EVALUATION - Creativity and Our Trailer

The purpose of our film trailer was to attract our target audience, and to build suspense about the release of the film. We feel that we have managed to achieve both of these as our skills as media studies students have progressed dramatically since last year.

I feel that our most developed areas of achievement are that of mise-en-scene, camera work and also our editing of transitions and captions etc. We spent a lot more time over planning costumes this year, ensuring that they not only reflected the characters personality, but were also fitting to the nature of the scene which we were filming. We also made an effort to adapt the lighting used to reflect the mood, for example we ensured that during filming of all the bag-packing scenes the lighting in Nikki's house was low to make it appear more eerie and mysterious, and is post-production we edited the flash-back scenes by upping the contrast to make them bright and cheerful, but also to give them a surreal glow to make it clear tat they are memories. We were a lot more creative with our camera work, adapting shots to make them high or low angle depending on the character being filmed and the scene being shot. We also used close ups and establishing shots to emphasise points and make the narrative clearer. Captions which we used this time were shown on a blank black background to make them show up and give more of an impact, whilst creating a contrast between the glowing red letters and the bleak dark background. The transitions which we used also made the trailer much more affective than last years. We used fades to black to make the images run more smoothly, and to reflect the plot line, also representing character personalities and the mood of the shots. Fade to blacks representing the scary and racy scenes, whilst dip to whites represent the happy and bright memories.

Our use of music and sound effects has also greatly improved. Last year we were unsure of how to delete the original sound from the video and so didn't use any music at all, we also attempted to record our sound effects ourselves rather than finding them on the Internet which made this years piece look much more polished and professional. The use of music also added to the overall effect and made the whole piece run much more smoothly, helping to put across the right message and influence the audience in the intended way, helping it to be a dominant reading rather than Oppositional.

I think that by being a lot more creative with our ideas and planning this year we were able to produce a much more polished and professional piece.

Lucy :)