Evaluation questions

EVALUATION QUESTIONS

Tuesday Bramley

IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT, USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

Before starting my A2 coursework of creating my trailer I conducted a lot of format research on horror trailers. This was by watching them online, reading reviews as well as on YouTube seeing how popular certain trailers were. I could also start to understand what conventions and codes were in a horror trailer which then led me to be able to make a horror trailer with certain conventions in the trailer. One of the main conventions I followed was having a scream or a sound right at the end of the trailer when the last scene or title screen appears. I decided to follow this convention however I added my own convention to this by waiting until the last few seconds of the last title screen to then play a scream so it would catch the audience but also makes them wonder what happened to the character and why is there a scream. Another convention was what was shown in horror trailers; there is always a lot of fast cuts in the middle and towards the end. I wanted to do this so the audience recognized it was a horror genre and I believed they would whilst watching my trailer as the fast cuts were when the characters were in danger or we saw the ‘villain’ this goes along with a convention.

Another convention I found whilst watching horror trailers is they always show that someone has died or is dying in the trailer. I decided against this as I didn't want any of my characters to die in the trailer and then the audience would already know I wanted to keep the suspense of whether they survive or not. Looking further into forms and conventions of horror I found that horror trailers don’t often follow a narrative. Although the actual film will follow a narrative the trailer it doesn't as it would give too much away. Narrative theorist Todorov states that most films follow a narrative theory but not in the trailer. The trailers I looked at was Scream and Saw. These gave me ideas which again i added my creativity to, which made it unique but also sticking to the media conventions to a horror trailer was realistic.

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?

I have learnt a lot from audience feedback I believe that it is very important as it was a guide to me where I was going wrong or if my work was not following codes and conventions of my genre. But also the audience feedback gave me ideas to already add to my work and as they were target audience who gave back ideas it helped overall improve my work. I got audience feedback from social media, talking to my peers, questionnaires and group discussions all of which were very helpful. I believe though that social media was the best way to get audience feedback as I targeting my audience for which I was aiming my work at and asked for their feedback They were clear, in the format it was set it was also easy to understand and as more people saw my work I got more feedback and discussions on what was good and worked well and in certain areas I could improve my work. I feel that through the process of actually filming the editing my trailer I have learnt for when I come to edit in the future that if I have certain ideas planned in my head or have an idea about something I should always get audience feedback as they always can tell me whether it is a good or a bad thing but also they can add ideas to make it even better.

If i did not have audience feedback I believe my trailer would not be to the standard it is of now as well as attracting my target audience as after feedback i changed certain aspects to attract them. Having audience feedback also helps as the director i didn't see certain things which they picked up on such as sound not matching the video or the colour of the scene not right.

HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE COMBINATION OF YOUR MAIN

PRODUCT AND ANCILLARY TEXTS? When I was creating my film trailer as well as my poster and magazine front cover I always made sure there was

link of my horror genre throughout and that the audience could tell it was for the same film as well as being creative for all three so they were not really similar. The main things which were shown throughout these were the fonts, colours, costume of my villain and the characters. I used one main costume for my villain throughout the three tasks. However for my trailer the villain can be easily recognizable in a white cloak, with blood splattered over it and the audience are unable to see the face of the person wearing the costume. This straight away made a link for me to use whilst doing the ancillary task of using this character however I decided to go against the conventions of doing that instead used two different gravestones which linked well with my movie instead as I beloved it gave the audience a bigger range for them to not just see the character but also other objectives which was linked to my trailer. Fonts and colour were also very important to the trailer as I decided to have the same house style for my trailer, poster and front cover to help connect all three of them together. This lead to our audience could associate the colours to each work. The colour was also very important as I wanted to have the same font for all three. After doing research I decided against this and went with the convention of having all three different fonts. As they were all different ways of promoting my trailer I wanted to attract the different audiences using different fonts and believe I did so by choosing to go with the conventions.

Looking back at my ancillary texts to my main product i can see how far i have come and improved by just how more confident and comfortable using programmes but also how my quality of work overall has improved.

HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

First of all to show my research, development, my work and my evaluation, I set up a blog on the site blogger. I would then be able to post daily of the work I was doing and how I was using media technologies. The first stage was research which I used Google for. This was so I could research film posters and magazine front covers, I could also see reviews about them online. I also used YouTube which I used to watch horror trailer but not just to watch I could also see comments from users of the site to see what they liked or disliked about the trailer which started it help me think about what my trailer would have in it. When I started to construct my work this was when I started to edit my trailer as well as editing the ancillary tasks to record my scenes I also used a tripod to make sure there were no shaky scenes but also so it looked professional.

I used a programme Adobe premier to edit my trailer and create it on that programme, I first of all found a soundtrack and using YouTube converter added it to the Adobe programme and started to edit my trailer on that along with it going with my chosen song. For the evaluation I decided to do a directors commentary over the top of my trailer to say why I decided to do certain things and speak about the conventions and why I had go along with them or had chosen not to. I also talked about my feedback from audience and how it influenced my trailer. I also used Microsoft PowerPoint to write out my answers to the questions but also to put it then on slide share. I believe my blog was the main aspect of showing off my work.