Evaluation for media

Media EvaluationSean O’Keeffe,

“Private Caller” evaluation.

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

• Me and Niall decided to try and stick to real life products as much as possible with our trailer, and we achieved this by watching trailers that are of the same genre. For example we watched the “Phonebooth” trailer a few times, and “The Box” trailer was also used as inspiration.

• Although we tried to stick to original conventions as much as possible, we felt that we needed to add our own style into the trailer to make it original, so for example the music isn’t really that similar to what we’ve seen in the trailers, and the camera angles give away more to the audience than that of a real life trailer.

• Before we shot our film, we went round at lunchtime asking pupils that go to Bishop Walsh what they would expect to see in a thriller/action trailer. The general feedback was quick shots, transitions, and music that builds tension. We took this feedback on board, and we have tried to apply these conventions to our trailer, so our target audience, along with us, will be satisfied with the finished product.

• When we started filming, we decided to use “The Box” as a sort of template for filming our trailer, I think this was a good idea because we want to set the same mysterious feel to our trailer as they have with theirs. Real teaser trailers are only around a minute, a minute and a half long and in this time it gives a basic narrative and shows a small glimpse of the main characters, this is what we’ve done, but in ours, we wanted to make it very clear to the audience that it is a thriller. The music really helped us with this, as it created an atmospheric backdrop for the dialogue.

• We only show key seconds with small shots, for example, important dialogue, some violence, and narrative.

• The Box trailer:• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFHa-ygkF_M• Phonebooth trailer:• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p07lBCfC2q8

• We started the process of making the film by drawing up storyboards to give us a basic outline/plan of what we needed to do for each individual shot. Although we didn’t end up sticking to the original plan that was drawn up on the storyboard, it did help us a lot, and kept us on task well.

• I think its good to have a template to work around, and although we didn’t use many of the shots on the storyboard I still think its a good idea to have something to refer back to just in case things don’t go to plan.

• Also, writing up a storyboard really solidified our knowledge of camera shots and angles – enabling us to take what we’ve already learnt about them and implement into our own work – which I’ve found very interesting.

OVERALL.• Overall I’m satisfied with my media film, as we stuck to typical

conventions of thriller films to satisfy our audience, but also tweaked things slightly to make the trailer our own. However, I feel it was more important to stick to the typical conventions of a thriller trailer, rather than try and make it too much like ours. I believe that if it looks genuine then the product will look better and I think we’ve achieved this.

• I’m also a fan of how well me and Niall worked as a team, assigning one another tasks and ensuring that the project was completed to a good standard.

• A strength of the project was all the research we put in I think; we made sure we knew who our audience was and we wanted to ensure we reached out to them – trying to stick to all the codes and conventions of thriller trailers but then putting our own spin on it too.

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

• Brand image has become an absolute must for film makers today, with the audience having so much choice about what to watch and why they should watch it. This is where the promotion for the film comes into play, and I think the combination between the two forms of media has been successful in my case. Typical conventions of a brand image for a film are:

-The main character throughout each promotion image.

-The mis-en-scene.- Catchy tag lines that bare relevance to one

another are conventions of the real thing too.- The posters colour schemes develop a sense of

enigma.

-The font you use for your title is clearly very important aspect when constructing a brand image. I wanted it to stand out. I think my poster really grabs the audiences’ attention, as the colour scheme is eye-catching. This is what I set out to achieve, as most real life film makers do this too.-The website used to acquire the different styles of fonts is called “Dafont.com”, “Dafont" seemed to be a great site to get different styles of writing, whether it be for formal or informal formats – which is exactly what I wanted for my magazine and poster.

FONT.

COLOURS.- If you look at my film poster, then you can see that the primary colour is red. I think

this was an obvious choice to use, not only because it’s quite eye-catching, but also because of what it represents; red often means danger, and this is exactly what our film is about, the danger of leaving your loved ones alone. Another obvious connotation of red is that it represents gore, and blood. And this is a possible hint at the audience about what the film is going to be like, without giving too much away.

