The document summarizes the creation of a teaser trailer and ancillary texts for a student media production project. It discusses how the teaser trailer and poster use conventions of real media products in their genre while also attempting to challenge conventions. Audience feedback was gathered at various stages and incorporated to improve the products for the target audience. New media technologies like photo editing, video editing, and web design software were used to construct and evaluate the ancillary texts.

1. Evaluation A2 Coursework Teaser Trailer Sophie Grainger “The Following”

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? When creating our media product we decided to follow some conventions of real media products (teaser trailers) by making our product viral. Our teaser trailer has a basic and simple storyline however by making it viral we hope the audience will feel more involved in the film and make it feel like real life. Film that has used viral marketing and that has a been effective in attracting their audiences are District 9 and The Dark Knight. Like The Dark Knight our website is a viral website. Our website is set up as a report on a news site. This report shows Sarah “the missing girl” and it is appealing for people to get in contact if they know any information. Our teaser trailer features a very stereotypical girl called “Sarah Bassett” she is a blonde school girl who is the victim of a stalker. When coming up with the idea of our teaser trailer I analysed existing teaser trailers, one teaser trailer that really inspired our idea was Prom Night by Nelson McCormick, the trailer for this film was effective without giving too much away. The storyline of Prom Night inspired us as we liked the idea of an innocent girl being followed, hence the Title “The Following”. Like Prom night our teaser trailer follows Carol Clovers theory of ‘The Final Girl’. The narrative of our film conforms and challenges this theory, our final girl goes through intense terror however it challenges this theory as she is the only victim.

3. Our teaser trailer also conforms to Laura Mulvey’s theory of “The Male Gaze”. Our main character Sarah Bassett is viewed as an object of desire rather than a person. The audience (spectators) are seeing this from a masculine perspective. However it also challenges Laura Mulvey’s theory as not all of the audience will have the same perspective and some may feel sympathy for Sarah. Like other Scary films we made are protagonist a very stereotypical character, a male that is mysterious, in our teaser trailer his face is not shown clearly this is to build up suspense so the audience will want to go see the film. We have used basic camera angle when filming, this was intentional as we wanted some parts of the trailer to look like it is the stalker watching the girl, we hope that this made the audience feel like they were also watching the girl through the stalkers eyes. We also used close up angles for example when sharpening the knifes this shot makes the audience feel closer to the action. We tried to make our product professional so when editing the filming we added effects such as cross fading, blurring and black and white, all these things added to the scary effect and makes are genre more clear to the audience. The genre of our a film is horror. We decided to chose this genre as there is a big interest in horror film at the moment. Films such as paranormal activity was a huge success and now there is soon to be the released of Scream4 in cinemas. I think there is a big target audience for this genre of film and therefore our film would fit into the market at this current time. As well as the genre horror we have a sub-genre this helps the audience know what type of horror film they are watching, our sub-genre is teen terror this relates to our target audience and therefore will attract them to want to see the film. Our film poster has conformed to the conventions of a real media product. We have used a Main bold title, Strapline, Colours, Actors and actresses, and a large main image these conventions will attracted our target audience. Our film poster shows both of our main characters Sarah and the Stalker, like our teaser trailer the stalker’s face is still covered to keep the suspense of a mysterious and scary character. When analysing existing scary film posters I was inspired by the “Chucky” this film poster this was effective in showing the audience clearly what genre the film is and also the main characters. I liked the idea of the two main character fading out from the black background.

4. We have used dialogue and music in our teaser trailer by using both this will keep our audience interested in what’s going on. The music creates tension and the dialogue shows the audience what's happening in the scene. I think this is effective in the scene where Sarah is tied up and she is screaming, the music that overlaps this makes this scene very dramatic. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?Are main product is a teaser trailer showing many events of Sarah Bassett being followed, torturedand areas and objects that are in the film. Our poster works well with our teaser trailer showing the horror genre of our film, the two main characters are in the centre of the posterback to back on the phone, this is implying that they are speaking to each other but they aren’t really standing next to each other. We edited the poster making the colours darker and changing the contrast to create a scarier mood. Are other product is our film website, unlike the poster we decided to make this viral. The layout of this website is a news report on a newspapers website (The Ely Chronicle). This website is aimed to make our audience think this is a real life event that has happened and therefore they will feel more involved in the film. Throughout this coursework we have been constantly getting audience feedback at every stage: research, planning, creating and evaluating. I think by getting audience feedback we have achieved the best products we could. The audience feedback we got wasn’t always positive this was a good thing as we could change and adapt ideas to make our products more appealing to our target audience. When originally coming with our idea, we as a group pitched this idea to the rest of our class( target audience). The feedback we got was mostly positive and therefore we knew that the idea we had was good and would be appealing to our target audience. After doing our first attempt of the teaser trailer the audience feedback we got told us that its wasn’t effective and didn’t follow our genre (horror). Our second attempt again didn’t appeal to our target audience, I think this was because of the lack of planning that we did.Our third and final attempt was much more professional and attractive to our audience. By this point we had gained more knowledge of what our audience wanted and how we could achieve this. The audience feedback that we got from the previous two attempts was very helpful as they suggested things we could change and things they would want to see in a teaser trailer. WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNT FROM YOUR AUDIENCE FEEDBACK?

5. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? Some of the new technologies I have used through-out this coursework production are: ImageshackPhotoScapeDreamweaverSerifMoviePlus5YouTubeThe main new media technology I have used is the “elymediastudies” blogging site. This site allowed me to share all of my work and communicate with the rest of my group. Also it enabled us to upload video clips, rough cuts and pictures. This way of sharing work is better than using paper as changes can be made easier and also people can view the work more easily.

6. For our Film poster we used photo editing software “photoscape”. This software was new to me. However I found it easy to use as you could add effects but also easily undo them if you wanted to change things. This was very useful in the construction of our ancillary texts as it enabled us to add filters and effects to our original image making our film poster image much more appealing to the audience. We were able to add text to the image, our title and strapline as well as the actor actress’s names. An important new technology we used was SerifMoviePlus5. This technology was where we edited and created our final teaser trailer. SerifMoviePlus5 had many features that allowed us to create a professional looking teaser trailer. We added effects such as crossfading, color changing and blurring. This software challenged my computing skills and helped me gain more knowledge on how to edit videos. To put images onto the blog we used imageshack, this website was useful for storing all of the images I had and also was and easy way to get the embedding code to use to put them on the blog. As well as using imageshack we also used YouTube in the same way to get embedding codes for the blog. This was an easy way to store all or videos (rough cuts). We used Dreamweaver to create our film website. This was another new technology that I used. Dreamweaver allowed us to create a website that is professional and useable for our audience.