Evaluation -Question 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Evaluation Q1 - In what ways do your media products convey, challenge or develop codes and conventions of real media products?

Link to Twilight teaser trailer

Link to our trailer

One last change to the poster

When looking at the poster one last time when beginning to evaluate the main codes and conventions on it, I released that real magazine posters all have a tagline so that people remember the film by something. Therefore, I have added one and this is the new poster below.

Evaluation questions to be adressed

These following questions are the ones we need to adress when completting our evaluation, we will begin these this week before the christmas half term and continue when we return in January as our new deadline is the 22nd Jan.

1) In what ways does your media product use, challenge or develop codes and conventions of real media products?
2) How effective is the combination of your main product and ancilliary texts?
3) What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
4) How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

could this be the new magazine cover?

After looking at the teacher comments and taking this into consideration we decided that we could change some things around in order to make our magazine cover appear less bulky and more realistic. Therefore, I changed the magazine cover around a little, i enlarged the main image that advertises our film, which covers the whole of the cover. However, in order to encourporate mordern images as this is a black and white silent movie produced in 2009 however set in the 1930's, i put a thin black boarder around the edge of our two modern day images that link with the subheadings. I have also added a tagline as when looking at other magazines they appear to do this. As with enlarging this main image, so that it didnt appear over strethced and ruin the quality of the image, it had to be cropped meaning parts of the daughter were cut short, however, when looking at this it does give the image more feel and manages to relate to the narrative, portraying the daughter as a metaphor, who has half of her missing, due to the fact that she has lost her mother and has been negleted to her father. Above is this new magazine cover however in tomorrows lesson we need to decide whether to use this or the previous cover created.

How we have used codes and conventions of real magazine front covers in our product?

When looking at our product we can view that we have used the main codes and conventions that appear in real front covers of magazines, this is the title of the magazine (the masthead), the main headline, the main image, a sub image, some sub headings that willl appear in the magazine (to draw the audience in), three predominant colours, the date, price and barcode.

How we have used codes and conventions of teaser trailers in our teaser trailer.

A teaser trailer is a short trailer that is generally released many months before a movie is actually released, to give a brief idea of what the movie will actually be like. It is felt that our trailer manages to do this, and it does not tell the full story and leaves the audience hanging to find out more. Our teaser trailer lasts for approximatelyone minute, and teasers trailers usually last anything from 30 seconds - 1 minute. One of the main reasons for a teaser trailer to be called this is because it teases the audience by releasing its teaser trailer a long time before the film is actually produced. Therefore, it often contains little, if any footage from the film itself. In our practice task we created the actual short movie to this teaser trailer as can be viewed way down in older posts to this blog and as you can see very little of the footage is the same. Therefore, we have also adapted these codes and conventions that a teaser trailer should follow.

Survey one (the film)

Ten people were again questioned, however this time on whether or not they feel that this film tells the narrative that is meant to be told and if the main issue of violence is put across in an appropraite manner.

1) Do you feel that this film portrays a sense of violence towards the child?

Yes -10 No - 0

2) From reading our narrative description can you tell from this silent film trailer that the mother has sadly passed away?

Yes - 8 No - 2

3) Are the effects that this has had on the family apparent in the trailer?

Yes - 7 No - 3

4) Do you feel that the music used is appropraite for setting the tone of the film?

Yes - 10 No - 0

5) Do you feel that the voiceover helps tell the narrative of the story and that without this the storyline would not be easy to follow?

Yes - 10 No - 0

As you can see here, the majority of the ten people questionned agree with what we would have liked to achieved from this trailer, in order to show evidence of this, we will scan a copy of the questionnaire onto the blog or into our evaulation.

Audience Feedback

Now that we have created our three products, we need to conduct three more surveys to see what our audience feel we have achieved through creating these and what they feel could be improved, this will be also be put in our evaulation of things that we could improve for next time around.

Description of magazine cover

As you can view from our magazine cover, it has changed from our plan. We had to use a different picture as mentioned, due to the fact that the one we was going to use was not the right size. We also tried to cut out the background of this picture on photoshop, we managed to do this through the use of the lasoo tool, this was quite complicated due to the fact that we had wine glasses on a beige background and that the sun was shining through the doors which affected the table. After we had cut this out we decided that it wasnt going to work well so decided to use this image. Looking at it now, we see that this image has more of an impact as we can see the Father and daughter in a medium shot facing the camera, we can clearly see their facial expressions through this image and the fact that there is a lack of love between the two. As you can see, this is a different photograph to what we used for our poster advertising our film.

