Evaluation Questions
1.In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
By creating a teaser trailer, magazine cover and poster, we have used and developed different forms of media products. We did not challenge different conventions of real media products as we thought that sticking to the normal forms of advertising was a better and safer way to advertise our product.
We aimed to make our teaser trailer not to give much away as some trailers that we looked at seem to mostly lay out the story and only leave a few things out. Our aim was to capture our target audience’s attention by having a series of quick shots that mostly did not relate to the previous to make our audience interested in the real plot and want to see the film. We used obvious repertoire of elements, in the trailer, poster and the magazine (their costumes) to portray exactly what kind of film this was, and did not specifically develop or change anything you wouldn’t see in a wartime romance.
We did not want to make our film look predictable, and created a very simple looking poster and magazine cover which was enough to get a hint of what the story was about but not giving to much away. We have purposely placed the woman in the middle, to emphasise her character as the centre of the plot, but we did not want to make her look like she has a typical woman role such as a ‘damsel in distrees’ or a ‘sex symbol’. So in some ways we have challenged stereotypes but the overall plot has stuck mostly to the ‘typical’ wartime romance genre. We have not tried to develop a modern edge to the film, or particularly challenged anything that you wouldn’t see in a wartime romance, and we feel this will get the right reaction out of our audience.
2.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our trailer and our ancillary texts are all linked, the same fonts the same backgrounds the same feeling. All very discreet and mysterious.We want our audience to be able to know what they are going to get out of the film but not what this “Betrayal” actually is. We want to tease them with the mystery of it.
Any new film needs to have a great advertising campaign that’s how it will get ratings and the audience viewings it needs, so the combination of all of the media pieces need to fit together and work off eachother in order to be effective to our audience.The magazine cover is the only real information the audience is going to get about the new film, we want to glamourise it to our audience make them feel special in knowing behind the scences about our film.
The slogan or quote of our film “Love is like war, easy to start but hard to stop” conveys the mood and feel of our film without giving too much away. To us it was important that we connected something throught all the trailer and ancillary texts, using the slogan was good because people read it and wonder exactly what it means and how it may relate to the film.We use this in the trailer and on the poster. Both the magazine cover and poster are black with a little light on the faces of our charcaters showing the bleakness of our film, the trailer itself switches its colours when the main characters life switches directions. The reptoire of elements in our film are used in all of our texts, the war planes, the villan, the showing of a heartbreak etc. So everything is linked together to show our audience what sort of a film they are going to see and how it is all put together without showing too much of the films plot or the importance of “the betrayal”.
3) What have you learned from your audience feed back?
Prior to the evaluation, we wanted to get some feedback from our target market, to see what they thought of our teaser trailer. Firstly we showed the trailer to our media group, and handed them a short survey to fill in after watching it. We figured that this would be the quickest and easiest way to record the results. (A copy of the survey is attached as a separate post). We found that mainly the females in the group preferred the trailer, however, we had positive feedback from some males also. Out of the 15 people that we surveyed, 12 would go and see it at the cinema, 9 of which were female. After discussing their favourite part of the trailer (separately from the survey), we found the most popular scene to be the one where two characters get caught having an affair by the sneaky maid peering through the banister. This indicated just how important the suspense of a trailer is to get the audience gripped. Something that really added suspense to our trailer was the music that we used from ‘The Edge of Love’, as we found that without music; the trailer was boring with no build up of shots. Out of the 15 people we surveyed, 15/15 said that they felt the music matched the tone of the trailer and added suspense. Something we were criticised on was the use of one of our shots, which was actually a 0.8 second shot taken from the film ‘The Edge of Love’ again. The shot is of a man at war, which we found increasingly difficult to shoot ourselves without looking amateur. This is why we decided to use this short war clip, however, the majority of people who watched our trailer said it didn’t quite fit in with the rest of our trailer. We have not removed this shot, as we want to exploit war in a violent way, and couldn’t reach the level of violence we wanted to show, without real guns or battle field. However, this point had been taken into consideration, and we attempted to darken the shot to make it match a little better.
4.
4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used many media technologies in the process of constructing our teaser trailer. We used ‘EDIUS Pro’ to capture and edit our clips. We found this a lot more complicated than the ‘Storm’ software that we used when doing our AS level. However, EDIUS’s major strengths are the speed of the editing, its reliability and the real-time performance. It is probably true to say you could do a job faster and more reliably in EDIUS than any other editor. We found overall that EDIUS had a lot more effects that we could use in our shots, such as the shot contrast and audio settings, etc. Obviously we used a camera to capture our shots, with a tri-pod, to steady them. We recorded the shots onto a cassette tape, and then captured them onto EDIUS in the editing suite. We used the internet to research existing products to enter into our blog, and other things. Of course, we used a computer to record things, such as target audience surveys and a time plan. We used Microsoft Publisher to compose our ancillary texts; the magazine cover and the poster. When blogging our research, planning and evaluation stages, we used ‘Blogger’, in association with ‘Google Accounts’, which can be reached through ‘blogspot’. We found this was easy to use, however, sometimes we had difficulty posting on pictures successfully. We had to do it a couple of times before it was successful in uploading. Overall, the technologies we used were simple and easy enough to use, however, EDIUS took some time in getting used to. After our media teacher had given us a tutorial on how to use it, we found it was fairly simple. When evaluating, we used Microsoft Word to produce a survey (attached as a separate post) and Microsoft Excel for some personal recordings, which we wrote up in the evaluation later.
