The document provides a critical reflection on a student's media products for a social realist film called "Young Adults". The student summarizes how their trailer, magazine cover, and poster follow conventions of those genres while also challenging some conventions. The student believes their products work well together to showcase different elements of the film. Feedback was generally positive but suggested improving the music in the trailer. New media technologies were crucial to the project's research, planning, construction, and evaluation stages.

1. Critical Reflection Joshua Askew

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the conventions of real media products? My trailer mostly follows the common conventions of a social realist trailer. It begins with a slower paced piece of music with lots of clips of bleak imagery, such as close-ups of characters and long shots of landscapes, the themes are introduced using a combination of text and video. Once these are introduced a faster-paced piece of music starts and the video changes to be more action-orientated and show that the film is exciting, culminating in a final emotional moment with the character and the film’s title appearing. All of the video is shot using realistic lighting and there is no voiceover. One way in which it doesn’t quite go along with the common conventions of social realist trailers is the lack of dialogue. There often isn’t a huge amount of dialogue in social realist trailers compared to other genres, especially concerning the plot, so I extended this so that the themes are introduced via text with only a couple of lines of dialogue.

3. My magazine cover follows the common conventions of a film magazine, featuring the main character of the main film featured in the magazine in a mid-shot with a direct mode of address. The picture also suits the social-realist genre, with a serious face and a dangerous look in a street environment. The masthead features the use of the word “film” to show what the magazine is about, the design very similar to Total Film’s, and there are several other plugs surrounding the picture and running along the bottom of the cover. The cover doesn’t really challenge any conventions. The poster follows several of the conventions of social realist films. It features the environment of the film with emotional connotations while also showcasing some of the themes in the background, via the text in the sky, and through the costume, using the hoody. The text is all of a standard film poster, giving the title, slogan and other information. It also challenges some conventions too: although the main character is on the poster, you can’t see his face – although as social realist films rarely feature big name actors, the face of the character is unlikely to make the audience want to see the film. They also often show the themes of the film, such as Bullet Boy’s head imagery but I’ve chosen to do this via text, offering something slightly different.

4. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text? I believe my trailer and ancillary texts work well together as they all showcase the film in different ways: the trailer shows all of the film’s elements, while the magazine cover shows the more exciting, darker side of the film and the poster shows some of the more bleak imagery although still made to look dangerous through the red sky and costume of the character. They are all linked by containing the themes too and the title of the film “Young Adults” is very prominent in all of the products, ensuring it sticks in the minds of those who view them.

5. What have you learned from your audience feedback? My audience feedback was generally positive. My trailer was said to have shown the themes of the film without giving away the plot as intended and my use of camera shots was apparently good. The choice of music could however have been better, the first track was apparently a little too fast for the slower imagery I used and, although suitable with its fast pace, the second one was said to be a little too electronic-sounding. Both of my ancillary products were said to look very professional and made clear the type of film it was. The use of text to tell the themes in the poster was said to be good, although it could have been made more obvious despite it ensuring that people looked closer at the poster to read what they say.

6. How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages? Technology was very important to the creation of my product. I used the internet to do all my researchinto filming and social realist films. I used Youtube to upload my finished trailer and other social media to showcase my questionnaire for audience research. I wrote all my planning in Microsoft Word documents and used Photoshop and Sony Vegas to edit and construct my products. I then used PowerPoint to write up my evaluation and Blogger to showcase all my work.