Evaluation 4

How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

I used Adobe Photoshop when making the intertitles, magazine cover and poster. I could have used another programme but I decided to use this one as I have more experience of using it and it's easier to make the final product look professional. Photoshop allowed me to put all the elements of my task onto different layers, letting me easily rearrange them and add filters to certain parts of the poster/magazine cover for a better effect. One of the tools I used was the blend tool, which allowed me to create the smoky effect around the edges of my poster without it looking unprofessional - as I could ensure that the colours fit and that there 'smoke' had no sharp edges. The only problem with using this programme is that I didn't know how to make circles and stars easily, so I made the shapes needed in PowerPoint and then put them onto my ancillary tasks.

To edit the footage, my group used Adobe Premier Pro as it was the only video editing software the school offered. In our previous school, we learnt how to use Final Cut Pro and were planning to use it again for this task but we were unable to. Even with a lesson on how to use this software, it still took us a while to get used to it and I feel as though we weren't able to use it to the best of our abilities due to our inexperience. This programme allowed us to reorganise the video clips and cut them down to the size we needed - which was very helpful when we were editing the fast-paced section of our trailer to the music. There was only a limited amount of video effects available and I found that quite annoying as the only way to make the lighting darker was to decrease the opacity and make the shot harder to see. It was also hard to add in text and I decided to just make the intertitles on Photoshop to save time and because then I could add on effects to make the text look better.

Blogger was used to record all of my work and progress easily. The teachers had a blog which they put work we needed to do on our own blogs on, which made it easier to catch up on work if one of us was absent and also ensured that everybody had the same quality of work. We used this site as it was easy to use (due to the fact that we had blogs last year) and we can access these at home.

I learnt from the making of my film last year that there should be a group chat from the moment the group is created, so we made a group on Facebook as it is easy to access due to all of us having the Messenger app on our phones. We could also access the group chat at home and this allowed us to organise filming times easier and find out who was available. This also allowed us to send photos easily amongst all of the group - which was very helpful when we needed pictures of Shauna for our ancillary tasks and didn't have time to email them to each other. I also used Messenger to send my work to friends and family who hadn't seen any of it before for feedback.

Google was my main search engine used as I'm more experienced with using it and it allowed me to quickly and easily find what I needed. I used Google for all of my research into theorists, poster and magazine covers. I found this very helpful when looking for my own examples of thriller magazines as it allowed me to narrow the search results down into ones I wanted and I could look at many posters to get inspiration and see what common themes are among them all.

I used YouTube in school and at home to research trailers in the thriller genre and get ideas for my own trailer. I learnt from last year that it's easier to put all my videos on there as it's easier to link it onto our blogs and share with people - which also allowed all of us to access the footage at home if we needed to. I found YouTube very useful for getting screenshots of previous work for my magazine cover as it saved time trying to find all of my work from last year on the school system.

Lucy used Direct Messaging on Twitter to contact Charlotte Campbell for permission to use her song in our trailer. She used Twitter to contact Charlotte as she didn't have any other contact details and needed a quick reply to ensure the trailer was finished in time.

We used Freeplay Music to find our music as it was important that we had a track without copyright. This site made it easier to find what we were looking for as it allowed us to filter the music available by tempo, feeling and mood it created. The music also gave our film a professional aspect as the tracks on this site are used for many professional projects, which made us pick this site over others. It was very easy to find what we wanted due to being able to easily preview every track we wanted and once we found the music we liked, it was very easy to download and came with other versions of the song. The music was also free, which helped the fact that we had no production budget.

Evaluation 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Trailer

As we wanted our trailer to be of the highest quality we could make, my group asked for a lot of feedback on what we were doing so that we could tell if our ideas were original and creative. Initially, we wanted our film to be based around a party but, after being told by our teacher that it wasn't enough for an entire film, we realised that our murderer would need a motive and this resulted in us changing our plot into something much better.

Most of our trailer feedback was about our two music tracks not fitting together very well and the common advice was to change one of the tracks to one that blended better with the other. We knew to begin with that the two tracks wouldn't go together, so we tried everything suggested in order to try and make them fit better - and we didn't want to use new tracks as we found it hard enough to find the two we were using. Initially, there was a long pause between the two tracks but it put more emphasis on the difference in tempos. We then tried putting a slower version of 'Pretty Parties' in this gap, but found that it was then harder to hear Lucy's voiceover and it still didn't help them flow better. Finally, we tried having a smaller pause between the two tracks and fading the first song out sooner, which we found made the blend sound better. As we had all listened to the same part of the trailer too many times to tell if there was a difference, we asked our teacher to listen too and she told us that it sounded better, so we used this in our final trailer.

