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

Evaluation question 4

(If you view this presentation in full screen mode, you will be able to read the text much easier. Particularly on the last slide.
Click on 'menu' in the bottom left of the power point and then enter full screen mode from there.)

One other form of technology that I left out was Google. It't simple, but was important for one small aspect of my teaser trailer. I didn't know how to obtain a 'TV static' effect, to use as a quick cut between some of the shots instead of pure black, and also to use with a very light and transparent opacity on the last shot of the camera on the floor, to make it look like the camera is breaking/broken. I asked the schools Final Cut 'expert' to see if he knew how to do it, but I had no luck. I decided to google how to do it, and within milliseconds I had pages and pages of free tutorials to use to my pleasure. In that sense, Google has helped greatly, even though I only used it for a small part of my coursework and for a very small aspect of my teaser trailer.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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

When you look at a teaser trailer and compare how it fits in with a magazine cover or a poster, they can generally link in a few different ways.
Some films use the same colour scheme throughout, with, for example, red filters throughout the trailer, then with a predominantly red poster and red magazine cover. They may feature aspects of the film like the storyline.
One of the main ones used is characters from the film, whether it be protagonists, antagonists or other main characters. I kind of mixed the last two, using the two main characters from my teaser trailer on the magazine cover, but an aspect of the hand-held camera from the trailer on the poster.

I believe that, even though my poster has a different style of picture than the rest of my products, my three coursework productions work well together to create a promotional package and awareness for the film. I tried to keep the whole hand-held camera thing a theme throughout the whole trailer, which I then integrated into the promotional poster, with the camera picture.
Below are a few shots from my trailer showing that the camera is hand-held, along with the camera picture from my poster:

I have used mainly red throughout the whole series of products for my coursework. I made sure I used the same red by using the 'eyedropper' tool in photoshop to sample the colour and saving it as a 'swatch', so that I could use it again and again. This signifies blood and death showing straight away its genre with the iconography.

From the third shot down in the list above, you can see I was wearing a grey jumper with a plain white top. I made sure that I wore the same clothes in the photo shoot for the magazine cover in order to keep the 'costume' the same throughout the products. The reason why I put quote marks around the word costume then was because the clothes are not really a costume. Due to the plot of my teaser trailer being based around teenagers, I didn't really need to plan too much in the way of clothes for the characters. It did take a degree of deciding that the clothes needed to be plain or dull, and not a brightly coloured floral Hawaiian shirt, for example.

One of the biggest ways in which I linked my main task with its ancillary tasks was by use of font. All of the inter-titles and other text on my teaser trailer (apart from the production house) was written in a font called "28 Days Later". I used this font every time I wrote the title of the film anywhere, in the trailer, on the poster and in the magazine. I also used the same font for the production house on the trailer and the poster.
By having the title of the film in the same font and in big lettering through all of the products, it creates a link between the three tasks for the audience, so that anyone who has seen the initial poster and then sees the trailer on the television or on the internet will know that the two products are about the same film. The same goes for the magazine cover as well.

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

Evaluation question 1

Here is a powerpoint that I made early on in my production process, however I believe it is relevant and useful to post here for my evaluation question:

Coursework analysis 2

Final Products

Teaser trailer:



Poster:

Magazine front cover:

Facebook page

I created a facebook page to try and obtain some feedback from my peers about my products.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/A2-Media-Studies-Feedback-Page/150668014998268

Above is the link to the page.

I thought about making a facebook page to get feedback because I know that people my age tend to use facebook a lot and it won't make someone go too much out of their way to take a look at the page. I know this from experience as I also use facebook.

Directors Commentary

Below is a video from my lovely application 'Screenflow'. As I explain quickly in the video, this is just to show my understanding of the teaser trailer and why I did what I did:

Quite a few changes...

I took the feedback I received from some of my peers and a large hand full of my target audience, and below is what I achieved:

To start with, I changed the mast head back to blue. I also made the star 'sticker' a bit smaller, while making the 'plus' section bigger. The 'also' banner at the bottom has been grouped together and tilted slightly.

Now, hopefully this is a finished (or at least close to finished) product. I'll now go round and film some of my target audience saying what they think about my whole coursework in general, as well as each individual task.

The videos and written comments will follow.

Conclusion!

