Evaluation questions

Evaluation questions

• 1.
  In what waysdoes your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Before we created our media product, we researched the overall horror genre, by watching a number of horror film trailers, in order to help us understand what typical conventions they used to create an effective trailer. Also by looking at a variety of different horror film trailers it gave us ideas of what we wanted to include in our media product, for example in the trailers we analysed, ‘30 Days of Night’ and ‘Jennifer’s Body’ there was a victim, screaming, blood, tense music overlay and quick shots. In addition to watching ‘30 Days of Night’ and ‘Jennifer’s Body’, we also looked at ‘Let me in’, ‘Orphan’ and ‘The Others’. We did this as they all have the key similarity of featuring children, which was one of our main ideas, as we felt that children or a child definitely give the film a creepy element. After watching ‘Let me in’, ‘Orphan’ and ‘The Others’, we both were in complete agreement that we wanted a child to feature in our film as the pure and innocent connotations, which are associated with them work so well in a horror film as nobody suspects them. However after brainstorming an idea we felt that the child in the film did not necessarily have to play the antagonist, which in many films that feature demonic children are. Therefore we decided to have the little girl in our trailer to be the protagonist and be a warning to the victim. One of the main conventions we followed was to have an innocent young girl feature. In all films there is a victim and we saw in many of the films we analysed that a common victim was a young girl, this is because this type of character is normally naïve, vulnerable and powerless, which makes her easy prey for the antagonist. Another extremely important element that goes in to creating an effecting horror film trailer is lighting, we saw this in both ‘30 Days of Night’ and ‘Jennifer’s Body’, however it was done very differently in both. Since in ‘30 Days of Night’ the natural lighting was dark throughout as it was set at night and only in key scenes to show the vampires coming did they have the lighting change, whereas in ‘Jennifer’s Body’ the lighting was constantly changing and as the trailer went on
• 2.
  the lighting seemedto darken. Therefore taking all these lighting techniques on we decided to use various lighting throughout, for example the trailer starts off in daylight, however although it is daylight it has a slight tint of darkness and is light is not bright instead is a little gloomy (maybe put a lighting affect on it). Also when the audience are first introduced to the little girl at the top of the stairs the lighting here is very significant. Since the lighting is much darker at the top of the stairs where she is standing, which means that the audience can only just about make out that there is something or someone there, creating mystery for the rest of the film and trailer. We kept to conventions when it came to some of the camera shots we used, one being our opening shot which was of the signpost saying ‘Churchfield’ we decided to use an establishing shot as in many of the trailers they opened with a shot of the place where the film was going to be set, also we needed to include the sign as it was a crucial link to what happens further on in the trailer and will help the audience understand what the film will be about. Another type of shot we used was a jump scare as this is something which is used in the majority of horror film trailers, we created our jump scare by having quite a fast pace scene with the character Elizabeth running and having footsteps of mystery man shown, then the shot goes very still and the music overlay stops. This relaxes the audience as they will think nothing else is going to happen it is only after the title of the film is shown ‘The Message’ a close up of Elizabeth screaming appears on the screen, which should scare the audience and make the want to go and see the film. The pace of the trailer is another thing that is crucial to get right, as a good trailer should keep the audience on the edge of their seat and wanting more. I would say started of slow and fastened up as it when on and the drama heightened, for example one of the key scenes where the female character Elizabeth sees the little girl for the first time is a very quick scene we decided to increase the speed in the editing process of when Elizabeth puts her head down and then up again, in order to create the drama and confusion of what was there. As I previously mentioned the little girl that features in the trailer is not the antagonist, however I think that it may remain unclear to the audience whether
• 3.
