animatic trailer

what ways did my media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions.

How i used media technology prezi

How i effectively combined my products.

Focus group feedback

Finished film trailer

Evaluation of focus group questionnaire

Questionnaire evaluation

As part of our audience feedback, during our focus group we handed out several questionnaires to our participants so that they could give us important information about certain points.
Our first two questions were simple enough, we wished to find out if the audience could identify the age group and gender that we were aiming our trailer. Our feedback came back positive as five of the questionnaires came back with male and two came back with male & female, this was perfect as we discussed within the group that there would be elements of the plot that would attract a niche female audience, coming to the agreement that it would be roughly 20% female interest to the trailer and 80% male. The feedback on question two was also very positive as we aimed our trailer at the age group of 15-25 because of the survivor’s age and also the action and violence elements to the plot. We gave the audience the options of 12-18, 15-25, 18-40 and 20-50 and to our delight all participants chose 15-25, confirming our selection of age group as being relative.

For question three we asked the audience what genre they believe the film would be, and this was a very important question as it isn’t straight up what genre our plot came under because of it containing different elements from other genres, the group came to a constructed conclusion that it was a mixture of action/adventure/horror and judging from our feedback the majority of the audience agreed. We told them that they were able to chose more than one genre if they deemed it necessary and so we had seven votes for horror, one for action adventure, one for psychological thriller and two for thriller.
I was happy that the genre with the highest votes was horror and that we got at least one vote for action/adventure but what came as a slight shock was how we got three votes in the thriller genres, this confused me as we had not intended to include any aspects of thriller in our trailer and especially not in the plot, but I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the audience were confused about the definition of thriller and the differences between thriller and horror, and that may be why we had those votes.

So that we could see what shots worked well in the trailer, we asked the audience what shots stood out the most and if they could give us three if possible, this was our forth question. Our most mentioned shot was the radio scene, where the group of survivors are in the woods and they tune into a radio transmission for an emergency broadcast, I was happy that this scene got so much positive feedback as it’s a turning point in the plot that lets the viewer know that these survivors really no longer have any hope, they have to look out for themselves from now on. It was also our most heavily edited shot; we put a lot of effort into mixing the speech with the radio tuning sound and timing it right with what was going on in the footage as well.
Another highly mentioned shot was the beginning sequence of the human changing into the zombie, and this is good as that shot is meant to set the narrative of how some people have changed into the zombies and how aggressive and dangerous they are. One person mentioned the scene where one of the zombies gets shot by an arrow and is impaled against a tree, they commented that the fact the zombie hadn’t died increases the tension within the plot, which I was happy to see someone mention as that was our intention, showing that typical zombie killing fact that you have to aim for the head to kill them.

Question five gave us very positive feedback as we asked whether there was any shots or scenarios in the trailer that had made no sense to the viewers and for them to comment on which shot it was that gave this effect and fortunately all results came back saying all shots made sense, which I was very happy about as it shows that we conveyed the plot well and there were no shots that we had to remove or add to make the narrative make more sense.

For our sixth question we asked the audience if they would go and see the film in the cinema if it was to be released, and all the participants said yes, and most even went on to tell us why they would want to go see it. Most said they were interested to see who survived the apocalypse out of the survivors, which is good as in the plot of the group do actually get killed and it showed that there was some attachment to the characters if they cared who lived or died.

For number seven we asked if the trailer left you with any unanswered questions, this was important as we didn’t want anyone to say no, otherwise it would show that we either showed them the whole plot or this was just no interest in the plot at all, that they didn’t want to hear anything else about it.  In the feedback three people wanted to know what caused the infection, which I was glad to see as I wrote a whole back story to the plot about how the infection came to be. Then the two other questions unanswered was ‘what happens next?’ and ‘Do they survive?’, which where the cliff hangers we tried aiming for.

Finally for our last question, we wanted to know if all the intertitles made sense and related to the plot, as during editing we found it difficult to give the right amount of information within such a small sentence that the viewer had enough time to read it and also understand its meaning. We were happy to see that our work didn’t go unnoticed and all questionnaires came back saying that the intertiles hadn’t confused them in anyway and all made sense.

From this feedback we were able to reflect on our trailer in positive light, knowing what needed to be changed and what should be kept in the trailer as well.

Finished film magazine cover

Film magazine, need to add sub' images

Film magazine progress

magazine barcode

Front cover main image.

I did want to have the full group of survivors on the front cover but due to availability of peoples time, this proved to be more difficult than i would of hoped.
Despite this, i am still happy with this image. I edited the saturation on the image, making the colours paler and i also adjusted the contrast and brightness to give it a dark shadowed tone.

first essay - Use of digital technology

Digital Technology

Digital technology was likely the most important factor in my work for AS and especially in A2. In our foundation portfolio we were given the task of creating a music magazine which consisted of a front cover, an index page and a main article page. Where as in our advanced portfolio we had to create a promotional package for a film, made up of a film magazine front cover, a movie poster and a film trailer, created with chosen parts of our film plot that we wrote over the summer and tweaked through the beginning of the year.

Our introduction to relying so heavily on digital technology was at the beginning of our AS course when we created our media blogs, though I was used to using blogs before year 12 I found this an interesting new way to display my research and planning for my work.
It wasn’t just research and planning that would be posted onto our blogs, but also our finished work pieces, which was useful when it came to getting feedback from others as I could then access my blog through my phone and show my friends and class mates my work and ask them what they thought of it, quickly and easily.
In our advanced portfolio we were asked to use the blogging site again for the same reasons as in the previous year, and therefore we were able to get into using our blogs a lot quicker this time as we already had a years’ experience. Our comfort with using blogger came of much use in A2 as we were introduced to new mechanics on the site like posting videos and linking HTML’s from external sites like slide share and prezzi, which we had previously not needed to do in our foundation portfolio.

