Final Trailer

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Final Poster

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Final Magazine

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Evaluation Question 4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Software
Blogger
I used Blogger throughout all stages of the production of my media product during both AS and A2 and it had provided and incredibly useful tool for recording and presenting my work. There have however been some issues with importing images into Blogger and moving them around, however I managed to make use of my computing knowledge and edit the HTML of my blog posts to give them the look I want and to get the formatting correct. My prior understanding of html was also useful when it came to embedding documents and presentations into my blog posts which I have done for all variety of situations, ranging from embedding an article on mental health for my secondary research to embedding excel sheets into my third evaluation to display the results of my audience feedback survey.
















Google Drive
Google drive was especially useful for me as I created my media product working in a pair and google drive allowed me and my partner to collaborate on documents at the same time from separate computers with ease. We created a shared google drive folder at the start of the year which we could both edit and the put any documents relating to the media product in their allowing us to both be able to work on them and see what the other one has done in real time.



Celtex
We made use of several of the different features provided on Celtex, using it for our script, shot list and props and location breakdowns. Celtex allowed us to present these as if they were professionally created and was very user friendly and simple to use. It also allowed us to share a folder between both me and my partner's Celtex accounts where similar to google drive we could see what the other one did in real time. It also cleverly encouraged you to work by having a timer at the bottom which told you the time you had spent thinking compared to the time you had spent writing. Once we had created our script it allowed you to go through it and tag your individual shots, allowing a quick way to create your shot list. Overal Celtex was hugely useful however we encountered a problem right at the end of our time using it that our free trial ran out. This meant we were not able to edit anything but by this point we had already downloaded our finished script, shot list and props and location breakdown to put on the blog so we could use these.



Incompetech.com
I made use of Incompetech to get trial music to use in my trailer, there is a huge selection of royalty free music organised by all variety of genres. Music here not only helped inspire me for the music I made for my final trailer but I made use of three separate tracks from Incompetech to use in my animatic, one for each act of the trailer.



Dafont.com
I used dafont.com to give me inspiration for the final font that I created myself for both my film title and my magazine title which were both based off a font from dafont.com names 'Lemon Milk'. Separate to this I used dafont.com to get the fonts for my inter titles in my trailer, I made use of four different fonts for each inter title to match my inspiration of the inter titles in 'Killing of a Sacred Deer' and unfortunately I did not have the time required to make each of these fonts as well as making the title font so dafont.com came in handy. I also made use of the font 'True Lies' from dafont.com when I mentioned in an inter title that the trailer was from the same director as 'Ruby' , my AS media film opening, to create a cohesive brand.



Youtube
I created my own youtube channel for my production company to allow for a single place to post all of my rough cuts, final film, animatic and director's commentary. Youtube also helped me to get audience feedback through youtube comments from my audience on my rough cuts to give me ideas of what needed changing so I could best meet my target audiences needs.




Premiere
I used Premiere to edit together my trailer, last year for my AS media product I used Final Cut Pro but I realised that this was lacking in several incredibly useful features that I knew were included in Adobe Premiere so made the decision to teach it to myself  to use instead. Premiere allows for incredibly easily importing in linked After Effects compositions which when they are edited in After Effects they will be updated in Premiere saving you having to re render and import your After Effects compositions every time you want to change something. Premiere also has a feature called 'sequences' these let me create an individual sequence for for each scene Premiere automatically saves these sequences as if they are ordinary footage allowing me to create a master sequence and input each of the scenes in there and when they are edited in the individual scene sequences they are updated in real time in the master sequence. This was incredibly beneficial to me as it meant my partner and I could separately work on different scene sequences at the same time and put them together with ease without interfering with each other's work. Premiere also provided far greater freedom in colour correction, it took a bit of effort to learn but once I had it let me create very realistic and professionally coloured shots.




Garage Band
I used Garage Band to compose the music for my trailer. It allowed me to easily import and loop already created tracks for the bass line and drum beat. Then for the melody I used the in built keyboard which lets you play notes and it will add them to your composition. You can then change the duration and pitch of each of these notes after. Garage Band also allows you to change the instrument so I would play the pieces on the digital keyboard to have it sound as if it was played on any instrument of my choice. I also used the feature in Garage Band to import video to compose alongside it, this meant once I had finished the mater of the edit I could render it in low quality to be used to compose the music exactly to fit the visuals.

















Illustrator
This year, in contrast to my AS media product I decided to create my own font for my film title and for my magazine front cover. To do this I had to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator which I had never used before. It actually turned out to be surprisingly easy to use, I imported a base font, 'Lemon Milk' from Dafont.com (see above) and then proceeded to use the different selection tool to manipulate the different corners and points on my letters to create my very own font. 



After Effects
After Effects provided very helpful for all variety of uses in my trailer, I used it to make the idents at the start of my trailer similar to how I used After Effects in my AS media product. However, this year I also used it to create the inter titles in my film trailer, incorporating my own font i created in Illustrator. Even though it did not make it in to the final trailer this year I also had a play around with super imposing different images over my characters, see below me attempting to place cracked paint over Eve to depict her fractured identity. This turned out to be far more difficult than expected as it was tricky to track all of the points on her face and to deal with her fringe as she moved her head.


