1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of media products?
Our teaser trailer did not challenge many of the conventions a trailer of our genre used. Through research into other trailers of this type, we learnt that they focused upon the main character/s, usually only one, but was in fact a narrative based trailer, giving insights into the story line of the film. These are some of the films with the same genre and similar story lines, which have elements similar to our own, which we researched into:
These three films have elements, which are similar to that of our film, together they cover all the issues that were raised in our film. In ‘Nil by Mouth’ a man hits his wife, like in our trailer our main character is hit by a man who was her boyfriend. In ‘Trainspotting’, the main characters use a lot of drugs and their lives revolve around the taking of these drugs. Finally, the aspect of ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ which is similar to our film is the story’s progression; the way Will Smith’s character was in a position where he had lost everything but did not give up and had improved his situation by the end. In our film Nicole’s character, the main character lost everything but improves her situation by the end.
We also researched into the length of teaser trailers, we did not focus on any particular genre for this. These are some examples of the films we used for this part of our research:
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
For our advanced portfolio work my group and I not only created a trailer for our film, but other texts used by film makers to advertise their product such as, film posters and being in editions of film magazines:
To gain an insight into how proffesional film posters and magazines look we researched examples of them on the internet, these are some examples:
All of the media texts we created convey the same message about the film.The trailer gives the most hints to the story line and the character but it is still important that the poster and picture on the magazine cover reflect what the film is about too. Audiences can learn that the film, for the most part, won’t be a happy one and this is something that can be seen in the poster and magazine cover.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Above is an example of a quantative set of results from a question in our audience feedback and what conclusions can be drawn from these results.
The audience feedback questionnaire was amongst the most important parts of our work. It helped us understand if we had achieved all that we had hoped to achieve with our trailer. I saw from the results that there was little negative feedback compared to the positive feedback indicating that people liked the trailer. It is clear that we effectively employed codes and conventions from trailers of the same genre or contained elements similar to our own. I believe this is the second most important thing as it gives the trailer recognisability which can be the key to attracting potential audience members.However, the most important was obviously whether people will want to watch the rest of the film. You can see from the chart that the majority of people (sixteen out of twenty) people would want to watch the film.
This was an extremely important question as it was what showed us that our trailer was effective and would be effective in attracting members of the public to watch the film.
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
We used a few different media technologies in our work. The internet was the most important resource in our work particularly in the research and planning stages. ‘Youtube’ was where we were able to see trailers, which were of the same genre or raised similar issues to the ones that would be present in our trailer and to actually look into the length of a teaser trailer.
This is just an example of a teaser trailer which is easily accessible through ‘Youtube’, for our film we used any random teaser trailer to learn about their length, however, for the more on depth research into them we chose ones which shared elements with our films. My group and I were able to generate ideas from the trailers that were of the same genre as the one we aimed to create, it aided us in learning the codes and conventions of trailers like ours and how they communicated the serious issues which our films raised through a trailer. The internet allowed us to look into posters and magazine covers, presenting us with enough knowledge of how professionals go about this process so we could do the same.
The internet gave us access to a vital tool, our blogs. The blog was like a group diary for our work, it holds all the completed work we did, for all parts of our work.
To actually create our trailer the group used ‘Imovie’, this piece of equipment was the main thing used in the construction of our media product. We used it to edit, add sounds and add effects to the trailer.
For our magazine cover and poster it was extremely beneficial to have Photoshop at our disposal, in this programme we were able to create these texts and give them a professional look. The hardest part of making the magazine cover and poster a reality was reining in the groups ideas, as it was so easy to use the Photoshop programme.
Without these media technologies it would not have been possible to create all that we did and achieve the same quality that we did.
George Bridges
