Evaluation (Aaron)

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

The genre that I had chosen in order to create an understandable and a movie storyline that will be more realistic, my genre thus was chosen to be a drama/fantasy genre. I chose this in order to make a life easy for myself and my partner in order that both of us can make an interesting storyline in which in someway or the other we can relate to. As I had a set genre to create a storyline towards, I managed to secure the needed codes and conventions to stay on the intended genre and also to aim for a wider range audience. My having a sub – genre, I am able to connect with the fantasy lovers who want to get away or find a deeper meaning in a storyline and at the same time attract an audience who want to see a bit of drama in a film so that they can, in someway or the other, compare the life of my characters to their own.
I can compare my trailer to the codes and conventions of other trailers such as “Taken”.

The best part of my trailer is how I manage to convey the storyline in the trailer without giving away any part of the storyline. Just as they have done in "Taken", the filmakers have given the adequaate information by following a non linear form of editing. By not showing too much off information on the storyline, I am automatically following the codes and conventions of a trailer. One of the many examples of us following the typical codes and conventions is adding in a clip of our production company “Universal” but also my own production company logo was created and put in the beginning of the clip.

A&M Productions

A = Aaron

M = Mori

In comparison to other trailers, I have created mine similar to the “Taken” Trailer, this is because in “Taken” as you have seen, the clip follows a linear scene with bits of other clips of the movie added in between, my trailer is very similar to this as I have my main characters on a sofa with Lucy telling them what is going in her mind with bits of other shots in between. I hope that you as an audience follow this concept that I have taken and put it in my trailer.

Other trailer such as the “Final Destination” Trailer has included and also inspired me to create the titles in
order to fit the genre.



In my own opinion I have managed to create my titles in order to fit the genre so that the trailer can sell the story as effectively as possible. My main aim for this trailer just like many other drama trailers such as, “My Sisters Keeper”, “Twilight” and also other genres that the title represents their theme, one of my main inspirational titles was seen in the “X-Files” movie trailer. I followed this same concept in hope of achieving a more significant effect of the trailer I order to get the audience target that is needed. My Mise – en – scene shows the location that I have hosen to represent the emotions of my character, the same is seen in taken when the main character is talking on the phone, the black background represents the emotion of intensity in the audience along with the main character. As you have seen I have followed the same convention in my trailer from the very beginning as the main actor is standing on the edge of a cliff as she is sad, the cliff in the Mise – en – scene represents the emotion of suicidal feelings, this attracts the audience as the trailer starts of with a very intense and dynamic scene.

Apart from the titles, one of the many aspects that work alongside the codes and conventions of a trailer is the editing. Like many trailers such as “Transformers” I have used quick fades at key points of the trailer to give a heartbeat sensation. This creates an amount of tense feeling in my audience making them more intrigued into what the storyline is all about.

In the end of my trailer (just like in "twilight") the last shot has calm music as the pace of the trailer has to come to an end, this leaves the audience in a suspense yet exciting mood so that they are furthermore attracted towards the movie. Just like many other trailers, the editing is slow in the beginning and then it is fast and non - linear in the middle only to slow down and come back into linear editing in the end.

It is important to remember that this trailer has been created in order for you as the audience to decide if you want to see this movie in the cinema and if it is worth paying £7 in order to see it in the cinema.

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

To have brand recognition in all three media is essential so that the audience can recognise the movie more effectively. My main aim was to make the audiene essentially breath my movie, see my movie and speak my movie and the only way I was to achieve this level was to create a combination of brand texts. By using the same font for my main film title was the recognition it needed amongst the audience. For example, in order for my film title to stand out, the first and last letter is bigger than the rest of my titles. This allows my title to stand out from the rest of my captions in my trailer so that the know what the film is called and watch the film.

The idea to make this title came by looking at other titles such as “apocalypse now”, I wanted to create a title similar to this however I could not find the font and as the budget along with the time was against me, I had to settle with another alternative.

I looked at other texts to get a better outlook on a simple yet affective title. By doing some research with the help of the internet i realised that the title for “I Am Legend” was very similar to another idea that I had for the title, I had manage to find the font and I created the title and used this font in all three media formats.By realising that the title would be a great impact on the genre I aimed to make a simple title in order for my audience to understand clearly what kind of movie this is.

I compared my poster and magazine to films that had the same marketing campaign, in order to be sure that my magazine and my poster were working together; I made sure that they were similar in comparison to other films such as star trek as their film poster was very similar to ours.

Left: My Cover

                                            Right: Empire Magazine Cover

Left: Star Trek Poster

                                                 Right: My Poster

By looking at the two Star Trek peces, they have managed to link the two together as their main image on the magazine cover is of the movie's main characters, as the audience remember faces better then names, this method is more effective, as they will see the faces they will start thinking about the movie.And so as you can see I have done the same to achieve that level of advertising and thus attracting more and more viewers. The similarities between my magazine cover clearly follows the codes and conventions needed for a magazine cover. All magazine covers use cover lines in order to attract more audiences or readers to buy this edition as there will be interesting stories inside, my selling line is the "Oscar Night" which shows the gossip that everyone enjoys. In terms of my poster the codes and conventions are very similar towards the professianaly done "Star Trek" poster. In their poster, they have two main pictures; one picture is ofthe actors, justifying their main characters and stars. This attracts the audience as some of them may like a certain actor and be instantly attracted to the movie, however another critical code tat they have is the spaceship justifying it being a sci - fi. As you can see this is similar to my own poster in which i have attempted to show the main characters and actors, by doing so I have brought attention to this as it is bigger then the other picture which means that the first thing you see is the big piture of my actors and then on the bottom is a snipet of the actuall film so that it gives the audience a slight inlook of the movie.

