Evaluation: Chloe Giltrow-Shaw

what ways does your media product, use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real life media products?

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How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary tasks?
Our brand image was designed to reflect the genre and also the storyline. We wanted the brand image to be clear and recognizable. The brand image is social realism dull and low colour, mixed with a sinister look to portray the theme of revenge in the storyline.

We achieved this look by taking images of the protagonist in the location of the trailer- the cobbled back street- as this clearly showed what genre it was whilst fulfilling the dull and low colour look we wanted.
We also kept the costume the same throughout the poster, magazine cover and during filming. The costume was black as she is a sinister character and the leggings and leather jacket were fitted and sleek to giver her sex appeal.

The wall and cobbles in the pictures were practical as they provided a good canvas to put our text on which saved time, and it also provided a contrast to the red text we used.

We found the text font 'base 05' on ‘www.dafont.com’, along with a few others but this one was chosen as it looked worn down, giving connotations of the social realism poverty theme, whilst still being clear and bold which was important as the title of the film also acts as our logo within the brand and so it was important that the font was clear and easy to read and recognize. The font also looked slightly like blood splattered which gives connotations of what happens in the film and also has reference to the blood present in the trailer.

The word ‘vendetta’ means revenge and so this is how we came up with the title. The word works as the logo as it is short and has three syllables which makes it catchy and easy to remember. The film title’s meaning, not only reflects the brand image as it gives connotations of the storyline, but the whole image created through the colour and font fits the brand’s image of social realism’s themes of poverty mixed with a blood and horror aspect and revenge.

To maintain this brand image across all of our products we kept most elements the same. The editing of the pictures was similar to the colour grading of the trailer. The colour was reduced and the brightness was reduced, whilst the black and contrast was increased. This made both the pictures for the magazines and posters and the footage for the trailer look grey dark and dull- something that fitted our genre and a key aspect within our brand image.

The font (base 05) was also used in all products.

 It was used in both posters, and was the key font on the magazine cover although a second font was used for the magazine cover as we had to make the cover as close to an ‘Empire’ magazine as possible. The font was even used in the trailer at the end when the trailer finishes with ‘coming soon’ and ‘www.vendettafilm.co.uk’.

The colours were also kept the same. Red text was used in all posters and on the magazine however blue and white was added to the magazine cover again to make it as realistic as possible as magazine covers often use a number of colours of text.

In the trailer however red was not used, instead the text was white. This was because the text was on a black background and we felt the text stood out clearer and made more of an impact when it was white and as the same font was used we felt the brand image was still present in the trailer.

Working Title films is a British film production company based in London and has produced films similar to ours, such as Billy Elliot which is also a British social realism film.

They have produced many British films that are not social realism films and so this would be the perfect production company for our film as our film is British social realism but has elements of other genres for example action and thriller. Despite being a British production company, Working Title films is a major competitor with Hollywood and has a good budget which again makes it ideal as it allows the marketing and profit of the film to be as big as Hollywood films.

This company would be likely to back our product as it has backed many similar products in the past. It produced ‘Shaun of the Dead’ which is a mixed genre film of comedy and horror, and it also produced the film ‘About a Boy’ which is also a mixed genre film of comedy and social realism. As our film is also a mixed genre film and of genres (social realism and horror/thriller) they are used to producing this would make them more likely to produce our film. Because Working Title films is a British film company and our film is a British, this would also make them more likely to produce our film as the majority of films they have produced in the past are British.

Our film has a wide target audience of 16-25s year olds however despite being a British social realism film; it appeals to this target audience of all nationalities as it has element of action and thriller which appeal to people in all countries, which makes it more appealing for a production company to fund.

Finally, I feel the brand image we have created is successful and would work as a real product. The brand image is realistic and similar to real products already on the market.

The brand image for Billy Elliot is very similar to our brand image. The footage in the film has been given a dull, blue-grey colour wash similar to the dull grey colour grading on our footage.

The pictures are of the protagonist in a typical British location that is also present in the film just as our images for the posters are also of the protagonist in a typically British location.