The main image is pulled into focus and is considered a higher priority than the title to the reader as the main image of my film “Private Caller”. I originally wanted to have the character over the magazine title, but it didn’t really work, so I just decided to have it below the title instead. I wanted to make the image have a lot of priority, so much so that even the masthead doesn’t dwarf it.

I’ve used big bold text in order to get the readers attention I’ve used black and yellow to make it stand out from the rest of the magazine. If I was to make another issue for the magazine, then the colour scheme would be completely different, it’s just that this particular issue had this colour scheme because I wanted to make it quite informal

I tried not just devote an entire front page just to one film, I wanted to break the page up a bit, this is to reel the audience in to read stories that are there later on the magazine, this is a feature which I was keen to use as you see it used quite a lot in real magazines.

The way that the sentence ‘Because you never know who’s on the other end...’ is placed at the top of the poster, and almost takes centre stage, this makes you think that maybe this face is in fact the person on the other end. This is what I set out to achieve, I wanted to get the audience guessing.

The review given to the film that has been printed on the poster again ties in with the thriller genre as it says that the film is ‘groundbreaking’. I wanted to make my film sound very good, which is the reasoning behind this description.

Change of heart about the poster

• After talking with my media teacher about the poster for my film, she suggested that the main image for it was a little too pixelated, and didn’t look clear enough for it to look professional. This discussion lead to me deciding to take a new picture for the poster and changing the colour scheme.

• The two different posters can be found on the following slide.

BEFORE: AFTER:

As you can see, the two posters differ quite a lot, and in my opinion this is for the better, on the second image I think the image has a lot more impact, and I think the fact that it is considerably more clear than the image I took before , leads to a better poster.I also prefer the colour scheme on the second poster more, it is clear and concise, as opposed to the jumbled up reds and blacks on that of the previous image.

OVERALL.• Overall I think the combination of my main product and

my ancillary tasks is quite good, as I’ve tried to link everything together by using the main character from the film as the central focus on both ancillary tasks. (The poster and magazine).

• However, I feel that my magazine and poster could be more similar in the sense of the colour scheme. One is predominantly red whereas the other is mostly yellow and black. On the other hand, in real life you don’t really see the colour scheme being too similar on both formats.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

• Overall, the audience feedback was quite positive, me and Niall were both satisfied. We asked people in my year through questionnaire, which you can see on the next slide...

Questionnaire.• Does the music go well with the shots?• • • Are your opinions of the camera angles good?• • • If not, why?• • • Where would you expect to see this trailer?•

Do you think the promotion package goes well with the film trailer? (Below)

• If not, why?•

What do you think of the magazine?

• What do you think of the poster?

• Thanks for your time.

• Generally, the feedback was positive. We asked people in our year, who also happen to be our target audience; teenagers aged 16-18. Both media students and people who don’t study the subject. Honestly, we were more hopeful that the media students will find it better than those who don’t do it, because they know what to look for, such as the camera shots, the music choice and where they’d expect to see this trailer.

• We also took it upon ourselves to film some of the people as they were giving feedback, we think it was a good idea to do something a bit different and a nice way to show what people thought of our film. The question tends to lend itself to this style of response too.

Feedback on film:

• I also acquired some feedback and filmed it too. The two people in this short clip are Harry Shipman and Daniel Campbell. They both watched the film three times before giving their feedback. They're also part of our target audience as they're both 17 years of age:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5NNtB3BLzU&feature=related

Strengths and Weaknesses• After acquiring the audience feedback I’ve decided to pick out a few key strengths and weaknesses:

TEASER TRAILERStrengths:

• You can easily tell what genre it is, and you get the basic idea of the film without giving too much away.• Typical conventions are used.• Use of lighting and costume is really effective. Lets you know what genre the film’s probably going to be without making it

too obvious.

Weaknesses:- Could vary the shots a bit more maybe, more variety in it could only mean it gets better.

