This is my powerpoint evaluation that I completed for my media A2 coursework.

1. Media Evaluation
Sean O’Keeffe,
“Private Caller” evaluation.

2. In what ways does your media product
use, develop or challenge formats and
conventions of real media products?
• Me and Niall decided to try and stick to real life products as much as possible with our trailer, and we achieved
this by watching trailers that are of the same genre. For example we watched the “Phonebooth” trailer a few
times, and “The Box” trailer was also used as inspiration.
• Although we tried to stick to original conventions as much as possible, we felt that we needed to add our own
style into the trailer to make it original, so for example the music isn’t really that similar to what we’ve seen in the
trailers, and the camera angles give away more to the audience than that of a real life trailer.
• Before we shot our film, we went round at lunchtime asking pupils that go to Bishop Walsh what they would
expect to see in a thriller/action trailer. The general feedback was quick shots, transitions, and music that builds
tension. We took this feedback on board, and we have tried to apply these conventions to our trailer, so our target
audience, along with us, will be satisfied with the finished product.
• When we started filming, we decided to use “The Box” as a sort of template for filming our trailer, I think this was
a good idea because we want to set the same mysterious feel to our trailer as they have with theirs. Real teaser
trailers are only around a minute, a minute and a half long and in this time it gives a basic narrative and shows a
small glimpse of the main characters, this is what we’ve done, but in ours, we wanted to make it very clear to the
audience that it is a thriller. The music really helped us with this, as it created an atmospheric backdrop for the
dialogue.
• We only show key seconds with small shots, for example, important dialogue, some violence, and narrative.
• The Box trailer:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFHa-ygkF_M
• Phonebooth trailer:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p07lBCfC2q8

3. • We started the process of making the film by drawing up storyboards to give us
a basic outline/plan of what we needed to do for each individual shot.
Although we didn’t end up sticking to the original plan that was drawn up on
the storyboard, it did help us a lot, and kept us on task well.
• I think its good to have a template to work around, and although we didn’t use
many of the shots on the storyboard I still think its a good idea to have
something to refer back to just in case things don’t go to plan.
• Also, writing up a storyboard really solidified our knowledge of camera shots
and angles – enabling us to take what we’ve already learnt about them and
implement into our own work – which I’ve found very interesting.

4. OVERALL.
• Overall I’m satisfied with my media film, as we stuck to typical
conventions of thriller films to satisfy our audience, but also
tweaked things slightly to make the trailer our own. However, I feel
it was more important to stick to the typical conventions of a
thriller trailer, rather than try and make it too much like ours. I
believe that if it looks genuine then the product will look better and
I think we’ve achieved this.
• I’m also a fan of how well me and Niall worked as a team, assigning
one another tasks and ensuring that the project was completed to a
good standard.
• A strength of the project was all the research we put in I think; we
made sure we knew who our audience was and we wanted to
ensure we reached out to them – trying to stick to all the codes and
conventions of thriller trailers but then putting our own spin on it
too.

5. How effective is the combination of your main
product and your ancillary tasks?
• Brand image has become an absolute must for
film makers today, with the audience having
so much choice about what to watch and why
they should watch it. This is where the
promotion for the film comes into play, and I
think the combination between the two forms
of media has been successful in my case.
Typical conventions of a brand image for a film
are:
-The main character throughout each promotion
image.
-The mis-en-scene.
- Catchy tag lines that bare relevance to one
another are conventions of the real thing too.
- The posters colour schemes develop a sense
of enigma.

6. FONT.
-The font you use for your title is clearly very important aspect when
constructing a brand image. I wanted it to stand out. I think my poster
really grabs the audiences’ attention, as the colour scheme is eye-catching.
This is what I set out to achieve, as most real life film makers do this too.
-The website used to acquire the different styles of fonts is called
“Dafont.com”, “Dafont" seemed to be a great site to get different styles of
writing, whether it be for formal or informal formats – which is exactly
what I wanted for my magazine and poster.
COLOURS.
- If you look at my film poster, then you can see that the primary colour is red. I think
this was an obvious choice to use, not only because it’s quite eye-catching, but also
because of what it represents; red often means danger, and this is exactly what our
film is about, the danger of leaving your loved ones alone. Another obvious
connotation of red is that it represents gore, and blood. And this is a possible hint at
the audience about what the film is going to be like, without giving too much away.

