A Message To The Examiner

Dear Examiner,

I've tried to create a Blog which guides the reader through the process of creating my main and ancillary tasks.  

Through the course of the project, I believe my skills have developed dramatically in a number of key areas.  These areas are my experience in using Photoshop and Blogger. Examples of these skills developing can be seen in my film poster and my magazine. I feel my skills have improved over practice in the last two years.

The Blog highlights some of the main tasks I've carried out through the course of the Blog.

I feel my strengths are my Photoshop skills and other technology I have used throughout the course and some of my favourite posts are my finished products because I feel they reflect these skills. 

Finally, I would like to thank you for taking the time to read through my Blog.  I hope you find my work enjoyable.

Yours faithfully ,

Sophie Whitlock

Construction - Reborn trailer Second Draft

Construction - Reborn Poster

Construction - Magazine

Evaluation Question Four - How did you use media technology in the construction & research planning & evaluation stages?

How did you use media technology in the construction & research planning & evaluation stages? on Prezi

• I used Google as my main search engine because by using Google, your search will cover more than 8 billion URLs. 
• Google search also uses likelihood of relevant results to determine the quality of results. 
• Compared to other search engines Google produces results that only match your search terms. Without this method of matching, your search will produce results that have nothing to do with your search terms. 
• Google shows a snippet of the text that matches your query which gives you a preview if a page is going to be relevant before you click to visit it. 
• You can access cached pages even when the original page is gone although the information on cached pages is not the most recent information about the site but it still contains useful information.

• This is indeed an advantage for beginners. Since you do not possess the expertise to create great photos, you can use actions. It is easy to learn using actions. You do not need coaching in order to do it. Aside from that, you’ll be glad to see how appealing your photos will look like despite your lack of Photoshop skills.
• This is more advantageous for beginners for as you see each action work, you’ll learn more about how Photoshop works. You can even explore and combine the different steps in an action. For sure, your knowledge and skills will be sharpened with what you will discover. If you use actions made by others, do not merely use it but also try to look into the steps and study what he used in creating it. This way, you will know which tool and effect is used to give a good result. This could also help you to make your own Photoshop Action.
• Of course, a simplified job will certainly help you save a lot of time. You can have more time in doing other tasks and you’ll surely save a lot of time with actions. This will even save you from staring long time at your computer screens doing the thing over and over again.

Evaluation Question Three - What have you learnt by your audience feedback?

What have you learnt by your audience feedback?

Feedback is very important because it will help me make minor changes to my products, to see what my audience want to create more products, to hit the target audience 'criteria' and to spot any mistakes I may have missed.

The methods of feedback I decided to take were Youtube, Social Networking and Sample audience where I filmed people's responses to my products.

As you can see from the image, I posted my video onto Facebook for people to see and comment. I got a minimum amount of feedback as people weren't interested in giving me feedback unfortunately. But here is some of the comments I did get:

• 'Looks pretty cool, I would go and see it. Only thing is the ending of the trailer seems like its missing something. . .'

• 'I like the editing on the slow-mo parts. Not a bad trailer'

• 'I don't think the storyline is clear, but it got my attention, its not quite enough to make me go and see the movie'

• 'I could tell the genre of the movie was horror, I like horrors'

As you can see from my feedback, I still have a bit of work to do on my trailer. Overall I think my audience found it attention-grabbing which was my aim in the first place. However, this feedback is not totally reliable as these people are 'friends' and probably didn't want to criticise it too much (although this is what I wanted).

These are the screen shots I have from twitter from a follower. She said it would have been more effective if I had filmed the opening scene at night time, and the camera angle change in the running scene was good. This was a better response for me as it was more critical and she picked up on more specific things from the trailer so I know what to change next time.

Magazine

Poster

Trailer

These are some video's on my audience feedback. I will use these to make small changes and improvements on my three media texts.

Evaluation Question Two - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

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

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

An audience is informed about a new movie through technological convergence. For example, a song used in movies often has a music video which consists of scenes from that same movie. The audience is also made aware of a new movie by the use of you tube, posters on busses and billboards, social networking sites, websites and magazines.