By creating a teaser trailer, magazine cover and poster, we have used and developed different forms of media products. We did not challenge different conventions of real media products as we thought that sticking to the normal forms of advertising was a better and safer way to advertise our product.
We aimed to make our teaser trailer not to give much away as some trailers that we looked at seem to mostly lay out the story and only leave a few things out. Our aim was to capture our target audience’s attention by having a series of quick shots that mostly did not relate to the previous to make our audience interested in the real plot and want to see the film. We used obvious repertoire of elements, in the trailer, poster and the magazine (their costumes) to portray exactly what kind of film this was, and did not specifically develop or change anything you wouldn’t see in a wartime romance.
We did not want to make our film look predictable, and created a very simple looking poster and magazine cover which was enough to get a hint of what the story was about but not giving to much away. We have purposely placed the woman in the middle, to emphasise her character as the centre of the plot, but we did not want to make her look like she has a typical woman role such as a ‘damsel in distrees’ or a ‘sex symbol’. So in some ways we have challenged stereotypes but the overall plot has stuck mostly to the ‘typical’ wartime romance genre. We have not tried to develop a modern edge to the film, or particularly challenged anything that you wouldn’t see in a wartime romance, and we feel this will get the right reaction out of our audience.
2.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our trailer and our ancillary texts are all linked, the same fonts the same backgrounds the same feeling. All very discreet and mysterious.We want our audience to be able to know what they are going to get out of the film but not what this “Betrayal” actually is. We want to tease them with the mystery of it.
Any new film needs to have a great advertising campaign that’s how it will get ratings and the audience viewings it needs, so the combination of all of the media pieces need to fit together and work off eachother in order to be effective to our audience.The magazine cover is the only real information the audience is going to get about the new film, we want to glamourise it to our audience make them feel special in knowing behind the scences about our film.
The slogan or quote of our film “Love is like war, easy to start but hard to stop” conveys the mood and feel of our film without giving too much away. To us it was important that we connected something throught all the trailer and ancillary texts, using the slogan was good because people read it and wonder exactly what it means and how it may relate to the film.We use this in the trailer and on the poster. Both the magazine cover and poster are black with a little light on the faces of our charcaters showing the bleakness of our film, the trailer itself switches its colours when the main characters life switches directions. The reptoire of elements in our film are used in all of our texts, the war planes, the villan, the showing of a heartbreak etc. So everything is linked together to show our audience what sort of a film they are going to see and how it is all put together without showing too much of the films plot or the importance of “the betrayal”.
3) What have you learned from your audience feed back?
Prior to the evaluation, we wanted to get some feedback from our target market, to see what they thought of our teaser trailer. Firstly we showed the trailer to our media group, and handed them a short survey to fill in after watching it. We figured that this would be the quickest and easiest way to record the results. (A copy of the survey is attached as a separate post). We found that mainly the females in the group preferred the trailer, however, we had positive feedback from some males also. Out of the 15 people that we surveyed, 12 would go and see it at the cinema, 9 of which were female. After discussing their favourite part of the trailer (separately from the survey), we found the most popular scene to be the one where two characters get caught having an affair by the sneaky maid peering through the banister. This indicated just how important the suspense of a trailer is to get the audience gripped. Something that really added suspense to our trailer was the music that we used from ‘The Edge of Love’, as we found that without music; the trailer was boring with no build up of shots. Out of the 15 people we surveyed, 15/15 said that they felt the music matched the tone of the trailer and added suspense. Something we were criticised on was the use of one of our shots, which was actually a 0.8 second shot taken from the film ‘The Edge of Love’ again. The shot is of a man at war, which we found increasingly difficult to shoot ourselves without looking amateur. This is why we decided to use this short war clip, however, the majority of people who watched our trailer said it didn’t quite fit in with the rest of our trailer. We have not removed this shot, as we want to exploit war in a violent way, and couldn’t reach the level of violence we wanted to show, without real guns or battle field. However, this point had been taken into consideration, and we attempted to darken the shot to make it match a little better.
4.
4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used many media technologies in the process of constructing our teaser trailer. We used ‘EDIUS Pro’ to capture and edit our clips. We found this a lot more complicated than the ‘Storm’ software that we used when doing our AS level. However, EDIUS’s major strengths are the speed of the editing, its reliability and the real-time performance. It is probably true to say you could do a job faster and more reliably in EDIUS than any other editor. We found overall that EDIUS had a lot more effects that we could use in our shots, such as the shot contrast and audio settings, etc. Obviously we used a camera to capture our shots, with a tri-pod, to steady them. We recorded the shots onto a cassette tape, and then captured them onto EDIUS in the editing suite. We used the internet to research existing products to enter into our blog, and other things. Of course, we used a computer to record things, such as target audience surveys and a time plan. We used Microsoft Publisher to compose our ancillary texts; the magazine cover and the poster. When blogging our research, planning and evaluation stages, we used ‘Blogger’, in association with ‘Google Accounts’, which can be reached through ‘blogspot’. We found this was easy to use, however, sometimes we had difficulty posting on pictures successfully. We had to do it a couple of times before it was successful in uploading. Overall, the technologies we used were simple and easy enough to use, however, EDIUS took some time in getting used to. After our media teacher had given us a tutorial on how to use it, we found it was fairly simple. When evaluating, we used Microsoft Word to produce a survey (attached as a separate post) and Microsoft Excel for some personal recordings, which we wrote up in the evaluation later.
posted by Sophie at
16:43
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