The title which also serves as the film’s logo is bold and red- just as our film logo and title is and so these similarities to a real successful, product show that our products would too work for real.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

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(MORE TO BE ADDED, PROBLEMS WITH UPLOADED PICS ONTO BLOGGER, WILL BE TRIED LATER OR TOMORROW AT COLLEGE)

Media Technologies Used

During the planning and construction I used a number of media technologies some of which I had used before, and some that were new to me.

During planning internet explorer was mainly used to gather information from websites such as www.workingtitlefilms.com to find out if our product would be suitable for a production company to fund. I was able to look through the archive of films produced which allowed me to compare it to my own, which allowed us to come to the decision that this was the most suitable production company for our film.

www.youtube.com was used to look at trailers of a similar storyline and genre to ours so we could get inspiration and make sure our product was as realistic as possible. We looked at trailers to get inspiration and to gather common conventions of our genre and what we need to include in order to make ours successful. Youtube was very easy to use and all trailers we searched were on the website. Youtube also allowed us to put videos on our blog by copying and pasting the embed code. We also put our finished product on to get feedback and to get an embed code so we could present our final product here on our blog.

Below is the trailer for Billy Elliot- just one of the many trailers youtube allowed us to view.

Another vital website used was www.jamendo.com . This is a creative commons music website. We found the soundtrack for our trailer on here. Although it was easy to listen to and download tracks from this site, I felt it was very time consuming finding the right track. There were search catagories such as music genre to narrow down our search but it still took a long time to go through possible tracks until the final track was found. The quality of the track (Wasuru- Undefinable Scenes) was very good and worked well when put onto Final Cut Express.

This print screen shows the website and the track we used. When a track was selected a pop up box appeared with the track,pause, play, fast forward and rewind tools on which made it easier to skip to different parts of the song in order to get a gist of the song as quickly as possible.

The site was very clear and colourful and simple to use.

http://www.dafont.com/ was also important during the editing and creating of our products. On here we found our logo font 'base 05' and the EMPIRE font for the front of our magazine.

This site also has catagories to narrow down the search e.g horror text and so it made it easier to find a suitable text to fit our products brand image.

Whilst looking through fonts you can type in a box a word (in our case 'vendetta') which allowed you to preview exactly what the text would look like in the words you were going to be using- again this made the search quicker and easier.

Another useful site was http://www.empireonline.com/. As this was the site for the magazine we were modelling ours on it was very useful to see the typical conventions of this magazine which made it possible for us to make our magazine look as realistic as possible.

It also allowed us to look at real film promotion pictures which helped us when taking our own.

Finally, google images was a quck and fast way when researching to look at many different posters and magazine front covers. Google images is a hugely developed search engine and so the search results were endless and it gave many choices for example many different versions of the trainspotting posters which was helpful in our case as we decided to do two posters.

The page screen is of a search of Billy Elliot posters. There are many different results and the pictures can easily be saved by simply clicking to get the full size then either saving, copy and pasting or dragging onto the desktop or file in use.

Evaluation: Holly Smith

This year for my media coursework I worked in a group of four with Chloe Giltrow-Shaw, Sarah Fowler and Rebecca Thorburn. We created a social realism hybrid film teaser trailer, two film posters and a magazine front cover for Empire magazine. Working in a group of four proved difficult at times but I am proud of our final product and glad that we managed to work together.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The genre of our film which we made was British social realism. "Social realism has shown us to ourselves, pushing the boundaries in the effort to put the experiences of real Britons on the screen, and shaping our ideas of what British cinema can be." British gritty films are slowly become more popular as people break away from the simple narrative storyline of the Hollywood films and experience juxtaposition, intellectual British films.

To create the atmosphere of a British social realism film, we used typical conventions of a gritty British film such as the locations that we used included urban areas with cobbled backstreets and areas which had a lot of surrounding buildings. We used these sorts of locations for both our ancillary tasks and filming to follow through with the theme of gritty and imply to the audience what the genre of the film is.

