The document discusses how the media products created for a film project used and developed real media conventions while also challenging some conventions. Feedback from audiences was gathered during the development of the trailer, poster, and magazine which helped the creators fine-tune the products to fit audience expectations of the horror and thriller genres. Key aspects like the villain's backstory, visual motifs, color schemes, and taglines were carried through each text to create cohesion in promoting the film.

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http://jaz-tormented-productions.xanga.com/745127503/evaluation/\"
Evaluation<br />In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?<br />For our media products we followed the typical media conventions we chose to do so because challenging the media conventions can confuse the viewers. We looked at real media conventions and chose to use a “horror villain” as our main character which include personality traits such as, a traumatizing past, hallucinations, confusion, and shown as a victim as well as a bad guy. This is a convention often used by real media conventions examples of this can be seen with such characters as Freddy Krueger, Jason and jack Torrance. The “horror villain” usually has a terrible past where he/she was abused as a child, this process dehumanizes them but also lets the audience sympathise and see them as a victim who has had their innocence taken away from them, however this sympathisation is short lived because the victim then evolves into a villain because the experience has led the character to seek vengeance. This is apparent in our trailer where the main character Chris is constantly reminded of his past through hallucinations where the audience is let on to his horrific past, Chris then goes on to seek revenge and closure by trying to break into the house he was tortured in as a child. The struggle of Chris to break free from his past using a metaphor is an idea often used by films. However we did challenge the media conventions by using our villain/victim as a victim rather than just a murderer, the metaphors present in the film make our film closer to the conventions of a psychological thriller, however the violence and depraved past of Chris is often used in slasher films, incorporating both conventions rehumanises our character and seeks to absolve him. When casting our main character we had to think about media conventions, we looked at Jason from Friday 13 because he is typical villain, Jason is a male, gender is something we thought about because female villains are a rarity because females are often portrayed as a victims, the few villains that are also victims are also seen as more vulnerable in comparison the their male counterparts, Samara from the ring is an example of this, in the ring she is responsible for a disturbing death of many people however she is also portrayed as a sweet innocent girl with a terrible past she is often portrayed as a emotionally weak. We chose a male to be our main character because of this and because we didn’t want our main character to be viewed sexually, female villains are often depicted as “sexy and dangerous” although they capable of evil things they are also often objectified and lusted after, this leads a lot of female villains to be not taken seriously as a scary character where as a male character can be seen solely as a character to be feared without sexualisation leaving the character to be taken seriously as a person to be feared. So in choosing a male character rather than a female character a we adhered to gender stereotypes. Male villains in scary movies are m often well clothed in order to seem mysterious and are often facially hidden by an item of clothing such as a mask, this is a why we chose to dress our main character in black clothing and a hoody often worn up to conceal part of the face, when casting we chose Emma’s brother because he is a very tall and broadly shaped, he is also very good at grinning in a way that is creepy and made him not shave so that he could have the stubble look, this is often used in films so the character looks like they don’t care for personal appearance, this has connotations of danger, laziness and the idea that more important things are happening than personal experience. <br />We have also challenged another convention of horror films by not including any authority figures in our film trailer. The film focuses on the depravity of out main character and the absence of authority makes the audience feel out of control, our main character is also revolting against his troublesome past where a parental authority figure tormented him, this follows the conventions of a youth revolting against authority through violence.<br />In our poster we followed the conventions by showing our character in a dark creepy setting using a mid shot, his face was also shadowed and depicted him with a crazy grin this is often used in horror movie posters, the typography of the poster also followed the conventions by being centered above and bellow our main character, the credits were used in a standard movie credit font and were centered along the bottom.