Evaluation Question 4 - How do you use Media Technologies in the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stage?

Evaluation Question 4 - How do you use Media Technologies in the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stage?

Evaluation Question 3 - What Have We Learned From Our Audience Feedback?

Evaluation Question 3 - What Have We Learned From Our Audience Feedback?

Tinika and I asked people to view our trailer, poster and magazine cover and then took them outside one by one to ask them for their honest opinion on each aspect. We asked them to give us varied feedback, some positive and some constructive. Below are the clips of the people we asked to give us feedback and underneath is their name and age. 

We chose to interview them and record it as a video to allow them to express more of an open opinion rather than a questionnaire which wouldn't allow for their own personal input and detail. 

We also chose to vlog our feedback to tell if our understanding of our audience's demographic had been effective when creating the video; especially in targeting the right demographic. 

Our trailer was aimed at males and females aged 16-25. We conducted our interviews on a few of our peers, all aged 17 and 18 and also we decided to do our interview on two people who fell outside out primary audience as their ages were younger or older than 

Name: Monique Jackon

Age: 18

Our participant made clear that she really liked the text we used throughout our film trailer and how she like the way we portray the stalker. She also goes on to say how she thinks it has come a long way from our first draft as we have condensed our film clips and developed the text on screen during our trailer. Her favourite clip was of our protagonists screaming and we added a blur effect at this point so it showed her exhaustion which she liked. She would have our text on screen on for another second just to make sure it is clearly readable and she would have the same title from our magazine cover/poster on the trailer to show they link. When we moved onto our magazine cover and poster, our participant said she liked the fact they weren't too busy. She said she also liked the colour scheme with our magazine cover and poster which links with the colour of our trailer creating the synergy and showing these media texts link. This is something we were aiming for and the fact one of our participants picked up on it is really positive. She also said both texts look professional and if she saw them in her day to day life she would believe it is a real film.

Name: Amber Ellis

Age: 18

Our participant made it very clear that she liked the editing of our piece, she also liked the mood lighting throughout the piece which she spotted carried on into our film poster and magazine cover which is again what we were aiming for. This is very positive as two of our participants in our primary audience have picked up on a key feature we were aiming for. She also liked the variety of shots and angles used and a low angled shot of our protagonist running was her favourite. She thinks its come a long way from our first draft due to our music and editing. The thing our participant would change would be our text/font to make it more suitable for our genre. When we moved on to our magazine cover, she said she liked the continuing colour theme and our central image. She said she would make the barcode clear if she could which was something new which we hadn't heard before which was an interesting piece of feedback to have! When asked what she liked about our poster this participant said she liked the colours and the water effect that is going on. She liked how bold the font was and the actual name of our film trailer. She said to be fussy she would change the accent colour on our poster to be a navy blue instead of a red or a white just so there wasn't too much going on. However, she did say she thought the poster and magazine cover looked professional and if she saw them in her day to day life she would think it was a real film coming out.

Name: Sue Cattermole

Age: 37

This participant said she really liked the music we added to our film trailer as it engaged her; due to the fact it was tense. She continued to say that she liked the variety of cuts we had used as it made our trailer look very fast paced and she liked how you could see a few different story lines in the trailer also. She believes it has come a long way from our first draft due to the editing and how the format now looks more like a trailer rather than a film. Her favourite shot in our trailer was when our protagonist was on the running machine in the gym. However, she was unaware of what our antagonist was doing writing on a whiteboard and would want to make that more clear if we were to include it.

Moving on to our magazine cover and film poster, she said she liked the different colours of blue and the contrast of the text colour with these blues to make it stand out. She said she would add a few more details about the film on the poster to give more of an idea of what it was about. However, our participant said she would not change a thing about our magazine cover. She also said she thought they looked professional and if she saw them, she would believe they would be part of a real film.

Name: Ionie Wynters

Age: 15

This participant said she liked the text on our film trailer as it engaged her into our trailer. Moreover, she said she liked the editing of the trailer as it flowed well and the quick cuts, even though they were quick, still allowed for a lot of detail to be added. She also said it has come a long way from our first draft as the images now catch her eye which is something we were really looking to do. Her favourite shot was our protagonists eyes as she said it showed her emotions which is also something we were hoping audience members would pick up on as we wanted our protagonists eyes to speak for her in that shot. She said she would add the release date into our trailer so audience members knew to look out for it. Moving on to our magazine and poster, she said she liked how colourful the magazine cover was which will draw her attention into it from a distance. This is a key thing to have as it means it appeals and engages with our target audience. Our participant also said a similar thing about our poster and how the writing and the colours would draw her in which is a really good thing to hear as it means we are engaging with our primary audience. She would keep the font of the title of the film the same throughout all the media products to create synergy and she agreed it looked professional and like a real film!

The main thing we learnt from our media feedback was our editing needed to be improved and spent a lot more time on. This is due to the fact that editing combines everything together and if done right can make it seem professional and can create many different emotions for an audience member.

Initially our editing was very jumpy and quite plane because we used Serif Movie Plus X6. However, from our experience last year and having this software which limits us, we realised that we were able to make a lot of the shots we wanted ourselves. One example included a CCTV shot. We initially thought we would have to use an overlay but we were mistaken when we just added a black and white filter and text on screen. Getting a variety of shots and speeds allowed us to mix it up and appeal and engage our target audience more.

Our editing process improved when using iMovie. It helped us to create a story line whilst following the conventions. It was a much more helpful piece of software to help us edit.

Adding in text really allowed us to change the format from a film opening to a film trailer. After doing so, we received feedback telling us it was a little too revealing and getting feedback really helped us to develop this and not reveal too much of the plot.

