Evaluation

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

A romantic comedy film trailer has the goal of attracting its target audience to come see the film which will generate as much money as possible and increase sales as much as they can, they try to market the well known actors and actresses used in the film or to advertise new unknown actors and actresses or the director, that has made the film possible. However media products that try to challenge these conventions will not do this and fight against it, they try to go in the opposite direction and are not too focused on what the audience thinks but mainly on their own individuality and ideas that set them apart from every other media product.
Developing forms and conventions is in the middle of using and challenging, it takes ideas and tries to make them better with a slight twist that the audience may not have seen before but will enjoy, I believe our media product uses the typical forms and conventions of a rom-com but also develops them and challenges them. The main aim of our own trailer is to introduce the new actors and actresses trying to break through onto the scene and establish a mysterious narrative that our target audience of young teens between the ages of 12-18 will want to come and see.
We used down to earth locations in our trailer and down to earth characters to appeal to our audience and make the trailer look modern to how typical teenagers live their lives these days. We used many different locations such as a house, a busy road, a park bench, areas which are bright, colourful and relative to our audience. Also using the characters as the key features which helps us advertise them and market them which is key in our main products and ancillary texts.
We feature our characters as your typical teenagers, they like going out, as shown by our protagonist character in a park environment when he is hit by a ball and also have interest in the opposite sex as most teenagers are at that stage in their life, example of this is our main character at the bus stop with flowers. This is to stick to classic forms and conventions of a rom-com and stereotypes and representations of young teenagers.
One feature we try to use to our advantage in our trailer is the lighting, throughout our trailer we use bright and colourful lighting to intice our audience, one example being on the park bench where we have our protagonist and deuteragonist characters, the bench is a bright blue, on a sunny day with our characters wearing vibrant colours. We tried to make each scene as bright as possible to highlight this was a feel good, generally happy movie and to represent what our characters were feeling on the inside, which is the majority of happiness and excitement of a relationship happening.
In our poster and magazine we used the actor as the main usp and in most rom-coms they have the actors on the posters and dominating the page, this is because they want the audience to immediatly be attracted to them and therefore perhaps be interested in seeing the film, we saw this as a key feature in selling our products sp we have done this on our poster and magazine, so therefore we use the forms and conventions of real media products in our production.
I believe also we have been able to use Ervin Goffmans character theory, although in the trailer we focus solely on the protagonist and deuteragnist characters, if the audience were able to see the full film then we would be able to in-cooperate the 'bit player' and the 'fool' because they are easily adapted into our genre that we have chosen.
I think we have also been able to develop Todarovs theory of a basic structure for all narratives, where as Todorovs theory had 5 stages starting with a 'Equilibrium' something happy/good, then a disruption leading to a 'Disequilibrium' and eventually a 'New Equilibrium'. We have skipped straight to a 'Disequlilbrium' which is a problem that needs to be solved, in our case this is our male character not being able to get the female character, finally this ends with him getting the female character the 'New Equilibrium'. So we miss out various stages and the music we chose is uplifting to fit in with this theory, to the idea that finally in the end the main character will achieve is goal and get his girl.
Our trailer is also able to challenge other forms and conventions of media products, often in teenage rom-coms sex plays a vital role, our trailer goes against that idea as it is clear to see it is more about our male character trying to win the girl, therefore appealing to more then just our target audience. Older audiences will be more likely to see this if they realise that it’s not about your typical sex drugs and rebellious lifestyle of a teenager which challenges the forms and conventions of teenage rom-coms today where sex often dominates the product.
Also compared to other film posters and magazines in rom-coms where they genrally have both the male and female charaters portrayed on the front covers, we have completly gone against this idea and we went in the direction of just having our male character on the cover, this is because we see him as the main selling point and he is the dominant character that will have the most impact in this trailer and film.
To challenge forms and conventions of a rom-com we have had to use and develop some ideas, taking away the obvious stereotypes and representations of teenagers and putting the focus mainly on how this teenager can overcome his obsticle, while doing this we have been able to develop narrative and character theories to help our trailer set itself apart from others.


How effective is the combination of your main products and Ancillary texts ?

