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.