Media A2: January 2011

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

Before going through with our trailer my group looked at conventions of thriller trailers. All trailers take out the important scenes from the film to give the background information of the film. We also used this, as it is a very important convention. Other important conventions are, background music for the trailer, as it sets the mood and atmosphere, plus trailers always have the date,names of actors,actresses, producers, etc. and not forgetting the name of the film. One way we have challenged a trailer convention is by not using a voice over. The reason for this is because we thought that the scenes where the two boys are talking slightly set up the story and we didn't feel that we needed a voice over. However, if my group had the chance to do it again, our film have would have a voice over, as it would have set up the story better than the talking scenes. Another convention we used was the use of quotes from magazines and newspapers. This lets the audience know if this is a good film to see or not. Our main product also challenges other media texts as it uses people from ethnic minorities, who wouldn't really be represented in a thriller. This shows how media can be diverse.

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

Our main product (thriller trailer) had been given some good feedback by class members. Once my group showed them the clip, they got an understanding of what the film is about and liked the camera angles. They also liked the fact that we used black and white to show the flash backs of the girl killing herself, to show that it was the past. They found this very artistic and effective. One of the scenes which i found very effective, was when the boy was running down the stairs. This was very effective as the audience will be in suspense as they do not know what or who he is running from. This builds up tension and will make the audience want to watch it.

Me and my partner produced both posters

Produced by me and my partner

These were our three ancillary products. We had quite abit of feed back from our class members aswell as our teachers. When we showed our products to our audience, they found the film posters very artistic and interesting. They found that they wanted to know more about the film and it drew them in. Also they commented on its "thrillerish" effects and liked it very much. My teacher also thought the same. We liked the dark stroke effect and thought that it promoted the thriller aspect that we were going for, as it made the poster seem mysterious. I wouldn't change anything about the film posters, but for the film magazine cover, if me and my partner were to go back and redo it, we would have taken a picture specifically for the cover, instead of taking a screen grab from our main media product. I think this would have been much more effective and drew in the audience more. I was very please with out film posters and thought that they had a very different view to most thriller posters and this may seem like a challenge to the typical thriller conventions.

Videos of editing

Editing the film poster

Editing the trailer "taunted"

What I learnt from my audiences feedback on my trailer
I conducted a focus group to get feeback on my film trailer the feedback we got was both good and bad and they also gave us ideas on how we could have improved our production. Some of the positive feedback we recieved was that using the black white colouring on the scenes to represent it was a flashback of the past was very effective because it lets you know its a flashback without having to be told. Another positve thing was that we had a few powerful shots for example when the camera is watching from the top of the stairs and the bully is running down it gives the affect of someone is watching him running. One other good thing that was said was that the non-diegetic sound was very tense which complimented the scenes. They also felt that the reveiws from magazine and newspapers was very effective. Some negative things that the focus group didn't like was that our scenes were too long for a trailer, usually in trailers they have a lot moe scenes from dfferent parts of the film. another negative thing was that the colour of the writing that we used within the trailer was not very effective and didnt go with the genre of the film. the last negative feedback we had was that some of ou background sound in the scenes were too loud which stopped you from hearing thhe actors dialog, we tried ou best to edit the sound so ht you can hear becausewe didn't leave enough time to re-film the scene

how my group used media technologies in tthe construction and research, planning and evaluation stages ?

This screengrab shows how we used Final Cut Express to cut down and edit our film trailer. in Final Cut Express you can capture your filming onto a mac and edited the video and audio using many different tools such as fading in and out and dissolving. You can also import music on top of the original sound and you can adjust the volume of either of them up or down to your likeing to give more of an affect
We used the headphones to hear the sounds that microphone was picking up. One problem we came across was that the first set of headphones we used were broken and wasn't picking up any sound this is the reason for some of our scenes having too much background sound. If we had enough time we should have re-filmed that scene because in our audience feedback our focus group said it was a big problem because you can't hear the characters talking
.
We used the tripod to keep our camera steady and to give us easy movement while we were filming. With the tripod you can adjust your shots easily by making the camera higher, you can also pan and tilt the camera neatley. There is also a bubble level on the side, this is to help you see if ur camera is level and ur shots are not leaned off to one side.

We used two different video cameras to film all the scenes previewed within our trailer. Because used two different cameras for the different scenes some of our trailer is filmed in a better quality than the rest and we used the detachable microphone to pick up a better quality sound than the camera by itself.