A2 Media Project

Film Promotion Package

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

I feel that my film trailer uses the conventions of including the names of the actors and the director of the film and the films they have directed in different places of the trailer to give more information and split up the trailer. It is a good way to let the audience of the film know what to expect, by giving them an idea of what other films have been made by the director so they can see what sort of style the film is likely to be and whether it is the sort of thing that they would like. It is a good convention to follow as it can split up the trailer and stop it from seeming like too much of a story and give the important details, without giving away too much about what happens in the film.

Another convention that I have followed with my film trailer is the use of a voiceover at the start of the trailer. I found from my research that a lot of film trailers use this method to set out the feel of the trailer and to tell you what the story is about without giving away what happens is the end. I used a voiceover in my trailer to set the scene for the film and then ended the voiceover with a statement that gives nothing away but makes you want to find out what happens and watch the film, which is a common convention that I have found.

I feel that my film trailer develops on the convention of using lines that the characters have said in the film to get a point across. In my film trailer you see the main character say to the camera, “its starting to come true”. The audio of this scene is the repeated throughout the trailer over the top of other key scenes. This builds up suspense and makes the audience want to watch the film to see what is going to come true and whether the character can preventing it from coming true. This is a convention that can be seen used quite a lot in different film trailers, however I have developed on this by making it an integral part of the trailer and one of the main methods of building up tension within the audience and getting them interested in finding out what the character is talking about.

In my film trailer I have challenged the convention that a lot of characters from the film are seen in the trailer. I have challenged this convention by only including the main character throughout this film. The reason for this is so that the trailer shows that the film is all about the one character and the events taking place in his life that he wrote about coming true. It also allows the audience to immediately build an affiliation with the main character without actually giving away any important details of the film. I feel that this is also a good idea that could be used more often in film trailers as it allows the audience to see who the hero of the story is and they will already like the character from the start of the film. It could also draw the audience in as they would want to watch the film to find out who else is in the film.

Another challenge of conventions that I have included in my trailer is the use of black and white, to determine what time the event on screen is taking place. Scenes taking place in the past, where the character is planning what will go into his book are shown in black and white, and then scenes that are happening in the present are shown in colour to give a clear difference of time and show that these things are not all happening at once.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I feel that the combination of my main product and ancillary texts are very effective as they all work well together and are all linked in someway. The Film trailer, which is my main product, can be seen on the website which is one of my ancillary texts. This is an effective combination, as the audience have an easy access to see the trailer as many times as they wish, and they can also find out more information about the film once their interest has been grabbed through the trailer. The website has a very continuous layout, where the colours and font are very consistent with each other. The font used in the website is a creepy looking font that looks like something could be building up suspense and looks like a sort of dripping blood but the font colour in grey to fit in with the black and white scenes from the trailer to keep up consistency, the idea of this is to make the audience wonder what is going to happen, and also to show that the film is not going to be a happy, feel good type of film. This look is also carried on over into the film poster. It keeps the same font as the website, so that it is easily recognisable to the audience when they see the font and know exactly which film it is about. This can also cause a good word of mouth because if someone sees the poster and recognises it with their friends then their friends will also hear about it and the word will spread.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The target audience for my film is anyone from the age of 15 onwards, who is a fan of the thriller genre. I have had mainly positive feed back from my target audience, although most of the negative feedback was on the quality of the picture from the film trailer. From this I have learned that handheld video cameras are not really the best thing to film with, as the picture quality tends to suffer, and this showed in my audience feedback, as the one main area that was suggested I could improve on was on the quality of the film trailer as a lot of people said it looked like quite a grainy picture. However a lot of my audience said that they liked the general idea of my film, and that they had thought it was a good story. When asked whether the film trailer would make them want to go and see the film at the cinema, the majority of those asked said that they would want to see the film at the cinema. A feature of my film that was very popular with my target audience was the use of black and white when the character is being shown in the past planning his book. This featured a lot when my audience was asked what features of the trailer worked well. When asked why they thought it worked well they said that it made the trailer make more sense as they were able to distinguish between past and present. Another feature that went down well from my film trailer was the screens that show up displaying information about the stars and the director throughout the trailer. A lot of audience members said that it made the trailer look professional and like other trailers that they had seen, which is what I wanted as it was a convention that I was looking to follow.

