In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
After some thorough research into the horror genre and watching and analysing many trailers, I concluded the following thing about trailer conventions:
- Short flashing transitions in between shots
Throughout our trailer I believe we mainly chose to conform to such conventions as it suited our plotline. However, our trailer did not completely fit with the Slasher Horror conventions, there were little violent scenes shown and the trailer mostly consisted of short, atmospheric slides which eventually lead to a climax.
From the very beginning of our trailer research we looked at the conventions used in two film trailers and chose to borrow such clips and captions from each one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBq8clz1nvQ Obsessed
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AruRpjQquQQ Notes on a scandal.
The beginning of our trailer starts with a fade in effect followed by a flash transition, ending with a fade out effects which we used for all the shots in our trailer. This gave it a creepy feel and created a mysterious tone. The scenes used in our trailer lasted only about 6-8 seconds as to not give too much away. We wanted to leave our audience in suspense and wondering what would happen next and what happened before. We didn’t want to give away too much as to ruin in for the audience, leaving them no questions in their mind.
Having to use our own music in the trailer, and not being familiar with the Mac music application, garage band, my group decided to use a non- copyrighted soundtrack from the website http://www.freeplaymusic.com/ When on this website we had to test out many sounds and effects to suit our trailer. To test this we played our trailer while having these sounds in the background to see which suited which clip in our trailer. We looked on the horror category which was clearly perfect for our trailer and found a suitable sound.
In the last scene in our trailer, it is a point of view shot from Mr lynch, walking up behind Evee on her way home. The cameras slight shake illustrates the hand held camera movement and the stance of Mr Lynch. We end this as Evee is about to turn around and see Mr lynch, but before anything happens the shot cuts to black and all we hear is a piercing scream until the title appears to reveal the title of the film with our memorable typography. This leaves the audience thinking about what could have happened and the last sound in their mind would have been the scream which would definitely leave an impact on them.
From our research into various horror trailers and such influential trailers as ‘Notes on a scandal’ we decided not to use a voiceover to break the tension but to use short phrases in between each trailer. I believe this gives the trailer a more sombre feel to it and furthermore uses our typography which reflects the Title.
The film magazine:
Research into other well known film magazines gives us a good outlook on the typical conventions we are likely to see on a front cover. Such conventions are:
- The focal point of the magazine, the main image which is normally of the main actor in an upcoming film
- Lures which appear around the image to inform the audience on other features appearing inside the magazine and to grab their attention.
- Freebies which would sometimes link to a certain horror film to bring in the followers and fans.
- The masthead at the top of the page, in large font, usually of a striking colour such as red which connotes horror and blood.
- This masthead is sometimes partially covered by the main image in well established magazines.
Because we liked this image so much and thought it conveyed a lot of emotion particular to our genre we tried to use it in our magazine cover but realise something wasn’t right. The image did not instantly grab the reader’s attention and you can barely see the main characters faces which could cause confusion. Instead we tried to find an image which still conveyed the same striking image to the audience but where we could clearly see their faces.
The final Magazine cover ended up looking like this:
This magazine cover is called SCREEN. This title relates to the SCREEN in a cinema but also has connotations of horror as it is similar to the famous sequel SCREAM. The lettering is written in Red which has connotations of blood and death, directly linking to the horror theme. Our Mr Lynch typography appears on the front cover to reiterate to the audience the memorable title if they were to see it again. Such typical conventions as lures below the main image and the barcode & price are towards the bottom of the magazine. To convey that our magazine is well established, we put the characters heads in front of the masthead to illustrate that people already know the magazine well and what it sells.
Also, further analysis of horror film posters gave me an insight into the conventions used. For our poster we used to different individual images and combined them together. This required the use of Photoshop as well.