Moving on to our poster and magazine cover, we created a lot of drafts before getting these how we wanted them before receiving feedback as we knew we weren't happy and we didn't want to release them. 

When we eventually did show our peers our poster and magazine cover we received really helpful feedback about our background colour on our magazine cover as half of it was blue due to the fact we took a picture of our protagonist with an L.E.D light which only covered half the background in the picture. Our peers told us to make sure we colour the whole background and we spent ages on a website called Pixlr trying to colour the background...unsuccessfully. I decided I would cut the image of our protagonist out and stick onto a different coloured background. Even though it took a while, it was praised much more by our audience.

Another thing we struggled with was our credit block, Tinika created an amazing credit block, however it was not able to be used on the editing website we were on called Canva. It was a really good website which is where we created our poster and magazine cover. However, it doesn't let you copy and paste texts without a white background occurring. Therefore, Tinika and I had to work on creating a new credit block at the last minute with limited fonts which became very frustrating. However, we did manage to develop a credit block that we liked and we were able to change the spacing between the letters and lines to make it have more of the conventions of a credit block.

One final thing we struggled with was changing the film title on iMovie to the one we had created on Canva. Tinika and I were unable, in the end, to change the film title on our trailer to match our poster and magazine cover which was a real shame. We were unclear of how to do it and ran out of time to change it. 

Evaluation Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main media product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main media product and ancillary texts? 

We researched a lot for our trailer and ancillary texts to make sure we could appeal a lot to our target audience. We wanted to make sure we achieved a mass audience and we realised that research would benefit

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

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

Shackled Final Draft

Shackled Final Draft 

This is our final draft of our media trailer called Shackled. It has gone through a long process of editing and adapting things to appeal to our target audience of our chosen genre, Action/Thriller.

We changed and adapted a lot of things on our trailer but, the main aspect Tinika and I developed was our text on screen. 

The name was one of the last aspects we changed due to the fact that we had a questionnaire where people were asked what name they preferred and Shackled came out on top. I am happy about this, due to the fact it links to our trailer more. 

Our first draft had no text on screen at all. This is something we seriously looked in to when changing our trailer. 

Tinika and I decided to study quite a few trailers including: Gone Girl, Inception and Die Hard. These were all Action/Thriller films which linked to our trailer. This enabled us to see where we were going wrong in terms of the template of our film trailer. As a result, we saw we needed to add more text in different parts of the trailer. This really changed our trailer for the better and helped us to create a film trailer! 

Moreover, the editing of each shot, adding effects, changing it to cuts or cross fades and creating cctv shots allowed us to make sure we really had developed a film trailer. 

Recently, we looked at feedback from our teacher and asked her how to improve our grade. She said that if we added foley sound and edit our protagonists eyes to make them red at the end. 

I took a lot of time doing this to make sure the eyes weren't too obvious but still had an effect. I also made sure I had the best high quality foley sound. 

Vlog on Editing Process

Vlog on Editing Process

Tinika and I created a vlog about the strengths and struggles we had during our editing process.

The first problem we came across was the number of shots we had used. Initially we decided we wanted to have lots of shots so, we could build tension by having lots of quick cuts. We soon realised this was much more difficult than we first anticipated as it started to look like a film opening as we began putting them in chronological order which is not typically something you do in a film trailer.

Serif Movie Plus X6 was the software we used to edit on and was very difficult to use, even though we had previous experience on Serif Movie Plus X6. This was due to it crashing all the time and the quantity of film we had was a fair amount which made it even more difficult to edit on as it became even slower to use. We also wanted to add more features/effects on our film trailer. This is due to the fact we had gained knowledge about media studies as we had been studying it a lot longer compared to the last time we had to create a media text. As a result of this, we knew Serif Movie Plus X6 was not able to provide us with all the effects we needed and had to resort to another editing site.

Before we changed editing sites, we opened all our footage on to Serif Movie Plus X6 and we began opening them all up and sorting between the clips we could and couldn't use. This was due to the fact a lot of the clips we filmed were either trail runs or had a lot of mistakes/bloopers. This took up a lot of time as we had to go through and delete everything or crop the lengths of the videos to make sure they were suitable to use. However, the deleted clips were put into a file that we called 'bloopers' in case we wanted to make a blooper video. However, we ended up not doing this as the school system crashed and some files were lost, including our bloopers. We were lucky enough to have everything else backed onto a memory stick.

To start creating our film trailer, we located our storyboard so we could refer back to it to help us get an insight into our first initial plan. We realised from looking at the storyboard that it contained a lot of short scenes, which was good however, we had a few problems with the amount of short scenes we added therefore, we had to merge and cross fade a lot of our short clips. 

After doing so, we looked at different films that were action/thrillers such as Gone Girl, Jurassic World and Inception. Then, we looked into the conventions of these specific genres and decided we would note down some conventions that we were able to copy. These included blackouts to create tension and fast paced cuts to build suspense. We chose different bold fonts to intrigue our audience too. 

Initially we had narrowed it down to two different soundtracks we liked the sound of. We decided to not add any sound until we had completed our trailer to see which sound track went the best with our film trailer. Unfortunatly, we still couldn't decide and ended up cross fading the two. This worked really well until we tried to edit the music to change on a beat drop. This ended up messing up all the work we had done with the two soundtracks and we both decided it was best to just stick with one. 
Eventually, we ended up choosing the one which sounded more like an action film to really stick to our genre and reinforce it. 

We added some effects to our trailer to make it more engaging. We added a blur effect to our protagonist as she was screaming to make it look as though she was exhausted. We also added a slow motion effect to the clock to make it seem as though time was taking forever to pass. These two effects were added to build tension to our film trailer.