A2 Media Product EvaluationThe Recluse

Jamie Branston, Lyle Petts, Will Turner

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of

real media products• Editing: The convention is to start slowly and build in pace as the

tension grows throughout the trailer, to achieve this we began with a number of establishing shots to set the scene, we quickened the editing pace to create tension and build excitement. We finished the trailer with a very slow final shot of the killer.

• Music: Often horror trailers use a combination of eerie music, sfx, and complete silence. We used all of these conventions to give our trailer a typical horror style feel to it.

• Mise en scene: Horror films are renowned for using cold dimly lit establishing shots, derelict sites and wooded areas. We followed all of these conventions

Q1. Challenges to convention

Point of view shot -

We challenged the conventions of a horror trailer by showing a point of view shot from the victims point of view. This was a challenge because usually this particular shot is from the killers perspective. We did this because we wanted the audience to identify with the victim. So that the killer remains a mystery.

Q2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts

Our ancillary tasks are designed to promote our horror film and attract the target market. Having an article on our film in a prestigious magazine such as ‘Total Film’ is an excellent way to market our products as it is where the target audience are likely to search for products of their interest, in this case horror films.

Q3. Main Production Task Feedback

Our main production task has come a long way from our first rough cut. Our audience feedback has helped our group develop our main task to a more professional standard, one particular example of this is when a member of the class suggested shortening a shot as it brought the pace of the piece right down and broke the entire flow of the production. We changed this one particular long shot into two smaller shots in order to keep the pace.. The weakest areas of our production include our lack in variety of different shot and this made the length of the trailer feel as though it dragged on as it appears very much as more of the same throughout.

Q3. Collecting FeedbackWhen we showed our rough cut of our main task to the class there where mixed reviews; we had many positive aspects pointed out to take away from it, however the class did emphasise a few mistakes and areas that have room for improvement. the good points that the class highlighted to us were encouraging, the bad points we made note of in order to straighten out for our final cut. By showing our rough cut to the class at this point we were able to make good use of the feedback as the age of the class is the age of our target audience and is likely to be the age group our film trailer will most appeal to.

Main Production-Feedback(title)Our feedback from our class suggested that we need to change our title as it was cheesy and irrelevant.

After a bit of brainstorming with the group we managed to produce a new title that gave a much more mature feel to the whole product, our new title had a black and greyish background with a kind of sepia effect and the title "The Recluse" appeared in black and lit up into a white in flash like approach and then returned to a backlit black, the change made the trailer appear much more professional

Q3. Main Production-Class Feedback

After a class feedback session it became clear that certain shots needed to be re-filmed and that we need a wider variety of shots we set off to our filming locations the next weekend. luckily for us the weather was very dry but not too sunny giving the abandoned church a dim lit effect which we would have otherwise had to edit into the final cut as this was the desired effect we wanted in our production. secondly we needed to re-film a lot of footage that was damaged by the tape as the filming was overlaying footage we had filmed over and sounds and lines of previous footage was permanently imprinted on to our work during playback which was a shame and a real step back for our group, especially in terms of morale. Once we began re-filming we encountered no real problems and was satisfied with the improvements made on the original footage.

Q3. Film Poster FeedbackOur poster was effective as a single element but we soon realised that although it portrayed a horror film well its convention were not quite appropriate towards our film trailer, to see if this was true we compared our audience response notes from the poster compared to the audience feedback noted from our production and found that most people felt our poster was that of a slasher horror and less of a more sophisticated horror thriller. In order to correct this we used decided to go for a more mature looking font and then presented our second draft to the class for more feedback; as expected the typography had a great effect on increasing the audience expectation of a film that was more complicated then a conventional slasher film. I do wish we had enough time do a photo shoot for the poster as the image on the front is a print screen of a shot from our footage which of course is not of the best quality and is definitively an area I would have like to improve.

Q3. Second Ancillary Task- Film Magazine Front Cover

Our poster was effective as a single element but we soon realised that although it portrayed a horror film well its convention were not quite appropriate towards our film trailer, to see if this was true we compared our audience response notes from the poster compared to the audience feedback noted from our production and found that most people felt our poster was that of a slasher horror and less of a more sophisticated horror thriller. In order to correct this we used decided to go for a more mature looking font and then presented our second draft to the class for more feedback; as expected the typography had a great effect on increasing the audience expectation of a film that was more complicated then a conventional slasher film. I do wish we had enough time do a photo shoot for the poster as the image on the front is a print screen of a shot from our footage which of course is not of the best quality and is definitively an area I would have like to improve.

Q3. Film Magazine Front Cover-Feedback

The majority of people said that they like how the images and title of the magazine overlay (bleeding in), the different locations of texts promoting other film etc (composition of design elements) and finally the different colours of fonts spread around the page.

People agreed that our front cover followed the conventions of a typical film magazine such as Empire or Total Film and contained relevant side notes and sub titles that would be expected on a magazine.

Our class feedback showed us that people believed our magazine front cover tied in nicely with our other tasks and kept up the consistent theme and emotions that was portrayed in them

Q3. OverviewOf the three tasks I believe that our most professional looking product was the magazine front cover as we had used a photo shoot session in order to get a high resolution image in good quality for the front cover with a equally good Total Film font to bleed into and the general composition of the design elements appeared very neat. My favourite part of the magazine cover was the angle of the killer in the picture, kind of a high angle off set image with the knife in hand gave the impression that he could come at you from any angle, also the colour scheme of the magazine was very effective as we stuck to bold colours such as black, white, red and yellow for some of the sub titles.

Q4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and

evaluation stagesConstruction

Media technologies we used in constructing our production include, a video camera, a tripod, a microphone, Adobe Premiere. For filming we used a small, handheld video camera (canon mini dv) the benefits of this were that it was lightweight, easy to film with in dim lighting conditions and it also allowed us to adjust the contrast when we were filming the point of view shot. We decided to use a separate microphone to capture gun shots and wild life sounds. This allowed our sound effects to have greater effect in creating tension as the sounds were of higher quality.

Q4.Research

For the research stage of our production we used internet search engines such as Google to identify our target audience. We also used Youtube to find examples of similar British horror film trailers. After collecting examples of horror film posters and magazines we annotated them using Photoshop.

Q4.Planning We also used a video camera for the production of our

anamatic, this allowed us to create a basic storyboard of our horror film trailer. By doing this we were able to decide as a group which shots would work best, so that when we came to filming our trailer we knew exactly how we were going to approach it.

Q4.Evaluation

After our first cut we posted our production on Youtube in order to receive feedback from a wider audience. This allowed us to make sufficient changes to our production so that we were able to gain the highest possible grade.