Evaluation (text version)

Q1: In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our trailer uses conventions of real media products in a number of ways. Our finished teaser trailer starts with a black and white establishing shot of Dalewood village and the house where the majority of the film takes place, this establishing shot gives a sense of normality however this is juxtaposed by the shot being in
black and white as this gives the opening shot a more eerie atmosphere which is emphasised by the high pitched music, this is a convention of real media products as we have started our trailer with slow eerie music which is commonly done with horror trailers. After the establishing shot there is a mid-shot of a police officer,
there is then a close up of the officer and he then begins to read a script which explains that three girls have gone missing, thus introducing the story to the audience. In our first draft of our trailer we did not include this scene however audience feedback from our first draft revealed that the audience were not clear on
the storyline, therefore we introduced the character of the policeman to make the story more obvious, this is a common convention of horror trailers as the story is usually revealed early on in the trailer. After this there is a long shot of a girl entering a house, while this is happening the police officer gives details on the latest victim demonstrating to the audience that the girl entering the house is the latest victim. The camera then pans upwards once she has  entered the house.

The screen then turns to black and there is a loud high pitched noise and the names of the directors flash onto the screen and shake, this is something that is done in real media products for example of this is 'Scream 4' when Wes Craven's name appears. The Scream 4 trailer is similar to our trailer in a number of ways as it
starts by explaining the story and then has a number of short scary frames from the movie, intended to scare the audience and make them want to see the movie. The Scream 4 trailer also ends with a scream which is something my partner and I decided to do as the product is a teaser trailer so by doing this the trailer ends in
suspense which is common in most horror trailers.

Another way in which our media product follows the forms and conventions of real media products is through the use of a tag-line as a tag-line is seen in every movie  regardless of the genre. Our tag-line "Sometimes what you dream, becomes reality" relates directly to the plot which is something a lot of tag-lines tend to do, for example, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) "If Nancy doesn't wake up screaming, she won't wake up at all..."

Although our trailer does follow most conventions, during planning we decided we wanted to challenge one of the horror movie conventions. In the past in horror films woman have mainly been portrayed as hypersexual damsels in distress who are usually murdered within the first five minutes of a film, as our trailer has a predominately female cast we wanted to challenge this convention. During our research we found that more modern movies have moved on from this convention and women are sometimes now represented as the main source of evil in a film, however the evil mainly comes from symbolic representations of the female genitalia we also found that vaginal representations in horror usually give birth to some horrible monster for example in the Fly 2 (1989) Veronica gives birth to Brundle's mutant son before dying. A more modern example of this is the horror/comedy movie, ‘Teeth’ which actually showed the main character, Dawn O’Keefe, with teeth in her vagina. After we had researched this we decided that we wanted to challenge the older convention and use the more modern idea of women being sources of evil, however we did not want to make it sexual we just wanted the female characters to be disturbed young women. We therefore decided that although Dr Corte would be the main source of evil, the girls would eventually become a source of evil.

Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

As we had decided to do a horror film our ancillary texts needed to convey this effectively to the audience. When starting my magazine I decided to first look at the popular film magazine 'EMPIRE', the first thing I noticed about this magazine was the simplicity of the front cover, it contained a mast head, an image and a few plugs and I decided that this was how I wanted my magazine to look. Another thing I noticed about EMPIRE was that the mast head was always in red, this appealed to me as the colour is striking and stands out and would also work well with a horror theme as it has connotations of blood, fear, passion and violence, things all commonly found in a horror film. Therefore the colour scheme I decided to use was red and black as these colours are commonly associated with horror films.

For my magazine I chose an image of Rachel holding a knife, although the image was already quite creepy I decided that I should edit it to give it more of an impact. I began by lightening her skin to give her a more pale and ghostly look as pale skin is associated with vampires and ghosts therefore it works well for a horror film, I then made the make-up around the eyes darker, changed the coulour of her eyes to red and made the whites of the eyes brighter in order to make the eyes more striking. Finally I made the blood on the knife darker to make the knife stand out more and to ensure that the image looked scary.

After seeing the landscape poster for 'Let the right one in' I decided that I wanted to mimic this look as the main focus was on the image and I found this effective as the image alone was creepy enough to make me want to see the film. For my poster I took an image of Rachel looking over her shoulder and edited in the same way as I did for my magazine, making her skin pale, the make-up around the eyes darker, changing the coulour of her eyes to red and making the whites of the eyes brighter and I then put it onto a black background. To keep the poster simple I then put the names of the cast along the top and the name of the film in the middle, on the 'Let the right one in poster' however they had a review from a paper on the poster, after trying this out on my poster however I decided that It would take the focus away
from my image and they may lose interest.

