.: 2012

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Sunday, 15 April 2012

Parris - Evaluation Question 4 - Post Production

Video Recording part 1
Video Recording part 2
Video Recording part 3

Parris - Evaluation Question 3 - Facebook

To receive audience feedback, I was originally meant to upload our horror magazine, poster and trailer on to Twitter but the server had said the files were too large to completely upload. This meant that I had to upload them onto Facebook instead. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to upload the magazine and poster onto Facebook as the files were still too large. However I was able to share our teaser trailer via the Youtube link.

When sharing the teaser trailer I had hoped at least 5 constructive comments. Unsuccessfully I had only received 2 comments, one being constructive. The constructive comment claimed the trailer “looks good, make it more flashy, add a horror part to it”. By this they meant the trailer did not seem scary enough and did not contain much action within. When they had said “add a horror part to it”, by horror they had meant blood, guts and killing.

The other comment was simply about how funny they had thought the trailer was at a specific part. The part they had thought were the funniest was when the scientist grabs their head and transforms into a zombie. He claimed that it was funny because the character looked as if he was doing the “migraine skank” which is an urban dance in the UK. This showed us that because our trailer was seen to be funny, people would then recommend it for other to watch as they may recognise the scene in the trailer that is funny.

Parris - Evaluation question 2 -CMP

The cross media promotion was important for our horror poster because it helped us learn how to converge our products in different ways through many different companies such as mobiles, computers and consoles depending on what softwares were used.

We had promoted our poster by uploading it on social networking site such as Twitter and Facebook. We had decided to put the poster on these particular sites because they are 2 of the most teenage populated social networking sites in the world.

The advantage of uploading the poster on Facebook was that a variety of people were able to view, like and comment on the poster. This meant that people of any age that we were ‘friends’ with on Facebook could give us critical feedback that could let us know the positives and negatives about the poster. However a disadvantage of uploading the poster on Facebook is that not many people will comment due to the amount of ‘friends’ you have on the website and how they are feeling at the time. What I mean by this is, if you do not have many ‘friends’ on the website you will have a limited amount of feedback which you may not benefit from.

The advantage of uploading the poster on Twitter is that people from all over the world are able to view the poster without any difficulty. This means that they would not need to be ‘friends’ with me as you would have to on Facebook. The benefit of this is that we could receive feedback from people all over the world who may even have experience in the media film industry. However the disadvantage to the poster being on Twitter is that people may take no notice of it because they are able to see that the poster is amateur and that they will gain nothing for themselves if they give us feedback.

Cross Media Convergence helps with the promotion of our poster it gives people access to it through many different ways. Seeing as we had uploaded the poster onto Facebook and Twitter, people are then able to view the product on their mobile phones, games consoles and iPods. They are able to view the poster on their phones and iPod because there are Facebook and Twitter applications that can be downloaded on both devices. People are also able to view the poster on their games consoles such as a Play Station 3, Play Station Portable and an XBOX 360. This is because you are able to access both social networking sites through the internet on all three consoles. However the only disadvantage of this I that to view the poster overall, you will need a wifi internet connection. Without this you are not able access Facebook and Twitter though your mobile phone, games consoles on iPod.

Parris - Evaluation Question 1 (Final Draft)

Our magazine

Our media magazine uses the conventions of a real product by placing a coverline above the magazine title. This is used to help grab the audience’s attention as it would initially be one of the first coverlines read.

Placing the majority of the coverlines including the main coverline on the right hand side of the front page is one of the conventions we had used. This is because they are easy to read and enables the audience to distinguish which coverline is the main one.

Creating the sticker was the convention we definitely wanted to use. This is because it is a technique used to persuade the audience into buying the magazine. Making the number ‘5’ the largest figure within the sticker shows the audience what they could gain if they were to buy the magazine.

Placing more coverlines near the rear of the magazine gives the audience more to read. This could potentially help bribe the audience to buy the magazine as it has given them quite an insight as to what is in the magazine itself.

Placing the barcode at the bottom corner of the front page is also one of the conventions we used. This is because it does not distract the audience from the main image or coverlines.

Our Poster

When creating out poster, we didn’t use many convention as we wanted out poster to seem out of the ordinary. One of the few conventions used was to place the trailer’s catch line above the main image. This is used to give the audience an idea of what the film could be about.