Poster

The first piece of feedback I received was to blend the edges of the trees to put less emphasis on them rather than my main character. I decided to do this in a 'smoke' effect as I had just added a smoky looking background onto my magazine cover and wanted the ancillary tasks to have the same theme so that they're associated with each other. I also made Holly's jeans darker so that they didn't stand out as much, as they were a bright blue and the only colour on the poster. This drew the attention away from them and onto Holly and the title, which is what I wanted the viewer's eyesight to be on when they first look at it.

I sent an photo of my poster in progress to my best friend for feedback as I needed somebody that hadn't seen it before to take a look and give me an honest opinion. She suggested to add a website to the bottom and make the 'Coming Soon' text more central in the billing block, so I tried out these changes and kept them because I liked the way they made the institutional information look more professional.

Magazine

As I was in a rush to finish my poster in time for our first draft deadline, I neglected my poster a bit and ended up submitting a version that was very basic. I knew before receiving feedback from my class that I would need to add pictures of other films and already had the pictures ready for when I edited it again. People in my class also suggested that I used different fonts on my cover as they were all the same. I was going to change the title font to the same font as 'In The Shadows' but was unable to add the same shadow effect onto 'Time', so I changed the other fonts on the cover instead to one similar but slightly different. The new font allowed me to position the text better and made the magazine look more professional overall so I am glad that I received that feedback.

Evaluation 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

Both of my ancillary tasks have the same greyscale colour scheme to fit with the typical use of dark colours in the horror genre. This also makes them stand out from the other brightly coloured magazines/posters around them - as I found in my research that most magazines/posters use bright colours to make themselves stand out, and decided that what would make my media different is to use no bright colours. The film itself also has a very dark colour scheme and hopefully this would make people associate it with the other promotional materials.

The title is the same on every text to promote synergy. This will make the audience remember the name better and hopefully reach a point where they know what the film title says without even reading it fully. The images used in all three texts focus on our main character, Holly, because she isn't played by a well-known actress and so we couldn't just mention her name and get people to watch the film. We also want the audience to see her and immediately think of the film.

The trailer is the only text that suggests what the plot of the film is as it uses non-diegetic clips and voiceovers to tell the audience what's happening. There is non-chronological editing used though as we don't want the audience to be able to predict how the plot goes before seeing the film and also to add a sense of mystery to it. The magazine cover and poster are vague on purpose but through the use of clichés (such as smoke and trees) they tell the audience that the film is in the horror genre. This is to emphasise the fact that the film has a major plot twist in it and we don't want to give that away to the viewer as we want the film to shock them.

Our target audience would spend a lot of time online so we made the trailer short on purpose to keep their interest and also so that we could make it an advert at the start of YouTube videos - which potentially could give us an international audience. The magazine would only be sold in the UK, which is where our main target audience would be, and we would also make sure that the poster would be seen by an UK audience.

We also added a hashtag and website to the end of our trailer to encourage people to talk about the film with their friends and do more research on it. The audience would want to be scared by the film, which is why I made the poster and magazine cover look mysterious but obviously from the horror genre. The trailer goes in a different direction and tries to fool the audience into thinking that the film is a teen angst initially, which is another genre that our target demographic would enjoy, but it's something I wouldn't be able to recreate for the ancillary tasks.

The institutional information is also repeated throughout the texts. The 'LEV Productions' logo is at the beginning of the trailer and at the bottom of the film poster so that the audience would begin to associate the film to the company. I also added a mention of the production company on the front of my magazine cover to further emphasise the relation of it to the film.

Overall, I think that it would be an effective promotional campaign as I've focused on the synergy between the three texts, with the combination of colours, images of the actress and production company. That will make the audience associate the film, production company and main actress to each other, while also letting them know effectively that the film is in the horror/thriller genre. I also made my texts around what my target audience would want to see, which would make them more likely to see my film.

Evaluation 1

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



Editing - The editing of my tasks was made to fit the genre on purpose so that people would instantly recognise the film as from the horror/thriller genre. For the ancillary tasks, I darkened all of the photos included so that they fir with the monochrome theme I was trying to achieve. This theme was used as a way to keep the colours minimal and dark, while also having a professional effect overall - although most horror magazines use a lot of red, I found that including this would make the quality of the cover decrease. I added smoke effects in the background of the magazine cover to stop the background from just being a solid black and to emphasise the genre as candles/smoke are common in horror films. I made the trees on the poster monochrome so that they blended easier with the solid black used on the bottom half, and blended the edges to give an impression of smoke yet again - keeping the same mise-en-scene as the magazine cover so that the audience would relate them to each other. In the trailer, I used fast-paced editing and fades to black as I found that these were very typical when conducting my research and it automatically makes the audience associate the film with the thriller genre.

