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.