Question 1

Evaluation question 1:
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Teaser trailers are a promotional medium with their own set of conventions. The main conventions of the teaser trailer are:

- A length of 30 seconds to a minute and 30 seconds.
- Little or no dialogue from the film, to avoid plot spoilers too early on.
- Often the latter leads to use of music in the trailer; the kind of music used can help pinpoint the film's target audience.




We decided to opt for the convention that no dialogue be spoken so as not to reveal too much about the film. Our decision to do this came from our opinion that the above trailer for the movie Cherrybomb was especially effective despite not incorporating a single word of dialogue until the very end. Instead, we used music to fit the mood of the clips- to match the two very different moods we wished to convey, we used two different songs. For the light-hearted scenes, we used The Specials' 'A Message to you, Rudy', and for the grittier scenes featuring gangsters, we used unsigned artist Trip's song 'Who's That'. The two songs are very different- one is ska-pop, one a rap song- but we feel they represent both the tone of the film and the aspects of teen film that we are parodying within our film.

The length of our trailer is exactly 0.59 seconds. This length is directly in the middle of the recommened 30 seconds to 1.30 seconds, thus conforming to the conventions of the teaser trailer. We felt that 30 seconds was not enough time to convey our plot, as we had eight different characters to show, but wanted it to be as short as we could make it because we felt that 1 and a half minutes without dialogue might get boring for the viewer.

Because of film is a spoof of traditional teen drama films, we obviously flouted many conventions of the genre. For example, posters for typical teen dramas tend to be dark coloured and filled with images of semi-clad teenagers- selling sex appeal and gritty storylines. Our poster, however, was brightly coloured and showed our characters in costumes that promoted anything but sex appeal; indeed, our female lead character was wearing a dog walking fleece! Below is a picture of our poster juxtaposed with a poster for recent teen drama, Tormented, which was a poster we kept in mind during the creation of ours. We chose to make our characters polar opposites of those featured on the poster, who are all pouting seductively and touching the half-naked boy; all of our characters are fully dressed and their expressions are childlike. However, we featured a bottle of vodka, demonstrating that they are fraternising with things that are out of their depths.

Our webpage stuck to the conventions of modern teen films, as it featured the poster on the homepage and tabs to the side featuring 'special features'- e.g. photo galleries, trailers, information about the film. We liked the ideas we found on pre-existing sites because we felt that the audience would feel more connected with the film whewn able to gain more information about it, especially from the photo gallery.

However, in many ways, our film does not fit the conventions of teen films, particularly British ones, which tend to be hard hitting and gritty commentaries on the problems of inner-city life- our setting is quite the opposite, a leafy surburbia, and we used elements of ridiculousness uncommon of the genre (because, as far as we know, angry gangsters are uncommon in small villages like our setting!)

Overall, we feel that we have mainly kept to the conventions set by our predecessors, although we have made some important departures in the genre and tone of our film.

Question 2

Evaluation question 2:
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

In the process of creating our three texts- the trailer itself, and the accompanying webpage and poster- we wanted to have certain things that linked the three and showed synergy in marketing.

In both the poster and the webpage, the same image in used- the picture to the side, of three of our protagonists lying on the floor in a park with a bottle of vodka, obviously drunk. The characters are all making gurning faces, in sharp contrast to the pouty, sexualised expressions conventionally shown in promotional media for teen dramas.Several things about the poster, such as the attire of the characters, the expressions on their faces, the prominence of the bottle of vodka and the picture being angled from above- as though someone were watching over them- tell us a lot about the characters. This was one of the primary reasons for us choosing the image to use in our promotional materials- we felt it conveyed the lighthearted tone of the film, and represented the core storyline of misfits being out of their depth.

We also tried to include common colour themes and similar fonts where possible. Unfortunately, technological limitations prevented us from being able to use exactly the same font in our materials, but we opted for the most similar we could find- the main thing we wanted was for a font that was big, bouncy and chunky looking, representing the humourous tone and youthful intended target audience for our film.

We also linked our poster and webpage by featuring the same reviews on them- 'A British Superbad' was one, giving the film instant credentials, as fans of that film will be drawn to this one via the comparison. 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 twist-filled.

The webpage also featured several photographs of our actors together in real life- we felt featuring them all in different costumes, as they were in the trailer, gave further links between the projects, although we deliberately had the three depicted in the promotional material wear the same, prominent outfits (eg. the dogwalking fleece worn by Sophie) in all three of our tasks to create synergy.

However, we did deviate from norms of marketing in that we used different colour schemes in all of our products. In the trailer, we used a chunky gold font, to give the impression of 'cash'. On the poster, we went for a simple black and white theme. On the webpage, we chose grey and pink colourschemes. We did this because we wanted to convey all the different sides of the film- we did the chunky gold writing in the trailer to indicate it's comedic side, the simple black and white poster to show that it did have slight elements of seriousness as it tackles the problem of social classes within teens, and the pink in the webpage was used to bait girls into being interested because of the romantic side of the movie. We showed during our research and pre production that girls we sampled were more likely to be influence by a film's webpage than boys, whereas boys paid more attention to posters, so that's the way we chose to do it.

Question 3

Evaluation question 3:
What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback has been an important part of making the trailer for my group. We especially wanted to garner feedback from young people, as our film is aimed at the 16-24 age bracket.

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.

We have used the Facebook page as a feedback tool throughout the project. The first time we used it was before we had even begun pre-production- we wanted to ask our target age group what kind of films they would want to see, so we posted two ideas we had for films and asked them which they would prefer. The most popular answer was the idea we went on to use.


