Our media product uses conventions of real trailers but also challenges some conventions: - It follows Todorov's story structure theory of equilibrium, disruption, new equilibrium. - Unlike most horror films, it only uses male characters. - The trailer editing techniques make it seem realistic. It gives viewers a taste without revealing too much. - Viral marketing on Facebook was used to target the 16-25 age group. - The professional website and logos help promote the film.

1. Media Evaluation Matthew Waites

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Firstly we had to conform to Todorov’s theory, which is for their to be an equilibrium at the beginning of the film, then for their to be an agent of change and a disruption then for their to be a new equilibrium. Our film trailer fits Todorov’s theory like this. Equilibrium: driving home Agent of change: running out of feul Disruption: trying to get away New equilibrim: (audience yet to see) Our teaser trailer mainly uses conventions used in media, but it does challenge one of the main conventions of media. In our film we have only used male characters. You would normally expect for a man and a woman to survive to the end in a horror film. We did this to make our trailer and film original to entice a new audience back to cinema. We didn’t want our film to be just another horror film we wanted it to be different.

3. In our trailer we used real media conventions, we used editing techniques to make our product as realistic as possible. Our teaser trailer also conformed to conventions in that we didn’t give away too much of the film. We only gave enough away to give the audience a taste of what is to come and hopefully draw them in. We also used viral marketing to draw in our audience, we used Facebook and a website which is something you would expect to see from a modern teaser trailer to try and get maximum market exposure. Also as our film is targeting 16 to 25 year olds Facebook is a great way to reach them as many young people use it. We also made a website for our trailer to be hosted on with the company logos on it as well, our website is very professional with a good colour scheme to fit in with the genre of horror films. We made the logos look very professional basing our logos on existing companies.

4. How effective is the combination of your media product and ancillary texts? I think the combination of our media product and ancillary texts is very effective as we made several ancillary texts to go alongside our main product. We made production companies, film posters, a website and the main product. The production companies we created conform with other real media companies in their appearance and layout. The film poster we created we hope would draw in the audience and give an impression of what to expect from our film. The website we made uses functions that occur in real film websites such as The Dark Knight. Our website shows the teaser trailer that we have created, also it uses hyperlinks to different pages on the site displaying different things such as the production companies and the film poster. It also displays the release date and our films slogan. The colour scheme we used fits in with the genre of the film as it is very dark with red text.

5. What have you learned from your audience feedback? We showed the trailer to a group of people who between them enjoy lots of different film genres to get an accurate level of feedback. Our trailer was very well received by the audience we showed it too. The audience enjoyed the effects used and noted by many was the effect of the flashbacks and the gun rising. They thought that the sound effects fitted in very well with the atmosphere of the film as it was very dark and tension building. Together with the visual effects they worked very well. They said that if the film was real the trailer we made would make them want to watch the film. Other positive things that were said are that the film quality itself was very professional and the angles we used are very intriguing. One of things that people said could be improved was the website as they think there could be more features on it, like on the Dark Knight website where there are lots of features and background of the film on it for people to look at and draw them in.

6. How did you use new media technologies in the construction, planning and evaluation stages? Firstly we used a blog on the internet to plan our media product. The blog allowed all of the group members to post ideas and plans for the film for our other group members to see, comment on and review. We also used the blog as an area to upload our final piece as a way of showing it to an audience and teachers. We also used social network sites to upload unfinished versions of our trailer to get some feedback. This was useful as we could get reactions from our target audience very easily. In the construction of our work many media technologies were used, We used Sony Vegas to do our video editing as it is a sophisticated editing software with lots of different tools. For the creation of the production company logos we used paint and serif together for different tools which work alongside each other to create a good product.For the website we used Dreamweaver as it is a easy to use website creator which we could achieve a good outcome with.

7. We used a HD video camera for the shooting of our film with a tripod to get nice steady shots. For research we used YouTube to watch other horror based teaser trailers to see how other film companies do their trailers. We analysed a couple of existing trailers to give us an idea of what to do in ours. This helped us to get are initial plans together before we started filming and storyboarding. Also we did other internet based research into what people expect from a horror film trailer using film websites. We used social network sites again to receive feedback that we could base our success on against our initial plan. We also shot video audience feedback which we could use in the future to help us with new projects. In the evaluation stages we used PowerPoint to create a evaluation of our final piece.