Final media evaluation

1. Final Evaluation Elliott Odell-Rourke

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products. The conventions of a teaser trailer are to follow Todorovs theory, these are equilibrium, agent of change, disruption and new equilibrium. The equilibrium is the sense of normality at the beginning of the narrative. The agent of change is a scenario that occurs during the narrative. The disruption is the consequences of the agent of change within the narrative. The new equilibrium is the new sense of normality within the narrative. Another convention of a teaser trailer is that it has to ask the audience questions throughout the teaser trailer. This is done through the use of semiotics. For example the use of colours, camera shots, angles, images and in some cases voiceovers. Our teaser trailer followed Todorovs theory to some extent, only leaving out a new equilibrium. We have used costumes efficiently for our trailer. The ex-army man is dressed up in a dark army suit, which suggests he is evil. He is seen as a deranged character lurking around in the bushes at night so the audience would see him as a bit of a stalker and very adapted to the outdoors. The victims in our trailer were dressed in normal clothes that suggests they have had a normal night out so the audience would largely favour them more over the army character. We used viral marketing to help promote out film trailer. We set up a Facebook page for our trailer and invited people to join it. This helped get some popularity. We also created a website, which has a front page stating “Enter if you dare” and then you reach a page where you can see the trailer and other details about the upcoming film.

3. We included a film poster which followed the conventions of other horror posters where ours has the title of the film with names of the actors, a slogan and a main image. We have also included small production company logo’s at the bottom of the poster. Our image is taken inside a garage which is the venue in which the torture scenes takes place.

4. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? The combination of the teaser trailer, posters and website are very effective because they all have viral elements and are directly linked to each other. The teaser trailer sets out to give the audience very little information about the film, just the general idea as to how the story line may plan out, We tried to keep a house style between our media products such as using the same font for the title of our film trailer throughout and similar colours so that audience clearly know they are related. The poster has an image of the inside of the garage, where you catch glimpses of during the trailer. The website front page states “click here if you dare” before you get to view the trailer. This helps build up tension before you view the trailer.

5. What have you learnt from Audience feedback? We got our audience feedback from a questionnaire and via facebook where we posted clips of our trailer and what our storyline was about.We came up with our film idea before asking our questionnaire. Our initial feedback was good as we had a good storyline and our idea of camera shots were effective. The use of text between scenes was also a useful idea to give the audience an impression of what the film is about. Before creating our final teaser trailer, we had already made three trailers, each getting some audience feedback on what was good and what needed improving. Each time we filmed new footage and included more ideas to make the film more realistic. For example, our first draft used a different camera for some scenes and this was easily seen, so we decided to stick to the same 1080p HD camera we had available. The fuel gauge was also dropping down to quickly to show the car running out of fuel, this looked too unrealistic. In our final draft, there is an image of the fuel gauge at its lowest rather than showing it drop to the bottom.

6. How did we use media technologies in construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? We used the elymediastudies.com website to blog what we have done in our project.We used YouTube to upload our rough cuts and trailers. Also to see existing film trailers which contributed to our ideas for our teaser trailer. Image Shack was used to upload images to then embed them onto our blog. We used Sony Vegas Pro to edit, cut, crop and publish our video. Macromedia Dreamweaver was used to create our website to a high standard. Facebook was used to help us gather our audience feedback and as a place to display our ideas and trailers.