As the project went on, we started using the platform to garner feedback for other aspects of the task- for example, we posted this question about the ancillary tasks.

As well as the Facebook page, we made up a questionnaire and gave it to thirty people between the ages of sixteen and twenty, with the basic idea of finding out the answers to these questions:

- What gender our project would most appeal to, and how we could make it better appeal to both
- What genres are most popular, eg. comedy, romance, and how can we include them in our project?
- What would make people want to see our film?

Based on these results, our detailed analysis of which can be found here(http://nicholathorpea2media.blogspot.com/2010/10/questionnaire-and-analysis.html) we shaped elements of what our project was going to be; for example, we found that comedic elements were universally popular, and romance was very popular with girls, so we included a scene in our trailer with a kiss (to pander to the romantics) followed by a slap (for comedic effect.)

We also used the fellow pupils in our Media class as a source for feedback, because the ages of our class range from 17-19, therefore everyone in it is in our target demographic. They gave us some more specific, technical pointers upon the showing of our rough cut (below).




The improvements they suggested were:

- 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.



Our Media group said they were pleased to see the changes they suggested had been made, and stated that the best change was the dropping of the tagline and the inclusion of narrative slides, particularly as our trailer does not use dialogue. They felt that the inclusion of basic narrative made the footage a lot easier to understand and had a better idea of the plot.

We felt all the way through that it was of pivotal importance that we listened to what our audience was saying, as if we simply made a film that we were interested in, we may attract a limited amount of people. Obviously we wanted our film to be universally likeable, and so we took into consideration every criticism that our audience presented us with.

Question 4

Evaluation question 4:
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

In the course of A2 Media, my group and I used several technologies that we either did not have access to or did nto need to use when undertaking our AS project.

In total, the softwares we have used to create our project have been:

- Blogger, the site I am using to host this blog.

- Search engines; Wikipedia, imdb., amazon.com, etc. We used these to research the genre of teen dramas/comedies and find common themes. Wikipedia and imdb gave us detailed synopses of films and pictures of the posters, whereas amazon and play.com linked us to webpages and had the 'interactive' aspect due to consumer reviews.

- YouTube.com, in order to host both our rough cut and our final version of our trailers. We also used the video site for viewing teaser trailers of other, similarly themed films and for finding tutorials on how to use other technologies!

- Photoshop, a complex editing program we used in order to create a professional-looking film poster.

- Adobe PremierePro was the editing software we used to create the trailer.


The main techonological advance for us this year was the use of Photoshop, a programme we had no use for last year, as ancillary tasks are not part of the AS Media project. Because none of my group had ever had any experience with the program, we had to learn how to use it from scratch, which proved more complex than we thought it would be. We were only able to learn how to use more complex functions, such as cutting and pasting the 15 certificate, with the help of YouTube tutorials like the one below. However, once we had watched the tutorials and mastered the more complicated elements, we had very few problems with Photoshop, and found it to be an effective and useful tool in producing our poster ancillary task. We particularly liked the tools available for 'warmifying' the colour tone of the picture, the range of texts available and the fact that we were able to (albeit with initial difficulty!) cut and paste whatever we chose onto the main poster.




YouTube proved invaluable to us during the course of our project. In the pre-production stages, we spent hours trawling the site researching teaser trailers- by watching several of them on the site, we were able to establish common conventions, and by entering specific search terms, we were able to research films with particular themes that we were interested in. Later on, the tutorials proved to be the only way we could make sense of the more complex aspects of Photoshop. Once we'd completed the editing process, we used YouTube to host our videos, and are able to gain even more audience feedback through the site's rating system- viewers are able to 'like' or 'dislike' the video and leave their own comments, and are given the opportunity to share the trailer with friends if they so choose.

The editing software available at our school is Adobe Premiere Pro, as seen in the image above. Unfortunately, we have experiences several problems with the software throughout the duration of the year, as we did last year. Our school computers operate on a limited amount of disk space, and the file size of the Adobe program was only just able to fit onto our systems. Because of this limitation, the program ran exceptionally slowly, and whenever we tried to play our trailer, the clips either would not open or crashed a few seconds into pressing play. We also found similar problems to last year with files disappearing, or sound quality being reduced by the program.

Another problem was that the software was only available on the school computers. A large portion of Media coursework is done at home, and my group felt it may have been easier if the school had opted to use a free program that we would have been able to download in our homes so that we could edit in our own time.

We also had some issues learning to use Weebly.com, the site we used to host our ancllary website. We discovered that we were only able to access the most basic functions of the site without paying a subscription fee, and so were unable to post a playlist of songs as we had previously wanted. However, we did manage to get some of the components we felt were important. Most pivotally of all, we included a link to a Facebook page for the movie, as we noticed with modern films aimed at the 16-24 audience, linking to a social networking site was common. This is a way used by production companies to gain free advertising for their film, as young people in particular use the sites to share information with friends.

We also noticed that many sites included galleries of photos. We liked this idea, as it gave a better idea of what the film was about and the content of it, so we found photos of our actors together, specifically choosing colourful pictures, or ones with amusing content.

Overall, we found the technologies available to us throughout our project to be useful, despite the issues we've had. The most useful tool was one of the simplest; YouTube's tutorials enabled us to find out how to use the other programs to their full effect, and also enabled us to host our own videos.

Final video

Final cut: webpage

http://dirteecashmovie.weebly.com/

Final cut: poster