Evaluation Activity for Media A2 Portfolio

1. How effective is the combination of
your main product and ancillary
texts?

2. What was the intended outcome of
the production?
The intended outcome of our production was to
produce comedy for a young audience. We wanted it
to contain numerous one liners and moments that
would amuse an audience aged from 16-24 years old.
Much like the Scary movie franchise, also distributed
by Dimension Films, is based on many other films and
references lots of different well known films. This
have spanned lots more films of this sort such as Date
movie and Superhero movie.

4. We intended our film to be a
somewhat spoof of the many
other vampire films that have
been introduced into the film
industry recently. The biggest one
is ‘Twilight’ which is now one of
the most popular movie series
ever created.
We moulded our main character
of Steve the Vampire on Twilights
main male character ‘Edward
Cullen’.
We mirrored scenes from the
movie in our production such as
the one when Edward is perched
in a tree.

5. Steve the
Vampire

6. We particularly looked at the hit
parody ‘Vampires Suck’ for some
inspiration into what spoofs are like
especially when mixed with the
vampire/ supernatural genre .
This particular movie was based
entirely around ‘Twilight’. The majority
of the characters are the same and the
main parts in the script are the same.
There are just extra twists in the
plotline which is what makes the
movie so comedic.
In particular there are many
references to other Movie and
programmes such as ‘The Jersey Shore’
and ‘Alice in Wonderland’.
We also looked at many other Vampire
films and television programmes such
as...

8. How effectively were storyboards and
ancillary task plans followed?
Storyboards- For the storyboards we used the shot list
and did a drawing for every shot so we could get a rough
idea of what our actual film would look like. When we
were doing our filming we used the storyboards for
help, and referred to them numerous times to make
sure we didn’t miss any shots. They were very helpful in
the end and we could see why they are used in real
filming.

9. Gaby drew our storyboards with simple black pen and
went over some bits in marker. We also wrote extra
annotations on the back to remind us of particular ideas
when we were filming.
We didn’t include an awful lot of detail in our storyboards
for the simple reason that we wanted to them to act as a
template for a film not a guide to follow religiously. We
found that some of our best shots were produced due to
improvisation or an idea on the spot.

10. Ancillary Tasks- The ancillary tasks were equally as
helpful as it forced us to look into already existing film
posters and magazine covers and to learn what made
them so effective. We looked at magazines like
‘Empire’ and ‘Total Film’ to get a good idea of what
magazines look like and what makes them appeal to a
reader.
We incorporated bits of our film such as the one
liners into the ancillary tasks, for example the slogan
is on both the movie trailer and the poster, it was also
one of the considered Titles for the film.

11. How were these outcomes achieved in
terms of matching mise-en-scene, including
page layout and camera shot choices?

12. For the Magazine Cover, I took the picture of Steve the
Vampire and placed it slight off centre but just him on
the cover. He is the main character of the film so I
thought it would be best to have him as the main part of
it.
Also when I looked at Empire and Total Film the majority
of their covers displayed the main character of the film
they were doing a feature on.
This is what swayed my decision to have both Steve and
Nora on the front cover.

14. I mostly looked at one particular cover of ‘Empire’ as a
guidance for our ancillary task as it stood out to me slightly
more than the rest.
I liked the colour scheme because the mix between red,
yellow, black and white words made the more important
words or phrases stand out more and seem more
important. I also like that in most of ‘Empire’s covers the
background meant something, it was just a random colour
or pictures. This is why I picked red as our background
colour because everyone associates red with blood and
therefore vampires it also made Mitch’ (Steve the
Vampire’s) blood ridden lips stand out more.

16. With the Film Poster I wanted to
give it an Old-School feel to it
hence why I used a picture of an
old fashioned school for the
background and a nice
handwriting font for the title.
The background worked well as it
related to the film being set in
and around a high school. I felt
that the old mansion feel it had
to it echoed the sort that was
seen in old vampire films such as
‘Dracula’ and ‘Nosferatu’.

17. I wanted to keep the theme of
red flowing in the poster much
like I did with the magazine cover
as it symbolises blood and
vampires. I put the picture of the
cat on to remind the audience
that this is at the end of the day
a comedy and not to be mistaken
for a serious vampire movie. The
slogan is also a reference to
vampires as vampires ‘sink their
teeth’ into people. I again looked
at other examples of movie
posters particularly comedies
and rom-coms rather than
supernatural movies that often
were rather dark colours.

19. What stylistic techniques were used to
support your trailer?
As I have already stated we used the same slogan in both our trailer
and film poster: “Here’s something to really sink your teeth into”.
We did this because if this line was remembered not only would
the audience remember the film they would also remember that it
is a vampire orientated film and a comedy. Also if you want to ‘sink
your teeth’ into something then it means it must be gripping so we
felt that this acted as a good slogan for our film.
If we had had a bigger budget, like most films, we would definitely
have made a website and ventured into other marketing ploys to
promote our film. The trailer and our ancillary task work well
together and I do think that the stylistic techniques used in making
the film poster and magazine cover do support our trailer.