Another convention of the social realism is a dark colour palette. Whilst filming we did not use any lighting equipment, instead we just used natural lighting as it is a more realist look to the film. It also made more sense to do that as we put colour filters on top of the film whilst editing to give it a grittier, darker and grainy look. Giving a social realism film a gritty edit is a main convention as it gives a more realistic look and therefore gives the implies to the audience that the issues involved within the film are more realistic than in a Hollywood film such as Spiderman or Ironman which people are unable to relate to. For example below are the film posters for the 2006 film 'Kidulthood' and the 2010, yet to be released, film 'Ironman 2'. There are quite obvious facts which can be seen which define the films of their category.

If you look at the 'Kidulthood' poster it is quite obvious that the genre will be social realism. It is not quite so obvious that it could be a British one as some of the actors are of mixed-race and perhaps trying to appeal to a non-British audience. However the convention of a social realism poster is still the same. There is the use of dark filters edited into the poster to create a grainier, realistic look about the poster and film. This is the sort of look which we have tried to create when we were making our trailer and ancillary tasks; you can see it here in our ancillary tasks:

The Ancillary Tasks

Other conventions we used to create the typically look of a social realism film which our audience would recognise was through the use of mise-en-scene. We used props such as the alcohol bottles, cigarettes and "drugs" to create a scene which is expected in the social realism genre. We also used money rolls to give the image of also the thriller genre aspect of the film, we created the money rolls ourselves by cutting up pieces of newspaper and covering them over with a real twenty pound note which I think worked very well.

Props like these can be seen in the trailers for films such as 'Trainspotting' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUOTs55KY40 and Awaydays http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPDoOVW1gXs

Throughout our project we have tried to follow the stereotypical conventions of the social realism genre to appeal to the audience's "same but different" familiarity liking, however at one point we have broken it too by creating a female protagonist within our film which is very unlike regular social realism films as they usually consist of male characters and perhaps one female character who is represented as being in Propp's theory the damsel in distress. However in our film, we have completely changed this around by making the female character the protagonist and the male character (in the trailer) perhaps the damsel. Even though female protagonists are not very common in British films, they are in Hollywood films such as Kill Bill, Charlie's Angels and Jackie Brown.

These characters in Hollywood films could be described as being sexualised more than they should be which we thought, as a female group, is quite degrading for women that all they are be shown as being is sexy. It can be seen in these posters that all of the actresses are wearing quite short, tight clothing which is what they constantly dress like throughout the film perhaps implying to women in the real world that you need to dress/be sexy to succeed and be powerful in the world. We decided as a group that we did not want to give off this image to the women who would be watching this as we wanted the film to appeal to them not repent them and therefore we create a character who showed more power and intelligence than one who showed too much skin. So we decided to dress our actress in heels, a leather jackets and leggings which were all black. We decided on this sort of outfit as we thought it gave off the image of the girl grieving for her sister which could perhaps gain sympathy for the protagonist and also gives the image of revenge through her clothing. The black also reflects the whole mood of the film as it is a moody, dark social realism film. We did have to change the outfit slightly during shooting as it would not of been practical to wear the original outfit we wanted our actress to wear with the lace body suit due to the weather conditions however I think the outfits we have used throughout the filming such as the black hoodie which she wears works quite well especially with the hood up as it gives off that rebellious teenage image which is what we wanted to create. Here is the outfit we were originally going to use:

The trailer will, we hope, attract a wider audience as women will be attracted to it from the feminism aspect and men will be attracted to it by the thriller/violence aspect.

By moving away from this stereotypical aspects of British social realism we are creating a 'same but different' film which still keeps the familiarity which people love but gives them something different too to keep the industry running.

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

The brand image which we created for our film was that of social realism with the connotations of the dark and gritty feel to it however we wanted to give our audience more than what they expected, and this is why we created a hybrid film. A social realism film with the element of thriller within in it not only to attract a wider audience but to keep the audience interested and wanting more.

To get this social realism look we brainstormed ideas of what we thought were included within films such as 'This Is England' and 'Kidulthood' and we decided that we wanted the trailer to be filmed in an urban area with lots of cobbled streets which reflects the British feel of this film. We used these locations in both our trailer and ancillary tasks as we felt that they reflected the working class area which we wanted to represent within the film. The use of the red bricked houses within the ancillary tasks helped give this interpretation of British life so therefore when the public saw the poster they would be able to establish that it was a British film rather than a Hollywood one. Here are some examples of the locations which we chose for our trailer:

We decided to choose locations like these above as they do look a bit gritty and dark and this is just what we wanted for our trailer. The locations are also quite secluded which was good for two reasons, one we would not get too disturbed whilst filming by people walking past and two, because we wanted to give the image that this girl is lonely and singled out due to the killing of her sister and I think we definitely achieved this through the location sites.