I asked around 15 people which page they thought looked better out of the three on the last post and it is safe to say that I should swap back to the old blue mast head. (Which is good, because I actually preferred that one!)

I will go back to editing with the old mast head and adding the changes mentioned in an earlier post.

Back to the old mast head?

I looked at my magazine cover and noticed a few things. The star thing is a little bit too big, as a minor point, so I will need to reduce the size of it slightly.
Also, convention for a lot of magazines that I've seen show that the banner at the bottom are normally sort of in a block together, not separated out like mine. I will need to group those together too.

As a major point, I think that there is now probably too much red. Below is a comparison of my magazine covers, one with the red mast head, and the other with a blue one. There is also an idea that I had about having some of the mast head blue, and the boxes red. All three are below:

  

A new look!

I changed the colour of the star to a blue, which sits well with the redness and stands out well from the rest, which is what that star needs to do in most, if not all magazine covers.
I also tilted the text in the star so it looks more conventional to magazines.
Below is what I have now:

Carrying on with the magazine

I made the changes I suggested on the last post: moving the star and adding a drop shadow.
I also carried forward the point about it not looking like a magazine cover and added a banner to the bottom of the page, along with a bar code:

I think this looks a lot better. it looks more like a magazine cover now than it first did.
The only thing that immediately springs to mind now is that there is too much red. Everything on the page has some sort of red in it. In terms of colour schemes, from my research I noticed that msot magazine covers have 2-3 colours on them. I have used 2 really, red and white (the blackness doesn't really count as it's a standard colour. The colours of the picture also don't count from what I've seen in my research).

To make the page less plain and to also separate the star from the rest of the page, I will probably change the colour of the star.

Back to the magazine

I showed my most recent draft of the magazine cover to my peers and my target audience and I got a few comments about the colour scheme, and that even though the mast head is kind of like a logo (and therefore can be it's own colour and not affect the colour scheme too much), it would probably look better red in this case, instead of blue.
I also got comments like "it doesn't really look like a magazine cover...".
To begin to rectify this, I added a classic 'star' shape in the corner. Here is the result:

Now in my opinion I think that the star looks a little unprofessional. It definitely needs a drop shadow.
Also, the male actor's head (my head) is almost covered up. So I may need to move the star as well.

Poster re-visited

Before starting on my magazine cover again, I had a quick look back at my poster with new eyes that haven't seen it in a while.
Immediately I noticed that the 'coming soon' part didn't stand out enough and the production label seemed out of place.
I did a bit of re-jigging and below is another finished draft of my poster:

Having the camera next to the pool of blood directly links in with the trailer itself. At the end of the trailer there is a shot of a pool of blood growing towards the camera lens. This is therefore a picture of that last shot from above. This would then link the two products together and with those along with the magazine, would create a lovely promotional package for the film.

Magazine cover

After showing people my magazine cover that has now been changed to red, I was told that it didn't really look like a magazine cover.
I looked at it for a while and looked at some issues of Empire magazine that I had and decided I need to fill some of the space I have on the page.

I will go away and do some more work on this filling the spaces with more film-y stuff.

Completed video

After changing all the things I agreed with from my class, I exported my teaser trailer and uploaded it to youtube. Below is the video:\

A feedback session

My whole media class, who are all just 18 and therefore predominantly my target audience, had a feedback session. They all sat and watched my teaser trailer and then gave me some feedback on what they liked and their comments on it.
Below is a video of the feedback I got from them and comments below it of my opinion on them, whether I will carry out the change they suggested and what I agree/disagree with.



I will analyse the points in the order that they are said:
The first comment was that they would actually want to see the full film if I was making it, which is really good news. It means my teaser trailer was successful.

I was also told the cutting was good, but there was a lot of black. I knew what he meant by this so I will go away and shorten all the parts where there are no images. However one comment was that in the shot where the girl is dragged down the corridor, you can still see her foot at the end. I will have to cut it a bit sooner while she is still being dragged so it doesn't stand out as much.

They seemed to be confused about what the shot was where the white and red thing hits the camera. As I explained, this was my brother in a blood stained shirt. I didn't mind this though, despite what they thought it was, because I wanted my teaser trailer to be one of those ones that you have to see more than once to really get what it all means. This is the same with the shot of the couple kissing with the strange character again with a blood stained shirt in the background. We did watch my trailer more than once and on the second or third time people were actually saying "oh I never noticed that before!", which is exactly what I wanted with my teaser trailer. It gets people enticed and wanting to see it.
This point is then sort of carried forward with "it makes me wonder what the film will be about".

