Tuesday, 3 May 2011
Evaluation-Question 1
- A length of 30-90 seconds
- Little or no dialogue from the film. This may be because the scenes haven’t been shot yet or to keep mystery about the film and to avoid spoilers
- If no speech is used then music is used instead to avoid awkward boring silences.
We decided to keep to the convention of having no dialogue so that we do not reveal too much about our film.We formed this decision after researching and viewing a trailer for Cherrybomb, as it was very effective and didn’t contain one word of dialogue until the very end. Instead of having silence which we decided might lose the audiences attention we added in music. We wanted to convey two very different moods, so we decided that we should use two different songs that had very different moods. One was a lighthearted mood- The specials- A message to you Rudy and the other was a hard gritty rap song by Trip to show the gangsters.
As our film is a spoof of traditional teen drama films we wanted to go against as many conventions as we could. In other trailers, the teens are seen as over-sexualised or very violent, however, our characters are seen as being hapless geeks. We also noticed that posters tended to be dark and gritty showing the male characters with weapons wearing “chavvy” clothing and females being very sexual with hardly any clothes on. We didn’t want this for our poster so we decided to focus mainly on their faces, which are smiling and obviously drunk. The poster is also very bright and the faces are well lit leaving no sinister sub-tones.
Below is a real poster for the movie kidulthood compared to our poster. As you can see they are very different and do not seem like the same genre at all. We chose to make our characters completely different to those featured on the poster. They are all looking aggressively at the reader and are typical youth gang members, where as ours are fully dressed and have calm and naive expressions.
Our webpage however comply with the conventions as the image is the same as that on the poster and it also has main features that most film websites have, such as, a hompage, navigational bar, facebook link and feauture the trailer itself. We chose not to diverge against the type of websites we researched because we found them to be very successful and we felt that the audience would connect with it better when they were able to gain more information, especially through the photo gallery.
In other ways our film doesn’t fit in with the conventions of British teen films as they usually outline the problems of gang members in inner city area. Ours, show the problems ordinary people encounter when they experience extra ordinary events. They are also suburbians who are good, intelligent geeks (rather than criminals). Our setting is also very different to those trailers we researched. We discovered that they were mostly set in dark dingy alleys in cities, where as ours often shows green, leafy areas. We used this to show the stupidity of the characters and that they should be living clean cut lives, rather than running around after stealing a gangsters drug money.
Overall, I feel that we have mainly kept to the conventions set of teaser trailers but that we have altered the tone of teen dramas to combine it with satirical comedy.
Evaluation-Question 2
Another link that we made from the poster to the webpage was theat we included the same reviews on them- 'A British Superbad'. We especially chose to write this review as Superbad was the film we mainly took inspiration from and it would give the film a potentially larger audience as it would attract superbad fans. We also used one stating that the film was 'a delirious, rollicking, roller-coaster ride of fun' giving an insight into it's comedic tone and also telling the viewer that it is exciting and something that would thrill youths.
The webpage also featured photographs of our actors together in real life. We thought that this would help link the trailer and website together as it would give the audience a better background knowledge of the characters before they went to see the film. We also hoped that it would personalise the characters and make them more likable. We dileberatly made the main girl character wear a prominent “Dog walking fleece” so that she was recognisable throughout the trailer, poster and the website. This was also to help create synergy.
We did, however, deviate from norms of marketing. We used different coloured titles throughout our three pieces. We did this to show the audience different sides of the movie. In the trailer we used chunky gold font to represent the money and to represent the flashiness of the characters. On the poster, we chose simple black and white theme which was the show the normality and ordinary nature of the characters. On the webpage, we chose grey and pink colour schemes to show the weakness of them . We also used them to try to attract the female audience because people associate pink with love. During our research we found that females are more attracted to romantic films.
We felt that to attract a large audience we need to listen to what their preferences are. If we made a film that only we are interested in we might not be able to gather such a large audience. We want are film to be successful so we have tried to incorporate all of the aspects that the audience want.
Evaluation-Question 3
Before we decided on what genre our piece was going to be we carried out some research (via questionnaires) into what type of films people prefer and what aspects of film they are attracted to. We found that females and males enjoy different films. Males, on a whole, preferred comedy and action films but the results for 15-20 year olds showed that they favoured comedy and teen drama. Females preferred romance films as well as comedies. This suggested that for our film to be successful and to gain a large target audience we should make our film a comedy. However, to ensure that we made our film original and to appeal to an even larger potential target audience we have decided to combine the popular genres to make a teen comedy.
In order to best connect with our target audience, we looks at the mediums in which they communicate most frequently, and found that social networking sites were the best way to get people to give us feedback. To this end, we set up a Facebook page and posted discussion topics on the wall of it, and then asked our friends who fit into our target demographic to answer our questions and give feedback on our ideas.
After establishing the who are target audience was going to be and what type of genre our film was, we decided to create a facebook page to ask people who they thought of our new ideas.
And, we have used it as a feedback tool throughout the project. The first question we asked our audience was out of our two final synopsis’ which one would they rather see? After collecting the results we saw that 75% of the people who replied would rather watch Ideas 2, s
o we used that idea as our plot for our trailer. We also asked them during the construction stages and we received comments back about our poster, rough cut of our film and our website. We then altered our products depending on the response.