Here are the locations which we used for our ancillary tasks:

The bricks and cobbles proved a very realistic and genre enhancing scene for our photographs and we all thought they look particularly well especially once we had finished editing them into our posters.

The text for our ancillary tasks was quite difficult to choose as we decided that we wanted to have a text font which reflected the social realism aspect of the film. Eventually we decided on the font 'Base 02' which we found on the website http://www.dafont.com/ here is a scene shot of the font:

We decided on this font as we felt that due to its worn down look it reminded us of blood splattering off the letters. And as blood could be described as being a connotation of social realism and the thriller genre we agreed on it. Even though the text font does look worn, it is still easy to read and is bold which is very important so that it is easy for the public to establish what the film is called from a distance on a poster. Here is what the title to our film looks like in the text font 'Base 02':

The word 'vendetta' means 'a feud between two families or clans that arises out of a slaying and is perpetuated by retaliatory acts of revenge; a blood feud.' This is why we chose the title of 'vendetta' for our film as it gives the audience an insight into what is to occur within the film and also gives off the genre slightly too. It works as the film's logo as well as the overall title as the word and text gives off lots of connotations to the audience about the film's plot and perhaps even genre. We used this font as the text on all of the posters, the magazine cover and in the trailer so there would be constant repetition of the logo and more people would recognise it. By repeating the font, we were keeping our brand image of a social realism film, other ways we did this was by using the same filters whilst editing the trailer and photographs to make the images seem more grainy, gritty and more realistic which fitted in well with our genre. We kept the constant use of the same colour palette by using red, black, white and grey in all of our images and font colour. On the posters, the colour red was used for the font colour to make it stand out more on the black and white background and also to give the connotation of blood which implies to the audience that the film contains bloody violence. On the magazine front cover, as you can see, we used red to highlight the article about Vendetta but the rest of the writing on the page is either yellow or blue because we wanted our article to stand out from the rest of the page.

If we were to produce our film in reality we decided, as a group, that a company such as 'Working Title Films' would be the one we would choose to produce our film. They have produced many British films such as 'Bridget Jones' Diary', 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' and 'Love Actually' which are not classed as British social realism films. In fact there is only one clear British social realism film which is 'Billy Elliot' (2000).

Even though 'Working Title' is a British company it is beginning to produce more Hollywood films than British as the company makes more money with Hollywood films as more people would rather watch them compared to British. As 'Working Title' is an international company if they produced 'Vendetta' it could be shown in different countries all around the world as it is not just a social realism film, it is also a thriller which would appeal to a wider audience and the issues would not just be significant to the British population unlike most British films such as 'This Is England'.

'Billy Elliot' was produced by 'Working Title' in 2000, it was a British comedy of a boy who wanted to dance, it addressed real issues such as loss, unemployment and the miners strike of 1984. The estimated budget for this film was a typical British £5 million, and on opening weekend in Britain made £1,541,109 and in the US made $215,681 which does not seem too much but shows that other countries are becoming more interested in our cultural. This is positive news for our film because if 'Vendetta' was produced our brand image is quite similar to 'Billy Elliot' as it follows the same gritty look and shows real life issues to the audience.
Audience
The main age group which this film trailer is aimed at is 16-25 year olds as these are the sorts of people who mainly would go and watch a British film as perhaps anyone older or younger than that would prefer Hollywood. Also, this age group is who films have always been aimed at as they have the most money and the most time to spend on leisure such as going to the cinema. Overall we said that the age group should consist of people from a socio-economic status of C-D which is lower middle class-working class as perhaps these are the people who could relate more to the British social realism films however with the rising in popularity for British films and the economic downfall perhaps now anyone from high social classes could relate to the issues addressed.