<br />In our magazine cover we decided to use the colour scheme of our movie which is white teal and grey, however I also incorporated orange to contrast, these are colours not often used in magazine covers for film, colours such as red and black are more commonly uswed. I followed the spacing conventions of magazine covers so when placed on a magazine sheklf it Is instantlky recognised as a magazine about film, the placement of the image and the face that is is a close up is not often used in magazine conventions however it was very effective. <br />Question TwoHow effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary texts?Whilst we were producing the trailer, poster and magazine cover we had to keep in mind that they had to be closely linked in orgery to work with each other seamlessly. We used a variety of key aspects to link our products together with a running thread of underlying themes in order to produce an effective combination of marketing products that all promote our film. the title of our film is present in all of our texts, the word “delusions is written in the same font (post nuclear) for everything with the exception of the magazine because magazines don’t often use the same font on their cover for copyright reasons and therefore use a font of a similar style that has been distorted In a way similar to the trademark font of thee movie, this is exactly what I did, I took a san serif font (just like our postnuclearfont) and edited it to look very similar to the real font, by using the same font throughout the texts the font becomes recognizable and instantly associated with the film. The colour scheme was also taken into account for every text produced, the teal/blue scheme was used in every text and in the case4 of the poster and trailer the saturation is very low, because the magazine is a third part and is not part of the film production team the magazine company did not have to choose to follow the colour scheme to the letter this is where I incorporated the use of oragane as a contrast to the teal, this is an convention often used by magazines to capture the reader’s attention with bright coloursa,m however when making the magazine cover I used teal as the primary colour so it would stay closely linked and recognizable with the trailer and poster. In every text there is a significant emphasis on the face of our main character, this is because he is mentally instable and his sinister nature and “creepiness” has to be shown through all of our texts to draw attention to the flaws in his character, this is why there is a facial close up on the magazine depicting his maniacal grin and also in the trailer, in the poster a mid shot is used but the same facial expression still remains. The tagline ‘Fear is the key that unlocks the mind’ is present in both the trailer and the poster, creating a slogan that is associated with the movie. The idea of an unstable mind could be linked to our magazine title ‘Mad about Film’, containing connotations directly linked with insanity which is a key theme in our trailer. The cover of the magazine also advertises articles and posters based on similar characters who also suffered from mental strain, the comparison between Freddy Krueger and our character represents the link between the movie villain word and our film.These processes and techniques have all been used to create a synergy between our texts and keep a clear and distinctive theme running throughout all three.Question 3What have you learned from your audience feedback?During the development of our trailer we tried our best to keep our potential audience in mind. We needed to gather a clear idea of what an audience of a horror film is and what they expect and not expect to see on screen. We did this in many ways such as: the making of a facbeook page. When uncertain on what features to add to our trailer or ancillary texts we constructed a short list of the best choices then sent them around people to choose, we constructed a tally from these results and the idea with the most votes would be chosen to include in our project. Constructive feedback was also needed so asking for peoples opinion helped decide on important aspects of our project.<br />Audience feedback was crucial to gathering information on what our potential audience would like to see, when the draft of our trailer, poster and magazine covers had been produced we showed them to people who were interested in film and experienced with viewing such media products, this gave us a clear idea of the conventions of our product and enabled us to fine tune our product to fit the conventions and also challenge them.we had a lot of difficulty choosing a title for our film and discussing it among ourselves as a team was leading to no direct conclusion, therefore we drew up a short list of names and sent them around the class and on facebook to the people who fitted the profile of our audience and asked them to choose a title, joint best were wymerring manor and delusions, we felt the delusions was more appropriate so we chose that as our title, choosing a title without this process would have taken much longer and we may not have been able to cater to our audiences needs.We got the best feedback during this project for our poster and magazine covers, I think this is because the visual elements of these are easier to decipher because these products are stationary where as in the trailer information is moving at a fast pace and the audience find it harder to process the visual information and form a conclusion in their mind. For example we originally decided to use a mid shot of our character on the front of our magazine cover in order to follow magazine conventions however; we also had an effective close up of our characters face. To make our mind up what to use, both images were printed off and sent around our media class where it was confirmed that using the close-up was preferred. The hardest way of getting audience feedback was facebook, because people did not want to “like” a facebook that had not been advertised by mass media before hand, other film companies (real ones) and movies (real ones) had a large following on facebook because of international renown and mass advertising, we had none of this so getting people to like our page was almost impossible. However with the ease of access of facebook we steal valued it as a valuable tool, and if this were a trailer for a real film or we were a real film company there would be no doubt the we would use facebook largely in advertising and getting information to our audience. <br />When asking for audience feedback we received varied answers; the