For my A2 media portfolio I chose the film trailer brief, this involved producing a teaser trailer, a poster to advertise the film and a webpage for the film. In this evaluation I have included links to posts on my blog.
1.
In what ways does your media product use,
develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Before I began producing my teaser trailer 'Vengeance' I researched the codes and conventions of both film trailers and then specifically the codes and conventiosn of films belonging to the horror genre. I researched and analysed a range of film trailers Most films use at least two of the following type of advertisement. My task was to create a teaser trailer, but as teaser trailers are usually shortened versions of the theatrical trailer I needed to create one of those too. My trailers sticks to the convention of being between 30 seconds and 2 minutes as it would most likely be shown on the TV. I also made a poster and a webpage which would further promote and advertise the film. After researching the structure of film trailers I decided to focus on films that specifically belonged to the horror film genre. When researching I looked into the different genres of films
My initial idea was to have the advert in a flashback style scene which would show that the film has more of a non-linear narrative similar to the films ‘Memento’ (Christopher Nolan, 2000) and ‘The Grudge’ (Takashi Shimizu, 2004), in which the trailer would open with a scene of the protagonist seemingly attempting to drown herself and then switch to a series of black and white flashbacks of the events that had lead up to this point. Due to time issues and cast members having other commitments I decided to change this to a simpler, classic horror film idea of a masked villain which would conform to the conventions of masks used to both show who the villan is but also hide there actual identity. I researched the portrayl and representation of villans to further my knowledge and extend my idea of what my villan would look like.(LINK). I also decided to look into stereotyping, stereotyping is used to help us quickly interpret a media text. By using stereotypical characters (ECT....) I decided to go against some stereotypes in my film by having the female protagonist appear to survive (in both my 30 second and 10 second trailer) this went against the conventions of how women are often represented in horror films, although with the introduction of the 'final girl' (often a teenager who is 'innocent' and conforms to the norms and values of society) defeating the killer in slaher films this view could be argued to be somewhat outdated.
In my video i included a logo from 'warner bros'. This is a well known film production company and by using this i think it adds to.... (info on warner bros, why i chose it and image, why i also made a production co, link to own text/image)
Poster:
I decided to make both a landscape and portrait poster as during my research i found that conventionally they have both as it allows the film to be advertised in more places.
After finishing the posters I decided to superimpose them onto real advertising spaces to show how they would look and to also show where they could be placed. It was also at this time that i checked that my posters would fit the conventional dimentions (either a 32 sheet billboard poster or a 6 sheet bus stop poster).
2.
How effective is the combination of
your main product and ancillary texts?
I think the combination of my main and ancillary texts is effective, they all have a similar house style and colour scheme which makes it clear they are all advertising the same thing. My trailer, poster and website all contain the same 'vengance' logo too.
3.
What have you learnt from your
audience feedback?
4.
How did you use new media technologies
in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
During the summer, when i did the majority of the planning for my trailer I mainly used media technonlgies such as websites like youtube to research and watch trailers and IMDb to research the plot of the trailer I watched and check to see its genre. I watched a range of both horror and thriller films to get an insight into what needs to be included in a film trailer and what film trailers gave away too much of the plot. I then went on to create a storyboard of an existing media text which helped me when i planned my own storyboard (LINK) as it gave me sense of how long each shot should be and the shot sequence.
During the making of my trailer i used a non-linear editing suite, the editing softwere i used was adobe premiere pro this allowed me to accesse and edit any frame of my footage at anytime regardles of its sequence in the clip. Non-linear editing also allows effects such as the black and white filter and fades which would be impossible had i been using a linear editing suite. During the production of the video I also used adobe photoshop to create the title scene and add a black and white filter to the Warner brothers logo (see below).
.jpg)