When we had established which target age group we would like to aim our trailer at and why, we constructed a questionnaire which we gave to people who were included between the age of 16 to 25 years old as research into what we should include in our film and whether it would have a positive or negative effect on our target audience. Here are the questions we asked the group:

1) Age:

2) Sex:

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 questionnaire was quite forward to establish what the group liked and did not as we needed to understand the sort of people we were aiming at and what they would enjoy to watch. All of the people which we gave the questionnaire to were between the age of 16-25 and consisted both male and female people so then we could get a good opinion from both gender sides. The questionnaire gave us a very interesting and helpful insight into what our target audience wants from a British social realism film for example over half of the people who took the questionnaire said that they would prefer a male protagonist rather than a female one. One thing which we, as a group, were not expecting was that some on the girls who did the questionnaire preferred male protagonists over female. When we talked about this as a group we thought that perhaps this was due to the constant use of male protagonists in British films and that perhaps the target audience is now use to this and the thought of a female protagonist seems slightly unusual and odd. However this is what we wanted to achieve, we wanted to bend the rules a little and give the audience that 'same but different' aspect. The questionnaire also helped us see that we had picked the correct target audience to aim at as all of the people said that they enjoyed social realism films and also that scenes of drug/alcohol abuse did not affect them. We found this useful as we felt now that we were able to show scenes of drug or alcohol if we wanted to so we were open to the option without upsetting or distressing anyone in the target audience watching the trailer. Overall we found the questionnaire very useful as it showed that we had picked the correct audience age group to aim at and it also helped us establish what they do and do not like within the social realism genre.

When we completed our ancillary tasks and teaser trailer we did some audience feedback to establish what could be improved on our project. We picked a group of people all within our age group to watch our trailer and fill in a questionnaire about it. The same was done for the ancillary tasks. Below are the questions which we asked to the people about the teaser trailer:
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?


And also here are the answers which the people gave which we filmed as evidence:









Here is the website address if the video does not work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlui8nWQcnI


From this audience feedback we were able to understand that we picked the correct age group to aim at as they were impressed with the use of genre and hybridity within the trailer and how we had manage to include a lot of the typical conventions which they easily recognised. They gave us some very positive feedback which reflected our previous research of what our age group liked combined with our research on existing popular social realism films.



Use of creative technologies -Skills I have learnt
During this project I learnt a range of new skills and enhanced some too.
Throughout the project we used many different websites to research, plan and create our project such as:

• http://www.blogger.com/

• http://www.creativecommons.com/

• http://www.youtube.com/

• http://www.empireonline.com/

• http://www.imdb.com/

• http://www.wikipedia.com/

• http://www.google.co.uk/

These websites helped us a lot to research other existing products and compare them to our own ideas of what we wanted our trailer to be like.

Blogger.com was helpful website as this is where we posted our research, ideas and final project. It is very accessible, easy to use and does not cost any money to use it therefore anyone can post blogs on it. This was helpful as anyone in the group could post their work or ideas on our blog whether they were at home or at college and anyone could look at the work which kept the whole group up to date.

Whilst creating our ancillary tasks we used a digital stills camera to take the pictures (similar to the one below). Whilst taking these pictures, we found that they came out a little too light because the natural lighting was too bright therefore we edited the pictures with the program Photoshop on the apple Mac. We used Photoshop to give the photographs more of a gritty look by putting filters on them, this was so that the photographs would fit the genre better. I have already used Photoshop as I created a magazine for my AS media coursework so I understood what tools to use to make our photographs look more professional. To create the posters and magazine front cover we decided to use InDesign as we found it much easier to construct them on InDesign rather than Photoshop and also InDesign provided many more tools to help create a professional ancillary task. Again I knew how to use this program as I used it last year so I felt that my skills in using it came in a lot of use this year.

Also as well as creating the ancillary tasks, we had to make a teaser trailer by using the video camera equipment. I was not as experienced in this field as I had never used a video camera before. Luckily, some of the other people in the group had done so they were able to show me how to work it and get the best shots. Most of the time when the group was filming I was not able to because it was during the time when I was in a lesson however I did get a slight taste of the filming aspect but I mostly tried to edit to make up for not being able to film. To edit the video we used the new program Final Cut Express which I found very difficult to use at first however after a few times of using it I began to enjoy it.

