Our group's completed media film

Evaluation Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
http://www.slideshare.net/galaxymedia/how-did-you-use

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our group understood that our audience feedback was one of the most important features of our production to consider if we wanted our film to work effectively to our target audience. In our early stages of planning, we briefly discussed which type of target audience we wanted to reach. We researched horror movie goers and ultimately concluded that the best target audience were teenagers and young adults (13-28).

Charles decided that we should issue out a questionnaire amongst our fellow students to gain further information on what elements of a typical horror appealed most to our target audience. We gained a rough idea of what we wanted to achieve, but the results helped us to further realize our initial ideas and also new ones.

In our later stages of our production, we selected a group of students who were our target audience age. We reviewed our feedback and were able to feature them in our media project. From the various constructive feedback we received, we were able to effectively implement changes that helped improve our media project. For example, one of of the students said "Perhaps the trailer music could be more dark or mysterious" so Charles made a brand new music track to accompany the progression of the trailer, timing it as accurately as possible to suit the rapid change in scenes.

Our chart clearly backed up our belief that late teens were our main target audience.

Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
http://www.slideshare.net/galaxymedia/question-two-12743588

Evaluation Question 1

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

'You Are Doomed...'

When we started our advanced portfolio we had set out to create a horror trailer that followed the conventions of a 70’s slasher film like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). After analysing various trailers on YouTube we compiled a list of typical details we’d expect to see a in the horror genre trailer like an all teen cast, an eyrie setting and a  creepy score.

Costume/Props:

One of the stand out features was the idea of a masked psychopath hell bent on the killing the entire cast as we saw in Scream (1996) and Black Christmas (1974). Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th series has one of the most iconic masks in the industry and after watching My Bloody Valentine, 1981 we settled on the idea of using a Gas mask to hide our killers identify.

Title and Tagline:

'Your Next Breath Could Be Your Last'

From when we started the project we had planned to create a teaser trailer that didn’t challenge the norms of the genre and even picking the title was carefully done to coincide with the cheesiness that most ‘whodunits’ have as well as a cheesier tagline as Halloween had. We also purposely related the tagline to the Killer’s mask.

'The Night He Came Home!'










Music:

One of the most notable features of horror trailers was the progression of pace that was present in every trailer we analysed, the music also follows this pattern as we generally heard a fairly daunting tune which would suddenly shifts into a dark more twisted tune, we again followed this convention and added a score to the trailer and preceded to edit the music to fit with fast paced scene changes which I feel we did effectively.

Voiceover:

Another key feature we noticed in a variety of movie trailers was the use of a voice over or a screen of text to elaborate and explain certain details of the story, since our piece seemed to be lacking clarity we utilized the idea to give hints as to what the back-story of the film is. The use of voice overs is present in all genres but specifically in action and horror trailers, The Children Of The Corn (1981) was a perfect example for us as the scenes are rather vague but a continuous voice over summed the story up.

Evaluation - Fourth Draft- 2nd point

Another addition that we have included to our latest draft is intended to be implemented into our plotline. Our project included the theme of bullying which will appear, to the audience, to be the reason of the Gas Mask Killer's (GMK) actions.

While we were studying postmodernism, we looked at Pulp Fiction and noted that in the beginning of the film, there was a defintion of the title explained in simple dictionary form, this being an example of self-reference, a postmodern technique. We agreed that it would be a smart touch to place a dictionary definition of bullying into our media piece.

Evaluation - Fourth Draft - 1st point

For this draft, we all agreed upon changing our non-diegetic soundtrack and invent our own. Charles created a new music track using GarageBand, learned that from our observation of trailers that the tempo and pace of the music tends to generally speed up as the scary scenes progress more quickly towards the end of the trailer.
Although the music track was a first draft, it turned out well. The music fitted the change and atmosphere of the scenes that followed. It also added to the dramatic effect usually used in horror genres through the different instrumentals he selected and placed at the best places where it would make an sudden impact.

Fourth Draft

Fourth Draft
(All scenes with text will be improved with Adobe After effects)

Ancillary Piece - Magazine Cover

For our magazine instead of using lots of colour to make the magazine stand out, we decided to go with one of the pictures we took and use it as the whole base for the front cover. To avoid making the colour of the text ruin the look of the magazine, we decided to use a simplsitc colour such as white.

