1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our trailer “Heroine” when comparing to professional trailers of our genre does relate well and fit in with the conventions of a professional trailer of its kind with the resources we had to work with. When comparing it to “Nil By Mouth” the relaxing yet depressing music was evident in both our and there trailer and really set the mood and gave an insight to what the whole film would be like; the appearance of the main characters and how they acted was again something we tried to duplicate but with a up to date setting. The way in which the women in “Nil By Mouth” looked and her persona is very similar to Nicole’s role in “Heroine” arguing with the man (boyfriend?) figure in the trailer disputing about money or when they might get there next fix? Was key to adding a narrative to the trailer to enthral viewers to come and watch the film.
We found it quite hard to get a real narrative in to the trailer to add meaning and capture the audience’s attention as with our resources and time scale we couldn’t create a real life crack den with loads of drug users in the shadows nor add more characters to give Nicole a real life other than her drug addiction. However our final piece does carry the biopic genre very well and fits in with the life of a drug user immensely and although most of the shots is off her abusing herself the music, change of shots and editing give it a real purpose and our final piece is something to admire within our genre; it is a very raw harsh insight of a drug users life in a well put together trailer.
The “Heroine” idea wasn’t our original idea we wanted to put together a football hooligan trailer but only after trying to plan it discovered we didn’t have the capabilities to make it happen so decided to lower our resources needed and went for a more accessible option of our biopic trailer “Heroine”.
Mark Mayaski.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our package is strong and all complement one another well, the trailer along with our film poster and magazine all give off the same depressing vibe our character Nicole feels which is evident in our trailer. Her appearance in the poster and magazine cover is our distinguishing factor. Her appearance and the professional look particularly of our film poster is our unique selling point the darkness of the poster with her slumped body is what we want to depict to the audience. These all together is benefiting as they all give off the same vibe so the audience has an idea what they are in for as our audience is a refined one.
The film poster here is our strongest most professional looking piece next to the trailer the whole look along with finer details of the star ratings and even a website is all key in selling the film and making it look enthralling to the public. The package as a whole show what you would expect in a biopic film the lone solitary figure of the main character Nicole in despair give off an insight into her life for viewers.
Mark Mayaski.
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Our audience feedback questionnaire told us a lot about our trailer the big picture being they enjoyed it and had only minor negative feedback which we were very pleased with. Our audience believed it was clear it was a biopic film and met the code and conventions of one to. Everything deemed to have worked well the music to the editing and camera variations was all mentioned and praised in our feedback. Our most surprising piece of feedback was that what the viewers most enjoyed our variation of shots within the trailer rather than the narrative on screen also what we were surprised about was that our homemade music was least enjoyed in our trailer however everyone bar three thought it worked really well and set the mood.
In particular we were eager to see the results to who would then want to view the whole film after seeing the trailer as we know we would have a specialist audience and out of the 20 people we questioned only 4 said they wouldn’t be interested in seeing the film. This helped us get an idea to what sort of cinema would show our film as we were thinking it may be an independent cinema but after seeing our results I believed it could be in a mainstream cinema like Vue or Odeon so this would also mean it would be pre set prices that the public would spend on any film they were looking to see including ours.
Mark Mayaski.
4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Media technologies we used for our trailer were things such as I MAC’s I Movie digital photography our blogs and so on. These helped us in all stages of developing and finishing our trailer.
Computer for internet research and youtube in particular was a big help in our research stage when comparing it to other trailers; getting ideas and finding out how long a teaser trailer is! Along with youtube was our blog we had to upload videos onto our blog so we could show where we got our ideas and research from. This involved us embedding the clip onto the blog which was simple once you got the hang of it but took a few attempts in the beginning.
With the digital photography component there was also photoshop to use for our pictures of Nicole, the magazine front cover and film poster. This helped tremendously as it gave our work the professional edge for our poster and magazine cover like I movie did with our trailer to give the package an overall good outcome that wouldn’t look out of place alongside Toy Story 3.
The blogs was like our diary to keep track of things where we were up to and what was needed to do we had our names titled on each piece of work so we knew we were all doing the our share of the work. Not only ourselves did this help but our teacher as well so she could keep an eye on us to ensure we met our deadlines. Also with our story board and filming schedule we could tick off what was done as we done it to minimise confusion within the group. When coming to our evaluation stage it was handy to post our questionnaire results to make a record of them and help us answer our evaluation questions and ultimately see what the public thought.
Our most precious piece of equipment along with our digital camcorder was our I MAC along with I movie and the editing and sound programmes they allowed us to turn our idea into a reality and make it look professional with the files and software they have. Our music for the trailer was homemade and was able to be uploaded and our cuts and transitions were smooth which was down to our knowledge of the system and the amount of tools it had at its disposal.
Mark Mayaski.
