Evaluation- Sarah

In our group, we decided to make a teaser trailer for our project. Our group consisted of Rebecca Thorburn, Chloe Giltrow- Shaw, Holly Smith and myself. My contribution to our particular project varied from editing, designing ancillary tasks and filming. We all shared the tasks equally and fairly so that we could all participate in every part of the project.
In what ways does your media product, use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The genre of our film is British social realism; this mixed with revenge thriller elements makes it a hybrid text. The conventions we used were incorperated elements and the themes were violence and social issues.

Other conventions that we used to create the style of a a social realism film which would be recognizable are the use of props in our scene, the mise en scen. The alcohol bottles, drugs (that we made look real) and cigarettes are some of the typical elements you would expect to find in a social realism genre. It is vital to use typical elements of a certain genre so the audience can immediately recognize what the genre is. We decided that our protagonist would be female to challenge the conventions of the genre. British Social Realism films usually involve main characters as males. So for our initial research, we looked at the branding of Charlie’s Angels. By looking at the poster, we could tell it was action packed with feisty female characters which were the films protagonists. Therefore the brand image is action packed and feisty

We then looked at Pulp Fiction’s brand image. It Is a violent gangster based film involving social realism. The brand image is the alluring seductive woman on the films poster. She is a female fatale, women use their charms to ensnare lovers in bonds of irresistible desire often leading to compromising situations. This is given off by the woman’s attitude, this is a feature we wanted for our brand image.Charlie's Angels won 12 awards for the film including favourite action team, favourite movie actress (Drew Barrymore) and best on screen team. Pulp Fiction won many awards including best actress, best supporting actress and best female performance. By looking at these figures I would say female protagonists are well perceived in films and are highly rated. Although in British Social Realism films female protagonists are not present, in Hollywood films they are, other films included (apart from the two mentioned above( are Jackie Brown and Kill Bill, this challenges the genre.

A teaser trailer highlights the most interesting parts of the film, not necessarily the whole scene or plot  but enough for the audience to be engrossed. A trailer starts with a slow pace to establish plot , genre and characters and then gain fast pace to show action. These elements are vital for our genre of film. Our trailer conforms as all these elements are shown in it.

When looking at narrative theories, the main ones that relate to our film are Barthes and Todorov. Todorov's theory simplified down to the notion that all stories begin with an equilibrium, a state of balance between potentially opposed forces. The equilibrium is disrupted by some event which in turn causes other events to occur and in doing so brings a second equilibrium. Our film starts off with two sister's, this is the equilibrium. the disruption is that one of the sister's gets shot which leads to the other sister hunting down her killer. The re-equilibrium is that the surviving sister has killed her sisters killer and can now be at peace. The other narrative theory our film could follow is Barthes. He believed that enigma codes were within a storyline to set up questions you would ask yourself which would be revealed during the course of the film. Some enigmas from our film would be: who died? why did they die? who killed them? what will happen to the killer? etc. These conform to teaser trailer enigmas.

I think that the choices we made work effectively for our audience. The feedback we received said that it was like a typical film trailer of the social realism genre. They said it doesn't use special effects and feels like a real life scenario rather than Hollywood glamour that can look made up and unnatural. The elements that made it recognizable of a social realism text were the props, alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, with crime being quite popular in the social realism genre. The audience recognized that the trailer stood out from the typical as it didn't have any speech whereas in usual film trailers there is commentary or speech involved giving us a hint of what is happening. It was similar to real life dramas and focused on things that could occur rather than made up, these seemed like realistic scenarios. Some impressive elements that the audience picked up on was the scream when the girl suddenly dies after opening the front door they liked this because it was dramatic and something they wouldn't expect from that kind of scenario. They also chose the music as an impressive element as it built up tension and the focus on the drugs on the table which stayed in focus until the scream, they found this effective but shocking. With the audience feedback we had, the only thing that could make the trailer stronger would be to add more camera angles in to make the scene more creative. The pace according to the audience was right for this kind of genre as it didn't focus on a scene for too long and it made it edgy by doing this and showed social realism at its best.

As our protagonist is a fiesty female character, we thought this would attract a wider audience. We thought this as women would want to watch it to show that women aren't always pushed about as they can be tough and strong. Men would want to watch this film to see the violence and revenge side of it all also because she is the attractive female lead. By having the female protagonist, these types of genres aren't repetitive and gives an exciting twist to the genre. The character's clothing reflect the fiesty character. The woman is seen as an "object of sight". The images underneathe is the outfit worn. She can also be seen as a role model to women for not sitting back and leaving the situation.

Leggings and leotard were worn to show the appearence of curves, the sexiness of the female.The shoes are high heeled to show of the femininity, although the acts in which she is partaking are manly.