7. The main image is pulled into focus and is considered a
higher priority than the title to the reader as the main
image of my film “Private Caller”. I originally wanted to
have the character over the magazine title, but it didn’t
really work, so I just decided to have it below the title
instead.
I wanted to make the image have a lot of priority, so much
so that even the masthead doesn’t dwarf it.
I’ve used big bold text in order to get the readers attention
I’ve used black and yellow to make it stand out from the rest
of the magazine. If I was to make another issue for the
magazine, then the colour scheme would be completely
different, it’s just that this particular issue had this colour
scheme because I wanted to make it quite informal
I tried not just devote an entire front page just
to one film, I wanted to break the page up a
bit, this is to reel the audience in to read
stories that are there later on the magazine,
this is a feature which I was keen to use as you
see it used quite a lot in real magazines.

8. The way that the sentence ‘Because you never
know who’s on the other end...’ is placed at
the top of the poster, and almost takes centre
stage, this makes you think that maybe this
face is in fact the person on the other end. This
is what I set out to achieve, I wanted to get the
audience guessing.
The review given to the film that has been
printed on the poster again ties in with the
thriller genre as it says that the film is
‘groundbreaking’. I wanted to make my film
sound very good, which is the reasoning
behind this description.

9. Change of heart about the poster
• After talking with my media teacher about the
poster for my film, she suggested that the
main image for it was a little too pixelated,
and didn’t look clear enough for it to look
professional. This discussion lead to me
deciding to take a new picture for the poster
and changing the colour scheme.
• The two different posters can be found on the
following slide.

10. BEFORE: AFTER:
As you can see, the two posters differ quite a lot, and in my opinion this is for the
better, on the second image I think the image has a lot more impact, and I think the
fact that it is considerably more clear than the image I took before , leads to a better
poster.
I also prefer the colour scheme on the second poster more, it is clear and concise, as
opposed to the jumbled up reds and blacks on that of the previous image.

11. OVERALL.
• Overall I think the combination of my main product
and my ancillary tasks is quite good, as I’ve tried to link
everything together by using the main character from
the film as the central focus on both ancillary tasks.
(The poster and magazine).
• However, I feel that my magazine and poster could be
more similar in the sense of the colour scheme. One is
predominantly red whereas the other is mostly yellow
and black. On the other hand, in real life you don’t
really see the colour scheme being too similar on both
formats.

12. What have you learnt from your
audience feedback?
• Overall, the audience feedback was quite
positive, me and Niall were both satisfied. We
asked people in my year through
questionnaire, which you can see on the next
slide...

13. Questionnaire.
• Does the music go well with the shots?
•
•
• Are your opinions of the camera angles good?
•
•
• If not, why?
•
•
• Where would you expect to see this trailer?
•
Do you think the promotion package goes well with the film trailer? (Below)
• If not, why?
•
What do you think of the magazine?
• What do you think of the poster?
•
• Thanks for your time.

14. • Generally, the feedback was positive. We asked
people in our year, who also happen to be our
target audience; teenagers aged 16-18. Both
media students and people who don’t study the
subject. Honestly, we were more hopeful that the
media students will find it better than those who
don’t do it, because they know what to look for,
such as the camera shots, the music choice and
where they’d expect to see this trailer.
• We also took it upon ourselves to film some of
the people as they were giving feedback, we
think it was a good idea to do something a bit
different and a nice way to show what people
thought of our film. The question tends to lend
itself to this style of response too.

15. Feedback on film:
• I also acquired some feedback and
filmed it too. The two people in this
short clip are Harry Shipman and
Daniel Campbell. They both watched
the film three times before giving
their feedback. They're also part of
our target audience as they're both
17 years of age:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u
5NNtB3BLzU&feature=related

16. Strengths and Weaknesses
• After acquiring the audience feedback I’ve decided to pick out a few key strengths and weaknesses:
TEASER TRAILER
Strengths:
• You can easily tell what genre it is, and you get the basic idea of the film without giving too much away.
• Typical conventions are used.
• Use of lighting and costume is really effective. Lets you know what genre the film’s probably going to be without
making it too obvious.
Weaknesses:
- Could vary the shots a bit more maybe, more variety in it could only mean it gets better.
ANCILLARY TASKS
Strengths:
- Typical conventions are used in both tasks, i.e. sub stories, tag lines, movie reviews, images, font.
- Clear images, eye catching fonts and effective lighting used make everything clear and concise.
Weaknesses
- The magazine looked a bit plain, I think you could’ve filled it up a bit more with more sub stories and features etc.