One more thing...

As you can also see, one of the subheadings part covers two of the letters of the title through the word 'film', this is due to the fact that people can still see what it is called and when looking at other magazine front covers and analysing these, it was clear for us to see that other magazines do in fact do this.

Further Improvements

When looking at this new improved magazine cover, I still felt as though there was something missing, therefore, around the bottom picture, I entered the same auto shape behind it to make the image stand out more and I also created a thick red boarder to give the magazine more feel and a bolder look.

Music For Our Trailer

As mentioned before I did email Amelie in order to see if we could use the music from her film, however, as i suspected I would not recieve an email back and so far I have not. We have listened to other pieces of music that we could possibly use for our project, we thought that Beethoven, Fur elsie, did go well with our piece especially if we editied where the high notes were played which portrayed happy images. However, again we are aware that in order to use this piece of music we need permission on purchasing the song. Our other option is recording Stephainne's Dad, who plays the piano and then putting this onto the Mac's. We found out that the way we can record this is through using a laptop and then coverting it onto the Mac computors.

Why we may not be able to use Amelie's music?

When choosing the music for our trailer, we did not take into consideration copyright and the fact that without permission we cannot use the music we had chosen to use for our trailer. Therefore, I have managed to find an email adress for Amelie and have emailed asking for her permission, however I am aware that there is a good chance I will not hear back from her.

MIGRAIN MODEL (for our project)

M I G R A I N

M - media - this will be a teaser trailer to be shown on big screens i.e. the cinema.

I - insititution - I will need to consider who will produce my film trailer.

G - genre - the genre of our trailer will be Drama as the characters are detailed and develop throughout the novel, major change in characters emotionally and physcallically, plot is slow, develop by character actions and emotions, usually has a happy ending, you can relate to characters, strong emotion. (the happy ending is the fact that the maid runs off with the daughter and they live happily with love and respect for each other - through the trailer you can view the differences in parenthood through the maid and the Father).

R -

Representation refers to the construction in any medium (especially the mass media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. Such representations may be in speech or writing as well as still or moving pictures. Throughout our trailer we are trying to represent abuse that a young child suffers from her Father from the eyes of herself and those that care for her, her maid 'Elsie'.

A - audience - We have already discussed our target audience and this will be teenagers and adults over the age of 15 as we feel that this is the most appropriate age and the ones who will understand it most.

I - ideology - this is the orientation that characterises the thinking of a group or nation - for our trailer there will be different ideologic views portrayed from different members of the audience as each person has their own views upon different / particular matters.

N - narrative - a message that tells the particulars of an act or occurrence or course of events; presented in writing or drama or cinema or as a radio or television program - we have written the narrative of our trailer in a different post, however, it is basically about a child who lost her mother shortly after giving birth, her father, has ever since resented her and has always been violent towards her, the maid, 'Elsie' does not like this at all and decides to run away with the daughter 'Gabriella'.

Unique Selling Point

A unique selling point is something that your product has that you feel makes it stand out from the competition around it. As said before we have to take into consideration that we are making a black and white silent movie in 2009! The USP for our product is the fact that black and white silent movies are rarely made now days especially showing at the cinema and consisting of issues that are aparent nowdays. Another USP that our product would have is the fact that as it is an old movie, very little special effects would actually be used and now days this is extremely unlikely. I feel that people would go to the cinema just to see this because it consists of such a unique idea that no body else has had or taken the risk to make, this was proved through my survey (survey 1).

Research of the history of silent movies

Link to the history of silent movies - wikipedia

As we are creating a silent movie I thought that it would be a good idea to research the history of silent movies, above is a link to a wikipedia page talking about the history of silent movies.

A silent film is a film with no recorded sound or dialouge. Due to the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only used in films in the late 1920s. After The Jazz Singer in 1927, "talkies" became used more frequently and within a decade silent films essentially disappeared.

