Evaluation

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

Before I created my media product, I conducted extensive research on various trailers, predominantly from the genre of horror. This allowed me to gain an understanding and insight into the typical conventions of trailers of this sort, with trailers such as Scream 4 bearing the typical features of darkness, screaming victims, death, blood, jump shots, panic and so on. This was a similar feature in other trailers I looked at, with the more action dominated trailer of Priest containing fight scenes and monsters, while Drag Me to Hell used the supernatural and demonic side of the large, horror genre. 

I also conducted some research into films which included young children as the lead role in a horror film. Recent films such as Insidious as well as older ones including the Exorcist and the Omen play on the horrifying aspect of a young, supposedly innocent child as the villain. My child character is not clearly a villain, but rather the protagonist in a horrifying position. Therefore her position can be played upon and is played upon to add maximum effect.

When watching other horror trailers, it was clear that the lighting was very important in the atmospheric, more frightening scenes, so the whole trailer was shot on various days in the evening when it was dark outside and only artificial light was used. Most of the trailer takes place in one room, with only a desk lamp lighting up the room which adds a darkness to one side of the protagonists face at several dramatic points. 

The costume I used for the ‘spirits’ in particular was all black, from the trousers to the overcoat to add to the ambiguity of the character. This is important for the trailer as nothing was given away, but rather the fact that they were not seen very prominently, provokes the audience to want to go and see the film to find out more about the spirits. 

The music that I used was suspenseful and captured the dark mood. As the trailer consists of only one line of dialogue, music is important in conveying the action, and I think eventually, the music I found fitted nicely with the trailer. I added special effects sounds to add to the drama and keep the audience on their toes, especially as there is no explicit scenes of violence to frighten the audience but rather the implied troubles and haunting of a mysterious spirit.

The jump shot at the end is a typical convention of a horror; something that draws the audience into a false sense of security only to be scared by a jumping bed sheet which seems to consume the unknowing protagonist. 

I took inspiration from film posters such as Scream 4, which used the simplicity of their original product; the mask and the knife, which is already an established concept and merged them together in the poster for maximum impact. My poster uses the simplicity of the protagonist in the trailer looking up the camera with fear and a sense of horror herself in her eyes. The candle below her face adds strength to the dark, chilling mise en scene, with the shadow behind her creating the effect that she may not be alone.  

One of the conventions from the posters I analysed was the position of the title of the film being placed at the bottom of the poster. I challenged this convention, as I had the title, “Spirit-Men” at the top of my poster to immediately capture the attention of the viewer and to give it a sense of power yet not dominance, with the picture still containing the main attraction. 

Directly below the title is “coming soon” which challenges convention of having it at the bottom, but the reason Id did this was because with “coming soon” at the bottom, it would be crowded alongside the slogan and credits. 

The slogan, which is the same font as the title and “coming soon” is also at the bottom, immediately below the picture to continue to build the atmosphere and leads the audience to question who the mysterious “them” is. 

Other film poster in the horror film genre such as Drag Me to Hell and Priest use this simplicity, using the main character to the marketing advantage, as they appear on the poster prominently to attract the audience.  

The colours scheme for my poster is similar to those which I analysed and looked at, with darkness and shadow very much a main feature while the light from the candle below also adds to the fiery convention - typically a show of danger - something very obvious in horror films.  

The colours used in my poster; white and black, with the former suggesting innocence and purity of the main character - a young girl, while the latter representing power, death, evil and mystery.  

The credits are conventionally at the bottom and in the middle of the poster - smaller than the rest of the text and less attractive but an important component nevertheless, while the website of the film is bigger, just below that as a final prompt to visit the site and take an active interest in finding out more about it.  

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

In task - the teaser trailer - took a long time to plan and get right, as I had many ideas of what to include and what the main storyline would be about. It changed a number of times from the beginning of the planning, but in the end, it was surrounding a girl being chased by spirits in her own home. This supernatural theme was played upon in all three tasks, with the trailer suggestively showing the mysterious appearances and haunting from the spirits, and the poster showing a haunting picture of the young girl with light shining spookily onto her face from below. 

The magazine front cover also uses the protagonist staring straight into the audiences eyes suggesting intrusion - a big theme in supernatural horror films, as the audience feel unnerved during most of the film. The colour themes in all three tasks are very similar; dark, gloomy and haunting, wi very little colour used, and only artificial light. This helps to create the dark and scary atmosphere in the trailer, the poster and the magazine front cover. The artificial light is used in all three tasks, as they are all shot at night. 

