Final Product - My Trailer

Evaluation

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

The editing in our trailer remains mostly similar to what we have observed in our case studies and general research; the pacing starts off slow and gradually builds up to a climax, featuring more action scenes and less plot. However we decided throw in a slight twist in this, half way through the montage of action scenes we inserted a long scene of the main characters waiting around, doing nothing, before returning to the action again with no explanation. This provided comic affect as we played off of the fact that audiences expected action scenes and would be somewhat amused to see the character’s lounging around in the midst of it all.

The characters in our film stick to the strict comedy duo idiom of “Straight Man and Fool” as popularised by Laurel and Hardy and more recently “Eddie and Ritchie” from Bottom, who were a small influence in for the characters, albeit, downplayed. However in keeping in modern trends we tried to blur the distinction between who played which roles, so as not to pigeon hole our characters.

The overall plot of the trailer is where we deviate most from the social norms of an action film. Though the villains in the trailer were clearly intended out to be dangerous professional criminals, our heroes have no expertise in combating them, nor do they have weapons or armour to protect them, more than this, they have a tendency towards bickering during serious moments; most of the humour draws on their lack of heroism. A symbolic illustration of this is their lack of any formal “hero attire”

When designing the poster I decided to stick soundly to the conventions of what I researched, namely using one main image of the starring characters, using as few colours as possible, mainly dark blue, black and red, and generally keeping a minimalist feel so that audiences want to see the film to have their questions answered. However I decided that to make the poster more interesting I would add a comic book feel by manipulating the images in Photoshop. This was ironically poking fun at the fact that comic book heroes were technically vigilantes and our film was a more “realistic” approach, this deviated from the poster's I researched as typically they look serious.

 

Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

When planning out our trailer, poster and magazine cover, I was very aware that I was attempting to create a brand between the three products, and I knew that I must make a conscious effort to make the three separate pieces identifiable as part of the same product. As our trailer was the main product, I made sure to try to link the ancillary tasks back to it as often as I could.

The most notable example is the typeface for the title, it is seen at the end of the trailer and the same image can be seen on the poster. The text again, this time missing the fist icon and in a different colour to the original, is featured on the magazine cover.

The other example is the characters themselves, they are seen in the trailer almost exclusively wearing black clothing as part of their uniform, and in the magazine cover and poster they wear black. The characters appear in similar outfits throughout the product so they are easily recognisable.

The Decision to give the magazine and poster two different styles was one that troubled us initially, but research suggested that the poster and magazine cover need not necessarily have close ties as long as they have some things in common, as shown via the Dark Knight.

One area which I believe I did not create a brand as well as I could have was the way I styled my the poster not matching our trailer, by giving the characters a comic book feel I gave it a tongue in cheek reference to a comic book superhero film, which this film goes some way to parodying. However, while this was an interesting visual idea, it was not capitalised upon in the trailer and there is fear that audiences might not get the link. If I were to do it again I would have included some more superhero visuals in the trailer.

 

Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The group was very interested to get our audience’s responses and ideas with each draft of our trailer, so our trailer was shown to members of our target audience, as well as people we were not aiming at as we knew in reality other people would view our product. Their feedback gave us very clear guidelines as the where to improve our product. starting with version 2. the first "complete" version and therefore the first version we took criticism from, these were the main things people said about our production.

Version 2

• The audience suggested we could tell more of the story using titles, as we provided very little back-story with footage alone.
• Some people said that there were too many long jokes to use in a trailer and that more one liner should be used to speed up the trailer.

Version 3

• The plot initially seemed very vague and jumbled, audiences wanted a more chronological plot as it was hard to follow the way it was.
• The general consensus was that having two songs in the background split the trailer in half without good reason, and that it would be better for us to go back to one.
• Audiences also said that our music was too loud and the dialogue could not be heard over it, which was again confusing for an audience.

Version 4

• Most people picked up on the lack of an enemy shown, and so the narrative suffered as audiences could not understand the conflict that the film was based on.
• There was some agreement that the jokes, while humorous, were cut away too soon for them to really sink in, so that the gags did not bear the full impact we intended.

Version 5

• Though we addressed the inclusion of an antagonist it was later observed that there was very little interaction between them and the heroes so it was not clear what the protagonists were actually doing about the problem.
• Audiences also commented on the lack of pace the trailer had, saying it was too slow for the action it was supposed to contain.

 

Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluations stages?

Research – During our research websites such as the Internet Movie Database and YouTube were used to research similar products of ours that we wanted to borrow conventions from. Google images also let us download images of the magazine covers and posters for us to analyse. Finally the popular website SurveyMonkey helped us gauge our audience’s interests and structure our film, and using Social networking site Facebook to advertise the survey meant that around 600 friends could take part.

Planning – Technology was used extensively throughout the planning stages. Notably using msn messenger and social networking site Face book helped us to co-ordinate with each other after school when we couldn’t be in the same room to plan. Which helped us save time as it meant we could have meetings of sorts around our busy school schedule.

 

Being able to email also played an essential part in helping our planning as files like Scripts could be sent to each other and then sent back edited very quickly. It also helped us procure the music for our trailer.