The next part is quite interesting. Louis states that he thinks he's at a loss. Although he enjoyed the teaser trailer and he knows it will scare him, he seemed to think that he may not have seen enough to want to see the film. However Liz then carries on saying that it is just the teaser trailer and not the full trailer, so there would be more footage to come. People seemed to agree with this and again goes to show that my teaser trailer was successful.

Look, It's red!

As the title suggests, I re-did the page in red. Here it is:

I do think this is starting to look a lot better.

I do still think there is work to do though, so I will keep fiddling with the page and see what I can do with my creativity chromosome!

The one thing that I mustn't do now is add any more colours. Many, if not all professional magazines of all types of media generally only stick to about three colours as a maximum. normally two.
I have the purple and blue from the mast head and the gotham logo at the bottom, the red of the anchorage text and black of the normal text. So I don't have room for any more colours.

Second draft!

So, here it is. The second completed draft. There are a few things to improve on, which I shall explain shortly.

 Firstly, the 'Survival' anchorage text doesn't stand out enough for me. So I will need to make that bigger somehow, which will involve moving the 'plus' section somewhere else.
Another big problem is that the piece of text to go with the 'survival' part is too much. It shouldn't be a paragraph. I will need to shorten that.
Finally, the colour scheme is a bit off. I sampled the purpleish colour from the 'Reel Time' logo and used that in some of the other words and as the glow colour for the 'Gotham independant film awards' logo at the bottom. However, purple doesn't match horror at all really, so I needed a different colour.
I watched my teaser trailer again at this point to see if there were any certain colours that stood out. At the end where the title appears, it sort of fuzzes into a red.
For this reason, I decided to go with red instead of purple.
The next post will be the same page but with all the problems listed above hopefully corrected.

New picture

Here is a second draft with a different picture:

I do think this picture is better. I used the 'dark strokes' effect on photoshop and it seemed to turn our eyes completely black.
Normally this wouldn't look good but due to the genre and narrative of my teaser trailer I think this is quite fitting. Conventions of real film magazines show that the actors on the front normally have something on them, whether it being a costume or a prop of just the way they look, that links them to the film.
This is quite obvious actually because if there was someone featured on the front cover who was wearing normal clothes and there was no text linking them to anything, the reader may not realise they are anything to do with.... well, anything! Let alone being in a film.

So yeah, I'm going to carry on using this picture and the next post will be the same picture but with the rest of the text added in.

First draft

Here is the first draft of my magazine cover:

Seeing this, I think I do need a different effect on the image. My teaser trailer was in the horror genre, and having a bright and raw picture like this doesn't immediately say that this is a horror film.
I also need to take out the inner shadow that I put on the whole page.

I may also need to make the text easier to read, either by picking a different font or making it bigger.

A bit of editing

I edited this chosen picture and came up with three different styles. Below are the ideas I had.

 



I liked the sort of oval shaped lighting effect that is common with these edits. I found it while working on the first one and carried it through to the others.

The picture on the left is just the lighting effect. The middle has a 'dark strokes' effect added, which makes it seem more dark and sinister.. The last has a 'diffuse glow' effect that really brightens the picture and makes the people stand out inside the oval lighting.

I decided to do my first magazine draft with the left picture to see what everything looks like together with the mast head and other texts.
I will most likely decide to use a different picture or use a completely different picture effect if I find a better one though.

A photo session

As I knew the kind of picture I wanted I only took a few pictures, here are all of them:

    

There were also five more, however they were very blurry so I got rid of them straight away.
There are a couple of problems with some of these pictures. Firstly, the first picture was taken landscape. I asked the cameraman to take one landscape just in case, but as it is a magazine front cover, which are generally in a portrait orientation, I decided not to use it.

In the fourth picture, I stupidly blinked as the camera took the picture, so I look half asleep. This then leaves me three more to choose from. As they were all pretty similar I chose the last one.

