Evaluation

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Similarities –

Large face at the centre of cover.

Large Masthead running across the top of the cover.

Competition mentioned.

Title of the issues main movie in large font.

Dulled or darkened colours.

Differences –

Cannot see the eyes of the main face on mine.

I mention the awards won by the magazine at the top.

I do not mention the names of any other movies.

Similarities –

The background is grey with a light centre.

The title of the movie is emblazoned across the bottom of the poster.

The picture is of something inanimate and is positioned in the centre.

Differences –

The strapline for ‘Grace’ is across the top of the poster and in a similar font to the title.

Mine has a reviewing quote across the top.

Mine does not have production notes.

The title ‘Grace’ is in a different coloured font to the rest of the writing on the poster.

Trailer – 

Similarities – Both trailers switch between a slow build up of tension to a quick release of fast paced editing.

Both trailers have interjected text between certain shots.

Both trailers use music throughout.

Differences – The number 23 had a more coherent and apparant storyline.

Mine is much shorter, more of a teaser trailer.

There is a lot of speech in the number 23 trailer and barely any in mine.

There are quite long sections from particular scenes left in this trailer, mine is largely all short snippets.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product (trailer) and ancillary texts (Film Poster, Film Mag Cover)?

I, personally, have never agreed with the Hypodermic model of audience reception. I genuinely believe that an audience does engage a lot more with its media than simply passively accepting everything. As a result, I feel it is important to keep audiences thinking, so they do not become bored with what they see. I do not like giving too much information away, be it through text on a poster, scenes in a trailer or a picture in a magazine. Instead, I like to suggest or imply things to the audience so that they piece together some kind of storyline themselves. This I feel I have achieved with my three media pieces. The trailer does not give too much of the storyline away, the magazine only gives away that the face is of somebody related to the movie and the poster just poses more questions overall. As a result, the combination of the three types of media combine to leave the audience questioning and thus hungry for more.
3. What have you learned from audience feedback?

I have learned a lot from audience feedback, including the following :

For my trailer I was told that it was too misleading, instead of it only hinting at the true storyline it seemed to tell a different one altogether so I changed this and added more scenes hinting at the true storyline.

The colours of my film magazine were not ‘horror’ enough and instead just seemed like a normal magazine so I deepened the colours to red and black.

The picture for my magazine is not scary or even sinister. I then re-evaluated the picture, darked it and hid the eyes.

The music for my trailer did not fit. I had used a Beatles song that, whilst I believed the music fit, the lyrics at least did not and hinted at a love story, completely different to my storyline. As a result I searched for new and more fitting music.

Having a lone voice speak over the rest of the trailer works quite well.

The rock effect of the arm in my poster was said to show ancient/ religious connotations quite well.

The storyline is interesting and well thought through.

4) How did you use technologies in the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation stages?

Research – To begin with I used ‘google’, this was just to get started by reading news reports and folk stories from around the world, to get ideas for a storyline. I then moved on to using websites like ‘IMDB’ for help with film names and posters. I used ‘Youtube’ to find trailers as inspiration and ‘google’ again for magazine covers. Though I also used the back catalogue section on the ‘Rolling Stone’ maazine website just to get a fuller idea of the progression of film magazine covers. I used CD’s and ‘itunes’ in order to search for suitable music and eventually ‘youtube’ again when I could find no music in my own playlist. I used microsoft word a lot as well, especially when writing the shot lists, storyline, character lists etc, this worked very well. For everything else I used old fashioned pen and paper.

Production – The most obvious addition in the prodcution side of things is obviously the camera. For the trailer it was a video camera from which I then uploaded the footage into iMovie HD and then continued to adjust from thereon. I also, for only one clip, used the webcam installed into the mac computers because this creaed and good effect when in dim light. For the magazine and poster I used a digital camera to take most of the pictures, the exception being the photo of my arm then used for the poster, this was taken using an iPhone as I wanted the poorer quality for a better effect when I altered it. And this altering took place using Photoshop, this was possibly the most used technology of all sat second only to the use of this blog, which was updated at the end of each lesson, or at least written about on paper and then copied up later.  I used Dafont for a large number of the fonts I used as well as a christian website for some information on various christian beliefs and quotes.

Evaluation – For the evaluation, the single most important technology is wordpress, simply because it is here where all my work is posted. I also used windows photoviewer to look back over screenshots to remind myself of various things that I created, devised and finished a long while ago.