The colour black was chosen for the outfit because the character was quite dark and wanted revenge, it connotes that the character is evil.  The colour also matches with the mood of the film and gives off ideologies of dark feeling and dark storylines. The outfit makes the character look attractive and it will appeal to our secondary audience which is males. In the home movie, the character is wearing a pink hoody, this connotes her to be sweet and fun loving which is the opposite to what you see during the course of the trailer. This gives off the "good girl" sterotype.

How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary tasks?

The branding of our film is through the colour and font chosen, these appeared in all three ancillary tasks so it was recognizable. The font that we chose was 'Base o2' as it gave the gritty, dark feel we wanted to achieve in our social realism text. We found this font through the site of http://www.dafont.com/base-02.font. This is the title of our film in the font, base o2.

The font is upper case and quite bold so the audience can easily read the title of the film. The font is also our logo as it has the colours of red and white which stand out against the black and white background, this is a juxtaposition. The colour red was used for the writing, this connotes blood, death and fear. The images that are found on the ancillary tasks were edited on Photoshop. Rebecca and I went out to find a suitable location to take the ancillary task pictures. The images were taken on a cobbled back street; this gave it a dark,urban working class atmosphere. We used dark filters to edit the film’s two trailer posters and de-saturated the colour on the magazine cover. We also raised the contrast and reduced the brightness to give the poster a colder feel. The advertisement poster idea with the words came from the film poster “Trainspotting”. Our trailer relates to the film Trainspotting by the social realism, similar characters, plot and ideologies.Our take on this poster was to write phrases that meant the title of our film, Vendetta. A few of these phrases are: 'One act of vengeance deserves another' and 'you cannot get ahead when you are getting even'. These are our posters and magazine cover underneath.

The colour palette remains the same on each of these. The characters body language gives off attitude and the tight clothing shows off how sexy she is and that she means business.

We chose to use Empire magazine as it is a well knowknown and recognizable film magazine. It is established and has a high profile and reputation. Our main feature is the film Vendetta and then we chose to employ the layout of Empires magazine so the audience would find it recognizable as it is conventional.

As our film is British, it would be appropriate to have a British film company to produce our film. As a group we decided that Working Title Films would be the best to produce our film. This was because they have produced many British films such as Billy Elliot. This ended up winning best British independent film in the year 2000. The social realist issue in this film was the UK miners’ strike 1984-1985. The film was set around this time to show the issue and how it affected people.

Working Title would back our film because it is original being concentrating on the female protagonist rather than male. The social issues are gritty and this develops the genre and gives it a modern 21st century twist.

The trailer was set in many differnt locations as most films are. These are some of the places we went to to create the feel of the film that we needed. These places seemed quite secluded and created the right atmosphere. The first image we used was when we saw Leah walking through the woods. This created the enigmas of where was she going? And who was she meeting? 

What have you leanred from your audience feedback?

To define our target audience we considered gender, race, Age and socio- economic status. The gender that we are aiming at isn’t very specific. Although females would generally watch this film as it is about a female getting revenge on a male, the female character would also appeal to males as our secondary target audience. There is no set race that we would chose to watch our film, but as it is a British film, it is more likely for British people to watch it. The socio-economic status that would be suitable for our target audience is groups C-E. These are the lower middle class to substidence. This offers it out to a wide audience making it inclusive. We would give our certification a 15 for our film as the violence in it would be quite strong for a 12 and the use of drugs would not be suitable for a 12 and younger. These people I think would have more disposable income to buy and watch films and they can also relate to the social realism films.  The target audience is a large mass audience so it is offered to more than one social economic status. When we finally established which target audience we would aim our film at, we put together a questionnaire to our target audience to whether they would want to watch our film or not. When we finally established which target audience we would aim our film at, we put together a questionnaire for our target audience to establish whether they would want to watch our film or not. The questions we asked were:

1) Age:

2) Gender:

3) Do you prefer a male or female protagonist (leading character)?

4) Do you enjoy social realism films? (E.g. This is England, Billy Elliot, Trainspotting, Green Street)

5) How often do you watch films?

6) Do scenes of drug/alcohol abuse shown in films distress you?

7) Do you know people involved in drug taking/alcohol abuse and violence?

The people we handed the questionnaire out to were our target audience both male and female, so we would get a balanced opinion. Over half of the people that we handed our questionnaire out to said they would prefer a male protagonist, even the females from the target audience decided that they would prefer a male protagonist. We didn’t think this mattered as we didn’t want to conform to other British Social Realism films. This decision could mean that both male and female would see that female protagonists are a good change for a film such as this. I think that they would presume males would be preferable rather than females as there aren’t many films with female protagonist’s roles. All of our target audience decided they enjoy social realism films and the scenes of drug and alcohol use that get out of hand do not affect them. We then thought of using scenes of alcohol and drug use would be appropriate for our film.