ANCILLARY TASKS Strengths:

- Typical conventions are used in both tasks, i.e. sub stories, tag lines, movie reviews, images, font.- Clear images, eye catching fonts and effective lighting used make everything clear and concise.

Weaknesses- The magazine looked a bit plain, I think you could’ve filled it up a bit more with more sub stories and features etc.

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

and evaluation stages?

YOUTUBE• Media technologies have really helped us a lot in every aspect of the

course as of yet. Even right at the start when me and Niall wanted to research into the thriller genre and trailers for different films, we decided that YouTube would be our primary focus. YouTube enabled us to search for different trailers for various films in seconds and it really did help us with our research.

GOOGLE• Google also really helped me with my research. If I needed to look into

various magazine covers or film posters for research for my ancillary tasks, then with the click of a button, thousands of results can come up to help me gain inspiration for my own work.

CAMERAS• Cameras that the school provided gave a good hand when we

wanted to show where we were going to shoot from, and the shots we wanted to use. The images were easy to save, which we uploaded to Blogger.

BLOGGER• Whilst on the subject of Blogger, it really helped us get up to date

with various checklists and tasks we needed to complete. There was a specific e-mail address and password for each one of us, which meant each profile was secure and safe. By having all our work on one profile in various posts, it made it an easy and efficient task to locate all our work, even if it was months back when we completed it.

***Blogger was an excellent tool when it came to keeping up to date with the course.

FILMING

CAMERA• We filmed our trailer using a HD AFGA video camera that the school

provided for us. It was very useful because I don’t possess a video camera myself, so for the school to provide us with such a high quality model was very good I thought, and I was grateful. The camera has a built in screen, this enables you to watch back your shots and filming immediately after shooting them, which saves you a lot of time not having to upload the film onto the computer and watch it back there.

***We used a camera similar to this.

ADOBE PREMIERE ELEMENTS.

• When making our trailer we used a programme called Adobe Premier Elements. At first, this was quite a complex programme to use, but after about a week of getting used to it, me and Niall felt we could use it with some ease and it ended up being a very efficient programme, enabling us to cut and edit as much or as little as possible.

• Another positive of this programme was that if we messed up the editing on a shot, there was always the original copy of the shot in a file, so we could just start again on the shot instead of having to make do with a small mistake.

• One of the most impressive factors of this programme I thought was the sound editing. This was very easy to use, and some examples of what you could do are being able to increase the dialogue and decrease any diagetic noise that was in the background. You were able to tone down the music you incorporated into the film at certain points in the trailer, so the speech in the film was clear and concise. This was important for me and Niall as there isn’t much dialogue in our trailer, but what is there plays a vital role in letting the audience know what’s going on.

• FREE MUSIC LOOPS• Adding the music to our film also turned out to be an easier task than expected, we chose

our music off a site called “Free Music Loops” that the school provide. I was impressed by this, because I wasn’t expecting much to be honest, but it turns out there was a wide variety of beats and songs you could pick from, which were all copyright-free. After careful consideration, we both decided that we were going to use the DRAMATIC DRUMS beat for our film. It's quite a conventional beat for a thriller trailer as it manages to develop tension as the trailer goes on because the tempo increases. This was good, because it was really quite easy to add non-diagetic sound to our film.

ANCILLARY TASKSPUBLISHER

• For both the magazine cover and the film poster I decided to use Microsoft Office Publisher. I’m a big fan of this programme as it’s really very easy to use and doesn’t really throw up anything at you that’s too complex to come over. The transferring of images and various fonts onto both tasks was very easy, as it just asks you to take them out your documents or simply copy and paste them onto the page. Very easy.

• It also gives you a lot of options with regards to colour schemes, you can simply click on an image or a particular font you wish to tweak slightly or drastically, and you very easily click on a paint bucket icon in the corner to chose whether you wish to put one or two colours into the main image, or maybe even more, they leave the decision completely up to you.