  or not sheis the antagonist or the protagonist, which I would say is something quite unconventional since in the majority of horror films firstly a supernatural or spirit would normally be the antagonist. Secondly in most trailers we felt that it is always made clear who plays the victim and villain, therefore we have created an enigma by not making the clear. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary task? The key importance in our project was producing an effective horror film trailer, however we along with this we had to produce an accompanying film poster and magazine front cover. Since when creating an horror film a poster and magazine front cover are just as significant, as they are just another way of persuading the audience into going to watch the film. As we felt the trailer was the key factor out of the three tasks, we decided to link the poster and front cover back to this. Therefore firstly our poster included a central image of thelittle girl who features in the film’s trailer. We used an image that was extremely unfocused this meant that the little girls face was very hard to make out, which is something that we intentionally did as we did not what to give what the looked like away in the poster, as we thought it added to the mystery. This is an idea that we got from analysing ’30 Days of Night’ since in there poster the audience are unable to make out what the vampire looks like, in addition to this we continued this in our film as we only showed the little girl for quick snap shots. We came to the decision to use the little girl in our poster, as we felt that she definitely brought a creepy and disturbing feel to the poster and would hopefully make the audience want to go and see the film. Since people go to watch horror films to be scared and this poster should show them that this film is going to be chilling and scary. When it came to our magazine front cover we decided to use the young girl ‘Elizabeth’, as she is the main character in the film and we felt that a good way to entice the audience to come and see the film would be to show her looking vulnerable and innocent and therefore make the audience want to know what happens to her in the film.
• 4.
  One way inwhich we linked the film trailer tothe front cover was by having the mystery hand on the girl’s shoulder this relates to the trailer as in the trailer we see a pair of footsteps. Therefore we thought the mystery hand would be good as it should make the audience want to know who this mystery character is creating an enigma. We added a filter to both the poster and the magazine front cover. The filters on both darkened the images, we did this as we wanted to create an eerie feel and darken the atmosphere of the overall film. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
• 5.
  How did youuse new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? New media technologies were crucial in creating our product, as we used a vast amount of them at every different stage of production, from the early stages of researching to the final stages of constructing our film. One of the initial media technologies we used was the internet. The internet was a vital part of helping us with our planning and research, since one of the first things we did in order to help us gain knowledge about horror trailers and trailers in general was to go on to the internet and watch them using YouTube. By analysing the trailers we were able to see what types of codes and conventions were being used and also as we looked at both horror trailers and then other film genre trailers we were able to compare them and see what makes horror trailers different and what makes them stand out and entice the audience to go and see them. Another type of technology we used was the green screen; we used it when filming our trailer presentation. We both felt that the green screen was the best medium to present our presentation in as we wanted to clearly explain and show our extensive knowledge and want we had learnt from researching trailers. Therefore by using the green screen we were able to do this as it allowed us to not only speak about the films but show examples to the audience using the specific film trailers we had researched, which added a visual element into our presentation. We not only used a camera when filming our trailer presentation, but we also used a hand held video camera when filming our main media product we used two different cameras, the first one being Samsung and the second being sbndfjgjsd. This was because we filmed our film twice; as we felt that our first attempt did not work very well therefore we tweaked the idea slightly and used a different camera in order to get a better final product. The camera was a vital piece of technology as it had a number of features on it that really helped us with the filming, for example the zoom feature allowed us to get close up shots and long shots, which were need to create a film trailer that had different shot types.
• 6.
  Also the camerafeatured a light at the front, which was extremely useful when shooting the night time walking scene as we needed it to be dark, as this is when the shot was set but light enough so that the audience could just about make out what was happening in the shot. Once we had all of our shots, we used an Apple Mac to download them on to Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro was an excellent help in editing our footage, since we was able to download every shot we filmed on there and then simply select what ones we thought were the best and put them in chronological order onto the timeline. This made it much easier when it came to adding affects and cutting certain parts out since it was in the correct order. After all the editing was complete we used Live Type, which is a programme that creates font and transitions, once we had created all the titles on Live Type we imported them into Final Cut Pro and added them to our timeline of footage. Another type of technology we used was Photoshop we used this to create both the magazine front cover and out film poster. We did this by firstly using a digital camera to take picture of the actress in our film, we then uploaded these images on to Photoshop and added filters, fades and text. Finally once we had finished our main media product and our trailer presentation we uploaded them onto YouTube. By doing this it allowed us to put them onto our blog site, we used Weebly. We used our blog site to present all the work that we had done this included our research, planning, construction and evaluation. - Internet - Weebly - Final cut pro - Green screen - Camera - Youtube - Live type - Photoshop