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.  

Poster - Institutional Information

Film Poster - Institutional Information

Whilst looking up the codes and conventions of a film poster, I found that, located at the bottom of my poster, I must include institutional information. This is conventionally in a small font, and should tell the audience some of the people who are involved in the production, editing and exhibition stages.

Here is the institutional information I created for my film poster using the websites 'canva' and 'infogr.am'. We made sure to include the costume designer, the editor, the director, the producer and some of the actors involved as, we thought these were the most important to include. This institutional information doesn't and can't include every body as it isn't the credits of a film. Therefore, we chose to proritise.

Analysis of Magazine Cover

Analysis of my Film Poster

Film Poster and Magazine Cover Final Draft

Film Poster and Magazine Cover Final Draft

Below you will see our two media texts; our film poster and our magazine cover.

This is our final draft of our film poster. Tinika and I took a while editing with the main image to make it as appealing as possible to our primary audience. The positioning of the main image on the poster was really important as we wanted it to sit well with our chosen background colour. This was really important to us due to the fact that the colour blue linked across our other media texts and shows the synergy of the three. 

We also spent a while editing our credit block due to the website we were editing it on. Tinika and I chose a website called Canva and as I edited the poster and played around with the image and title, Tinika was given the job of creating the credit block. She did this off Canva as she found better fonts elsewhere. We didn't realise until afterward that the credit block wouldn't paste on without a white background which we were unable to cut out using Serif Draw Plus X6 either. This was very disheartening as it took Tinika ages to create it and would have looked really good on our film poster.

However, we eventually created a new credit block on Canva, trying to mimic the previous one as much as possible. 

Other feedback we received was to make the title stand out more which is what I spent doing, experimenting with different fonts, sizes and colours. The end result is what you see pictured above which we received a lot of positive feedback about.

This our final draft of our magazine cover. This went through a major change from our last piece of feedback. The colour of the sticker changed and the size of the font inside the sticker.

The words 'mega movie marathon' changed size, position and were taken out of a box because it took away from the central image. We also added in a review from The Guardian about our film. 

Furthermore, we added the buzzword 'exclusive' to our magazine cover to make it more eye catching to audience members when it is just sitting on the shelf. 

Both of these media texts have come a long way from their first draft and have really developed to appeal to our primary audience.