After showing the facebook group our rough cut we got the following responses:
- Including more of the footage we shot, as they felt the rough cut got a bit repetetive and the extended shots of the characters walking down the alleyway were unnecessary.
- Instead of including the tagline, 'Money don't grow on trees,' they suggested that we should have prompt cards that told the viewer a little more about the plot, as they struggled to tell what the film was about.
- They liked the use of the song 'A Message to you, Rudy', but when we informed them of our intention to mix it with a grittier rap song, they were enthusiastic and felt it may help the audience grasp the nature of the film better.
We took this information on board and edited our rough cut, eventually coming up with the final trailer below. We adhered to all of the changes suggested by our 'test screening' group, and then we showed it to them again.
After we altered these criticisms we went on to show our media group our final cut, to which we got very good feedback.
Evaluation-Question 4
Question 4
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In A2 Media Studies my group and I used several different technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages. Below is a list of the different technologies I used.
- Blogger (This site). I have used this site to act as a kind of diary to present all of the information I have researched. I have also used it to keep information into how our production is progressing and to show any problems we may have faced.
-Search engines e.g. google, imdb.com. We used these to research the kind of genre we wanted to use. We researched into popular films to research any conventions the films may have including those in their synopsis, posters e.c.t. It also helped us in our construction. We had to write an email to “The Specials” to request their permission to use their copyrighted song. We wouldn’t have been able to find their contact details without the use of search engines.
- YouTube.com. We posted both our rough cut our final cut of our trailers. We also used the site to viewing teaser trailers for research purposes to see the codes and conventions. We also used it to research and find the music we wanted to use in our product. As well as using it for research puroses we also used it to help us construct our piece. We sometimes got confused when using other technologies such as Photoshop, so we used tutorials to help us.
- Photoshop. Although we found this complex and difficult to use, we produced our Poster using this programme.
- Adobe PremierePro We used this software to edit our trailer.
The main techonological advance for us this year was Photoshop. None of our group had used this programme before in the previous years study of media as we did not have to create ancillary tasks as part of our AS Media project. Because of this we had to learn to use the programme from scratch and needed the help of tutorials and the advice of other students. We found the complex buttons too over complicated but once we managed to find out which processes we needed we were able to quickly grasp the programme.
We struggled to edit the 15 certificate and needed the help of a tutorial such as the one below.
However, once we had grapsed the programme and had watched the tutorials, we didn’t have any more problems with Photoshop. Overall we found that it was effective and useful tool in producing our poster ancillary task. One aspect we found particularly good was the 'warmifying' process which warms the colour of an image. We thoughtthe range of texts available and fonts very useful.
YouTube was very helpful to us during the research, planning and construction of our project. In the pre-production/ research stages, we watched dozens of teaser trailers. It was quicker to use this site as all of the videos are in one place so we didn’t have to waste time trying to find them. This allowed us to see specific conventions within the trailers. In our construction stages we also viewed videos to help us grasp programmes we hadn’t used before such as Photoshop and I also used it when editing if I had forgotten how to use a specific editing tool. After we had completed our product we posted it on Youtube so that it was easily viewable and could be found easily by the group, teachers and examiners.
The editing software we had to use was Adobe Premiere Pro due to it being the only one available at our school. We have had several problems with this programme throughout this year as well as last year. Our school computers have a limited process power and available memory that this programme maxed out. This meant that they ran extremely slow and often crashed half way through editing; losing our work several times. We also had problems when opening our trailer to show people in order to get audience feedback. It also crashed several times and the programme often skipped past some of our clips giving the illusion that the video was of poorer quality than it actually was. Another problem was that the sound quality was sometimes reduced automatically by the programme in order for it to run more smoothly.
Due to licensing the programme could only be used at school; where there were limited computers available meaning that we couldn’t do our work as often as we had hoped. My group and I think that it would have been better if the school had chosen to use a programme that had been free or downloadable so that we could use it at home and could have a longer period to edit in.
Although we chose to create our website on weebly.com as it was easier to use and more readily available than the other option, Dreamweaver, we found that it was quite limited to the amount of features we could use. After completing the website and when trying to publish it we were notified that some of the feautures we had used, e.g. a playlist were only available if you paid for the “Pro” version. This meant that we had to change the layout and features of the website to a more basic version. However, we did include main features such as a link to a Facebook page which would be set up for the movie. We noticed when carrying out our research that most films produced in todays market have a Facebook page to appeal to their target audience of 16-24 year olds. This was the same age group as our target audience so we decided the best way to advertise our film would be via that social networking site (alongside our own website and poster. Another feature we used in our website was a photo gallery. Here, we produced photos of our characters together to show them outside of the film to give the audience a better feel of the characters. We specifically chose ones that were amusing, which coincided with our film.
Overall, we found the technologies that we used throughout our project were useful and helped us to achieve the best work and end product we could. The most useful tool, I think, was Youtube because it helped us throughout our Planning and Research stage as well as our Construction.
Friday, 29 April 2011
Final Video Audience Feedback
- Very good editing of music- as we had to cut it half way through and repeat the introductions
- Good costumes
- Some clips are blurry- This is because we had to use poor quality cameras, something that was out of our control. It may also be due to slow school computers.
- Good titles- explains background information