For our project I had to create a trailer, a magazine and a poster. The purpose of this is to promote a horror film. We chose the genre of horror because as a group, we decided it would be more feasible than any other genre as we didn’t have a budget at all and had to make the most of our surroundings and equipment. We looked at other posters and magazines from other genres (comedy, romance etc.) and last year we had also learnt a lot about magazines as our project last year was to create three of the main pages of a music magazine. From this, we also learnt a lot about technology which made it easier to jump into a more difficult project like filming a trailer.

We also analysed a lot of trailers, magazines and posters from the horror genre to understand the conventions. For example, on my blog I analysed a poster for the film ‘The ring’ and I also analysed the trailer for ‘The Shining’ film. I also looked at movie magazines such as empire where it helped me to create my own magazine following the main conventions.

The major forms and conventions of film posters could include: A large title which attracts the eye, bold colours which stand out from the background, intriguing picture which would attract viewers to the film, persuasive language which might persuade the viewers to go and see the film, using the main character's name for promotion, and the certification will either to ensure that the right type of people are watching the film. An example of how different types of film (e.g. comedy, horror) poster use these forms and conventions to attract a certain type of person (e.g. teenagers, horror fans) would be a really scary horror film, which will use eerie images in order to appeal to horror fans. A successful film poster will accomplish attracting the target audience and persuade them to come and watch the film.

Click on the images to see annotations:

Research - Target Audience

This is an example of my target audience. She is an 18 year old student who enjoys parties, joining her friends at the cinema (to see horror movies) and likes to invite her friends to her house for 'film days'. She enjoys a good film and studies media so she has a lot to say on her views after watching a film.

She reads magazines so she would see my product in a shop or a library whilst studying for her exams (as she is a student). She also goes to the cinema a lot with her friends so she is likely to see my poster advertised around. Living in London, she would also see my poster advertised on buses and billboards around the city.

She is the perfect target audience for my products as she fits the age group, the products appeal to both male and females and she enjoys horror films.

Filming Photos

Planning - Storyboards

Research - Moodboard

This is my storyboard. I have used a lot of disturbing and scary images from previous films to get ideas for my own poster and to show what genre I am aiming towards. However, in my trailer I will try not to include gory images and scenes because this is not my aim. My aim is to scare the audience and attract them to my film without using gory images. I want to use more questioning and suspicious content in my trailer to entice the audience without giving much away. 

Planning - Our Narrative

Possible Titles of Film:

- The Night that never lived

- Slaughter Reborn

- REBORN (chosen name)

We found the title 'Reborn' to be the best fit for our plot as 'slaughter reborn' gave the wrong idea to our target audience suggesting blood and gore when our main story is more about ghosts and spirits. 

Characters: 4/5 ghost hunters, a ghost, church caretaker.

Settings: City of London Academy classroom and a church. Most of the trailer will be filmed in the church. 

Narrative: based on a true story, the Charles Manson murders. 4 or 5 ghost hunters looking for the ghost of Charlotte Manson, a mass murderer of South London, Bermondsey in the late 1960s (based on Charles Manson). Rumours say that the spirit of Charlotte Manson is trapped within the church that he body was buried under and this is the church we will be filming at. Her spirit possesses one of the ghost hunters when they enter the church (Sophie). Sophie starts acting differently towards the others. Whenever they make ghost jokes she doesn’t laugh or respond in anyway. Her face begins to turn paler as the trailer goes on showing that she is clearly possessed. The spirit is now fully REBORN within Sophie's body and starts killing the other ghost hunters. The spirit of Charlotte Manson is trying to recreate the murders of the late 1960s.

Tagline: Charlotte Manson is back…

Editing Styles or techniques: We agreed that we were going to use a handheld camera throughout the trailer to give the effect of realism and illustrate that the ghost hunters within the story are amateurs.

Props/Clothing: Within our £0 budget. Everyone will wear their own clothes nothing extravagant. Dark coloured casual clothing will be worn by all the characters within the trailer. Props include fake blood, Charlotte Manson's previous murder weapons, etc.