Another convention used was to use the main characters face as the main image. Depending on the characters facial expression, it could help the audience determine what that character may be doing/have done in the film.

Another convention used was to make the credits a long and thin font. This is because the majority of the audience does not spend their time reading their credits as they have more interest in the film being advertised on the poster.

Our Trailer

In the making of our trailer, we decided to use 5 main conventions. The first convention was to show the audience where the surrounding will be and what could possibly happen in the scene.

Another convention was to show what is the cause of the storyline and how people started to turn into zombies.

Another convention was the colours used. We decided to change the colour of how the audience would view our trailer. This is because the majority of zombie teaser trailers do not show the actual colours of the scenery.

One convention was to have the main character in the trailer look at the camera. This was used to enhance the fear of the audience by making them feel they are apart of the film.

The last convention used was by showing the audience the date and film title in different shots. This was used to help make the audience eager to watch the rest of the trailer as they would have to wait until the end of the trailer to find out more.

Friday, 30 March 2012

Evaluation Question 2 (Continuity) - Jeffrey

When it comes to how the product is advertised continuity is one of the most important factors if not the most important one. This is one of the easiest ways for the target audience to recognise our film, poster and magazine and it also gives the work that we’ve done a more professional feel. The continuity in our product is very noticeable and I believe that as a group we’ve done a good job keeping some things consistent throughout the three main products. The most noticeable use of continuity is the model/actor that is seen in all the main products. This shows the audience that the actor plays an important role in the film as he is constantly seen and he can be associated with the group due to his constant presence. There is some continuity between the poster and the magazine which is shown through the use of the font nowharehouse.

The image is also placed on the left while the plague is written on the right side in both products and we make use of a black background. The reason there are these similarities between these two products is because we wanted to make sure that the poster and the magazine were as closely linked as possible which explains why the composition of the two products are practically the same.

Continuity is important when it comes to advertising a product as it allows to the audience to familiarise themselves with the product and everything related to it and a good example of this would be the text used in the Harry potter series which is why Harry Potter fans can spot anything related to the series easily thanks to the distinct text which is what we tried to achieve.

Harry Potter's distinctive font

Evaluation Question 1 (Conclusion) - Jeffrey

In conclusion my group’s final product does manage to incorporate and challenge some conventions of real life media products. This is shown quite clearly in the three products that we produced e.g. in the magazine the masthead is put in front of the actors face rather than behind it. We managed to use and develop conventions meaning that we mixed things up which gave our products more variety. When it comes to challenging conventions the most notable thing is that we didn’t follow the convention of making a horror teaser have low-key lighting and it wasn’t scary but was seen as funny. On a whole I would say that the group did well to make use of the conventions.

Evaluation Question 3 (Facebook) - Jeffrey

There were lots of ways to get feedback from the audience for our teaser trailer. I was tasked with getting the feedback from a popular social networking website ‘facebook’. This was to be the first time that anybody got to see the trailer since there wasn’t a lot of promotion done through facebook.

Even though there was no promotion done on facebook for the trailer facebook is an excellent place to reach out to the intended age group because most of the people that use facebook are teenagers (mid to late teens).

On my profile I posted the link to trailer which received comments that I didn’t expect to see. These comments weren’t very relevant to the trailer and showed that the trailer had more of a comedic side to it than a scary side which I saw as a surprise because the trailer was meant to have as many elements of horror as possible. I also managed to put the poster and the magazine on facebook to receive feedback from the audience and they received better feedback than the trailer and the magazine managed to get some constructive criticism about the title saying “The title could do with a little change to match the coverlines”. This showed me that the magazine was effective but the appeal was cut short by the title.

Thursday, 29 March 2012

Evaluation Question 1 - Jennifer

Ways in which my media production Challenges forms and conventions of real media products

For our A2 media coursework, we were told to create a teaser trailer, magazine front cover and poster as our ancillary task all in which we recorded through our blog.

As a group we decided that from group discussions and watching different teaser trailers, we decided that would create a trailer that related to some of the conventions used in horror teaser trailers.

Most of the ideas we received for our teaser trailer was all down to the planning and research stage.We watched different trailers and saw them from different perspective's which gave us more motivation and confidence to create a good final product.

We decided that our main theme would be based around a scientist lab, which can be normally seen in our chosen sub genre of a zombie teaser trailer.