Overall I believe that the combination of our main product and the ancillary texts are very effective. I believe this as I feel that they work well together in encouraging the target audience to go and see the film, this is because they both contain conventions that are successful within horror films and which people enjoy.
All of our magazines and posters have a similar theme which is the hospital gowns the ancillary texts can all be associated with our trailer by the audience thus
making them an affective combination.
Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

One of the  first problems we had after receiving audience feeback was the name of our film, from the first stages of planning we had decided to name our film 'The Doctor' however after watching this our audience were not clear on who the character of 'The Doctor' was and why this was the name of the film, therefore we had to go back and re-think the name of our film. As our trailer has more footage of the three girls we came up with film names that could relate to them such as 'The Lost Souls', 'The Damned' and 'The Damned Souls', eventually we decided on 'The Damned' as it is clear from the trailer that the film has three girls who have been 'damned'.

Another problem we encountered was that the audience were not clear on the story, in order to fin this Jamie and I decided we would add a new scene, we decided that an effective way to help convey the story would be to have a police officer giving information on three girls going missing, as we have a police station on site this was easily assessable so was successful. We also added a voiceover of a news report revealing that all three girls had been receiving help from Dr Corte. Once we had added these things we started to receive more positive feedback as the audience were now more aware of what the plot of the film is.

Throughout the editing process a lot of people commented on he 'annoying' laugh and scream in our trailer, once we showed our trailer to an audience they confirmed that this did not work, therefore we decided to go back and try and improve these things. We started by replacing the scream with one available on Grageband, the software on the Apple Macs that we used to edit the sound on our trailer. We then added an echo to the laugh to make it less annoying and more creepy. 

After showing our final trailer to a year 12 media class we were disappointed by the audience feedback, the audience we not enthusiastic at all and had to be pushed to answer questions. When asked if the trailer would make them want to see the film only one person responded, the boy who responded said that he would not want to see the film as was not interested in horror films, however as this was not to do with the quality of the trailer we were disappointed with the response.

From my audience feedback I have learned that in order to make a successful trailer it is not just film footage that entice the audience, it is important to make your story clear to the audience, otherwise they are left confused rather than intrigued. It is also important for the name to be relevant and for the sound to work with
the trailer.

When I first showed my magazine to my audience I was told that it did not work as the mast head was too small and there was too much on, I therefore made my mast head larger and increased the size of my image to fit with this and I then removed some of the plugs to make the magazine more simple. Once I had done this the audience said that my magazine worked well as the colour scheme and the image kept in line with the conventions of horror films and the simplicity of the magazine was similar to that of EMPIRE. The first draft of my poster worked well however I moved the names of the cast members to the top of the page as my audience believed that this looked better. By gaining audience feedback I was able to learn what people really thought of my media texts and what needed to be changed in order to make them
successful. 

Q4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

In order to present our work this year we used the website Blogger which we had not done before. By using this site teachers were able to supervise our work on a regular basis and give feedback easily. This also aided in making things easier as we were able to work from home making it less time consuming than written work.

After deciding that our trailer would be of the horror genre we decided that in able to gain knowledge about what people expect to see form horror films we posted a questionnaire on 'Yahoo Answers' and on social networking sites such as 'Facebook', this was effective as social networking sites have branched out so far, for example Facebook has over 500 million users thus making this an effective way to gain knowledge. By doing this we learned things such as our target audience like to see a  dynamic villain in a horror film.

During the research stage we used the internet to evaluate trailers, magazines and posters. To evaluate trailers we used the site TrailerAddict as this made it possible to embed the trailer onto our blogs in order to evaluate it, this made things easier as Youtube was blocked in our school. The internet also made it easy to evaluate magazine covers and posters as rather than going out and buying magazines and finding posters Google has them all available at the click of a button and can be copied and pasted onto Blogger.


When editing the main media technologies I used were Adobe Photoshop, Serif Page Plus Final Cut Pro, Youtube, Motion, Garageband and Blogger as all of these except Youtube were available at school. These enabled me to edit both my trailer and my ancillary texts I was then able to make them available to other people by posting them on Blogger Youtube. Another form of technology I used was the photo editing website Piknic which along with Adobe Photoshop allowed me to create the desired effect of my images. By using Youtube to post the drafts of our trailer we were able to gain sufficient feedback as we had over 130 views.

To import our footage onto the macs we used iMovie, wee then proceeded to use Final Cut Pro on the Macs we have in school in order to edit our footage. This software allowed us to move our clips around when we wanted to in order to create an effective trailer with a clear storyline. Using this software we were also able to make our footage shorter if we needed to for example throughout the trailer we have flashes of Rachel that have been made shorter. We were also able to edit the footage so that it faded into the next stage to ensure that it looked clean cut. We also used the software Motion to the manipulate the text we used in our trailer, for example when the name of the film comes up on the screen, by using Motion we were able to use the effect 'Quaser In' and two behaviors "Earthquake' and 'Bad Film' these made the text look more professional. We also used Garageband in order to edit the sound on our trailer, we were able to add music to the trailer, replace the screams and add an echo to the laugh, that everyone found annoying, in order to make it more eerie.

For my evaluation I used Blogger, Windows Movie Maker and Acer Sound Recorder. By using Acer Sound Recorder I was able to recorde my entire evaluation then import it into Windows Movie Maker in order to use visual aids with my evaluation.