My design

Instead of just copying an existing magazine I decided to sort of design my own. I had a logo I used in an enterprise week a couple of years ago for a film club I also thought of, called 'Reel Time', that would work well with a bit more professional editing of it as a mast head.
I already had a mast head ready, in that case, but I decided to keep to a similar page layout as an empire magazine so I had references to make when placing things.
Also to solve this problem I will use my knowledge from experiences in the past and from my coursework last year that I will make a flat plan, as it helps a lot.
Below is a scan of my drawn flat plan:

Sadly, the scanner kept cutting the edges off. The only major things missing are the boxes in the top left stating the price, issue number and date etc.

The bit on the right that has been cut off says:
"+plus exclusive interview with Quentin Thomas, the president of the BBFC, about classification!"

The mast head of the front cover says 'Reel Time'.

I went and took some pictures for this front cover, the next post will show the pictures I took.












The reason why I have decided to design my own magazine cover as opposed to following a generic design from Empire or Little White Lies is because of the publicity for the film. Empire and Little White Lies mainly publish mainstream films that will be/have been successful in the box office and generally feature films that will bring them a lot of money too. But my film is not played by anyone famous and would be an independent, low budget film. Therefore if I create my magazine I can justify this concern and say that the magazine is also an independently published magazine that features less mainstream films.

The other ancillary product

The other task was to make a magazine front cover promoting the film.
I looked at about 20 or 30 Empire magazine covers in school. I decided to analyze a couple to see what the main features were.
Below is this information:

So, what would it look like?

I needed to know what the poster looked like in its natural surroundings and where it would normally be placed.
Due to the amount it would cost and the fact that I didn't have any huge sizes of paper off-hand, I decided to use the power of technology to get this image across.

I found a picture of a train station with a board where a poster would normally be held, and quickly dragged in a JPEG of my poster onto the board. It hasn't been stretched or moved around to fit with the scale of the board, so it does overhang some edges of the board, but it still gives a good idea of what it would look like:

A (Hopefully) Final Poster

I needed a new slogan, as mentioned in the last post. I decided that it needed to be something to do with the camera on the picture, as the title of the film doesn't tie in with it.

I did some research and found the now-famous quote by Cesar Romero: "They say the camera never lies. It lies everyday".

I took this and modified it slightly, coming up with "the camera never dies", hinting at the horror genre.
I also wanted the slogan to be addressing the audience, but to also tie in with the idea about cameras.

Below is a picture of my final poster. I also did a final bit of editing to give the whole poster an inner glow, I added the certificate and also added the production house from the teaser trailer too:

I believe that this is a massive improvement to what I had before.

New Slogan

I decided, first of all, to take away the 'is key' part of the mast head to prevent confusion about the film title.
I also wanted to use a different slogan for the film that tied in with the whole idea of the camera in the picture.

As an overview of the plot idea for the film, I changed my idea from the whole 'zombies take over the world' kind of story, and thought about tying the plot in with the fact that the film is filmed Cloverfield style on a handheld camera. So I've started to think of new captions instead of 'One for all all for none...'.

The next post should be a picture of another draft of the poster.

New design

I again added the text to this new picture, but didn't add the overall glow in Photoshop because I knew that I would be editing it again at some point:

I added a large drop shadow to the text this time, which puts it away from the rest of the poster. I thought this looked good.
I also added a 'coming soon' and a slogan for the film at the bottom of the poster.
I am aware that I need to add some more things like a possible credit block and an age certificate at least, but I will add that last for technical reasons with the age certificate.

In terms of the raw picture itself, I added some more blood splatters on the floor, however I may make these look more realistic.

New edit

Here is a second edit of the original picture, which looks a bit better than the last in my opinion:

After looking at this picture, I realised that my foot is in the bottom. It's not really visible on this little picture, so click on it if your interested. So I need to crop the picture down a bit before I add the text and effects. I can also crop a bit of the left and the top to get rid of a little bit of the door and the wall at the top.

I think that the pool of blood looks a bit better in this picture, so I probably won't edit that part much more.

First draft/playing with effects

I added some text to the picture and put it into Photoshop and added a glow to the whole picture.
Here is what I finished with:

You know the drill, click the picture to enlarge it...

I added a 'glow' with noise to the whole layer to match the noise in the teaser. I also added some bloody hands at the bottom.

In all honesty, I didn't like this. There is a lot missing and doesn't ring professionalism.

I decided to start again with the raw picture.