Age rating - The age rating of my film is very typical of the genre as most horror films are rated 15 to attract a teenage audience that would relate to the young main characters. The film is rated 15 because it portrays topics such as death and kidnapping in an almost realistic way - which means it can't be a 12 - but is not gorey/psychologically harming enough to be rated 18.

Poster format - The format of my poster is very typical of films in the genre, although I feel as though there's too much on it and it might have been more effective with just Holly and the title because most horror film posters are very minimal with their information. There is a focus on the background and a long-shot of our main character to put emphasis on them and to connote to the audience that they are important to the film. This could be considered typical due to many posters being formatted like this, but could also be seen as different because a lot of posters I saw in my research only focused on either the character or setting, not both. There is a large title as the focus of the bottom half of the poster, which is typical of posters as they are used to make sure the viewer knows what the film is. The title itself is typical of the genre as its vague and makes the audience wonder what the film is about, while also giving them an idea that the film will be a horror due to the use if the word "Shadows".

Settings - The setting of the film are very typical of the genre, as most horror films follow teenagers going about their 'normal' lives before something supernatural happens, but we tried our hardest to make sure we used nothing too clichéd such as a forest or a cemetery. Although we were trying to use setting that weren't too typical, we needed to use a couple of common settings to ensure that the film would be recognised as a thriller, which is why the trees and dark street were used. Holly's house and school were used to give a sense of verisimilitude to the film, as they are places that a typical teenage girl would spend a lot of time at. They are also used to get the audience to relate more to the film, as they would be around Holly's age and would recognise these settings better than an older audience. This is very typical of the genre as almost all horror films are set in a 'relatable' setting in which the audience relate to the characters and wonder what they would do if they were in that situation themselves.

Narrative - The plot of the film is very stereotypical of the genre, but we've tried to mix two common tropes in order to shock the audience. The majority of the film is set around some 'supernatural' being terrorising Holly, which is very typical of horror films and can lead to the film's ending being guessed very easily by the viewer. We are then going to reveal to the audience that the events were actually caused by a jealous friend that's gone too far with his plans. This is also used in a lot of films but we are hoping that the audience would be shocked by this shift in antagonist enough that it makes the plot a bit less typical.

Magazine format - Most magazine covers have the same layout and I've ensured that my magazine is similar to them so that people recognise it instantly as a film magazine. There is a large picture of my film's main character to draw focus to her, even though she isn't a well-known actress that is typically used to sell the magazine. Even though the colours are dulled, I've made sure that she's still the brightest part of the cover so that the viewer pays a lot of attention to her and hopefully recognises her from the trailer or poster. There's also a big title for the magazine - that's been coloured to match how 'In The Shadows' looks - and other new films mentioned, which is what every other film magazine has to grab attention. As mentioned before, the colours aren't bright like most magazines, which isn't typical but fits with the genre of the films featured.

Characters - The characters of our film are very typical of horror films, but could also be recognised as from the teen angst genre too due to their ages. All of the main characters are teenagers that we are portraying as 'average' and relatable, so that our target audience of teenagers would be more likely to see the film. Holly, especially, is aimed at being relatable for a female audience, which isn't typical of the genre as most films are aimed at young males. Although it isn't common in many films to have a female lead, it's more common in horror films but only to sexualise the main character - whereas we aren't using her for that purpose. The antagonist is also very typical as supernatural beings and murderous, jealous friends are used in quite a lot of horror films.

Hashtags/fonts used/colour scheme - All text I used was in a white or grey colour to go with the black backgrounds, so that the audience can read it easier and also so that everything to promote my film looked similar. The fonts used are basic sans-serif to make the film look professional and to also make people associate my three promotional materials with each other, as I used the same couple of fonts for everything. Hashtags are more common in modern films as they allow a younger audience to talk with their friends about it, which is who we are targeting the film at, and would also allow us to monitor the success of our film through how much it's mentioned on social media.

Trailer format - I based the format of my trailer on existing horror trailers, with the pace getting faster along with the music to build tension and ensure that the viewer wants to keep watching until the end. I challenged the typical format by making the trailer seem like a teen angst film to begin with and then changing the style quickly to reveal that the film is a horror instead. This is because our target audience are teenage girls, who typically like teen angst films, and this would make them interested in watching the film by making them curious about what the plot actually is. There are also fades to black used throughout to emphasise the change in pace. I kept the intertitles typical too, with the production company at the beginning and the institutional information/title at the end, but added in an extra shot of Holly when the audience would think the trailer's over to make it different.

In The Shadows - Trailer

https://youtu.be/JXA5azNXlTg

In The Shadows - Magazine Cover

In The Shadows - Poster