We added various brief statements that would appear on typical magazine covers, for example, Empire, to further advertise the film and to conform to the standards of a normal magazine cover. The secondary text "HIDE AND SEEK", instead of describing the film with a lot of text, we decided to use short words for whats in store.

Ancillary Piece - Poster

Title Changes

When starting our project we went for Silent Elimination as it did fit our cheesy ideas but as we progressed and started to use the name in our trailer and posters we realised it didn't fit at all so we thought up Daunting Carnage which again didn't work well so we went with a much more current name thats still quite cheesy but works...... Hide and Seek.

Our work is currently filled with all different titles.

Third Draft - Evaluation

We created an entirely new piece from the footage, we included new features :

• We added booming and heartbeat sound effects for the cinematic effect associated in horror movie trailers.
• In a private recording session, we added new voiceovers.
• A total restructure of the plot to add some clarity to the plot of the trailer becuase in earlier feedback, we recieved criticims that the plot involving the motive of the Gas Mask Killer wasn't clearly outlined in the trailer.
• We added a sequence to clear up the plot showing that the group are being picked off, a mobile phone is seen ringing close to the camera while Ade is standing in the foreground, the camera's autofocus helped greatly as it switched the focus from Ade to the phone.
• The draft is relatively rough, but we wanted to see how it worked, after showing it to our classmates it was graded at roughly a level 2/3.

Third Draft

Creating a timetable.

We had to decided to create a timetable to help us plan our in work in advance far more efficiently as we included all those involved in our piece with their free periods laid out clearly.

Elements Of A Movie Poster.

After looking at various professional film posters such as The Dark Knight (2008) we noticed the inclusion of 'Billing Block' at the bottom of the poster which included the Director, actors and other members of the production team. We copied the text and edited our own version (with our names as various roles) into our poster. We included a link to our blog as the real posters had a link to the official movie website, we included a fake mock up of a 'Galaxy Media' logo to replicate the Warner Brothers logo and we also included a fake release date as 'Coming Soon' (we may make an actual date in the future).

Movie Poster Idea/Inspiration.

Continuing with our movie poster research, we came across the French drama La Haine (1995). The poster appealed to us mainly due to the fact that the eyes were striking and there was minimal elements on the poster. The bold black undercut of the poster shows off the text and helps the picture to stand out, as there is more colour to the picture.

Elements such as the text were also interesting as what we saw in posters and this one in particular is that the tag line/review was at the top and the name of the film at the bottom.

Research into film magazine covers

We looked at several magazines including Empire and Total Film. Our group observed that the magazines who's front page was solely based on promoting one motion picture film;

• there was a huge picture of the film of the main cast in dramatic poses.
• the words were limited
• the font was big and bold
• A date of issue
• they featured minor information about other films
• the background color varies from the intensity of the main picture on the cover

Second Draft - Evaluation

We have improved our original draft in several ways:

• We included two different musical tracks to accompany the scenes.
• We added two voice-overs
• We added a sequence where key scary scenes were shown in whilst rewound. This was done to travel back to a 'significant' scene involving the killer and his victim which should show the killer from a new point-of-view.
• We included a evil breathing sound effect for the killer in the last few seconds of the trailer.
• During editing, we made sure to time each scene's progression to the way the music changed. E.g. when Wilson gets dragged away, we timed the song's progress to intersect the precise moment he gets dragged for a more dramatic effect.

Second Draft

Non-Diegetic sound effects

Since the killer is featured with a gas mask as part of his appearance, we considered using sound effects that can be implemented into the trailer during editing. Members of our group suggested that we included a ragged breathing sound to play whenever the killer's scenes appeared or perhaps when the killer strikes. We also came up with the idea of using the Wilhelm scream to play when Wilson is dragged away over the floor. Charles conducted some research to discover that it was a "cinematic sound cliche, and by 2011 had been used in many instances, including over 225 movies." He also mentioned that it would be easily identifiable within the horror genre, thus targeting the right audience.
Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream