Evaluation

Feedback:

After we completed our trailer we showed it to various people to get the feedback and opinion and things that could be done to make it better.

The people we asked initial opinions included that it was very good and they had lots of questions; e.g. whets behind the door? They also said that they would go to the cinema to see after and as there were many enigmas left once the trailer finished. They easily identified the genre as a horror and this was easily found out. They also said that general improvements would be to see more of the stalker and to see more incidents happen to the girl such as fall over.

Questions:

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

Our media product uses the forms and conventions of the horror thriller genre as in our trailer we have added the usual tension and suspense leading up to the finale of our trailer which usually has the outburst of horror as keeping the suspense throughout the trailer keeps the audience captivated within the trailer.
Our trailer challenges the forms of horror thriller trailers as we use ideas of repetition, although it does relate to the story of what is it happening and it doesn't give too much away as to what will happen in the film. Usual horror thriller trailers involve many clips of different scenes, so there are different clips of what is happening to different characters in the film, but we don’t always know why these things are happening to them, hence the name teaser trailer. Some parts of our trailer is the same as others with the dark contrast in certain clips and the way the pace picks up throughout as the tension begins to build up leading to the final end of the horror.

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

The poster we have made for our film has a dark contrast and has an image of a character from our film. We have used the same image for our magazine cover also as it doesn't give too much away about the film and makes the audience intrigued to watch more so they can find out what happens.
We have used same font colour for the title of our film on the magazine cover and poster but we haven’t used the same font. The rest of the font colour on the magazine cover is in yellow, we have done this so that our trailer title stands out the most and it makes it more obvious to the reader that the image being used links to the “Exclusive” for our trailer.
The image is the same making it obvious that they both link together.
There is a link to a website giving you more information about our film, but the website isn’t the name of our film but instead is the date which the film will be coming out so it doesn’t give away too much information away about the film.
People can easily tell that the Magazine cover is related to the poster as we have used the same image and the same colours for our text
Overall it is a good combination but the difference of fonts could be changed to improve our product and make it look more professional.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From the audience feedback we have a positive outlook as many of the comments were that the trailer was really good or improvements which are helpful so that we know what would be needed to improve it; more of the stalker or an incident to happen to the girl. Some of the responses were that they like particular shots; an example was of a shot where it looked like the running girl was holding the camera creating a point of view shot to make the audience feel like they are in the shot. They also liked the shot where it is at a low angle going slowly past a door that has a shadow. Another comment was that they liked the way the trailer had been edited to make it darker etc by changing the brightness and the contrast of the picture as this impacted to the atmosphere of the trailer. All the people who viewed the trailer were in our target audience of 18-25 so we knew it was a successful as our target audience enjoyed the trailer and would go to see the film.

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

We had to start by using the Internet for our initial research to decide on our genre and help us get ideas about a story line. On the Internet we used Google as our search engine, the things we searched for included, details on the horror genre and films of the same genre. Once our initial decision had been made we had to do further research and look at similar trailers to get an idea of what our trailer needs to include and the repertoire of elements; to do this we had to use YouTube on the Internet. The next thing to do was start planning we had to decide on what was going to be included in the trailer and characters, setting and what shots we were going to include as well as taking still camera shots using a compact digital camera of the locations we were going to use to create the trailer. We had to do our storyboard so we knew what shots we needed and the order it was going to do, as well as creating a paper version of our storyboard we then took still images with our digital camera and made it into a movie on windows movie maker as well as doing a time plan so we knew what time we had allocated for each part of filming this was done in Microsoft word.. Once our planning stage were completed we had to move onto the filming process, we put the shots into categories; head, running, stairs etc, to do this we had to use a mini DV camera. To keep in contact with each using our mobile telephones as well as email to make sure everyone had a copy of the time plan etc so everyone knew where we were and the time and date. Once we began filming we ended up coming up with more shots that worked better than some of the shots we planned. The final stage was to capture, edit the clips together and add titles, effects and cut clips down. We first had to capture all the clips we wanted to use by watching it back. Once all the clips were captured we had to use Canopus Storm as our software for editing we then began piecing them all together, we followed our storyboard but had to add in titles and effects to make it work together and cut down clips as well as swapping some of the original clips with other ones we had came up with when filming. For the evaluation we had to use a TV that was connected to the computer to allow us to show our trailer to people so we could get feedback to allows us to do our evaluation, to contact the people we had to use email and text so they knew what we needed them for and the time and date. We also had to use the work from our target audience to make sure we chose the appropriate people.