There was many different tools to get use to and to have the eye of making the cuts fit all together which I think we all found difficult and frustrating but by working together as a group we managed to make the whole trailer work. We used tools such as filters over the footage to give our trailer a darker, grittier look to it to make it look more realistic and link it back to our genre and I think it works very well and reflects the idea of social realism. The use of the diegetic continuing footsteps at the end of the sequence when the 'coming soon' is shown was something we did through Final Cut. We had to copy the sound which was already at the end of the trailer and stretch it along and adjust the tempo to make it sound as though the character is still walking away from the camera/audience. We added many different effects into our trailer to give it a more interesting, fast paced look to keep the audience entertained and wanting to watch more. Effects we used included cross fades- to show change in time, jump cuts -to give the trailer that fast paced look which we wanted and fades to black -to create tension on the trailer and imply to the audience that something had happened which they do not know about making them want to watch the film. This program was very good to use once we got use to the tools and how to use them and I think it helps us produce a very good project however we did have lots of problems at the start regarding uploading our filming and also the sound being out of sync with the images but except from that, I enjoyed using this program.
Here is our trailer which we created by using Final Cut Express:



Conclusion
Overall, I think that our project was a huge success. I believe that we managed to create the brand image that we were aiming for through the use of mise-en-scene such as the costumes and props, the lighting, the editing, cinematography, locations and the non-diegetic music. I think that we, as a group, managed to create a good quality project consisting of a 90 second teaser trailer, two film posters and a film magazine front cover. Even though this trailer gives the impression of the 'same but different' it still gives that hint of familiarity which audience love to recognise and with our film being a hybrid of social realism and thriller that will attract a wider audience therefore making it more of a popular film on release.

I think that our trailer works very well together with what we could fit into the 90 seconds slot, it gives the outline to the plot, the genre and perhaps what is to come within the film which is what a teaser trailer should do and I think that we have definitely achieved that.

Rebecca Thorburn Evaluation

For my media coursework I chose film promotion. I worked in a group of four to produce a teaser trailer, a magazine cover and posters all campaigning our film. A bigger group could generate more ideas and research so it could be a success. I worked well together with Sarah Fowler, Holly Smith and Chloe Giltrow-Shaw. We all contributed equally amongst the group with the research into existing film teaser trailers and generating ideas and the plot for our own project.


IN WHAT WAYS DOES YOUR MEDIA PRODUCT USE, DEVELOP OR CHALLENGE FORMS AND CONVENTIONS OF REAL MEDIA PRODUCTS?

The genre of our media text we chose to be was British Social Realism, basing it around revenge. We have followed some typical conventions such as fighting, social issues and drugs that fit into this genre, as we thought the audience could relate and understand like other successful social realism films in the British film industry.

As our trailer was about revenge we made the protagonist, not a man, but a strong minded woman instead of a weak victim as she is usually portrayed in this genre of film. We made this vital change of the protagonist so the genre does not appear too repetitive.
As the female protagonist was included it gave the trailer a twist from the other repetitive British Films who mostly have male protagonists, unlike a Hollywood film where having a female protagonist is quite common, For example the successful films of Kill Bill and Jackie Brown. I think these innovations proved to be successful from the audience feedback we received.

Our initial research was into the branding of Charlie's Angels. This was becuase the Hollywood film included female protagonists and also violence, these two points are exactly what we wanted to achieve, and i think we did as we have a female protagonist who is domineering and strong minded.

Another film we researched into was Pulp Fiction it is a violence and gangster based film involving drugs and realism. This film came to our our attention because of how it is branded. On the poster there is a seductive and alluring woman. By her attitude she shows that is what we wanted to portray into our own brand image.

A new film we researched was Harry Brown. Although the protagonist was male, the plot of the film was around British Social Realism and a vigilante taking revenge on youths. After watching the trailer we were able to generate new ideas into our own film and decide how it could be a success.

HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE COMBINATION OF YOUR MAIN PRODUCTS AND ANCILLARY TASKS?

As our film is about Revenge, we decided as a group to research words that relate to the word Revenge. Eventually we found Vendetta, which means 'A private feud, in which a relative of a murdered person seeks revenge by killing the murderer or some member of his family'

I researched quotes online that related to the term Revenge and these are what we found that we thought would be acceptable to include in our posters, based on the Trainspotting promotional posters.

"Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind"
"No one rejoices more in revenge than women"
"Don't get mad, get even"
"Sweet is revenge - especially to women"

Here is our poster based on revenge quotes

Throughout all our products, such as the teaser trailer, magazine front cover and the two posters that we all created we succeeded in maintaining a brand image across them all that is dark and gritty. Everything was combined the same dark colour palette, fonts and editing of images. The branding was the colour and font scheme that appeared in all three ancillary tasks. There were many choices of font to choose from on the website: http://www.dafont.com/ but after narrowing down the numbers we decided on ‘base 02’ as it gave off the gritty feel, and that was what we wanted to succeed in our Social Realism trailer.

The font was basically our logo; it held the colours of red and white as this contrasted in a bold way with the background of the black and white image.

Heavily manipulated images were created too in Photoshop. I went out and photographed the protagonist, Leah Sumner in her clothes that she appears in the trailer wearing. These being the leather jacket and leggings, both being black, this links with the colour schemes of the ancillary tasks. The photographs have been manipulated by raising the contrast and reducing the brightness.

Locations we chose for our film were deserted wooded areas, and back cobbled streets with red brick. These were chosen because of the dark and lonely feel we wanted to portray in the protagonist after the murder of her sister, and i think we succeeded in this.
Here are examples of the locations we chose for our trailer:

Being a British film, the film would require a British distribution company. We chose Working Title Film. The reason why is that they are a successful long running distribution company and have distributed films that relate to our British Social Realism film, such as Billy Elliot that became very profitable.

If Working Title institution had to support our film then the twist of not following the typical conventions of a social realism film would probably be the reason the company would possibly be backing our film.

The film ‘Kidulthood’ is also a social realism film that relates to our own project, Such as the gritty lives of working class people, therefore our product did follow the existing conventions of successful social realism films. The promotional posters of this film have a dark colour palette, and use dark filters when edited, and this is what we have done is our posters to give a more realistic look. Here is our comparison to Kidulthood's.

AUDIENCE

Target audience for our film is the age range of 16 – 25 years.

Viewing the socio-economic group structure I could categorize group D, which is the working class that are unskilled and work in manual labour as the main audience of our film. Being a British Social Realism film the working class people can relate to the real, gritty lives that are being portrayed in this genre of film.

Potentially this is a good target audience because it has a large mass audience and the age range of the film have the most disposable income, therefore are an appropriate audience for our film financially.

A secondary target audience appears too in our film as this would be Men, people who are older than the target audience age range and people who live in other countries, yet these are not large masses of audiences.
As our target audience was the age range of 16 – 25, Questionnaires were constructed for the age range asking what we should include in our film, and what things could effect the target audience in both positive and negative ways. Here are the questions we asked:

1)Age:

2)Sex:
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?

We gave the questionaire to both male and female people so then we got opinions from both genders.
We recieved interesting information that would help us in our research and planning of our film. Examples of this is, Over half of the people, including females responded by saying they would prefer a male protaganist rather than a female.
We decided that a change from the usual British Social Realism films would be a good change for our target audience, so we used the female protaganist anyway.
In my opinion the way the audience reacted this way with the question about protaganists because they presume males take on the leading roles as there are not many films with a protaganist as a female.
All our target audience responed that they enjoyed Social Realism films and the scenes of drug and alcohol use does not affect them.
After completing our teaser trailer and ancillary tasks we presented our trailer to our target audience range, for audience feedback. They filled in questionnaires whilst I used a video camera and filmed their responses. Here is the questions we asked:

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?

Here is our original copy of our questionaire:

Also here is the video which the answers to the questionaire are filmed.



The feedback we recieved was:

1.Do you think the product is typical of film trailer of the social realism genre? If so in what ways is it similar?
Responses were that it does not use special effects and because of this it looks like a real life scenario. Unlike typical Hollywood films, due to the cobbled street scenes and focusing on real issues such as drugs and crime.

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

No talking was used within our teaser trailer and commentry is usually heard. Hand held cameras were used and the response was that this was good for the genre and symbolises real life.

