Here is evaluation for my A2 media piece.

1. Burgess field evaluation By: HollieTuckwell

2. In what ways does your media project use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Our media product uses many forms and conventions of past media products such as ‘Friday the 13th’ which we researched and took ideas from for our own media product. We tried to use many conventions of the Dogme style of filming which we took examples from other products. To achieve this affect we didn’t use a tripod to film our piece, however we did have to break one of the vows of chastity in order to achieve good lighting in our piece.

3. Developing our ideas... When we initially conducted our research we knew the type of genre we wanted however knew that ‘horror’ comes in different forms with different conventions therefore we decided to look more in depth to ‘hyper real’ settings and characters. By focussing on the characters expressions rather than showing the audience what is going on or who is behind the killings it gives a sense of suspense. However we did decide to focus on the killer in our ancillary task we tried to make them look almost paranormal and un-human like to add to the postmodern sense of the piece. In this way we challenged typical forms and conventions of horror pieces as we showed the audience who was behind the killings.

4. How effective is the combination of your main and ancillary tasks? I believe that both our ancillary tasks complimented each other well as it has visible continuity and yet using different angled pictures meant repetition for the audience wasn’t an issue.

5. Cont... The image portrayed on the last slide from the movie shows recognisable contrasts to that of the poster and magazine cover which will instantly be noticed by the audience. Both the magazine cover and poster show clearly the genre, this is enhanced by the dark backgrounds with the paranormal whiteness of the face and the deep red of the blood.

6. What have you learnt from your audience feedback? As part of our audience feedback we created 2 questionnaires one for the general public and specifically for our target audience and one for media students. We decided to conduct 2 different surveys as it would mean we would get valid results from people looking at it in different ways. For the media students they would look at it in an analytical view where as our target audience would give it from an audience perspective and would be able to give true feedback. We posted the surveys both on blogger and on facebookto try and reach out to the majority of our audience.

7. Feedback.. ‘ the teaser trailer was quite short, it could have been longer.’ ‘there could have been some opening credits to the trailer with the film production companies logo.’ ‘transitions betweens shots were good as it was fast paced and it reminded me of previous horrors i’ve watched.’

8. Changes made.. Once receiving the feedback we sat down as a group and decided to discuss changes which could be made to the piece. We decided in terms of the length of the trailer it differed on the person and when researching into length of trailers further we decided that ours was very appropriate, otherwise it would have looked more like a conventional trailer which we were trying to avoid. However we changed the font of the initial draft and decided to change the colour of the font to deep red for maximum impact of the signifier of death.

9. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? We usedPicasa to edit our images for our ancillary task, we took the pictures on the camera which I blogged about previously, and as it was a relatively low megapixel camera we needed a good editing software in order to enhance our pictures to a high standard. Along with Picasa we also used Adobe photoshopwe used this in order to create and edit our text. We did think about using dafonts.com where we found really appropriate fonts for our piece however time constraints meant we had to work with what we had.

10. Cont.. We used blogger an internet blogging site in order to record all our planning and reasearch for our piece. We also used this along with facebook to contact others in the group to organise times and meetings. To edit our piece we used apple mac computers and the software imovie to create the best teaser trailer we could. The sounds were also from imovie which meant we could concentrate more on our editing and less on copyright laws for our soundtracks.