Evaluation Question 4

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

 Starting off, we were in possession of HD video cameras, we each would take turns using them so that everyone got a go, and had some practise. These were rented from the college, which enabled us to pick them up whenever we needed them and get on with our filming, quite a lot of the filming was done upon a tripod, but some parts we shot hand held, as that is quite conventional in low budget films, a good example of that is the first paranormal activity.

After everything was filmed, it was all placed upon an iMac, these are for standard use for any media student. These Macs contain all of the programs that we needed to complete our trailer. Each group was assigned a Mac to use each week, this way, we could save our work directly onto the mac rather than on a server and have slow access every week.

Premiere Pro was the first program that we used, it is our basic video editing software, it enabled us to order and create our trailer from nothing, everything that we made goes through this program.

Here we have cubase, this was used to create the soundtrack for our trailer by Oliver Lavery, he was a bit of a pro using this program seeing as he was a musician, and used it quite often. It was used to good effect, giving us a great soundtrack to work with, and incorporate our trailer around.

Dafont.com was used next to gain us a suitable font for the intertitles, after much debating we settled on one eventually, as the website contains a vast volume of fonts up for grabs.

Once we had finished the editing process using Premiere Pro, we had our trailer uploaded onto youtube, so it was available to the general public, but it was also a very central site that everyone could access their work from.

After finishing our trailers, we used Adobe Photoshop, to create and edit our posters and magazines together, we used a variety of functions and features, which turned out to be very fun to use.

Finally we used blogger to upload all of our work to, it was essential to showing off our work, it is a place in which we can upload our work to be viewed in a professional looking manner. Everybody was assigned their own blog to upload their work to, to avoid any confusion.

Analysis of a magazine cover 2

Analysis of a magazine cover 1

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The audience is the most vital part of the media industry, without them, there would be no need to create anything that we do, so getting feedback from them is essential in moving forward. We screened a rough edit of our trailer to a secluded group of about ten 17-19 year olds, which was our desired target audience, they provided us with feedback that helped us create a finished product that would meet all of their needs. There was some good and some bad feedback, at the end of the day it was all constructive criticism, we were told that the music we used was very good, it helped to build the tension up in the trailer, the montage was one of the best liked bits, as it involved a large build up of exciting images to fast paced music that ended in a sudden bang, leading to the climax of the trailer, we were told that it could have been better to make some of the cuts more apparent and to also perhaps use a different font on the intertitles. All of the feedback was very useful and was taken into consideration when making the final cuts to the trailer.

Evaluation Question 1

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

From the beginning of our trailer, we made it very clear that all is not right in the world of the film; we kick off with our setting, a long winding road that seems to be in the middle of nowhere, leading to a large eerie house, we make sure that, we use the right filter on the lens to let through the correct amount of light, following the conventions of an ordinary horror trailer, making it light when everything is okay, and dark when everything is going wrong. We use a couple of different shots of the house to show how big and old it is, you often see this in horror trailers, it is almost conventional that there is such a big location that the many victims of a killer can get lost in so many different places. The setting of any film is one of the most fundamental parts, if we had set our trailer in Disneyland with the same narrative, it would have a very different feel to it. We used different sound effects accompanied with a soundtrack to emphasise certain parts of the trailer, and to add effect, in the screenshot below of our trailer, we used a rushing

sound when panning the camera round to him to emphasise that he was the killer, we also had the camera looking up at him, and down at our other two characters getting out of the car, to show his dominance over them, making him the more powerful out of the trio. Making the killer look powerful in the trailer is essential, as you don't want to know that the main characters are going to win, it takes some of the fun out of it.

We used only a couple of shots containing blood, gore and torture in the trailer to leave the audience of it satisfied, yet wanting more, enticing them to come and watch the film to see what it has to offer.

As in any film trailer out there, the intertitles and overlays are essential to getting a real professional feel, and to make the trailer better, we used them to give the trailer more of a narrative, but also to jump forward, be it only a small bit, but they can be used to jump massive time gaps as seen any other trailers, but I believe we used them appropriately. I also believe we met the convention of any genre of trailer, by showing the production company logos at the beginning of the trailer, it gives the audience a chance to guess what they are in for, as they may have seen a film before made by the same company, and know their style of shooting, the way the use special effects, or just how good they are in general. We also used these at the end along with the end titles and release date, to reiterate their importance. The release date and end title are arguably the most important part of the trailer, as it is the last thing that the audience will see, so it has to stick in their minds, they will know the name of the film, when it's coming out and who is making it.

We could not include any special effects in our trailer, as it was so low budget, but we did the best we could with camera angles and different props, my favourite being the killers choice of weapon, its a classic in the genre, a large knife, mainly seen in such blockbusters as scream, in which the masked villain yields the weapon, testing peoples knowledge. We included Carol Clover's theory of the final girl, the one who has slight masculine traits and will always survive, but the audience will not know this. I believe that our trailer meets many, if not all conventions of horror that we chose to include, our narrative structure does not differ from what you see out available at the minute, and we tried to follow everything to the letter.

Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your product and ancillary texts?

One of the main aims of the film distributor, is to make and sell products and advertising that will make the film and company the maximum amount of money; the three roles of the distributor that I took on, was to make a trailer to advertise a small portion of the film to an audience, hopefully enticing them into paying to see the full movie at the cinema, the other two jobs I took on, were to create a poster, and a magazine cover for the film, all of which I think I have pulled off to a high almost professional level.
On the right here, is a screenshot taken from the trailer for the film "2", I chose this screenshot as it best represents what the film is all about, the killer. He is our masked villain that brings some mystery to the ideology of the film, why wear the mask? Why hide the face? And so on, he is the main selling point of the movie, which is why I have continued to use the similar image of the killer onto my movie poster and onto my magazine cover.
On my poster here on the left, I have tried to incorporate, my basic knowledge of film posters, whilst trying to provide a similar look to what a professional one may look like, I took the idea for my poster from the nightmare on elm street poster on the right, a figure that has provided a scare through many generations, I attempted to get the same stance to make our killer look big and scary, and I also attempted to darken his figure out, but I decided to only apply this to half of him, and blend him into the background, to make it look almost as if he is  disappearing. I added Production Credits at the bottom and distribution company logos, to give it a real authentic look.
 With my magazine cover, I looked through many different Total Film magazines and realised that they all
share the same basic layout, so when it cam to creating my own,
all I had to do was find one that I liked the look of, and try and create something similar, yet more suited to my genre. I believe that I have a winning combination when it comes to my main product and ancillary texts, as all have that dark, horror theme to them, that sends a bit of a chill through your spine.

Narrative Theory in relation to The Crazies

Levi-strauss: His theory is on binary oppositions.

Sane/Insane - The Sane people within the text are the uninfected, where as the insane, are those who have become infected and dubbed 'The Crazies'.
Male/Female - Our two protagonists here show the conventional male and female roles, David is being the strong male role model, and Judie is being the stereotypical woman in horror that doesn't normally survive, she needs caring for and looking after each step of the way.
Known/Unknown - The known obviously being everyday life for these people, living in a small rural town where everybody knows everyone, and there isn't a single thing in town that gets past anyone, and then the unknown being this mysterious cargo plane, that seems to appear at the same time as the infection.
Normality/Chaos - This is important within the film, as at the beginning we see a disruption in which the town is in flames, but then it returns to the equilibrium where everything is fine, these two slowly transcend into one another.
Infected/Uninfected - One of the biggest binary oppositions in the film, showing the distinction between those who are fine and those who need a bullet in their head.
Light/Dark - The most common in horror films, the technique being used, when everything is light, everything is fine, but when it becomes darker, we know that something is not right.

Vladimir Propp: 

Villain: The U.S Army are the villain in this movie (not often you'll see an american movie do that!), as they are the ones who release this bio-weapon into the town. although it was not purposeful, it was their doing.
The Hero: David our protagonist is the hero, as he rescues his wife and several others and escapes from the quarantine. He is also one of the only ones alive at the end of the film.
Donor/Helper: Deputy Russell Clark qualifies as both the Donor and Helper. He is the donor because he gives his life so that David and Judie can continue theirs. And he qualifies as the helper because he saves David’s life on three separate occasions.
The Princess/Father: Judie, David'd wife, qualifies as the princess because she is married to David and he is trying to save her and create a new life. She also qualifies for the role of the father as she attempts to protect ad save Rebecca throughout 
The Dispatcher: Rory seems to fit this role as he is the first person within the town to become infected.
The False Hero: The Mayor is the false hero as he refuses to turn off the water for the town and by doing so he allows the virus to spread throughout the town.

Tvetan Todorov: 

Todorov's theory states that the movie should start with an equilibrium, I believe in this movie it does, we see an equilibrium of the town in flames, and destroyed, you may not think this is an equilibrium at first, but it is the 'new equilibrium from the US Army's point of view, the narrative then soon after returns us to the original equilibrium. There is no real resolve of equilibrium from the protagonists point of view, but that is not who you have to look at this theory from.

Bordwell & Thompson

We do not see all of the events unfold on screen, we only see a portion of them, for us, we start at a baseball game, in which a supposedly drunk man, stumbles onto the field with shotgun in hand, we later learn about the crashed plane with the bio-chemicals on board which is the apparent cause of this behaviour, this leads to the other events unfolding; people become infected, they then become crazy, the crazy people begin to kill the normal people, the crazy people get destroyed by a nuclear blast, survivors/carriers continue into closest city for help, infection starts again.