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

Alcohol was shown and this is a convention for our genre of Social Realism.

4.Name two interesting/impressive elements from the video?
The scream was mentioned and the reason why is because it was very dramatic and un expected. Music was also a factor because it was so tense and this set up enigmas.

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

Everyone agreed that it could not be stronger

6.Do you think the pace of the video is typical of this kind of product?
Everyone also agreed that the pace was correct as it did not focus on a point for too long and the editing was quick.

Overall quite positive results occured here and iam very pleased with the respones we gained. The strengths were that everyone seemed to enjoy watching the trailer and the Social Realism genre they could relate to unlike typical Hollywood films.

USE OF CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIES – SKILLS I HAVE LEARNT

Altogether we used a variety of different media technologies in all the research, planning, construction and the evaluation stages of creating our project.

During our project we used throughout an apple Mac computer, this hardware I was able to use as I already had a basic understanding of them by using various different software on them.

When researching many websites were used, especially Google images to gather images and research into existing films that linked to our chosen genre.

Blogger, http://www.blogger.com/ that was generally easy to use did have its advantages and disadvantages, it was useful to produce our research when done and document how our planning stages were going. But when you wanted to upload a picture or video this was complicated as they had set sizes and not easy to move around once uploaded up onto your blog, at times it got very frustrating.

As we took location shots, casting shots and photographs for the magazine cover and posters we had to use a stills camera. The model and make was (Samsung S760) This was easy to use as it was just so basic.
Photoshop we used to edit our images by de saturating and raising the contrast for our images in our ancillary tasks, as I use Photoshop regularly it was very easy to use and edit in a quick way. Indesign was another software we used in our ancillary tasks, as I was not familiar with this program it took me a while to grasp how to work it but in the end I managed to create a poster on my own which I thought turned out to be successful and enhanced my skills using a apple Mac.

More websites we used when constructing our trailer was the site we got our soundtrack from this was Creative Commons. Another was the one we got our font for our ancillary tasks from, this was named www.dafont.com. Both these websites were very useful and easy to use from the broad range of soundtracks and fonts.

Whilst filming the trailer we used a video camera. The model and make was (Canon video MD235 E Video recorder) This was also simple to use as I was familiar with the camera from last year. We used a hand held effect, and also used the tripod to capture different effects into our trailer.

For our editing of our film we all used a new Software package called Final Cut Express. It was the most challenging software to use in our whole project as we did not get as much training as we probably needed due to the lack of time we had. Final Cut wasted a lot of our time due to many faults it kept creating for us, for example our footage not uploading when linked to the mac computer and a grainy effect kept appearing on all our footage, although it was not there when viewed on the video camera, and all this we needed help with. Eventually we managed to keep focused and deal with all these faults and find some positive sides to using Final Cut like having the timeline at the bottom and easily placing our footage and soundtrack into it so the transitions in our video flowed. We were unable to finish our project on time to participate in the group audience feedback as Final Cut took so long to perfect our teaser trailer.

Here is our final version of our video we created using Final Cut Express:




 

When evaluating our trailer we used YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/ to upload our final video onto it for feedback.

I think all the technologies we have used have in one way been successful and allowed us to finally achieve our desired outcome.

CONCLUSION

My personal response of our whole project is that it had its up’s and down’s but overall it came together and became a success.

Within our group we have mainly worked well together and evenly contributed to each part of creating a film promotion project, including the 90 second teaser trailer.

The research was a bit slow starting off but when we decided on a final idea for our trailer it seemed to flow. Definitely more planning was needed to be done before shoots as nobody knew exactly what to do, and that extended the time we had shooting our footage.

The technology used had both strengths and weaknesses as some work did not save and editing had to be re done in Final Cut Express.
I believe we have created the brand image we desired to make, due to the use of costumes, props, locations, lighting and mise-en-scene and the editing process. It has been successful as all the ancillary tasks advertise the teaser trailer and that is what initially we hoped to achieve in our outcome. 

Myself during this whole project I think has contributed to each part of researching, planning and constructing our teaser trailer, although on some parts I could have done more. But now the project is finished I am pleased with the result.