After we produced our film trailer, we made other questionnaires so we could find out what our audience thought of what we had made and what we could have done differently. Above is the audience feedback sheet for our trailer.

The questions are:
1) Do you think the product is typical of film trailer of the social realism genre? If so in what ways is it similar?

2) Does anything make it different or does it stand out from the typical? How?

3) Does the video help establish the genre of the film? How?

4) Name two interesting/impressive elements from the video?

5) Could this product be stronger – if so how?

6) Do you think the pace of the video is typical of this kind of product?

In our group for some tasks we split into two so we could share the work load, so we have two audience feedback videos.






Looking at this audience feedback we realised that we had made the right decision choosing our target audience. The audience watched our trailer and could tell that the conventions we used were typical of the social realism narrative. They gave us feedback, about how we could have made the trailer better, although there wasn’t that much we could have done. The comment from one of the videos was that we could of experimented with different angles.

Use of Creative Technologies

During the time working on this project I enhanced many skills and learned some new ones. I used a variety of technologies to construct, research, plan and evaluate the film trailer project. From the very beginning of the project we used an Apple Mac computer. We used this to use the internet to research trailers of films that we wanted to achieve with our own. We used the internet quite a lot to research and plan. 

We used: http://www.blogger.com , which helped us to develop our ideas and document our progress. Some elements of it such as uploading pictures or videos took time if more than one of the group was trying to upload, this took much longer than anticipated.

To look up videos of other trailers, we used http://www.google.com which led us to http://www.youtube.com to watch them. To find a soundtrack for our trailer, we used http://www.creativecommons.com which took a while to search for the perfect track.
We entered in words into the search bar to help find the track quicker, such as sad or horror.

We used http://www.dafont.com to find our font for our ancillary tasks. This site made it easier to find a font as we typed in the name of our film and it came up with all the different fonts so we could easily discard the ones that were too hard to read.

In the group, we also borrowed a digital stills camera. We used these to take location shots, props and casting shots. The camera was Samsung st550 digital camera. We also used it to take the photographs for our ancillary tasks. Although some of the imagery we had taken came out too light because of the natural lighting, that was easily corrected by using Photoshop by lowering the brightness and adding more contrast. As I take A level photography I am familiar of more or less everything that Photoshop is capable to do which I found to be of great help whilst working on this project. Another programme we used for our ancillary tasks was In Design. This was a programme which was unfamiliar to me so took me a lot longer to get familiarised to it although Chloe and Holly were much more capable of using it as they created magazine covers for their AS coursework last year. The video camera was mostly used by Rebecca. Although sometimes it had its faults as it could be temperamental and put a different setting on such as wide screen when some of our other scenes had not used this setting, the video camera was a Cannon.

For the editing of our film, we used a new package, Final Cut Express. We were taught, at its simplest form as training how to use Final Cut would take up time, which was time that we did not have to waste. Although learning more than the basic skills could have made our film trailer a much higher standard. Final cut Express did create problems for us when editing. Sometimes it wouldn't load up our video properly, and when it did, it added a grainy effect which made the video look slightly blurry. Problems exactly like this carried on happening through the course of making the project. 
Final cut helped us to edit the raw footage and allowed us to be creative with effects and techniques to help our film look successful. Various scenes of the film were spread out on the timeline to help us see them in more detail. The music we chose was easily put onto the film and made each transition flow perfectly. We were unable to finish our project on time due to having to participate in group audience feedback. Otherwise our film would have been sorted out with time to spare. 

Overall, I think our planning and research went quite well. The group had a few arguments about who wasn’t pulling their weight in the group but that was resolved quite quickly for the greater good of the project. By researching into female protagonists, we thought there was a gap in the market for a film with this genre. We thought this would draw in a wider audience because we are appealing our film at a mass audience of 16-25 years old.


Our projects key strengths was the research I think, as it was well looked into and our target audience enjoy the type of genre we wanted to portray. I think another key strength would be the way we switched scenes from a video camera effect (home movie) to the present time of Leah walking, running and being attacked.

A weakness of our project was the lack of varied shots of our film. The audience feedback from the audience came back as this so it wasn’t a surprise when they revealed it.


Overall I think our film trailer looked like the real article. It had varied shots and scenes that flick from one to the other, back and forth with quick sharp shots to show intense and feel to the film.

I think overall that our group worked very well together. We varied tasks so we all could have our fair share in the different activities.

If I was to re-do this project, I would make sure every task was complete when it was given out. A few tasks were done last minute which put strain onto the group which caused a few disagreements.
With all this in mind I am pleased with the final product of the film and all we have achieved in so little time.


This is our final film trailer product.

VENDETTA.