17. How did you use media technologies in
the construction and research, planning
and evaluation stages?
YOUTUBE
• Media technologies have really helped us a lot in every aspect of
the course as of yet. Even right at the start when me and Niall
wanted to research into the thriller genre and trailers for different
films, we decided that YouTube would be our primary focus.
YouTube enabled us to search for different trailers for various films
in seconds and it really did help us with our research.
GOOGLE
• Google also really helped me with my research. If I needed to look
into various magazine covers or film posters for research for my
ancillary tasks, then with the click of a button, thousands of results
can come up to help me gain inspiration for my own work.

18. CAMERAS
• Cameras that the school provided gave a good hand when we
wanted to show where we were going to shoot from, and the
shots we wanted to use. The images were easy to save, which we
uploaded to Blogger.
BLOGGER
• Whilst on the subject of Blogger, it really helped us get up to date
with various checklists and tasks we needed to complete. There
was a specific e-mail address and password for each one of us,
which meant each profile was secure and safe. By having all our
work on one profile in various posts, it made it an easy and
efficient task to locate all our work, even if it was months back
when we completed it.
***Blogger was an
excellent tool when it
came to keeping up to
date with the course.

19. FILMING
CAMERA
• We filmed our trailer using a HD AFGA video camera that the
school provided for us. It was very useful because I don’t
possess a video camera myself, so for the school to provide us
with such a high quality model was very good I thought, and I
was grateful. The camera has a built in screen, this enables you
to watch back your shots and filming immediately after
shooting them, which saves you a lot of time not having to
upload the film onto the computer and watch it back there.
***We used a
camera similar
to this.

20. ADOBE PREMIERE
ELEMENTS.
• When making our trailer we used a programme called Adobe Premier Elements. At
first, this was quite a complex programme to use, but after about a week of getting
used to it, me and Niall felt we could use it with some ease and it ended up being a
very efficient programme, enabling us to cut and edit as much or as little as
possible.
• Another positive of this programme was that if we messed up the editing on a
shot, there was always the original copy of the shot in a file, so we could just start
again on the shot instead of having to make do with a small mistake.
• One of the most impressive factors of this programme I thought was the sound
editing. This was very easy to use, and some examples of what you could do are
being able to increase the dialogue and decrease any diagetic noise that was in the
background. You were able to tone down the music you incorporated into the film
at certain points in the trailer, so the speech in the film was clear and concise. This
was important for me and Niall as there isn’t much dialogue in our trailer, but what
is there plays a vital role in letting the audience know what’s going on.
• FREE MUSIC LOOPS
• Adding the music to our film also turned out to be an easier task than expected, we
chose our music off a site called “Free Music Loops” that the school provide. I was
impressed by this, because I wasn’t expecting much to be honest, but it turns out
there was a wide variety of beats and songs you could pick from, which were all
copyright-free. After careful consideration, we both decided that we were going to
use the DRAMATIC DRUMS beat for our film. It's quite a conventional beat for a
thriller trailer as it manages to develop tension as the trailer goes on because the
tempo increases. This was good, because it was really quite easy to add non-
diagetic sound to our film.

21. ANCILLARY TASKS
PUBLISHER
• For both the magazine cover and the film poster I decided to use Microsoft
Office Publisher. I’m a big fan of this programme as it’s really very easy to
use and doesn’t really throw up anything at you that’s too complex to come
over. The transferring of images and various fonts onto both tasks was very
easy, as it just asks you to take them out your documents or simply copy
and paste them onto the page. Very easy.
• It also gives you a lot of options with regards to colour schemes, you can
simply click on an image or a particular font you wish to tweak slightly or
drastically, and you very easily click on a paint bucket icon in the corner to
chose whether you wish to put one or two colours into the main image, or
maybe even more, they leave the decision completely up to you.