The film Poster:
The main aspects of this poster is the lighting used. The shadowing around Joel’s face creates an eerie aura to him. This Contrasts with the lighting around my face which connotes innocence and vulnerability. We have used a strap line at the top of the poster to create the impression of what the film is about to the audience. 'He’s about to go where no teacher has gone before....’ indicates to the audience he has broken boundaries and already thoughts will arise in their minds about what possible actions he has done. We use typical Poster conventions as the release date is given at the bottom and age certificate. The main character names are given above my head in the same font as the strap line to attract the eye. The production details in written in white to make them stand out against the black background.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Just the trailer alone in our publicity campaign is not enough. To create the full effect, our whole campaign must be successfull and appealing to our target audience through our poster and magazine. I believe we had many links between the three media texts and so worked well together as a campaign. If it were to be a real marketing campaign, we would need a certain prop or weapon which would act as an iconic image to make it stand out compared to other films at the time. I think more publicity on the internet would have improved our campaign as this is where our target audience spend a lot of their time. If it was to reach the Television, an even shorter teaster trailer could be used which would include the iconic symbol and just a flash of the title to create impact and the shock factor to keep our film fresh in the audiences minds.
Our products would be used in such typical places as the poster on the sides of buses or on billboards at a bustop. The poster could be put on noticeboards in schools or colleges around the area and in the inside of a cinema. The magazine would be put in newsagents and such bigger stores as WHSmith and Borders within the film section. This would attract the regular film goers and film fanatics. When playing the trailer we would need to think about which time of the day and what TV shows we would use to play during the advert breaks. Celebrity Big Brother on channel four would be a perfect time and show to play our type of trailer as our target audience watch such reality shows. Also, such investigative programmes as CSI:Crime Scene Investigation are very popular among our target audience and would be perfect to play our trailer during such breaks also.
Target audience is a crucial aspect when producing trailers, magazines and posters. We had to think about what would attract our audience and persuade them to watch our film. Many aspects of our marketing campaign appeal to the target audience. We were told by ‘Film works’ to target an older teenage audience of 15 and above and also creative & aspiring adults. Teenagers can relate to our British school setting as it is in a 6th form and adults can relate to the older teacher character in our film and the seriousness of the concept used.
The continuous use of mine and Joel’s image where I am always in front and Joel behind me in both the film poster and the Magazine front cover create a solid sense of continuity and solidity relating to the movie. When someone sees one character they will instantly relate to the campaign & film. Furthermore, the use of our Typography in the title, Mr Lynch is used throughout our campaign to make it recognisable to our modern target audience. The last text you see on the screen at the end of our trailer is this exact font and so remains prominent.
Prices were important when considering our target audience also. The price we used for our magazine was £3.50 as we know that students would be able to afford it, we did not want to make it too pricy as we know students are on tight budgets. Our teenage audience can relate with the position of Evee has she has a hatred for a teacher which is common amongst most students. This may make them sympathise with her character more and find it easier to place themselves in her shoes. By using our questionnaire we gathered information to realise that the most popular sub genre of horror is teen and slasher. Our trailer incorporates both aspects of this and so will definitely appeal to our adolescent audience.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Audience feedback made a large impact on what we produced. The first instance to where it helped us was in choosing the font for our film title. We placed a question in our questionnaire with examples of four different fonts to see which one our audience preferred. A staggering 100% chose the font that we as a team preferred also. We decided to use this for the whole marketing campaign as that is what we will be recognised by.
Whilst editing our film magazine cover, we asked a few people in our class on their opinion on the image, they told us the image did not suit a magazine cover and suggested another image we had taken that would be more successful. This was an image we had not considered before as it was originally discarded, but looking at it again made us realise the potential it had to look attractive on the front cover of a magazine. It was eye catching and was the main focus on the cover.
To promote our campaign we began to make publicity pages on social networking sites such as http://www.facebook.com/ which is a perfect way to target our audience because is the most popular network site for them. Also this will help us to get any other additional comments that could help our products become more appealing. We wanted to know what they liked and disliked so could help us improve if we were to ever do this again. Here are some comments praising our work, what parts and why.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/pages/Mr-Lynch/211502777213?ref=ts
Our audience also thought that our Mr Lynch poster was similar to the one used in Obsessed which is what we based our poster on initially.
After our comments from peers about our Film magazine and Poster, we wanted to ask a few questions on what they thought about the most important aspect, the trailer.
We thought of three questions which we thought would be evaluative enough to give us an idea on what worked well for the trailer and what didn’t.
