Evalutation

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



My Media products all challenge real Media products. My Media poster does this because I have included all the details that you would find or expect to see on a real Media poster. I have learnt that everything you find on a poster is important if you want to reach out to your target audience. For example if we take a look at the Pineapple express poster, it says "From the guys who brought you Superbad” above the poster credits and since Superbad was a successful comedy film it's letting the audience of the Superbad film know to come and see this movie because the audience might find this film funny because it will have the same kind of appeal to them as Superbad since they are from the same writers. The producers put these lines on the film posters to show how good the producers/directors/writers they actually are. In a small way it's like showing off, if we take a look at James Cameron even though most people know he is not that original and most of the time steals ideas from other stories to include them in his own (Like Avatar wasn't a futuristic rip off of Pocahontas) people can still see him as this "amazing" director because of the film Titanic. All his work after Titanic always included somewhere on his poster "From the man who brought you Titanic", this is a simple way to assure people that this film will be good because of a writer that has had a huge box office hit in the past. This could trick the audience because the new film might not be any good and could be such a letdown but it's still drew people to the cinema. If we look at James Cameron now after the box office smash hit Avatar smart people will know the reason that film did beat James Cameron's last box office hit Titanic is because of the 3D gimmick behind it and it gave people a reason to flock to the cinema for this "amazing experience". The audience knew that you couldn't pirate it or illegally download it because it wouldn't be the same as the Media is making it out to be. From this knowledge of Media I have observed over the years I know what to do for my Media products, especially for my Media poster. I never did use this writing technique in my Media poster because the writers are supposed to be new, even the director is supposed to be a new person in the Film business so that’s why I never used it in my Media Poster. My Media poster is more of a teaser poster since I didn't include that information and that I kept it simple. The reason because I thought I would change the way I did this from last year and to take on different aspects of the Media world. The things I have used from my Knowledge of Media posters is the tagline, what I learnt from my research is that the tagline has to be something catchy, things that inspired my tagline, "Time just flies by" in my poster was the Harold and Kumar sequel and their tagline was “This time their running from the joint” where the word joint has been used as prison and as a joint which they usually smoke throughout the film. My tagline "Time just flies by" relates to the film’s title "Killing Time" where I have used the known phrase for my tagline to link the two lines together. If I was trying to be professional for my film and if I had more time I would have included a song in my trailer which relates to "Time", I do not know of any songs that reference this at the minute but I bet if I had the time I would be able to find one. The tagline would have then been more relevant to my film and I could also use the song to make the film sound comedy like.

My Media Magazine challenges real Media products because I have used something that I learnt from my Media research and that is the magazines layout. I had to be careful that I don't have the same kind of layout like my music poster I did two years ago or it would look like I have not learnt anything about presenting a front cover neatly. The layout is important because the layout, when done right, can be really appealing to the audience. The film magazine EMPIRE always has done this with their front covers because they always are eye catching to the audience. The advantage of doing the music magazine last year is that it has improved my skills at fireworks which made the process of making my movie magazine “Films4You” quicker, I will talk about fireworks more when I start to talk about the technologies I used throughout my coursework. The main thing I had learnt from my research and real Media magazines is that the main featured movie always has a different font in the middle to make it relevant to the film, for example the Dark Knight cover on the Empire magazine is of the Joker and it has a green font to match the style of the film and of the character. On my Media magazine I had a smart looking font which was Red and White. The font was a little bit narrow but neat and the colour Red would match the style of my film which was about the Horror genre. This gives the magazine more of an effect because the film then related to the magazine more and had a bigger impact. The picture I have used on my Magazine poster has a comedy effect which really does show that kind of the film as well as the horror aspect because of the clothing I had the Killer dressed in. I decided to use the ghost face costume because I thought it would fit in nicely with the release of Scream 4 in a few months. I also used it because the comedy that I am using was supposed to look like Scary Movie, this did not happen but the Killers costume still stuck with us because it could show our audience that it is a horror. The reason behind this is because the costume, over the years after Scream was released, has made its self into the horror costume market, including selling really well over Halloween, because Scream was a successful franchise and even lead on to film spoofs featuring Ghost face like "Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth" and the most popular one "Scary Movie". I used a tea set because I got the inspiration for it after watching Tim Burton's "Alice and wonderland", even though it has nothing to do with my film I just thought it would be funny and give off that comedy effect in our film with a plastic tea set. In my Media magazine I used two picture stories; the pictures however were from my Media work over the years. The Hankicheifs new movie was the picture I did for my Music Magazine and the Security sequel is what I did last year for my other Media coursework. I thought I could use these because since it's my last Media coursework doing this it would be nice to include past work and at the same time using pictures instead of wasting time taking more photos.