Through AS and increasingly more in A2, blogging was certainly not the only reason for using the internet. During our foundation course, besides blogging we only really used the internet for researching into magazines, looking at images of front covers and index pages etc.
However, in A2 we used the internet in many more ways, like social networking for example. This was used for our group to organise certain shoots between the people we had in our trailer and to also create an event inviting as many people as we could get to be zombies for certain clips. I also used YouTube a lot during the research stages of my advanced portfolio, mainly to search for film trailers which I thought related to my groups plot, I could then give feedback on these trailers and post this onto my blog with services like slideshare. Slideshare was a site that I could rely on to turn any presentation that I created in PowerPoint into a format that allowed me to post it onto my blog, by copy and pasting the HTML code provided by slideshare into a feature on blogger.
Prezzi was also another presentation style website which allowed me to display my research in a more aesthetically pleasing format than an ordinary PowerPoint presentation, letting me show a lot of information in a small area with its zoom in and rotation method it uses to get to the next slide.

Through the creation of our products during AS I used two different pieces of software which where Photoshop and Adobe InDesign. I already had some experience with using Photoshop before I began my A levels, but I only really scratched the surface. My foundation portfolio helped me expanded on those skills within the programme, by increasing my knowledge of text manipulation and photo editing while creating my magazine pieces.
Because I was more comfortable with Photoshop I created the majority of my magazine within that programme, making parts like the mast head, banner lines and editing the main images was a lot easier to do with something I was used to, as I then transferred these over to Adobe InDesign anyway to take advantage of the column alignment and page structuring it uses. As Adobe tend to design most of their programs rather similar I found getting used to InDesign came a lot quicker than it would of if I hadn’t been familiar with Photoshop already, though it certainly was a bit of a learning curve having to use an older version of the software but I feel this gave me more of a broad range of skills surrounding the adobe programs.
In our advanced portfolio our use for image manipulation software wasn’t so great, as our most used programme was soon to be Adobe premiere, which we used to edit our film trailer together. I still used Photoshop to create my poster and magazine front cover, editing images captured on set of some of our shoots for the trailer, to create these pieces which was made a lot easier in A2 with the experience we gained from our foundation portfolio.  However video editing software was something completely new and exciting to me, as I have only ever really played around with lower end software such as windows movie maker, Adobe premiere took a little more getting used to.  This software allowed us to add multiple layers of sound which was useful as in times during our trailer we need to fade in music with dialogue and vice versa. Adobe premiere was also useful to my group during the research and planning stage as we used it to create our animatic for our trailer, which proved to be a very useful method of deciding what would and wouldn’t work for our finished trailer.

I think out of all the digital technology we relied on the most through both our foundation and advanced portfolio, the one that stands out the most is the digital cameras we had to use.
Through AS I used my own digital camera to capture images to use in my music magazine, I already had a lot of experience using my own camera as photography had always been something I enjoyed, so taking these images came naturally to me. These images could then be used later on in the editing stage, but the key part of the cycle always came down to the use of the camera.
My experience with my own digital camera came of no use however this year, when recording our film trailer, as my camera only captured still images and was unable to record. It wasn’t difficult to learn the basics of what we needed to use on the camera to record and transfer footage, but I found it was an interesting process as it increased my knowledge of the usage of cameras as a whole, especially due to the fact that I was use to using a memory card in a camera, making transferring images to a computer a lot easier, where as we were provided with cam recorders which used tape instead, so using a fire wire connection to transfer footage was something new to me, which I was a skill I was more than happy to learn in case I needed it again in the future.

To conclude, digital technology played a vital role in my media studies A level, very much so during AS and increasingly more demanding through my A2 course. Along the way I felt like I gained much skill in many different mediums, which were able to be applied to my work through the course and could also be used in the future situations if I needed them. 

Film trailer first draft.

This is the first draft of our film trailer. We created this to show in the focus group and so we are aware that the music is copy righted, we are currently in the progress of creating the finished soundtrack and shall have it ready by the end of this week. 

Poster analysis

Finished poster

This is my finished poster as of now, it is subject to change after i have been given feed back on it, and also the white square in the top right will be a QR code leading to the film trailer when it is uploaded to youtube.
In its current stage I rather pleased with it. 

Poster progression

15/03/2013 - Trailer update

My groups film trailer is at the stage of near completion, we have our first draft and we are now looking for ways to improve and tweek everything.
We have a few more shots that we need to include but other than that here is a small list of things we need to include after getting feedback from the class on our first draft:

• Concentrate on including more sound effects.
• Natural sounds
• Heavy beat played over intertitles
• Include heartbeat over zombie transformation scene mixed in with the sound of a heartbeat monitor  
• When zombie is fully transformed mix zombie screams with the sound of a heartbeat monitor of a dead heart
• Fast pace editing on final zombie scenes
• Include load zombie scream over jumpscare ending

Billing block-

This billing block will be placed at the end of our film trailer for the risen.
it will also be used at the bottom of the film poster that i create.

Production company logos -

With the above images the words cannon productions will drop
down from behind the image of the cannon.

Here, the Z will be shown within the text and then the rest of the text will fade into black
before the Z, then the Z will glow.

Final draft of film posters

Poster concepts

First and second poster drafts.