FINAL POST EVER - FINISHED BLOG

This year we feel as if we have worked well as a group and we have all enjoyed taking this media A level. We found some aspects of the course challenging, especially learning to use the new technology and programmes such as adobe premiere and photoshop. However, overall we have had a lot of fun!

We greatly enjoyed editing our trailer and even though we encountered some problems, we felt that over coming them was a great achievement.

Our marketing campaign as a whole: We feel that our teaser trailer will spark an audience interest and the film poster and our magazine will further enhance this. We think that they are well linked to each other and they look like a full marketing package. Our audience feedback has been positive about our marketing campaign with many people mentioning that they would go and see the film if they had the choice.

We feel as if our hard work over the last two years has paid off as we are extremely pleased with the final products.

RACH, LUCY, NIKKI and DALE.

EVALUATION - director's commentary recording

I have posted below a directors commentary script, I have made a recording of this script using my mobile phone, I then bluetoothed it to a friend so that she was able to send it to a computer, we then changed the format of the file to mp3. She then emailed the file to me. I tried to upload it onto blog spot but it said there was an error, so I tried uploading it onto YouTube but again there was an error as it was only a sound file. I then decided to make it into a windows movie-maker and tried to upload it to YouTube and the blog from that. This also didn't work because of the format. I then decided to re recorded it with a video camera, I have then changed the format to MPEG. When I got home however my laptop did not recognise that format either, I decided to try to use windows movie maker again and this time it worked! :D
Here is a link to the commentary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJwt3m7p5TI

This is a link to our teaser trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P70hIAhZ5Hg

In the director's commentary, I go through the trailer chronologically and comment on the shots we have used and explain why we thought they were effective. I also mention captions, costumes and editing, including the transmissions.


Rach.

EVALUATION Of This Year

Evaluation of our marketing campaign

Overall I feel that our whole marketing campaign is effective in the way in which we were trying to be. We address our target audience in our trailer, poster and magazine cover by giving clear hints of genre and showing them what our trailer is about which will attract their attention (love, death/ tragedy, good vs evil, jealousy, and the race to save the beloved girl). They show who our main characters/ actors are which could attract an audience adding a USP to our campaign. In our magazine and poster we have used subtle colour schemes of black and red to portray death and evil.


Evaluation of how we worked as a group

I feel that as a group we communicated very well with each other and coordinated what we were going to do as individuals and what we would do together as a team. We each shared responsibility for getting certain tasks done individually for the rest of the group and all shared filming and editing together. We all voiced our opinions over what we thought should be done,considering others views and then always chose a comprise to satisfy everyone in the group so they were happy with the final result.


What we did well

I feel that from last year our filming techniques have greatly improved. We used a tripod more to create a more stable and professional look. We shot our sequences many times from a variety of angles, so that we could pick and chose the best ones. The music we chose fitted perfectly in time with the action of our film, creating suspense and building a climax where needed. However had it not fit so well, we could have adjusted the audio track to make it fit. Our editing transitions are also effective in the way in which we have the 'fade-to-black' to show the transition into the evil present and the 'dip-to-white' for looking back into the good/ innocent past.

What we could be improved

I think the way in which we approached our coursework this year has dramatically improved since last year as we have learnt from our mistakes and corrected them. However saying this, I feel there is always room for improvement and there are certain things which we could have done differently.

I feel that for our flashback scenes resulted in a poorer looking quality. This is because we changed the contrast of the light of our footage and with the limitations on the programme Adobe Premier Element 7, it just makes our film look like poorer quality. As you can see below it looks very yellow, but it does show the clear difference between the past and present which is why we changed it to communicate this to the audience.

I didn't feel the sound effects we used were very realistic. The door knock sounded as though it was a wooded fence being hit, but as we lack resources to find better sound effects we had to work with what we could find. Also, the phone ring is for a mobile and we have a house phone ring, which isn't very good. If we had more time and accessibility to more resources I would have liked to of had better sounding effects.

Our trailer is a long teaser trailer and may give too much away but it is under 2 minutes and only shows two/ three characters so the audience is yet to learn about the twist at the end.