We decided to use simple sans serif font for the heading on our poster. we did stick to one of the colours mainly used in horror white is white, as it connotes peace and purity.

The texts we used for our poster a seedy motel type font which we recieved from da font.com

for the main image of our final product, we had taken a close up of our actor. as you can see the coulour actors face is very dim and eere. We decided to do this as it added to the effect of our trailer. Aslo we used one of the scientific symbols which we placed at the back the actors head, which stands out very clearly.

On of the coventions we used was the masthead at the top of te main image. This masthead also indicate what type of genre the magazine is, as it it a film magzine.

We used coverlines for our final product, these were placed at the right hand side of the magazine. The cover lines also include artist which were spesific to the genre of our final product

Main cover line was used and placed at bottom right hand side of the magaizine

We did include a BB scan bar where our audiance could purchace it from their BB (Blackberry) Also we included the bar code and a reasonable price for the magzine, with other cover lines placed at the bottom of the page.

Chanlleneging conventions we did use was the fact that the masthead was placed in front of the actors face instead of putting it behing as seen in other magazines.
Also the colour of the image is not as bright as others, but we did this simply because we wanted to create a dark side to the magzine, which hopefully worked out for the best.
The conventions of my media depended generally on its genre. Within the horror genre the actors are usually to appeal to the audience.
There is also usually a simple narrative or story which also cutsbetween this narrative and the acotor in the trailer.

Wednesday, 28 March 2012

Evaluation Question 3-( YouTube feedback) Jennifer

Audience feedback was a key part of our final product, it allowed for our media product to sign off as excellent or satisfactory of our chosen sub-genre. It is incredibly important for the audience of our media product to relate to the genre, as they are consumers of the product, this is why they are key to the production of our task.

At the beginning of our planning and research, we decided to obtain a better understanding of our target audience, to do this we wrote up questionnaires, which contained multiple choice answers of the genre of horror films. Within the questionnaire, target audience were allowed to give their own ideas and perceptions of horror films and what they'd like to see in a horror.

From the audience feedback I learnt that it is important to have constant feedback throughout the different stages of our product.

Feedback was gained through various methods, including Facebook, twitter, BBM (black berry messenger) and YouTube.

As you can see from the screen shot taken from our you tube website, comments have been made by our viewers. As you can see, we had some positive feedback from our audience. Two of the comments that were made, expressed how they would like to see movie and continuously keep watching the trailer. This feedback was vital for us as a group, which proved to me that from what our viewers have commented on, our trailer was at a good standard.

Above are the statistics for our final trailer. Overall, so far we have had 470 views from our audience, which has proven to be a good thing for our production team, clearly showing that our trailer has made steady progress. It also shows the percentage of people who have liked our trailer and disliked our trailer. So far we have 5% as likes and the other 3% are dislikes, this may be because they did not feel that our trailer suited their taste in film, even so honest feedback is considered as a positive for our production team.

Tuesday, 27 March 2012

Our trailer

Practice shots

For our poster, we wanted to see what effects we would be able to use. One of the effect we practiced what the shutter speed effect. By using the shutter speed we were showed what the effect can create..

As seen in this photo you can see that by slowing the shutter speed down will show the movement of an object/person from one position to another. This will then give a ghostly effect.

When we were given the opportunity to take a few photographs, we started off simple by having our model standing in one position and only moving her head. Seeing as we didn’t not use a tripod, our cameraman had to keep his hands as steady as possible. For our first attempt, the photo taken had come out quite good. This is because you can see where the model’s head had moved to and from, and you saw little movement in the body.

Our next attempt came out better than expected. This is because there is hardly any body movement shown and the face looks like a complete blur. This means that the model had stood completely still, and the cameraman kept their hand steady

For our second attempt of using the shutters speed, we decided for the model to not only move her head but to walk into three positions which is in a shape of a triangle.

As you can see from the image on the left, this did not work out as we thought it would originally. However, it was our first attempt .

In the next attempt, we made considerable progress. This meant that the models figure was shown in each position they stood in. by doing that the model had to stand in each position for a certain amount of time ( time ranging between 5 and 10 seconds).

Finally, our last attempt was a huge success in using a moving figure. This was because you can see the two solid figures of the model with a vaporous effect in between each one, which showed the movement of the model.