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.