We chose to produce a magazine cover and also a film poster to go with our film trailer, with each different piece of media we considered how it would tie in with our other products to gain the best possible marketing campaign.
In our trailer we used as many bright colours as possible to give the film a happy vibrant look about it, so therefore in our film poster and magazine cover we also have done this with the main character wearing a bright red jumper in the poster and colourful fonts in both texts. In both magazine and poster we used a white background as we see the usp's of the main character as the most important thing of the whole product, as we have tried to do in the trailer.
Another thing we tried to do is create clear synergy with a prop, this was the watch the main actor is wearing, this ties in with the narrative, the title of the film and also the font. The narrative in the film trailer is all about the watch and time, so in the magazine cover and poster it was unquestionable that the watch would have to play a key part, with the actor wearing it and making facial expressions towards it. This prop also ties in with the font of clocks' 'James Svensson' is used in white font in the shape of clocks to relate to the narrative in both magazine and poster. This watch is also a usp because it is what the audience are going to be attracted to, what is so special about this particular watch ?, so helps attract our audience.
Also we believed the font to play a huge part on how to promote our brand, on the magazine cover we have the actor and watch as the usp’s and then we use different coloured font for different sentences, this is because it is a youthful magazine so appealing to our target audience, and also with a white background it was useful to make this as colourful as possible. In our poster once again with a white background we used the red font to go with what the character is wearing, as to not overload the viewer with too much, we wanted the poster to be basic as to not give too much narrative away and I believe we have achieved that.
I think there is a clear link between all of the different texts, especially the font of the clock which would be recognised instantly and is therefore helping us establish our brand.


What have you learned from your audience feedback ?

To gain the feedback that we thought would be most useful to us; we thought any questions would have to be specifically directed towards our target audience of young teens between the ages of 12-18. The best possible way to put across our questions we thought would be in the form of a questionaire, we handed out this questionaire mainly around school as schools have our prime target range, and then also outside of school such as social metting places, like football or rugby teams, these would be the places that our questions could easily reach our target audience, audiences which would enjoy funny and idiotic rom-coms. After gathering our feedback we could then place our results into tables and charts as they would be easier to read and we would be able to come to definite conclusions
We found the audience really enjoyed having a character that they could find bits of themselves in that they could really relate to, this helped us form how we would film around our protagonist character. We also found that the majority of the audience liked a soundtrack that would be able to reflect certain emotions a character was feeling at the time, so we chose a fairly upbeat one with lyrics such as 'bouncing of the walls' so the character is not knowing what to do next or when he is going to have his luck, a emotion that many teenagers had gone through.
Another impact our audience had was that most of them liked the 'knocked up' film poster, as it was simplistic. They were able to focus on the character and already start to establish a relationship with what looks like a likeable figure with silly facial expressions, rather then being overloaded with information, too much narrative or other characters, so we used this feedback when developing our posters and magazines.
This feedback was vital in the way we would produce and market our brand. We chose to gain our audience feedback before we really got stuck into our filming so we would be able to create a trailer product which included ideas that they would be happy with and therefore not much editing would be needed. We really appreciated our audience’s feedback and tried to help make our product best to appeal to them because at the end of the day they are the people that are buying our brand and therefore giving us the success

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research and planning and evaluation stages ?

To do any research we would most likely have to use search engines on the internet to research products or trailers, the search engine we mainly used was Google, as this was a reliable one we have used a lot in the past. This helped us find many movie posters and trailers that we could then gain ideas and feedback from.
When searching most of our film trailers we used 'youtube; has this has a high variety of trailers and helped us look at what camera angles looked good, and how the editing worked well, as well as the mise en scene.
To show all of our research and planning along with this evaluation we decided to use a blog as the best way of showing our work, this would also show good time management as that was a certain aspect of the criteria we had to meet. We found this blog fairly easy to upload things such as videos, photos, and charts to which we could then discuss and analyse. Gaining feedback was also easy to receive on our blogs as we could send links to friends, or simply open up our blogs in class to fellow media students or teachers and gain their thoughts.
To film our trailer we then used a portable video camera and accessories like a tripod to make use for steady filming, and a microphone so we could hear the dialogue. Once we then finished filming we would upload it onto our macs, where we could edit them on there, with features such as slow motion, freeze frames, fade outs as just to name a few of the effects we could choose from. The editing programme also made it easy for us to cut clips and place them where we would want them and to how long we needed them for.
For our magazine and poster we used a digital camera to take photos of our main character then used formats such as 'gimp' and 'photoshop' to edit them, adding in colour and changing the contrast for example. We had used most of this technology in our previous As coursework so didn’t really have any problems when using this technology.
We also were able to create our own font of clocks to go with our narrative of time, we did this using Photoshop and images of the internet to do this, and we found this font gave our trailer and ancillary texts great individuality.
However to do all of these things it was the internet that gave us a basis for being able to look into and research similar products and with technology advancing and getting better all the time we were able to create these products.

'The thrill of 30 seconds' Film Trailer - Final edited product

Here is our final edited teaser trailer for 'The Thrill of 30 Seconds'