Above is a still clip of 'Roundhay Garden Scene', this is an 1888 British short film directed by inventor Louis Le Prince. It was recorded at 12 frames per second, so extremely fast and runs for approximately 2 seconds, this is the earliest surviving motion picture.

New Animatic Explanation

Above is the new animatic that Steph and I created, we have added extra shots that we will include in our trailer and we have also put in where words will go on the trailer. We have also decided on the words that will be said over the trailer and we have chosen a man to do this as many trailers that we have heard have more of an effect when a mans voice is spoken over it. This animatic is how we will portray our trailer and the order that the shots will be in. Our plan from now on is to film the extra scences and begin to edit our short movie and these extra scences into our trailer. We hope to have completed this by October half term so that after this, we can begin our two print products and end with our evaluation.

NSPCC child abuse trailer

This is a trailer consisting of the main issue of child abuse conveying fear. When watching this trailer the audience are under to impression that the young daughter is being abused and is scared of her father. This can be viewed by the fear portrayed on her face. We are shown a shot towards the end, being told that this was 2 hours before the father returned home to his daughter. He is shown drinking at a graveyard, as no mother is shown in this trailer, we are left to assume that the mother has died and the father resents his daughter for this. Coincidently, our trailer has got the same sort of storyline, however, set in totally different time periods. Something that also makes us feel that the daughters mother has died, once we see this graveyard shot, is the picture that she was drawing before hand, the camera zoomed in on this just beofre the words '2 hours before' appeared on the screen. It was a picture of a woman, with what appeared to be a knife going through her and blood dripping from her body. At the end of the trailer, the audience are left thinking, did the father do this and is this why he is drinking and taking his anger out on his daughter?

Some of the medium shots shown of the little girl have beeen edited to black and white, this portrays more fear and lonliness than colour as we cannot see her whole surroundings. The little girl appears totally alone and isolated, where this trailer has been filmed, the props that have been used are plain and show a close up shot of the little girl alone doing her homework with no one to assist her and no one even at her home when she returns from school. This makes the audience sympathise totally towards her.

There is music played the whole way through this trailer, we can hear that it is a piano, this music creates emotion and the fact that there is no one speaking until the very end helps the audience to view exactly what is going on, or as we are not told the story through somebody elses eyes, left to imagine what is going on. Despite this not being a trailer for a film, it is a trailer that revolves around the main issue of our film so it does help us to see the ways in which child abuse is portrayed. We do not actually view the father hitting his child in this trailer, but through her emotions we can see that this is what does usually happen. In our trailer we will not show abuse towards the child in a physical way, just anger portrayed through the fathers actions and sadness shown through the daughters face.

Survey 1 - Results

I handed out my survey to ten different people in my class, nine out of the ten people asked thought that creating an old black and white silent movie trailer is a unique idea. Eight out of then ten asked said that they would be interested in going to the cinema to see this. 

Seven people said that the features that attract them to silent movies would be a good story line and three said the music. I asked if they thought a voice over would be beneficial for the trailer, seven said yes and three said no. One of the people questioned said yes due to the fact that without this the story line might be difficult to understand. I then asked if you thought no, would words appearing on the screen after clips have been played would be a better idea and three people said yes. We thought that maybe having a mixture of both would have more of an impact and the majority of  questionnaire's did in fact agree with us as seven said yes and three said no. Each person asked said that the main idea of our story line (abuse from a father to a child) would be a hooking idea. Eight of the ten then said that if the main idea was portrayed well enough through the tailer, people would go to see this film because of this. 

Age is an important factor when using emotional story lines that can effect some people as I have mentioned before in the target audience post. I asked what age they felt would be appropriate for a movie with this type of plot either 12, 15 or 18. Initially we felt that 15 would be the most appropriate age, one person said all ages would be okay, another two said 12 and seven agreed with our thoughts of 15. Therefore, the age we are using for our film is 15. 

My final question was concerning the length of the film, I said that as this was a silent movie and in black and white, it could get a little boring after a while, especially for audiences now days, who are not used to this type of film. I gave the option of 45 minutes, one hour or an hour and a half. Four people said 45 minutes would be a good time for this type of film and six said one hour, therefore, we would make the film in between 45 minutes to one hour.