1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forma and conventions of real media products?
I feel as though we are following the conventions of a film trailer very precisely. We looked at many different trailers and researched what made them look professional as well as identifying what all the trailers had in common, ‘what made them a trailer’ so to speak. The most obvious conventions of a trailer that I identified were, they all had shortened film company clips at some point in the trailer generally the beginning, this is to show the film companies that the production is made and distributed by. In our trailer we used a clip for Universal Studios and then we also had our very own clip that I designed for our hypothetical film company called A&M Productions, I thought this started the trailer off professionally.
I feel as though we are following the conventions of a film trailer very precisely. We looked at many different trailers and researched what made them look professional as well as identifying what all the trailers had in common, ‘what made them a trailer’ so to speak. The most obvious conventions of a trailer that I identified were, they all had shortened film company clips at some point in the trailer generally the beginning, this is to show the film companies that the production is made and distributed by. In our trailer we used a clip for Universal Studios and then we also had our very own clip that I designed for our hypothetical film company called A&M Productions, I thought this started the trailer off professionally.
Another convention of a trailer is the final shot which comes up, it has all the producers names on it, the name of important actors, the directors names, the film companies logos, who the music is by etc. So I used Photoshop to create a similar page for our trailer, I looked at one in an existing trailer and used it to guide me and therefore I managed to make it look realistic, putting all the logos on including our ‘made up’ one. In the trailers that I looked at many of them had shots lasting longer, for example 5 seconds at the beginning and the further into the trailer the faster the editing was as the editing sped up so also did the music, the volume and speed increased and sound effects such as a heart beat or loud thuds like in ‘Transformers, The Revenge Of The Fallen Trailer’
this builds up the tension and the excitement in the trailer. Most trailers then generally ended with one final longer shot with the sound suddenly decreasing in volume or even stopping altogether, this leaves the audience in a sense of awe over the trailer and leaves them also wondering what happens in the film and therefore ensuring that they go and see it in the cinema. This was the exact technique that we used to excite our audience; we started off with slower shots and a voice-over, as well as fairly calm and sad music the trailers editing then speeds up and we increase the speed of the editing and fade in a scary sound effect when we show the rape scene and the death of the boyfriend. Although we follow the typical trailer conventions throughout the trailer this is the one bit where we challenge the conventions of a trailer, we mix up two scenes, one in which a girl is being raped and the other in which a boy is being run over, we used very quick clips but show about three clips of the rape scene and then switch to the car scene for about three very short clips and then back to the rape scene again and so on. I think this is very effective as it gets lots of information into audience’s brains very quickly and therefore gives them a greater idea of what the film is about. This meant that we had something different from other trailers, something which makes it stand out and interest viewers.
this builds up the tension and the excitement in the trailer. Most trailers then generally ended with one final longer shot with the sound suddenly decreasing in volume or even stopping altogether, this leaves the audience in a sense of awe over the trailer and leaves them also wondering what happens in the film and therefore ensuring that they go and see it in the cinema. This was the exact technique that we used to excite our audience; we started off with slower shots and a voice-over, as well as fairly calm and sad music the trailers editing then speeds up and we increase the speed of the editing and fade in a scary sound effect when we show the rape scene and the death of the boyfriend. Although we follow the typical trailer conventions throughout the trailer this is the one bit where we challenge the conventions of a trailer, we mix up two scenes, one in which a girl is being raped and the other in which a boy is being run over, we used very quick clips but show about three clips of the rape scene and then switch to the car scene for about three very short clips and then back to the rape scene again and so on. I think this is very effective as it gets lots of information into audience’s brains very quickly and therefore gives them a greater idea of what the film is about. This meant that we had something different from other trailers, something which makes it stand out and interest viewers.
2. How effective is the combination of your main prduct and ancillery texts?
I think that the combination of the three different media is good and there is brand recognition between all three of them. The first way in which this is achieved is in using the same font for the title of our film, ‘Divine Intervention’ this puts a picture into audiences minds and therefore when they see the font on the poster they recognise it and remember the trailer and it refreshes their memory. Another thing we did with the title to make it stand out above other film titles is to make the first and last letters on each line capitalised, this can be ssen in the picture above this paragraph. To develop this i looked at many different film titles and how they looked, which fonts they used and what effects they put on them, i firstly wanted to do something like 'Apocolypse Now' as it is unique making the film stand out by the viewers not recognising the text font, but i thought it would be far too difficult to develop my own font as time as well as budgets became issues.
So i then did some more research on titles to looked at some other films and what their titles looked like and i found the 'I Am Legend' which has a far simpler title and still looks very professional and smart.
To make sure that my poster as well as magazines look as though they are working together i looked at 'The Dark Knight' which was on the cover of 'Empire' magazine, so i looked at the poster for the film as well and saw how they were linked together and then compared the two to my magazine cover and poster to see if they both looked as though they were from the same film.