Photoshop



Excel 
Excel is incredibly useful when it comes to managing data, I made use of excel after I held an audience screening for audience members in my target audience to come and view my trailer and fill out questionnaires, to help me collate the results. Excel allowed me to create tables of data and then select groups of data to have them formatted into easily understandable graphs to display my results from the survey.


Powerpoint
I used powerpoint to make a presentation to describe how my trailer conformed and subverted conventions of real media texts. Microsoft powerpoint allowed me to easily import in screenshots of my trailer along with images I found on google images of my inspirations then format them with text boxes explaining the decisions I made. I found powerpoint provided me far greater freedom and ease than blogger in moving around images and text, it also allows me to step through the presentation a slide at a time.


Prezi
Lastly I used Prezi, again for evaluation question 1 but this time to illustrate how my poster and magazine front cover conformed and subverted conventions of real media texts. Similarly to Powerpoint, Prezi is very simple to use and creates a very visually pleasing presentation that you can step through. However Prezi has the added advantage of animations, while this means Prezi's take longer to make this feature hugely aided me in talking about specific parts of my poster and magazine front cover as Prezi allowed me to then zoom in to these parts of the image to make it clear what I was talking about.


Hardware
Camera
I used a canon 80D to film my trailer, an upgrade from the Canon HG G25 that I used last year providing far greater freedom. The 80D allowed me to change lenses which I did multiple times during the filming process to allow me to achieve a wide range of shot types. The 80D also provided a large amount of choice when it came to manually adjusting the aperture, white balance, ISO, exposure and much more allowing me to get the shot exactly how I wanted.

Sound Equipment
I used the same sound equipment that I used at AS, a Rode microphone, boom pole along with a Tascam digital audio recorder and headphones. This allowed me to clearly record dialogue on set along with any background sound needed. I again made use of this equipment in post for recording foley sound for the bus stop scene as we had to film from the other side of the road.



Tripod

We used a variety of tripods in the filming of the trailer, a mixture of mine, my partner's and tripods borrowed from school. They all contained the essentials, adjustable legs, moveable head and the majority of them included a spirit level which proved very useful.


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Evaluation Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To help us get a good range of audience feedback we decided to host a screening for our film and invited various people, largely choosing to invite people in our age range of 15 - 25 but selecting a few outliers of this as well as it is likely our film will receive some viewers of an older audience.

See below the questionnaire I created to give out to our audience at the screening to find out their opinion on a variety of topics, helping me to find out is if chose the correct target audience and if my audience can detect that the film is marketed towards them. A few of the questions at the bottom asking the audience about their opinion on the connections between our ancillary task and main product I will be using the results of in Evaluation question 2.

Audience Feedback Survey - ‘We All Fall Down’ Trailer - General

Please feel free to leave a comment under any of your answers.

What is your gender?

☐ Male

☐ Female

☐ Other

☐ Prefer not to say

What is your age?

☐ 16-25

☐ 26-35

☐ 36-45

☐ 46-55

☐ 56-65

☐ 65+

Have you seen any of the following psychological thrillers / horrors?

☐ Inception (2010)

☐ The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

☐ Shutter Island (2010)

☐ Taken (2008)

☐ Psycho (1960)

☐ The Shining (1980)

Do you like psychological thrillers / horrors and why?

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Watching a trailer in advance to watching a film

Strongly Disagree Strongly Agree

1.     Helps me decide 0      1      2      3      4      5      6      7      8      9      10

if I want to see a film

2.     Is something I do 0      1      2      3      4      5      6      7      8      9      10

3.     Helps me understand 0      1      2      3      4      5      6      7      8      9      10

the plot

4.     Gives away too much 0      1      2      3      4      5      6      7      8      9      10

We will now ask you some questions about our trailer

Who do you think the trailer was aimed at?

Age Range: …………. Gender: …………….

What was your favourite part of the trailer?

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Is there anything you did not understand in the trailer that needs further clarification and why?

Yes ☐                         No ☐

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

What did you think of the music in the film? For example, I liked the instruments used or I appreciated
the transitions between pieces etc.

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

What did you think of the ending?

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Would you want to see the rest of the film and why?

  Yes ☐                         No ☐

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

We will now ask you some questions about our poster and magazine front cover

Do you like Emma’s poster and magazine and why?

  Yes ☐                         No ☐

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Do you like George’s poster and magazine and why?

  Yes ☐                         No ☐

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Can you see connections between Emma’s magazine and poster with the trailer, and what are they?

  Yes ☐                         No ☐

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Can you see connections between George’s magazine and poster with the trailer, and what are they?

  Yes ☐                         No ☐

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Here is a photo of the screening taking place, we first showed our trailer and the gave out several printed copies of our posters and magazine front covers to audience members for them to have a look at.