Without trying to sound over my head, I believe that my partner and I have achieved a 100% of my advertising level in order to get my target audience and possibly even attract more people. More people means more tickets being sold and more DVD’s, which essentially mean making more grossing movies. As a director of a movie it is his job to realise the essential necessity for a movie to be advertise fully which even means by having preview screenings just like “Clash of the Titans” is having. This allows you to have word by mouth which is one of the strongest form of advertisement. However, with my ancillary texts which connect each form of media to one another, achieving a wider scope of advertisement becomes much more achievable as my personal aim when advertising my movie was to make sure that the first thing that comes to people’s mind when they want to watch a movie will be “Divine Intervention”.

• 
  
  What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

 I needed to make sure that I can achieve my highest potential so it was completly neccessary for me to get feedback so that I may improve. I started getting feedback from my teacher as to seeking her advice on the sountrack I had chosen on the trailer, one of the biggest feedback I had recieved was in fact on my music as I had an acoustic sound on whilst i portraying a rape scene!! clearly that wouldn't work but as I was thinking that I could experiment, I was rightfully put in my place as a collegue said to me "Why do you have a happy tune playing whilst she is getting raped? That just ruins the whole point!!". After this I changed my music and added more than just one soundtrack. After reviewing the trailer again with my partner we realised that in fact it makes the trailer more tense as that is the effect we wanted to acheive. Feedback is vitaly essential to understand how and where we are going wrong and to learn from these mistakes.

Word by mouth is not the only way I got feedback, but through this blog (which is the main reason I had set this blog up was to get your opinion so feel free to comment) I had managed to get feedback from many other people.

 Both of these comments showed us what I was doing right and there outlook on to the trailer. This made me confident about how the trailer is laid out and certain aspects of the trailer such as the voice over. Due to feedback we had changed our voice over as originally I used a mans voice to do the voice over, then due to not only personnal preferance but also feedback, I learnt that by using the main actress as a voice over, it gives a better affect towards the trailer. 

Other feedback given through the blog in the earlier stages of creating the trailer was added such as ,

"Jacky P said...

I like the trailer very much, but i dont understand why she says that Jack dies and there is only a scene with Stef dying. Other than that the voiceover is very effective anf the pace slowly increasing, i find vwery effective."

By reading this I added in scenes of my male protaganist being un over. I then manged to turn the trailer which looked like as if it was linear editing into a non linear editng because I managed to add in scenes of the trailer.

I'm not sure about other filmakers but I am sure that through feedbackI was inspired more as to what is needed for my trailer. Recieving feedback allowed me to adapt to the thoughts and ideas of what essatially is my audience and as a filmaker, it is my responsibility to provide entertainment that not only I enjoy providing but also entertainment that they enjoy recievig. If a filmaker understands this then he will be able to make the best of films or entertainment product.

• How did you use Media technologies in the construction, research and planning stages?

During the construction stage it was vital that I had the correct technology otherwise creating my project would have been very hard. Adobe Photoshop had been used regularly as the main project such as the titles for my trailer was created in this software. However my trailer was not the only reason why I used Photoshop, but on the contrary the main reason was in fact to construct my poster and magazine. Due to Photoshop I was able to put my vision of my poster and magazine on paper and create it. Things like adding in texts and colour to the picture, making the whole layout look neater and also add in some text fonts to make it look more interesting. One major thing I was excited to learn on Photoshop was feathering as it taught me how to merge to photos together to make it look like they flow into one another. The effect that this created on the poster was  that it looked more professional and made the poster look better as the two different colours of the photo did not suddenly clash and make the whole poster look awful. Photoshop uses layers which meant that you can delete a certain piece without having it affect the whole of the poster whereas if this was done by hand then on mistake and I would have had to start all over again. All in all I guess what I’m saying is that the software saved a lot of time because of its unique features. In creating my trailer, the software that I used in the course of construction was Adobe Premier Elements.

This software helped my construction of the trailer as it has enabled me to create the filming done by my digital camera more affective, for example I created key frames in order to alternate the voices in between both the speaker and the music so that the audience can hear both but also hear what the speaker is saying. Editing was also made easier rather than the old fashioned cut and paste, I was able to put shots where I wanted to put them I could change their fade in and fade outs. I was able to control and cut very easily how long and how fast I wanted the shots to remain as well. All this is due to the technology I was given which helped me do this project as well as I possibly could.

My research stage was helped by the internet in major ways. Websites such as IMDB had given me views and inspirational ideas on what narrative I should choose and allowed me to observe how they have created their own trailers. Yet the most help I got in research was You Tube. The availability of videos and trailers on this website allowed me to go deeper than mainstream but also to see how other amateur film makers have created trailers. This helped me in my planning and in my research as it gave me the power to analyse but also allowed me to be inspired by their narratives and how certain shots show how they are trying to portray certain things.

In the end of this long evaluation I am going to talk about this blog, as it has been a great help as it has enabled me to keep track of what I am and have done, I have received great feedback on this that helped me to improve my trailer to the fullest but also it has turned me from a media consumer into a media producer because as of now my trailer is online and published. My aim is to hope that my work can reach some big enough to recognise me and my production and this will be all due to the fact that today’s technology has helped me.