A2 Media Final Production - Film Trailer

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

During the research and preparation to our trailer we looked into many real media products, and looked into techniques we could use to challenge these and to incorporate into our project. We looked at many things such as title credits, music, location and camera angles to try and see how these real techniques could be portrayed in our own film trailer, and how many be could challenge them.

We looked at camera angles and used a great technique which challenged many conventional horrors and other type of genre films. This was the use of a handheld camera. We used a handheld camera to create a real life aspect to the film and it is a great way to challenge normal forms and conventions of a film, as it implies it is real. This technique has been used before, but we thought it would be a great way to challenge conventions of a film, and it did work effectively.

We then thought of genre, and we had selected horror. We researched a lot of horror films through extensive planning and came to our own conclusion of a conventional horror film, and tried to use this is as a foundation of our film through things such as location. The location of our film trailer was predominantly in a dark forest, which is a conventional horror film technique, which we thought would be the general structure of our trailer, clearly indicating that’s it’s a horror film and then we could focus on challenging other forms to trick the audience, but letting them know it’s a horror.

Another factor we looked at was music, most film trailers have one type of music overlaying, or none at all, but normally heavy music when the state of equilibrium changes in such types as ours with a zombie/infected villain. We challenged this normal convention by using two sets of music; one was UB40 – Red Red Wine, which is a cheerful song, unlikely to be in a horror film which is unconventional. This cheerful music then turned to Linkin Park – Paper cut, which is a heavy metal song, this ignites the action and reverses the mood when the state of equilibrium had changed. Normally you would tend to find just the heavy metal song in a film like ours.

Our film took on a postmodern role in some elements but we used normal horror conventions in some key areas to allow the audience to see from the trailer that it is a horror film so they will immediately want to see it if they like the horror genre. We thought the foundation of our product could be conventional, with the use of techniques that challenge normal conventions so it interests the audience.

What have you learned from audience feedback?

Audience feedback played a crucial part in the developing of our trailer and ancillary tasks as it allowed us to shape our products to the desires of our demographic audience,and also find using our demographic audience and what they specifically look for in a horror trailer. We collected the majority of our early audience feedback in the planning stage of our product, from a questionnaire which we uploaded onto the social network site Facebook which resulted in range of people answering our questionnaire which gave us a wider range of feedback to use.


These are examples of our audience feedback from the questionnaire

 We used this graph to back up and comprehensively decided that the correct demographic audience that we would target would be 16-25. This also gives us insight into what other 16-25 think about certain film genre, music, scariest moments and scariest killer etc which will ultimately aid us in making our film more enjoyable for them by including as many aspects of their favourite films with our own spin onto them.

Cloverfield was the most popular horror film and a close second was 28 days later which has alot of simple yet effective scenes which we have chosen to try and incorporate into our film e.g the chase scene across the field. Also close to the most popular was 30 days of night which is also one of the films we have researched into and decided to use aspects of that film e.g the darkness of the entire film and using people that you have to look hard to spot. We also learned from this audience feedback when we researched real media texts so we could invest more of our time looking at the more popular films and using some of the aspects from that film but with our own spin attached to it.

We uploaded our film onto YouTube which allowed people to comment on our finished product which allowed us to learnt what our audience thought about our film trailer. The audience feedback on our YouTube film allowed us to learn to be more careful with our spelling and punctuation which is quite a basic error but shows that without checking the finished product thoroughly there can be mistakes. This taught us that in future projects we have to check our finished product to make sure no mistakes go out. This feedback also shows that our original plan to keep the protagonist character hidden which adds to the suspense of the film, which taught us that in future products an element of disguise is needed to keep the audience hooked on the product so they will want to come and see the film evolve. This feedback also allows us to see that hand held camera effect worked but in future products we need to use the effect less so it becomes more effective on the audience in specific shots where the hand held camera is necessary.

 

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

Planning and preparation

New media technologies helped in this process in aiding things such as time, practicality and inspiration. In this stage we had gathered most of our research and was planning our film and constructing scripts, video shooting schedules and storyboards. We did most of this on Microsoft Word, creating these documents. We also found Microsoft e-mail outlook helpful too in order to quickly organise happenings within the group, like emailing each other things such as preparing props for next day, making travel arrangements and ensuring cameras and work at home was brought in. We also used e-mail to ask people to star in our film trailer.  Another new media technique we used for the planning stage of our project was to use Corel Video Studio12 to make practice film edits to see what would be the correct camera angle to use, and to see such things as time and colour manipulation techniques. We also used things such as Microsoft Excel to create graphs and tables clearly showing the answers from our questionnaire, helping us plan around these clearly shown answers. New camera equipment such as Sony Flip cameras came in handy with easy to use one press shoot filming, and easy to find camera captures clearly marked out on the camera. One of our group members also brought in his own personal video camera, which was a Samsung top of the range. This came in handy as it had different modes on the camera itself, instead of doing it on the editing software; this was such things as colour modes.

Research

We decided to conduct a long series of research to find aspects to our trailer such as genre, music and appropriate camera angles. We did this by looking at film trailers on the internet on such sites as YouTube and Empire, where we could extensively look into films such as The Crazies and The Blair Witch Project to incorporate things we saw into our own media project. New media technologies such as these websites has allowed us to gain inspiration from real media conventions and put them into our own practice, which is a big boost in the creation of our media project. We used other sites such as Google to find other aspects of research such as target audiences and if films like ours had been done before and how to steer away from the normal conventions. Music sites such as iTunes came in handy for the music selection to our trailer, storing a large amount of music to pick from and try out by overlaying them in our practice trailers. Another big factor for our project was the audience research and what our target demographic wanted out of the film. We conducted a number of surveys from things such as what is you favourite music in a horror trailer And what’s your age. We did this through Microsoft Excel creating a questionnaire and used social networks such as facebook to give out this questionnaire, this way receiving a larger response rate for a better generalisation. Our whole research part was predominantly on the computer, using new media technologies.   

Evaluation
We did this first by putting it on YouTube and taking necessary feedback and criticism which anybody can put forward. We also used sites such a facebook to post our trailer on also wanting comments to evaluate and receive constructive criticism towards our project. These new media technologies have opened doors for media planning, construction and evaluation. 

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

Ancillary Tasks

The combination of our main products and our ancillary products of the magazine front cover and film poster all follow a similar dark mysterious theme which adds to the suspense of the film and the mysterious looking characters as the audience will want to see who or what they are. As we took the scene of the scary forest from the trailer this still image from that particular scene is carried on in both ancillary tasks which gives all of the pieces of work a unified identity which viewers of the ancillary tasks and main product will be able to see the trend of all the pieces of work. 

As the trend is the same throughout the work, this will be effective for the audience as they will immediately know the product just by looking at one aspect of our work. Also the use of the mysterious character in our ancillary products leads the audience to what type of film our product is just by looking at the still images of the mysterious character, the dark distorted image of the forest and blood like title of our film which shows its effectiveness in delivering our trailers horror genre without even watching the actual media product which is the main objective of similar look to all the pieces of work as it allows the people looking at the work to be able to identify the film immediately. 

Filming Practice

As we were undecided on certain filming aspects and the editing programme corel studio we filmed a running shot in the film so that we could play around with the effects such as slowing the run down and changing the colour of the shot. This allowed us to get used to the new editing software and find out which aspect of editing looked best so that when it comes to the final edit we know what looks good already.

Filming Locations

This is a short clip of some of our choices for filming locations. Each picture shows an area which part of our film will be filmed there if we choose that specific location rather than elsewhere as we have 2 or 3 choices for certain scenes and shots to choose from.