I then took the results of all of the questionnaires and typed them up in Excel where I collated the results. see below all of the raw data.  

To make the results more user friendly and to help me write up what I had found I decided to create graphs to graphically display the data for each question.





In the above two graphs it can be seen that we managed to get people to attend our screening who fit well in to our target audience which was the age bracket 16 - 25 and either gender as we felt these were the people who are most likely to attend psychological thrillers. It was important to us that these were the sort of people who attended our screening so we could find out if our film would be apealing to its designed audience.





Only 13.3% of our audience said they did not like psychological thriller/ horrors which left us with the large majority of the audience being a fan of the genre. One of the audience members said they "love twists in movies especially if they aren't obvious" which fits well with our trailer and there is a seemingly twist in the change in personality in Eve



Here we used a Likert scale to get an insight in to our target audience's opinions on trailers as in institution. When creating our scale we deliberately scaled it from 0 to 10 to ensure there was no middle, neutral value audience members could select, forcing them to have an opinion either way. For the first two, 'helping me decide to see a film' and 'is something I do' we had hugely positive results with no one choosing less than 6 for trailers helping them decide if they want to see a film. For 'is something I do' we had similar feedback with no one choosing less than 4 and a large number of people selecting 10, which is very beneficial to us as it means our product will be os use to our target audience. For 'helps me understand the plot' the feedback was slightly lower than we would have liked with no one putting higher than an 8 and a couple of 2 results however the fact that the target audience would still like to watch the trailer over rides this I feel. For 'gives too much away' the results were very high which we expected which is why we intentionally attempted to keep an air of mystery in our trailer where possible without making it boring, we achieved this by revealing very little about what was wrong with Eve and the previous issues that had occurred in her family and left these to be revealed in the full film.

Now we showed them our trailer and asked the audience questions based on it



These results in the above two graphs were very helpful as they illustrated that the large majority of the target audience could correctly identify that the trailer was aimed towards their age range. 13.3% of people speared to believe the film was targeted at females which helps tell us that we have correctly subverted the usual thriller film as it can be seen as a very male genre by some people yet 0% of people said are film was targeted at males and the other 87.6% of people gave us the response that we wanted that our trailer could be targeted at any gender.







It's pleasing to see the majority of people did not need further clarification of anything. Most of the people who did need further explanation were confused as to what happened to the girl and we had made the conscious decision not to give this away in the trailer as we did not want too much to be revealed so there was no point in going to see the film. Therefore the fact that we left some viewers still wanting answers to questions is actually beneficial to us as they will then want to watch the whole film.





Here we had only one no to wanting to see the rest of the film which is a great success, most people said what drew them to wanting to see the res of the film was the open ending we left which was what we were attempting to do leaving the audience guessing what happens to the mum. The one person who said no said it was because they were not a fan of the genre so would not be inside of our target audience anyway.



In response to my poster and magazine, similar to the film there was only one person who did not respond positively to it and this was the same person who did not want to see the rest of the film and so is likely not within the target audience. Aspects people particularly liked were the fact that the two protagonists were looking in opposite directions on the poster hinting at the imminent breakdown in their relationship. Another aspect commented on was the falling down letters of my title, mirroring the title of the film, also several people mentioned how eye catching the whole appearance of both were which is hugely important in drawing in an audience.



George's poster and magazine again had a very positive response with 73.3% of people responding that they liked them both. However it is clear from the feedback that people preferred the poster to the magazine as they felt it did not fit as well with the thriller genre. The audience commented on how 'ambitious' the poster was, picking up on the ingenuity of it, making it very eye catching.

The last two questions of the questionnaire I have chosen to include in Evaluation Question 2 as they relate to the connections of my ancillary task and main product.

I then decided to conduct some Vox Pox to get further feedback on my poster and magazine front cover, this I have included below however it also links back to question 2 as they answer their opinion on the connections between ancillary task and main product.

Here are the questions I posed to my audience

1. What do you like about the poster?


2. Would this make you want to see the film?


3. Can you see connections with the trailer and poster?


4. What do you like about the magazine front cover?


5. Would this make you want to see the film?


6. Can you see connections with the trailer and magazine front cover?

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

In order to answer this question I decided to create a directors commentary to my main trailer, picking up all of the key aspects of it and talking about the ideas behind each of the shots and music composition, to give a better understanding of my trailer.

After completing this, to help better answer the question I created an annotated video for my poster and magazine front cover to discuss the decisions I made at every stage of the construction process to ensure they both linked back to my main task well.

Here is the final question from the questionnaire that we gave out to our audience at the film screening, I have discussed the screening in full detail in evaluation question 3 but have included this question here as it relates best to this question.




Here I got 80% of people responding that they could see connections between my poster, magazine and trailer which is very pleasing. The audience picked up on the colours helping to link them through their connotations to the thriller. They also picked up on the fact that I used very similar shots for my poster and magazine to shots used within the tailer itself. Responses I particularly appreciated were people who discussed how my poster and magazine mirrored the mind of the protagonist, through the tear emulating the 'tearing apart of reality'.

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