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Friday, 8 April 2011
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
Louis' Evaluation
louis percival part 4 - How important is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks
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louis percival part 5 - What have you learned from your audience feedback[1]
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louis percival part 6 - The use of creative technologies
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Monday, 4 April 2011
Leanne's Evaluation
For our product we had to create a film teaser trailer, film poster and music magazine cover for a target audience of our choice. I worked alongside three of my classmates; Louis Percival, Jessica Knowles and Mike Keenan, unfortunately half way through our project Mike left college but we carried on successfully with our project. Together we all worked on the project from shooting the footage for our trailer to taking the photos needed for the ancillary tasks. When working on our ancillary tasks, we used Photoshop and In Design and when working on uploading and editing our footage we used Final Cut Express. In order for us to have a first idea of what sort of teaser trailer we would use, we researched our chosen genre and updated our progress throughout onto our blog. I contributed mainly on the ancillary tasks as I took the images and focused mainly on the magazine cover whilst Jessica focused on the poster and Louis as well as help from both Jessica and myself, worked on the editing of the footage. As well as us all working together as a group on editing the footage we all also worked on progressing our blog. By watching existing trailers of our chosen genre we also looked at their particular target audience so then we could have an idea of ours. We came to a decision of making our project target the audience of age 15 and above, both male and female. This is due to the fact that we chose to use disturbing violence throughout our teaser trailer. As our target audience is 15+, the social economic group is likely to be E meaning it appeals to students as well as group D as it also appeals to the working class.
For our teaser trailer we decided to follow the conventions of the popular genre, horror. The horror genre is becoming more and more popular as it does follow the conventions of a mainstream genre. The genre shows a supernatural side and reflects on demons etc. The general view of a horror genre stereotype is dark clothing and low-key lighting used when filming to create a ‘spooky’ setting and we have followed this throughout our project.
The two main influential film trailers we watched were; Paranormal Activity 2 and The Last Exorcism. Both trailers are supernatural and convey a storyline similar to which we have chosen. The use of colour grading in both trailers was very interesting offering alternative conventions to the typical horror genre. We decided to use this form of editing in our trailer.
Paranormal Activity 2 trailer-
The Last Exorcism Trailer-
Picture 1 – this is a still image of one of the characters on Paranormal Activity 2. The use of colour grading in this shot shows the genre clearly to its audience. We also chose to use colour grading to convey the same purpose.
Picture 2 – This is a still image of the protagonist in the film; The Last Exorcism. The use of mise en scene in this still shows a clear stereotype especially by the use of costume. From this image your audience can clearly see that the protagonist as an evil side as she is covered in blood and the use of low-key lighting used to show shadows also shows this. We chose to use this effect when photographing our ancillary tasks. We chose to use the dame idea of costume for our protagonist.
Picture 3 – This is the image we used for our film poster. This image clearly shows the personality of the protagonist in the film as the lighting shadowing on her face conveys a meaning of having a ‘split personality’ and the use of blood gives a sense of evil to our audience.
For our ancillary tasks we created a film poster advertising our film and a music magazine cover. We decided to focus on our brand image as being young and enjoyable. Below are some examples we were inspired by;
We were inspired by this magazine cover as it involves a lot of what the buyer can read about inside. Also we found the image on the front very interesting as the lighting on the celebrity gives an idea of what kind of character he plays in the film advertised. We tried to convey this when creating our magazine cover.
This image stands out to us because of the difference between the two images you can see on the picture. One of the innocent women which is placed in front of the almost distorted image of, it looks, a creepy man. We thought this idea would work well for our trailer, as we would be able to display the two sides of the women: her normal self & when she's possessed. The colour tint of the images are outstanding too as it’s a red tint: immediately giving connotations of gory, blood and death.
This is another we were inspired by from the film '30 Days of Nights.' We like this one as it’s bold and it’s in your face, straight to point of something not being quite right. Our own idea of this was to have an image of our possessed women as an extreme close-up with her covered in blood and try using effects to distort her face and again use the idea of the images colour grading, making the blood stand out with full colour.
This is our final product for our magazine cover. As you can see, we have decided to use the magazine Empire and in order for our product to look professional we stuck to the colour scheme they use and the same fonts. The Empire magazine cover used above as an example inspired the image we used. This was used to show the evil side to our protagonist, giving an idea to the audience on what the genre is.
This is our final version of the film poster we created. We have stuck to the colour scheme used in the trailer and in the magazine in order for audience to be familiar. The font for ‘Disturbed’ is also repeated throughout our three products, again for a familiar effect to our target audience. The image on the front has been chosen, as we believe that it shows a clear connotation to our audience of ‘split personality’ and evil. Although we have not chosen to follow any of our inspired film posters when creating our own we do believe that this image is kind of ‘in your face’ just like we found that the ’30 days of 30 nights’ was.