By Nikki Stock

EVALUATION - Marketing Campaign and year 13

Our marketing campaign for the film Runaway had three elements; a teaser trailer, a main poster and a magazine front cover. In previous posts we have evaluated each other these individually, however we did think about the campaign as a whole when conducting our coursework. The teaser trailer gives away genre and narrative indicators but leaves the audience still asking questions about the plot of the film. We felt that this enigma was important as it was a teaser trailer. The poster is heavily linked with the trailer as we show the male character which a light and dark side - this adds enigma as from the trailer the audience will be confused about whether he is could or bad. The knife on the poster shows the genre of the film well and links with the trailer as knives are used in that also. The magazine cover draws an audience to it as it shows our male character in a tux - this relates a Hollywood image and tells the audience that it is a serious film. The font in which Runaway is written links the magazine to the rest of the campaign as it is red - this reminds the audience that there is danger in the film and makes then distrust the male character again.

We worked extremely hard with our marketing campaign and I am pleased with the results, I think the trailer, poster and magazine cover all link well together back they can also stand by themselves.

Throughout this year I am pleased with how our group has worked, we have all discussed our ideas and gave ourselves a number of options before deciding on our finale ideas. We each did a lot of research and planning to make sure we had sufficient knowledge about the conventions of teaser trailers, posters and magazine covers so that our coursework could look as professional as possible.

We did encounter problems throughout the year such as choosing a finale idea, however I think we should we could work well as a team as we were able to compromise so that everyone in the group was happy. The weather caused us to have to change scenes in our trailer, I think if we were able to still have those scenes our trailer would have more diversity as it would have more settings - I also think it would help it flow better. We had trouble finding the right sound effects, the ones which we have used are 'okay' but we would have liked the door knock to sound more menacing and the phone ring to sound more like a mobile phone. When making the poster and magazine cover we also encountered problems; I think that is we had more experience with using photoshop we could of made our products look a lot more professional and clean cut, we could of also added more effects. Also we made a mistake when filming our trailer, in all the bag packing scenes Jen has her hair down, then when she gets her passport she has her hair up. We only realised this later on in the editing stages and it was too late to re-film. Luckily when we have shown our trailer to our class mates, friends and family not one has noticed the continuity error. If I could do this product again I would find more realistic sound effects, add more settings and practise using photoshop so that our magazine and poster could look more professional.

Overall I am very pleased with what we have accomplished this year, I think we have produced an effective marketing campaign and worked well together as a group.

Rach.

EVALUATION - Further poll results

As I have posted before I made a poll in facebook to find out what type of genre our target audience prefers. The choices where:
Thriller
Comedy
Romance
Western
Crime
Horror

These are the new results from poll, as it is on going the results will be slightly different to when I last posted them. These are the results I got:

Thriller --> 13
Comedy--> 8
Romance --> 5
Western --> 2
Crime --> 3
Horror --> 10

I have decided to plot these results in a pie graph and a bar graph as they show clearly which genres our target audiences favours.

Rach.

EVALUATION - A graph to show the most common way which our target audience consumers films

This chart shows the most common way in which our target audience consumes film texts. As you can see the most common way is through Internet sites. This backs up the argument which shows this youthful population can be called the 'YouTube generation'. This is because most teenagers have access to computers and the Internet and use it to research films and YouTube is an excellent website for watching film trailers and interviews etc. It shows convergence of multi platforms ad how the audience can research more information about anything they want.

Nikki Stock

EVALUATION - Graph on our the audience's favourite film genre

Here is a graph to what our target audience (teenagers to young adults) favourite film genre is.

We did a survey of our target audience asking them a number of questions reguarding the types of film they enjoy to watch and why, etc. These results show that thriller was the favourite genre of film to be consumed by this target audience. With an analysis of these results our group decided to produce a thriller genre teaser trailer. We found this a fun and challenging process.

Nikki Stock

EVALUATION - What I think we could have improved

One aspect of our trailer which could have been improved, as mentioned by several members of our audience, is that, for a teaser trailer, ours is rather long. We had planned originally to cut it down in terms of the flashbacks, and the amount of narrative which was given away. However, as part of our brief was to include features such as taglines, it was necessary to reveal at least some of the plot. We also felt that in order to draw the audience into the narrative, the trailer needed more content than simply the bag-packing scenes.

Something else which we would have changed if we had more time was the continuity error in one of the bag-packing scenes. In one shot Jen's hair was tied up and in the next it was down. However we concluded that since it was a different period of time she could have taken it down off screen whilst packing her bag. The contrast change of our flash back scenes also makes the quality of the shot look quite bad, however there was no other way of changing the lighting of the shot, short of filming it again, we therefore decided to leave it as it was. We also wanted to add in a sound effect each time the fade to white flash transition changed the shot to a flashback, however we could not find the sound we wanted as it does not have a specific name and so was hard to find. We thought it would be better to leave out this sound altogether than have a sound effect which didn't fit.