Construction – This was obviously the most technology dependant area of the whole production, constructing our media product required a vast amount of technologies, obviously from filming using a film camera mounted on a tripod to obtain the raw footage, we then uploaded the footage onto the computer, taking and sorting out the useable clips from the unusable ones. Once we had our clips together we used Power Director 9 to edit them, trimming them down, changing the colour on some and speeding up some clips to improve the overall quality of the shots. Finally we added music to give the film the all-important sense of pace.

            Our Ancillary tasks similarly required a lot in the way of post-production to create a truly professional and interesting looking piece, transforming them entirely from the raw pictures we took using Photoshop 5. In particular using filters gave the images on the poster a comic book look and using the Burn tool in both products gave the images a grittier feel.

 

Evaluation – Submitting my work to Web 2.0 has also allowed me to obtain a great deal of helpful user feedback from my audience, sharing our product with Facebook let’s over 600 friends give us feedback, and with YouTube an almost limitless audience can see and give feedback to our product.

Trailer Versions 1 to 5

Final Products (Magazine & Poster)

Magazine Cover

The magazine cover needed to mirror an actual issue of Empire Magazine as closely as possible; to this end we copied the basic layout and logo the magazine franchise uses, it has a price tag and barcode so that it resembles a legitimate magazine.

The primary goal however, was to promote our product as much as possible to make it memorable in the minds of a potential audience, so we opted to use the VIGILANTE logo and make it huge on the magazine cover, so that it was the first thing that audiences would see. With it we included the tag line for the film, to further aid continuity. These are both overlaid on top of the central image of the magazine.

The main image features the two central characters of the film, in the same costume they wore for the film poster, providing more synergy, however their roles are reversed somewhat, with the serious character behaving comically and the joker character looking more serious, we chose this image particularly as it makes the actor’s seem out of character. And the spotlight may be on the actors and not the characters, which may have interested readers who liked the actors.

Finally, we decided to feature different films on the cover similar to ours to appeal to what David Gauntlett described as the “pick-and-mix reader” so if one of these perked the reader’s interest who are more likely to like comparable films to ours, and would be more enticed to buy the magazine.

Poster

The Film Poster was designed to jump out at the viewer, as such I the colours I used were primarily black and red, which contrast strongly with each other and make our poster stand out, with the red more prominent and the black I used to make the red stand out even more. Using my research I observed that red invoked ideas of danger and action in a viewer, so I included it into the text specifically so as to get across the action side of the film rather than blatantly point it out.

My Muse

The main characters are the focal point of the poster as they are for the trailer and the film itself, their personalities and the way they interact with one another really made the film we felt and I wanted to capitalize on this in the poster, on the left, James takes a classic superhero pose head tilted up as if contemplating, a well known, even cliché pose made popular by early superman, unbeknownst to him Rob is mocking him with bunny ears. This image represents the comic side of our film.

As stated in a previous post the fist links with revolutions and uprisings, symbolic of the power of might, which is, essentially, what our film is about, albeit taking a comic twist on the matter. as well as breaking up the plain black of the central image the fist serves as iconography for the film franchise as a whole, not only appearing at the end of the film trailer accompanying the title but also being used within the film as part of the “Justice Posters” being put up, giving some continuity to the franchise as it sort of mimics the posters in film, but with obvious differences. Nevertheless, it creates a sense of franchise to the products, linking them.

Planning The Poster

PART 1

I decided that this image from the photo shoot most strongly caught the identities of the two characters and their relationship with each other. Using Photoshop, I took the background away leaving just the characters. I then used a filter that gave the image a comic book appearance, and finally went over the image making small touches to thicken the outline and make other aesthetic enhancements. Following the conventions of the Harry Brown poster I analysed I will put this image over a plain dark background.

                                                                                                                       

PART 2

My group decided very early in the planning stages that a fist would make good iconography for our production, a fist being a representation of might and more specifically having being symbolic of revolutions, and we thought these links matched our narrative.  I coloured it red, being the primary colour of the poster, and used a white background as it did not show up well over the main characters.

The Font for the Vigilante title was downloaded from DaFont.com we use this font throughout the trailer so it matches, however for the title I coloured it red, and then used Photoshop to burn and Smudge the colour so the image looked more visually interesting.

                                                                                                                                            

PART 3

The Tagline “Get Some Justice” was thought up between my groups, we wanted something short and snappy and that fit as well as matching the narrative of our film just right, as Justice is a big theme throughout our Trailer/Film. The font is also taken from DaFont.com.

I chose this font as it resembled graffiti, which fit with the idea of revolutions and gritty urban crime. I then took the text onto Photoshop, resizing each letter so it looked less uniform, then blurring the edges of the letters and lowering the opacity so that it looked like it was spray painted.

                                                                                                                                          

PART 4

Finally I added the names of the stars and the “coming soon” so that my product looked real and matched real media products, with these I took a more minimalist approach, while keeping the burnt red motif that the other text pieces have, though to a lesser degree.

Poster & Magazine Photoshoot

We decided to take a number of pictures featuring the two characters in various different poses that displayed their individual personalities to a viewer, as we previously decided that our main character's would be our central image for both the magazine cover and the poster. These are a few of the more interesting shots we took.



Poster & Magazine Initial Sketches