What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
When discussing our target audience we found our genre would appeal to both male and females from the age of 15+, meaning it appeals to the socio-economic groups D and E (young people and working class).
I believe the choice of target audience is perfect as it is the age when you start going out with friends, for example; to the cinema to watch films you enjoy. They are the right audience for our film financially, although it would mainstream, people of 15+ go to the cinema and mainly to watch horror films.
In order to gather feedback for our final product, the whole class watched each other’s products and answered questioned as we videoed, we then uploaded this feedback onto our blog. As we believe we should ask a variety of people, each of us went away and asked certain people a set of questions of which they wrote the answers down and again posted on the blog. We did this as we then had a variety of feedback and it wouldn’t be bias. From this feedback we were able to discuss our positives and negatives as a group and bits we could have improved. To our success our use of colour grading and whit noise effects proved to be popular to the audience but found that the pacing of the trailer didn’t work to well.
Below is an example of our audience feedback for our final video product:
From this feedback I believe that we gained a lot of positive comments. I learnt from this that in order to relate to the right audience you need to not only see things from their point of view but also follow the conventions of that genre, in our case horror, and try and attract your audience’s attention as much as possible. From choosing the correct location, a dark house, relating to the genre, the correct storyline we were able to attract a young audience who enjoy horror films.
Final Cut Express
This software was new to us at the beginning of the year and in order to learn how to use it we did a small tutorial. From using this software I believe it has allowed me to take my skills to a new level in using successful software to produce a film trailer. When first putting our footage together on final cut we found the software to be complex but after some getting used to and finding out what e could do on it proved to be more simple than thought. We firstly had to upload on footage onto the software and this seemed straight forward because all the tools were clearly labeled. We did find we had some difficulty using the software, for example; we decided to black out our protagonists eyes on a section that was slow in order for her to look evil, from doing this we found that when she moved the blackening out didn’t making it look unprofessional. With help from the media tech we soon figured out how to make this section look better. Also when creating the split screen effect, when using the scale tool we found that placing both images together wasn’t working as we expected but then soon after working on it we found that the images were to big and so the bit we wanted to focus on were hidden but the other image. After changing the stills we wanted we found ones that worked even better when creating our split screen, making our product that more professional looking.
Photoshop & InDesign
When creating our ancillary tasks we used Photoshop and InDesign of which I had used last years and so my skills with these software’s were already at an average standard but I still needed to improve when using them. In order to become more familiar with Photoshop and InDesign I followed out tasks in each software, which refreshed my memory. By using Photoshop this year it has allowed me to progress further when editing my photos and when using InDesign it has allowed me to experience different ways in creating different products such as; magazine cover and film poster.
Other technology
When capturing our images for our magazine cover and film poster we used a Samsung camera which were easy to access as this was college equipment. This piece of equipment was very straight forward s I have used a digital camera on a regular basis.
When creating our logo for our products we used a website, dafont.com which helped us find a suitable font for our genre (horror). This website was very straight forward and as I had never used it before I encountered no problem with it and found it easy to convert to the Mac laptop.
In order to keep track of our progress and development of our products, we each uploaded individual posts on to our blog on blogger.com, this was an easier way in updating the progress of our products rather than writing it down. I found that blogger was easy to use as I have had full training on it last year when creating my magazine cover. It allowed each member of the group to post their research and panning toward our tasks onto the blog showing our progress as a group.
When we had finished our final video, we uploaded it to the website, youtube. We did this in order to gain audience feedback on our final product as this was easy to access for everyone, especially our target audience. Using the site was simple to use as everything was clearly labeled making it easier for us to upload our video. We didn’t have any problems with the site and our video uploaded quickly.
From using all this technology I believe it has made it easier for us to produce our tasks and final video and without these software’s and technology we wouldn’t have been able to make a professional looking product. I believe I have progressed on my skills when using InDesign and Photoshop from last year.
Conclusion
Overall I think our final product has been a success and worked out better than the group thought. We didn’t really stick to our story board as we chose to use a baby when planning but found it hard to get hold of a baby when it came to filming and so we adapted these scenes by having the protagonist going crazy. We used split screen well in creating the contrast between “normal” and “supernatural” storyline and the chosen location was a brilliant idea for the genre as it showed a sense of haunting to our target audience. We used our bran image of supernatural throughout out ancillary tasks and trailer. Our audience feedback showed were we were successful in our products and were there were places for improvement of which as a group we found this very helpful. I thoroughly enjoyed creating the trailer and found that although some member of the group didn’t work as hard as other we all came together in the end to make a successful final product.
I believe my contribution to the product was a lot as I attended all the meeting we had to filming the video and also took both the images for the ancillary tasks. We all contributed well when it came to planning the trailer and ancillary tasks. When watching the final video I feel proud as I know a lot of work and effort has been put into making it look professional.
Sunday, 3 April 2011
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