The film poster that I have chosen was one of three possible choices for my final design. After I had created the three possible designs asked members of my target audience which poster they had preferred and this was the poster that came out as the most popular. They said that they liked the way that the background was dark and mysterious, but at the same time not being to boring and dull. They also likes the way that the text stood out from the background and was easy to read. Another common comment that I received from my audience about my final poster design was the release date being in red, they said that they liked it, as it had connotations of it something bad or dangerous happening that day and added to the mystery of the film.

I have learnt from my audience feedback, that they like websites to be interactive and not all be too much of the same thing, I learnt this through my audience telling me that they liked the way there was a good mix of pictures, text and video in on my website. It was frequently stated that having a trailer on the website looked professional and like something that really would appear on a website. This is the type of reaction I was hoping for, as it was a convention that I had looked to follow when in the researching stage. Although my website went down really well, my audience said that I could have included a few more links on the homepage that could have been linked to page that gave things to the audience more, such as downloads or games. This is something that I feel I should have added if I were to do this project again, as these are also things that appear on a lot of other film websites.

New media technologies played crucial part in all parts of the task. In the research stage the internet played a huge role in finding out about different aspects of film trailers. Using the internet I was able to use YouTube to watch teaser trailers for films from within my chosen genre to search for different conventions that could be used for the creation of my film. The development in search engines on the internet was also very useful, as it allowed me to gain access to film posters and promotional websites, so that I could look at these and find out what would need to be included in my own work.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation

stages?

In the construction stages of my work new media technology was vital in me being able to complete the tasks. I would not of been able to make a film trailer without a video camera, so this was the first media technology that was vital to me creating a trailer, the cameras that I used where very simple and easy to use which made filming a lot easier and allowed it to be done at certain times without an trouble at all. However the picture quality from these cameras was quite poor and the end product looked very grainy on screen which was not good as it made my work look worse than it should be. The software is used to put my film together was imovie, this was not the best software to use but it done the job okay, however it was very basic and quite limited in the things that we could do which restricted some of the ideas I had for the trailer and cause me to make a lot of changes from my original ideas. To construct my website I used iweb which I thought was a very good piece of software to create my website with. It was simple to use but also had all the features that I needed to make a good and professional looking website. I used Photoshop to create my poster, I chose to use this because it has a lot of very effective tools that I could use to perfect my poster and make it look as professional as I could. I used the tools in Photoshop to create the background gradients and to use effects to soften the edges around the photo I used after cutting it out from its original background

In the evaluation stage of my project I used PowerPoint to create my evaluation so that each slide could be answering a different point of the evaluation and it can be gone through and displayed easily. I also used a new blogging website called tumblr to blog about my progress through out the task and evaluate as I went along. This presentation will be added onto the blog as well so that of can be seen as part of my work. I chose to use tumblr for my blog as it had a lot of useful features that I could use to make it a multimedia blog with lots of different parts of my work added so you can see what I have been doing throughout the project.

ConclusionIn conclusion I feel that my project has gone fairly well, although there are a

few aspects that I would feel can be improved upon and things I would do differently if I done this project again. I feel that I have followed and developed the conventions of the thriller genre, but challenged them at the same time to put my own spin on it. I feel that the film trailer could be vastly improved if given better equipment and software to use, as the picture quality was very bad and the editing software was basic and cause me to have to make a lot of changes to my original ideas. I also feel that my blogging needed to be stronger, particularly in the planning stage, as a lot of the research that I had done was not properly recorded and as a result some things that I had research were missing when I came to put all the work together.

However I am very pleased with my website design and film poster. I think that these look very good and professional, and both fit in well with each other and the trailer by keeping the same style across all three tasks.