In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
As a group we have aimed to show the conventional stereotypes throughout our film trailer, this was so that our audience are able to identify it as a horror/ thriller straight away. We have also used tense music and build ups to add sudden and prolonged sections to keep the person watching interested in going to see the film. Another way we tried to keep our audience interested was by not revealing what actually happens to the girls and who the killer actually is and why he is doing it.
Another convention we spotted whilst analysing the trailers we chose was that the victims are mostly always girls or females of some sort. This may be because stereotypically girls are seen as weaker and now able to defend their selves as well as males can. We showed the two kidnappings in different ways. The first girl being aware of what she was doing but she was unaware of who or what was in her house and as the second girl was on her mobile phone whilst walking through the car park she was unaware of her surroundings at the time as her concentration was on something else which makes her more vulnerable.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I think that both of the ancillary tasks link in well with the film trailer as the film poster is a photo of the kidnapper wearing his mask so that his identity is still a secret which will add to the suspense of our film trailer to make our audience want to go a see the film. With using the photo we did for our poster it’s very effective as the editing adds an atmospheric frame around the kidnapper. We also chose to use a dark background as from our research this was done quite often for example on the ‘The Last House on the Left’ film poster the background is black and this is the same for ‘The Woman in Black’ film poster. This could be used quite often as light colours are used in the foreground and with a dark background they stand out more which makes it more eye-catching. At first we were going to use a photo that we took whilst we were filming back after receiving feedback about this we changed the layout and the photo. After doing this I think the poster is a lot more effective and is a better representation of what the film/ film trailer will be like.
After looking at and thoroughly analysing the font covers of magazines such as Entertainment, Total Film and Empire we found quite a few conventions that are followed similarly to the film trailer and poster researcher. Some of these were; a big bold short and snappy title, only using 2-3 colours, a posed photo of the main character in that particular film, the sub-heading is mostly always the film title and the photo used is centred with the smaller sub-heading creating a boarder around it. This is to create a focus point.
Overall I think that the trailer and ancillary tasks all follow some of the set conventions but they also challenge them, they also all have the man in the mask in common so the all have that link so people cam relate to that person our film, Concealed.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our audience feedback has been a great help in the development of our ideas and our trailer overall. At first we had the idea of three girls being kidnapped. The first girl would be kidnapped whilst going for a jog at dusk, which was quite hard to film to make it seem like a horror/ thriller film. As expected the feedback we received from this was that it didn’t build up enough tension. SO form this we tried to change the girls’ location to a park sitting on a swing at night time. This setting seemed to be a bit eerier but our audience feedback was that it dragged on a bit too much. From this we decided to just use two girls to make the footage snappier so that it would entice the viewer to find out more. Our teacher then came up with an idea of building a relation between the detectives and the kidnapper through a phone call and a specific saying. We filmed this and added it to our trailer to show that there’s an investigation to find out who this person actually is.
Our original ideas of the girl being kidnapped in her own home and from walking through a car park were liked by peers in our school year so we decided to keep these two situations and film more shots to add to the overall suspense of these situations.
Whilst in the editing stage of creating our trailer other teacher suggested not using a mask to show the bad guy. So we asked our classmates and other people around our age what they thought of using a mask. The feedback that we received from this was that it was a good idea as it doesn’t give away his identity which makes you want to find out more. Also as the mask is expressionless it makes it scarier as you don’t know how the person behind it is feeling which makes you add more questions and adds to the ‘thrill’.
To receive further feedback from our target audience we posted our unfinished trailer onto YouTube and Facebook from this we found out what the viewers liked and what we could maybe improve on.
One of the comments we received was from Scott Neil, he said that the acting for the police detectives wasn’t as good as it could be. We took this into account the next time we were editing our trailer, although we couldn’t change all of the shots as there are quite a few of them throughout the trailer.
Soon after re-editing our trailer we uploaded a near finished version onto YouTube and Facebook and received further feedback:
The second comment questions the name of the title we had chosen for our film, he asks what is being concealed. So to make sure that the message was getting across correctly we asked a few people if they understand what we meant by the term concealed and they all guessed correctly without being told. So we decided as a group that we didn’t need to change the name of our film trailer.
Further feedback we received was about making it faster to make to viewing of the trailer more effective, from this we changed the paced of which the detective turns her head to make it timed correctly. Another comment was made about them not being able to watch it as it was ‘too scary’ for them, this is what we were originally aiming for so we achieved it.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used a range of new media in the production of our film trailer and ancillary tasks. These include a digital camera, video camera, Apple Macs and software such as Photoshop and iMovie.
Although we had used iMovie to make our film opening we came across a few things that we had to research into further, for example the time you can cut a single clip down to (0.1seconds) when we needed it to be less than this to make the sequence more affective. During this the making of this product our editing and refinement of the clips was much quicker than before. Although we did have a problem when uploading clip as they were the wrong file types so these had to be converted to MP4 files.
As we hadn’t needed to take photos in our previous year we didn’t know what sort of picture we need and how to frame the shot. So it took us a while to choose what picture we wanted for our poster and magazine. Also because we used Photoshop to edit these photos on this was new to us as well, so it took a while to figure out how to do certain things and we found out that you can’t add a separate picture onto another using this software.
Our group were had all used a video camera before in the making of past short films and film opening we had created so we had overcome past problems that occurred already. To research we had also already used and were familiar with YouTube and Blogger so we knew how to use them to find existing products and sounds and to also show development and upload our finished product onto.