The trailer plays upon the mystery of the spirits and the unfortunate position the presumedly innocent young girl is in, while the poster and magazine show the girl in a slightly different light, with her looking unnervingly into the camera with light strategically placed to make her eyes look unnatural and to create a large shadow behind her and on many of her features. I think the two ancillary tasks add another dimension of mystery and horror to all three tasks which may provoke the audience to want to go and see the film to understand and solve the mystery surrounding this girl. I think the combination of all three products is very effective in attracting the target audience and I think I used the right amount of horror conventions to make the audience feel unnerved and scared by the horror aspects of all three while encouraging them to spend the products. 

What have you learned from your audience feedback? 

DO YOU THINK IT IS SUITABLE FOR THE TARGET AUDIENCE?

 During the planning of my products, I sent a questionnaire around to a number of people inside the target audience bracket to find out what they think a horror film should contain, asking what they do and don't like in a films inside the horror film genres. I also asked what different features should be included in a teaser trailer and what they did and did not like about horror films. I discovered that many people liked the supernatural horror genre, citing paranormal activity as a favourite in many cases, and this was a feature for both male and female subjects. 

I also found out that most people dislike films with bad acting and/or over the top portrayals of horror action. I therefore learned that a supernatural horror film would be a good one to create which was subtle in the approach in scaring the audience with very few pieces of dialogue, because with amateur actors and actresses, this is a very hard thing to get right without looking over the top and cheesy. My questionnaire results also left me with the conclusion that jump scares are an effective way in frightening the audience and attracting them into watching the film. 

So, in my trailer I used two jump scares very near to the end of the trailer to hopefully catch the audience off guard. The general feedback from my products once they were finished was very good, with people enjoying the trailer and believing it was an appropriate horror specific trailer, poster and magazine front cover. Below are some audience reactions to my media products... 

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

Media technologies were a huge part of researching, planning, constructing and evaluating my media products. The researching stage of my media products including extensive searching on the Internet for ideas and concepts which have been used before in an attempt to complete my own unique idea for a product. I used YouTube a great deal to watch and analyse other horror trailers to gain an understanding on what features and conventions were needed in a similar product and what kinds of things attracted people to go and see films to make them success'. 

Throughout the process, I typed up my findings on Blogger on my own personal blog in which I placed all of my media work to be marked. The planning of my products also needed media technologies to be used, as I created storyboards, scripts, noted ideas, created mid maps and made questionnaires on the apple mac computers in the various programmes needed for these sorts of products. 

 The planning also required the first use of a camera, as I had to record myself talking about my findings to the camera. Once I had done this, I had to upload my recorded video to final cut pro, where I added clips from the films I was talking about - which I downloaded from YouTube - as well as screenshots of the films trailers and objects I was discussing to be placed in the video as I was talking. These videos were then uploaded to YouTube and then uploaded to my blog as part of the coursework. 

 In constructing my trailer I had to use the camera again to shoot the scenes. The camera was high definition, and the tripod was also very important to keep a steady shot. I had to shoot each short scene several times to get it right, and as I had begun recording ahead of schedule, when I had gotten the shooting wrong and had to rethink an idea and concept, I had plenty of time to re do the filming and perfect the shots. Once I had filmed, the use if final cut pro was once again integral in completing this stage. 

I was able to put all of the scenes to together and edit them appropriately in order to portray a clear picture for the audience to understand what is going on. To add the typography for the titles, I used another media programme in live type and motion as well as my first use of photo shop to creat a production logo. These were exported and imported into my trailer appropriately and then edited to fit well. For the various sound effects used, another media programme called GarageBand was required. I browsed through most of the readymade sounds offered by the programmes to look for a suitable soundtrack for my trailer and found none which I believed fitted well, so instead I turned to YouTube. 

I downloaded appropriate soundtrack and uploaded it to final cut pro with the permission from the owner and a disclaimer on the final trailers description as the owner of the original music had asked. I did use GarageBand for other sections for the jump scares for example, but the main track used was from YouTube. Once the railed was finished, I then had to upload this to YouTube as well and place it on my blog along with all my other work. For the two ancillary tasks, the main media technology that was to be used was photo shop. 

Once I had taken the pictures with my camera and uploaded them to the computer, I begun editing them and creating the final products. I added the various effects desired to make the poster as scary as possible and added appropriate text to add to the muse en scene of the poster. The conventional credits at the bottom were created by a programme on the Internet for free, and the chosen font for the title, the slogan and the release date were created by photo shop. The magazine front cover was also created in photoshop, and using the empire magazine template, I added the picture to e already established text logo from the American magazine and then added some created features for the rest of it.