We have also developed our story boards and filming schedules for our group. We created our filming schedules so that every member of our group knows what things they are doing and when they are doing them. These filming schedules list the dates we are filming on, director, actors, setting, camera shots/angles, lighting, actors costume for continuity, etc.

Research - Narrative Theory

Todorov 's theory -


Bulgarian scientist Todorov, proposed a basic all narrative structure. In his theory, he suggested that every story had an equilibrium or a 'calm period', a disequilibrium which is the disruptive factor and a new equilibrium to restore the 'world of fiction'.  


Five stages of a narrative (according to Todorov's Theory) -


1. A state of equilibrium - all as it should be 
2. A disruption of that order - by an event
3. A recognition that the disorder has occurred
4. An attempt to repair the damage - of disruption
5. A restoration of a NEW equilibrium




Propp's theory -


Vladmir Propp's theory suggested that in all narrative's, there were eight types of characters:


1. The hero (seeks something)
2. The villain (opposes the hero)
3. The donor (helps the hero, providing help)
4. The dispatcher (Sends hero on his way)
5. The false hero (falsely assuming the role of the hero)
6. The helper (giving support to the hero)
7. The princess (the reward for the hero but also needs protecting from the villain)
8. Her father


According to this theory there are only eight different character types, and only 31 different things they ever do. This is easily related to a lot of stories/narratives today. 



Claude Levi-Strauss' Theory -

Levi-Strauss looked at narrative structure in terms of binary oppositions. Binary oppositions are sets of opposite values which reveal the structure of media texts. An example would be GOOD and EVIL – we understand the concept of GOOD as being the opposite of EVIL. Levi Strauss was not so interested in looking at the order in which events were arranged in the plot. He looked instead for deeper arrangements of themes. For example, if we look at Science Fiction films we can identify a series of binary oppositions which are created by the narrative:

Earth - Space

Good - Evil

Human - Aliens
Past - Present
Normal - Strange
Known - Unknown

Slaughter Reborn Poster Draft

Planning - Typography

Here are some examples of fonts we would consider using for our poster. Each one has a 'horror' or 'spooky' feel to it. I got these examples from www.dafont.com under the 'horror' themes.

Planning - Images

Research - Questionnaire Analysis

From the results of our first questionnaire for random people we found that 9/10 sixth formers we asked said they liked watching horror films. Also, the majority of people said they enjoyed the 'shock factor' of a horror film instead of gore, violence and other aspects. This suggests we should include a few shocking scenes in the trailer that will make the audience jump. They also told us that they are more attracted to a good storyline rather than gore or violence. This connotes we should make our storyline intriguing to our audience instead of including a lot of violence to draw them in because they want to see a good storyline.

From the results of the focus group questionnaire, we found that the most popular sub-genre was 'gore' and the most popular 'time' of horror was the 1980's so our storyline could be from the 1980's or based on the 1980's horror.

Research: The Shining Trailer

The Shining has alot of short, quick clips that show quite alot of the action but it does give quite alot away about what is going to happen in the film. For example, at the beginning the storyline is revealed before you see any of this 'action'. Also throughout the trailer there are a lot of fade-ins and fade-outs into the next clips, this helps create the tension within the trailer instead of just cutting to the next scene. There is tension also created in the middle of the trailer as the clips start getting faster and shorter as more action happens and as the trailer goes on. 


At the start of the trailer there are a number of establishing shots just showing the setting that the film is. Shortly after this, there are quite a lot of short clips showing what happened in the house before with the man walking up the drive with an axe which makes you think that the film will be based around this. This is similar to when films use the 'based on true stories' line to entice their audience. Then we meet the family that are going to be living in the house and the audience automatically know that something bad is going to happen. Then the quick shots start as the tension rises, during the quick shots there are a lot of long black shots that are followed by short, quick clips of action. The music in the trailer also helps to build up the tension as its quite dramatic and fast.

RESEARCH: Questionnaire