This question will give us an idea if we stuck to the production task and followed typical conventions that suited the genre.
- What do you think could be improved in our trailer?
This will help us realise were we went wrong in the process and what could get better next time if we had the chance.
- Would you pay to go and see this film in the cinema?
Obviously, this is not an actual film however; the planning was as if it would be real. So this will let us know if we would have been successful if it was a real film.
The response we got was mixed but mostly we received positive comments which included:
"The pace of the trailer increases well to create tension"
"The killer being male is a normal convention"
"You could have shown more killing/action".
- I agree with this comment as I think our trailer was slightly one level and could have shown more action and scenes of violence without giving away the whole plotline.
"The last scene could have been filmed in a clearer environment"
- This comment is also relevant as we did struggle to film in the dark on Hampstead heath. The shaky camera could have been made clearer so the audience fully got the impact of what was going on.
The things we could have improved on that were mentioned were:
-The back story, we could have shown a previous killing of a previous victim, to increase the action without giving away the film's storyline.
- Use a lot more people during the shooting, to create a more realistic school environment as the classroom was too empty to make it beliveable.
.- Use a "signature" weapon of some sort, to give the audience something to remember Mr. Lynch in a more sinister light as we had nothing which stood out during our film to make Mr. Lynch very memorable.
In my opinion I feel we lacked an iconic symbol which normally makes a horror film stand out. Most films such as Scream and The Texas chainsaw Massacre have memorable props that you immediately link to the film, which is something we did not have.
I think we targeted our target audience in the correct way by using popular social networking sites and placing our Teaser Trailer on Youtube which everyone can access. However, i think the film magazine aspect of the marketing does not necessarily reach our target audience as few teenagers read magazines, especially not film magazines. Some young adults would but this is only targeting a small niche in our market.
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
We could not have done any of the work we produced if it wasn’t for the advanced technology we used. The equipment which we used the most was digital cameras to take original images and to have a basis to then edit the images later with Photo shop in which we used to change colour contrasts and crop them. We also used the Mac application Movie to cut, change, arrange and edit our iMovie. We used the default Mac internet browser Safari, to search for a suitable soundtrack for our teaser trailer, research typography and other film campaigns. Finally we exported the final teaser trailer to QuickTime format, so it could be viewed on Windows PCs as well as Macs.
Once we had exported the iMovie project to Quicktime format, we converted it to an MP4 file and then uploaded it to video sharing website http://www.youtube.com/, for it to be viewed by the world.We used the professional image editing software Adobe Photoshop to edit our ancillary texts, and used both Internet Explorer and Safari to search for and download fonts from http://www.dafont.com/ which is what we used for our recognisable campaign font.
To show analysis of such media concepts as trailers, posters, magazine front covers and production logos I used Microsoft Power point because of how easy it is to use and manipulate images and writing combined. To complete this blog, I used Microsoft words to place images in the correct place and complete such pieces of writing that I can edit and add to. To add the slideshow I have I used http://www.slide.com/ to show my images in a more attractive way of displaying them. I further used http://www.blogger.com/ to display all my work and to upload images from my work area. So that I could edit my images and look at my work on every computer I saved it onto my USB which I could carry about anywhere. We used social networking sites such as http://www.facebook.com/ to display our finished products and gain audience feedback.
Through these media technologies i have developed my skills compared to my foundation portfolio. I have developed the use of Adobe Photoshop and used it effectively to produce attractive and appropriate posters & magazines. The use of Mac application Movie is a large improvement from the foundation task and was a bit tricky at first but practice on it helped me to get the hang of it. We could crop out any unwanted parts from our film and add in any extra clips.
Without the use of all of these technologies we would not have been able to market our film so well and so easily. The internet can reach such a wide audience and can distribute our ideas very effectively. The use of this blog is so adaptive as a USB is not needed to look at our information. We can use any computer at any time and the work we have done will be there, easily edited. Making it very mobile, portable and independant. This reflects the changing audience consumption and the everchanging media today. It is up to date and easily accessable by anyone to see and comment on. We can gather followers for our blog and recieve feedback aswell.