My Trailer challenges real Media products and the way I have done this is by using all research I did for the trailers and using them to help me create a good Film trailer. The main idea behind my trailer was from the film trailer the Cottage. The cottage, in my opinion, was a great trailer because of the use of the trailers song which was old Mac Donald had a farm. It really fit well with the trailer and it inspired me to borrow ideas from it. One of the main scenes in the teaser trailer was the stairs scene near the end of the film; it featured the main characters running down the stairs screaming. Alex was the person who gives off more of comedy effect in the film because she really contributed to the film and was the person who did most of the dialogue and the one who screamed the most. The stairs scene is sometimes included in horror movies where the main character is running away from the killer down them, I wanted the trailer to relate to them kind of movies and that’s why we did that scene. The scene which was in our opinion like Scooby Doo was the lift scene, which we filmed in the schools lifts. The idea was to have the main characters go in and the Killer comes out of it even though we know he wasn't in the film to begin with. The main characters would be completely oblivious to the Killer following them. It's like Scooby Doo because this usually happens to Shaggy and Scooby when they enter a room. However this scene was never included in the trailer because Saifur who was filming held the camera the wrong way thinking you could turn it around when editing, a common mistake people have made in the coursework, and we could not turn it and never had the time to redo it because of people’s free time. A nice addition to this trailer was the use of daylight savings since it was dark when we filmed, making it look like the characters have been locked in the school and were staying there other night and other nice edition was that it was the week after it had snowed a lot, making it seem like that’s the reason the characters have been locked in. The use of transitions in the film made the trailer look better, including the title cards like "Warner brothers pictures presents" this really gave the film a professional look like in the real trailers. I learnt from real Media trailers that using titles is important because it shows the audience the information that the audience does not see. My trailer was no the original plan the past idea behind my film in the early stages was about a group of friends in the woods and finding a small estate where the Killer lives. Now the obvious problem with this was the location, there was no way we could do the woods since there’s not any near our location, even if there was the other problem is getting people organized to come out to shoot the film. This is unlikely because people are not free all the time and the whole thing would be a waste of time. The idea had to be watered down to set the film in school, a location which is easy to shoot in because this is where we are all the time.

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

All three of my Media products are effective by the way I have combined my magazine and poster with my film trailer this is because the products help each other and that is why I have managed to keep the same theme in all three of my products. In my poster I kept the simple neat look that linked into my magazine which was a simple picture of the killer have a tea party. The pictures might not relate to each other but the whole thing is what related the two. The trailer was just a teaser trailer so the idea in general was simple by the way we did it. Most of the scenes in the trailer were just people running around screaming but it worked because of the horror theme I have kept throughout the three tasks.


Thanks to my research I have discovered that most trailers correspond with the poster and at least one magazine that is either reviewing or previewing the specific film. If we look at the Scream franchise every bit of related Scream merchandise along with the movie covers have a picture of Ghost face in the background or the number of the film with a women screaming inside it like the number has covered the photo and it's slightly being showed through the number. A film called Scary movie noticed this and used it for their spoof film of the Scream franchise. The Scary movie films always have the characters from in the film in a movie theater with different weired things related to the film whether it's popcorn, a knife or a "I see dead people" t-shirt. I think the reason being the relating content is so it's more well known the the audience. If the audience get that picture in their head of a film their most likely to be intrigued about it and curious to see it, they might even make them more likely to go to the cinema to see it and bring along their friends setting off some kid of chain reaction. If the audience spotted different pictures of a certain film that don't really relate to one another then the audience will be confused with this, people these days expect the media to guide them to whatever it is their selling. It seems people have gotten used to this over the years as advertising has gotten more creative and interesting playing a big part in peoples life, why go out and search for something when you can let someone else do it for you. The audience depends on this and this is the reason why it's impotent for whatever your selling, in this case a film, to relate to the things which relate to that film.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

