probably the most useful is an online tool which allows us to send out surveys, and interpret the response is Survey Monkey. We used the school email service to send the survey out to our target audience in our school.


To do the filming we used my Canon PowerShot camera, which is HD ready. We were pleased with this camera because the quality is very high, which meant that we wouldn't have any 'fuzziness' in the videos. It also recorded sound in HD, but we decided due to our research that we wouldn't include any diejectic sound or speech, but only a soundtrack and narration. It was also very handy for both of us as we didn't need to arrange with our students to borrow the cameras which were lent our at school. The only exception to using this camera was with the rope swing shots which we shot on a HD Nokia 96 camera as we were unable to take my camera on all the activities. To achieve the straight filming we used a tripod to do all of the filming, and where we were filming in any uneven surfaces we created a platform to rest the camera on. Because we are limited living on an island to the type of scenery we can shoot it was very lucky that I have a car we were able to use. This meant that we didn't have to rely on any public transport which would of limited the time available to shoot. To do any effects on our trailer we used After Effects. Due to us not having the funds available to buy this software, we had to download the trial version, and wait for it to be installed on the school computers. When we started off using this software, we had no idea what we were doing, and there wasn't anybody at school who could train us, so we had to teach ourselves. We had some help in this by the online guru Andrew Kramer, who posts videos on tips and tricks for After Effects. Learning to work After Effects helped to expand our creativity and also decide how to move forward our story. To put our first draft together we used Windows Movie Maker, but we decided this didn't really achieve the professional effect we were looking for. Halfway through our production process I purchased a MacBook Pro which allowed us to use iMovie to construct our trailer. This helped us to create smooth transitions between all of the shots in our trailer and make the story run a whole lot easier, whilst looking more professional than the previous draft. To make our ancillary tasks we used Adobe Photoshop, which both of us are used to working in due to also taking Photography A Level. This program is once again industry standard which allowed us to create expert results in a short amount of time. The ability to work in layers meant that we could easily edit anything once we had finished with. For our soundtrack we used iTunes to collect ideas of different songs that might possibly work with sections of our trailer. This also meant we could play the song alongside the specific section of the trailer to see if it worked like we anticipated. To merge all of our songs together in to one soundtrack we used a MacBook program called GarageBand. This program allows you to professionally join two songs using different transitions such as fade, or slice. We found this program very difficult because once again neither of us are used to working with it, but we managed to overcome this by teaching ourselves to do anything that we required.

 

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback was the route to success for our media trailer. Right from the beginning we both agreed that we would base the majority of our decisions on any feedback that we had received from our target audience. We started our audience feedback by sending out a survey to our target audience of both genders from the ages of 13-19 who are all in full time education. We used survey monkey to do this and based the genre and idea of our film on these results. Since both of us have an avid interest in superhero and action films we had an idea that this was the genre of film we wanted to create but we wanted to make sure it would be a hit with our audience. When the results came back to say that a higher percentage of our target audience would be interested in a superhero movie we were very happy, as this meant we could continue with this theme. We also chose the powers for both the protagonist and the antagonist by this means, although you never actually see the power of the villain. We put all of our results in tables and graphs which allowed us to read the results easier and make more feedback based decisions.


As we processed along the path of creating our trailer we showed our drafts to our focus group. We selected the focus group of our peers at school from different backgrounds but all in our target audience to give us a varied response to all of our productions. We formed a good relationship with everyone which we felt important as it meant that they could tell the honest truth to us and not have any inhibitions. Their feedback was increasingly influential towards the decisions that we made and they helped to make our production more successful.

By aiming our production at teenagers gave us the benefit because we are both currently teenagers at the age of 18, and we have experienced all of the ages below, so we know what children of that age are looking for. Also, it meant that we could play around with the prices of our ancillary task magazine, because school students have the highest disposable income. This is due to many of them having part time jobs but not needing to spend the money on any rent or essentials as these are still bought for them by their parents.