answers we received from people uninterested in film were almost completely useless in critique, film lovers feedback was useful but many of them did not know the reasons why they liked certain parts of disliked others, the most helpful comments came from fellow media studies students or film studies students because they had knowledge in the construction of film trailers and understood the conventions, therefore their comments were most useful in developing our project further.Question Four: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?The variety of tools we used span from, hardware, and software, handwritten and viral tools: here is a list of the tools we used: Photoshop, indesign, illustrator<br />Scanner, photography<br />Word<br />Facebook<br />Xanga<br />Prezzi<br />Youtube<br />Imovie<br />Garageband<br />Logic<br />Video cameras<br />Stills<br />slideshare<br />The internet was probably one of the most important tools we used and crucial for our initial research, we first looked at the questions of what a trailer is; Wikipedia was one of the sites we used for this, although because of Wikipedia’s credibility other sites were also used. File sharing websites such as YouTube allowed us to access existing film trailers and we used these to analyze and deconstruct in order to get a clear view of what we thought was effective or not in terms of trailers. YouTube was also the site we used to host our trailer and drafts. IMDB was where we got most of our poster images from to deconstruct and film reviews to see what audiences liked and disliked about popular horror films. Xanga the blogging site we used, I chose this site rather than blogger because I have used it before and it enabled us to edit html which was very useful to present our material and research in the form of imbedding codes, I also used my skill of html and css to create the theme for all of our blog sites. <br />Initial we used a range of hardware was used to acquire the film footage and photography. Emma had a professional photography camera so we chose to use that one when taking pictures a hd film camera was used to capture footage for most of our trailer , we transferred these to an apple Mac where we edited the visual aspects on programs such as imovie and Photoshop, when using text based programs such as word or internet browsers I used a windows pc because the word processers work faster and internet browsers such as chrome and Firefox enabled me to extract and edit html easier than safari or Camino on a Mac.For me personally the use of Photoshop is probably the joint most important tool I used; the use of Photoshop was crucial to developing out final products (particularly the poster and magazine cover) to a profession looking standard. As a graphic design student also I was used to using Photoshop and similar programs, so I was allocated in charge of design and visual effects, whereas Emma was mainly in charge of filming and Jasmin was mostly in charge of editing and evaluating as we worked. The effects I used the most in creating imagery was adding layer styles and overlays to create grungy distorted imagery, I did this by creating a texture (such as crinkled paper) and overlaying it over the photo. Changing the hue and saturation enabled me to change the colour to suit our colour theme and unsaturated the image a little to create a feeling of darkness. Because of the difficulties of taking pictures at night some of the pictures I used where taken in the daytime, I had to use the replace colour tool to remove the daylight and add darkness to add the effect of nighttime. Photoshop enabled me to create many effects and experiment with ideas; some of these are on the blog. We also used illustrator to smooth out pixilation in low resolution images by using live trace. In design was the tool I used to create the magazine cover, similar to windows publisher it made it possible to create a professional looking magazine cover that followed the spacing and conventions of a real magazine cover, by creating rulers and lines follow I maged to place images precisely into indesign and create a quality magazine cover for our hypothetical magazine “mad about film” I did this with the help of Emma and jasmine giving me feedback<br />Imovie was the primary program used to create the final trailer, we used raw footage we had filmed and were able to edit and compress this footage into our minute long trailer, and we were able to cut from one shot to another smoothly making it look more professional. Imovie was very limited however in editing the trailer with little range of special effects for both video and audio, however this was the only program we had access to, and we had very little knowledge on video editing software so imovie was useful because it is relatively easy to use. Because of the limited effects we could add to audio I ripped the audio from the voiceover and the music and edited them both in garageband to create a eerie effect on the sound, garageband was also very limited however with some difficulty I manage to create some acceptable sound effects there were several useful things we did on imovie such as speeding up or slowing down certain scene sequences to give emphasis on a particular mood or message; the fade to black tool enabled us to fade our trailer out and present the credits and release information at the end of the trailer smoothly, and removing background noise from the original footage was also needed as well as inserting sounds and music, these were all basic things needed in a trailer but essential for creating one.<br /> During the evaluative stage, online presentation tools such as ‘slideshare’ have been extremely useful uploading the evaluation in the form of a presentation. Facebook was useful to gather feedback and essential for any production company and movie team to have because it is the biggest social networking site. <br />