I have learnt from my audience feedback that my poster and magazine kept the same theme and that they could relate with each other. It seems like most people chose the most obvious answers that I expected them to choose. For my poster I learnt that people would like to see a good picture as the main thing in a poster, this is because posters are mostly pictures with a small amount of text. The poster is the main thing which draws people in look at the poster. If the poster was rubbish and did not meet the audience expectations then it would not be good advertising for the film. Just like the magazine cover the audience also expects so kind of decent layout to make the whole thing look presentable. The reason for this in my Media magazine cover is because with a lot of text and a huge picture on a front cover sometimes things can look abit crowded and won't look as neat for the audience to read. Catching the audiences eye is the main thing I have learnt in my research it is the main thing I had to focus on because that is what it's going to take to make people look at this poster or magazine cover to either go and watch the film or buy the magazine. The things I have learnt for my film trailer is that people expect to be interested by the quality of the editing but also the trailer must show the audience what kind of genre it is. It would be false advertising if a genre is a horror but the trailers make it look like a comedy/horror, It's misleading to the audience and puts people off watching the film or taking any notice of the directors/writers next film.


Questionnaires are an important thing to get information from because they offer the insight into the minds are our potential audience. It's all about what they want to see and what they want the film trailer to offer to please them as they will be the ones watching the trailer and the ones who will pass the poster on bus stops or billboards.

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


In my Media coursework the Main program I used for two of my products was Macromedia Fireworks. This program was vital to my work because it was the main program to edit my pictures and colour font on.  Macromedia is the best software for this that I know of, there is other programs that are probably better but I don't know of any other software like this except for Photoshop. In fireworks I was able to take fonts I had got off "Dafont.com" and colour them in. The problem with Dafont is that you have to pay to use the images, but if you print screen the page and then colour them in from Fireworks it's a way around from paying. We had to use a camera for our photos, instead of the one provided for us in school we used Saifurs camera which was better quality in the images. The camera was easy to use and we managed to get a lot of photos done with it. The next bit of technology we used was a camcorder, we used the one which was provided at school and we managed to shoot no problem with it. The only thing which was a problem was the noise in the background, this was totally unrelated to the camcorder though which means we had no problems with the actual thing.


Another program we had to use was iMovie. This program worked really well and made editing our movies easy. It also took a little while to convert our media movie files on the Mac since our movie clips were all separate since we shot so many scenes.  It had easy navigation on which scenes to cut and how to cut them, same goes for the music files on iMovies and the transitions. There was one more program we used on the mac and that was Handbrake, this was the program we used to convert our files so we could use them in iMovies. As I have stated before because we had so many scenes it took a little while, it didn't help as well that we couldn't convert all of them at the same time but had to convert them one by one.  That was the only problem we had we Handbrake and the only problem we had we the editing. Handbrake displayed a message saying "An error has occurred and Handbrake will now close" every time we tried to convert more then one file.  As I improved my work this problem did not happen as the new camera we had already converted our scenes into MP4 quick time files, this made it easier to improve our work and managed to help us edit and complete our work in three days rather then over a week and a half


In my conclusion I feel like I have improved on what I have done in Media over the years, I've done media since year 10 and every year I learn new things about media that I've never learnt before. As each year progresses I learn about new concepts, camera angels, film ideas, theorists and the media industry in general. This year, four years later, I felt that I had come to the point where resitting this coursework would bring me no new knowledge in Media, I was wrong however as this year I have been able to understand more about how to craft a trailer then I learnt the previous year. I have improved beyond believe and managed to make a trailer which takes concepts from popular films and make them into my own. With my friends help in my coursework, I have managed to complete the three tasks that I was set and have done them the best I could, the trailer is the one I am most proud of because, even though it's no Steven Spielberg material, it is way head in terms of professionalism because of the more careful planning and shooting we did over the time since we got our last mark. My most favorite bit of the trailer is the music I luckily found on the Internet, it is the trailer music for the new Scream 4 film in trailer 2. Overall I think that my improved coursework will be a better installment then the trailer five months ago.