Another aspect of our planning and research which I think could have been improved upon was our collaboration in relation to joint planning and development. Had we had more time outside of lessons to meet as a group and post on the blog our joint research, our final piece may have been more polished and professional.

However, having said that we spend a large proportion of our free time over the past few months, working together in the media rooms over the trailer, poster and magazine cover. This has been made difficult due to full timetables and extra curricular activities, however, I think we pulled together well as a team in order to ensure that everyone had their say and input even on days when some of us were not available. Much time has also been spent individually at weekends and after school in order to ensure that our blog posting has been as informative and accurate as possible.

Lucy :)

EVALUATION - Audience response

Earlier we posted links which show our class mates response to our teaser trailer. In the YouTube video we were asked the following questions:

What was the idea for you film?

In your marketing campaign what ideas did you have for your trailer?

Who was your target audience and why?

What do you see as a strength of your production?

These questions were asked so that our class could understand some of the thinking behind our trailer and what we were trying to achieved. I think these questions were important as our class then knew what to look out for when watching our trailer.

After viewing our trailer our class mates were asked the following questions:

Was the editing effective?
What can you say about the use of titles?
What was effective about the mise en scene?
Can you comment on shot selections?
What shots stood out for you?
What could have made the production even better?


As shown in the video our class mates liked our editing, they thought our fade to blacks were effects and that our trailer flowed well and at a quick pace. We were very pleased with these comments as we spent a lot of time editing our trailer and focused a lot on the fade to blacks and fade to whites and what effect they would have.

When asked about our use of titles our class mates said that they were good as they helped explain what was happening in the trailer and also give clues to the narrative. They also thought that were we point each title was effective as it split up the trailer and kept the flow going. We thought about the font, size and positioning of the titles as well as their content, we were glad the class picked up on this.

It was said the knives we have used in our trailer are effective as they are a good genre and narrative indicator. Also they thought that our use of lighting was effective and it should the dark side of the characters. The props, settings, lighting and costumes we used in our trailer were carefully selected to give narrative and genre indicators and also give hints about that the characters are like.

They thought that we used a good variety of shots and the different angles we used made our trailer look professional and well made. The shot that they thought stood out to them the most was the last shot as it showed the emotion of the character and how vulnerable she was. We filimed this shot a numbers of times playing around with the position of the character and the angle of the camera until we were happy with the shot.

The improvements that were suggested we agreed with, we did originally have more settings (which was mentioned as the one of the things we could of improved) but due to bad weather we weren't able too use the other settings that we had planned. Another point that was brought up was that our trailer has to much of a story which is not a convention of a teaser trailer. Our trailer does follow a narrative and give away a lot about the narrative and the genre of the film but we wanted to have as many shots and angles as possible. Even though we have a narrative the fast pace nature of the trailer and the enigma created makes our trailer a teaser trailer rather than a theatrical one.

This is a link to the audience feedback video again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xmkz_fnKilE
We are the first group to be shown (00.00 --> 04.47)

Rach.

EVALUATION - Survey analysis

Most members of our target audience who viewed our trailer and completed the questionnaire were asked to give criticisms as part of their general feedback. Although most people who were questioned stated that there was little to criticise, their feedback has been extremely enlightening in terms of improving our coursework.

The survey shown below, which I took from different members of the audience to the ones who answered the questionaire, has also been enormously beneficial in order to help us learn from our work and be more audience orientated in the future. If we had more time to work on our final trailer, based on the feedback which I have received both from this survey and the last, we would spend more time on preparation in terms of lighting and props. We would further analyse the mise-en-scene used in other thriller trailers and use this information to incorporate more successful and convincing images into our work. Mise-en-scene is definitely an area on which we could have spent more time.

Lucy :)

EVALUATION - Audience Survey Graph

As shown below I carried out a questionnaire on several members of our targeted audience. I recorded my data and also analysed it, as can be seen a while back on the blog. I also conducted a survey to find the strongest and weakest aspects of our trailer in relation to editing, sound, mise-en-scene etc.; in order to learn what could have been improved upon had we had more time to adapt and edit it.
Audience members where asked to choose which of these features was the most effective in our trailer …

 Editing
 Sound
 Camera work
 Costumes
 Lighting
 Setting
 Props

The following graphs display my findings.



Above can be seen my analasis of these findings as I pin-point what, in my opinion, we could have improved upon had we been given more time to work on our final piece.

Lucy :)