Left: The Dark Knight Poster Right: Divine Intervention Poster (Mine)
Left: Empire Magazine with a cover about The Dark Knight. Right: Red Carpet (My Magazine cover) with cover about Divine Intervention.Looking at the two pieces on The Dark Knight i can see that the brand reconition is present because they have Heath Ledger the 'Joker' on both covers and that is exactly the same as my poster and magazine cover have, Lucy the main actress is on both of them (as well as in the trailer) thus linking the two together because people always remember faces, especially if they are ‘stars’ and that is exactly what we have done with the poster, magazine and film, audiences will notice the actors/actresses and associate them with the film, ‘Divine Intervention’, like with The Dark Knight above.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Feedback has been an essential part of my A2 coursework; throughout the course I have been receiving verbal feedback everyday whether I have been working on my film trailer, the magazine or the poster. Feedback is an essential part of effective learning. It helps students understand the subject being studied and gives them clear guidance on how to improve their learning. According to Bellon et al.1state 'academic feedback is more strongly and consistently related to achievement than any other teaching behaviour...this relationship is consistent regardless of grade, socioeconomic status, race, or school setting.' The feedback has been from my teacher and my fellow media studies students, I think having the feedback from the students is very important because they are part of our target market and therefore their views are almost as important as ours when making decisions as they and people their age are in the end the ones who are going to buy our product. This everyday feedback is very important, it may only be a quick conversation such as, “Mrs. Downes do you think the red looks good on this title?” followed by an answer, this goes on all the time but slowly helps to build up a stronger and stronger piece of media with your ideas that have been slightly adapted to be as strong as possible. Feedback is essential in the process of creating media as it is other people’s views on what your product is like and therefore you can tell if you need to edit or change what you have done and what bits are effective or ineffective. If positive feedback is given on something such as a logo then it means that you can tell you have created an appealing piece of media and therefore you can use this through out your product portfolio knowing it always looks good and will catch potential viewer’s eyes.
As well as receiving verbal feedback we also received feedback through our blog,
we posted our film onto the blog and it meant that through the internet we could receive feedback from anyone, not just the limited amount of people in our class. We posted the first version of the trailer on the blog on Tuesday 9th February and received feedback, “I like the trailer very much, but I don’t understand why she says that Jack dies and there is only a scene with Stef dying. Other than that the voiceover is very effective and the pace slowly increasing, I find very effective.” After reading this comment Aaron and I spoke and decided to add in the scene that we originally planned to have of Jack being run over, this then added more bulk to the trailer and helped it to make sense. The voiceover was approved by ‘Jacky P’ in this comment as well, similar to it had been in the class but we also gained some more verbal feedback that the voiceover should perhaps be in the same voice as the main actress, so we asked Lucy our main actress to do the voiceover for us and we then put it into the final version of the trailer. Since posting the final version of the trailer we have received more feedback from Bronnie and Oscar who said, “I really liked you use of voiceover and music and thought that the shots of Lucy at the beach were really nice.” And Freddie who said, “I thought that the action scenes where Lucy was being raped and jack was getting run over were very effective as the music made it hard hitting. The voiceover is good.. it helped me to understand the movies idea.”. Both of these pieces of feedback were very useful as it meant that I could see that the changes we made to the trailer were effective and worthwhile.
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the construction stage Adobe Photoshop was really useful for me; I used it for the trailer but specifically for the trailer and the poster. For the trailer I made captions on Photoshop enabling me to access many different types of font and put different effects on the words making them look more professional. The part of my coursework that it was best for was when I had to create the final screen of the trailer, one which says all the names of actors, producers, who did the music etc. Photoshop was very useful for this because it uses layers therefore I could make different parts of the final screen and import them back in for example the production company logo that I created, I made it using Photoshop before the final screen and then added it back in. Other effects I learnt from Photoshop was feathering which I used a lot in the making of the poster for my A2 trailer, this tool merges the edges of photos making them flow into each other, this makes the poster look far more professional and means that the different colours do not suddenly meet each other. I also used layers to a great extent when creating my poster and the magazine cover, they are very useful because it means that you can delete or move or edit small bits of the piece easily without affecting the rest of the piece, for example when I was creating the poster, I printed it out and realised that one out of the two pictures that I used in the poster was not good enough quality so I went back onto Photoshop and selected the layer it was on and deleted it and replaced it with a higher quality version, the one which I originally intended to put in. The other useful aspect of layering is that you can bring different parts of the piece to the front very easily, for example if you wrote some font first and then put a picture in you could simply select the layer the writing is on and drag it above the picture layer and it would then be on top of it and visible again.
Left: Screen shot of the editing software (Premiere Elements) in use.Also in the construction part of my coursework Adobe Premiere Elements was most probably the most important technology that I learnt and used over the course of creating the piece. Premiere Elements is the editing software we used to edit our film trailer. One brilliant aspect of the software that I found really useful is key frames which came in very useful in the making of the trailer, they enabled me to fade the sound in or out very precisely, meaning that the songs didn’t abruptly end when the next one started, the sound flowed with the video and came out very nicely, it also means that you can lower the sound of the music and increase the video audio, which is exactly what I used it for in the trailer. The key frames also allow you to fade the picture in and out to work with the sound and create smooth transitions between two shots. This video shows the use of key frames in my tralier:
I used key frames to lower the music and increase the sound of the voice-over, this meant that the music didn’t stop it was just far quieter enabling the important information to be heard by the audience. Also Premiere elements has a timeline which greatly helped the editing, it means that you can zoom in as much as you like and therefore finely edit the video and sound to your liking, the timeline also means that you can cut the videos and put them in linear order before you actually start to put them into the place you want the individual shots to be in the final trailer.
The internet and more specifically YouTube and IMDb helped me greatly in the research area of the coursework. I used YouTube to help me look at any movie trailers I wanted, this was essential as I needed to analyse them to help me to decide what I wanted in my coursework, what was effective and what wasn’t. IMDb helped me to tell when the films were made and therefore how modern they are as I want to be able to keep up with the modern up-to-date films because as time goes on so does technology and therefore what people are creating and the way they are going about it. 
The Blog is the final piece of technology that I want to talk about, the Blog enables me to become a media producer as it goes onto the internet for anyone to see and therefore I can receive feedback from anyone who views it. I posted up what I have been doing, screen shots of the trailer and images of the poster and magazine cover and the trailer that has been made.
