1. A2 Level Media Evaluation By Chloe Langhorn

2. Our Product For this unit I worked in a group of three to create: A teaser trailer for a film called ‘Circus’ A Poster advertising the film ‘Circus’ A Magazine cover promoting the film ‘Circus’

3. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (The trailer) Throughout our media product I think that we have followed most of the conventions of real life media products, this starts with the teaser trailer, as we kept it short and we didn’t let on the story line too much. Secondly we added title pages to it with reviews and nominated awards. As a horror trailer we gave quick sharp shots of the main characters from good and bad, also we kept the trailer quite dark and dismal. The only way I think that we challenged the conventions of a horror film itself would be how the ‘damsel in distress’ is usually a blonde figure, but in our trailer of a horror film we decided to challenge that stereotype and use a dark haired girl who is usually seen as a stronger character. Films that helped us achieve our final product were films such as ‘Black Swan’ and ‘Saw’

4. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (The Poster) Our film poster very much follows the conventions of real media posters with our title at the top along with a tag line. We also added a fine print to the bottom of the poster. This therefore following the codes and conventions of a film poster. To follow the conventions of a horror film poster we looked at other film posters such as ‘The Dark Knight’ for inspiration for the clown, and ‘One Missed Call’ for inspiration for the horror aspect of it. From these we developed a better sense for a horror film poster, creating dark edges and putting more light and focus on to the clowns face. This then accentuates the horror of the film.

5. Forms and conventions – addressing the audience. We followed conventions for addressing the audience by giving them short clips of what could happen instead of what will. With the text ‘You’ll never walk alone’ flashing on screen it gives the audience a definite feel of horror. As the last clip of the girl seen is of her being dragged from a room it adds tension and suspense to the audience leaving them at a cliff-hanger, this would then leave the audience wondering what may happen, so hopefully leaving them feeling that they want to see the film.

6. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (The magazine cover) Also with the magazine cover I feel that we covered most of the codes and conventions of a real life magazine cover. We mainly focused our attention to the film magazine ‘Empire’. Especially its cover for ‘The Dark Knight’. From researching in to these magazine covers we got a feel for what ours wanted to look like. We also took onboard our finished poster for inspiration for our magazine cover. So therefore we created black edges again with more light and focus on the clowns face. We made sure we followed the main conventions of a magazine cover including the masthead, the main image, coverlines, barcode etc. From this we developed a professional looking magazine cover. The only thing I think we challenged for our magazine cover would be that each different story line had a different font which most magazines don’t usually do.

7. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? I think that the ancillary texts are very complimentary of the main product. All three work very well together. The main product being the teaser trailer gives a small insight in to what may happen in the film but focuses more on the girl rather than the clown. Whereas both the poster and the magazine cover focus more on the clown, so therefore outweighing each other. Also with little reference to the clown during the trailer the magazine and film poster really do show the contrast between characters off screen.

8. What have you learned from your audience feedback? After finishing our main product we decided to show a group of students it to aim to get some audience feedback on it. Most of the comments we received back were positive but we did however want to know what could be done to improve the product. Comments that we did get back were comments talking about how the lighting in the part where the girl is dragged along the floor could be improved and it looked quite pixalated. Other parts like when the title ‘Circus’ came up it only flashed on for a second, the students thought that it could have been on for longer even though we had followed conventions of a trailer for it. Overall the students were really positive about our product and had commented on how they felt naturally scared like they would if it were a real trailer for a real film.

9. The main successes from our audience feedback For me the real success of our trailer was what any horror film sets out to do to an audience and how they set out to make an audience feel... Scared! Most of the students commented on how they actually felt a thrill from the trailer. One of what I thought may be the weaker parts of our trailer was the editing as last year a lot of the editing was left in my other group members hands, but this year it was all new to me and I felt like a made a large contribution to the editing this time.

10. The main unsuccessful parts of the product from our audience feedback. Our audience although said the film was scary did not believe that mystery was well created. They thought that it could have been mysterious and because it was not mysterious enough this could have been because we may have showed too much in the trailer of our film, also another point to make was the setting of our trailer, they said that could have affected the mystery aspect to the trailer. If we were to do it again one main thing we would have to look at would be the mystery as it was the one aspect of the trailer which failed to impress with a minor 33% thinking it had average mystery.

11. Construction – Different media technologies This time around we used iMovieas we were new to mac computers we were new to iMovie. I think being completely new to a software gave us all a equal chance to edit between us. I found that I contributed quite a bit to the editing of the trailer, and from that I think that my knowledge of the software has grown through the time in creating the trailer. Secondly we used Adobe Photoshop to develop the magazine cover and the film poster. Through GSCE photography I already had in-depth knowledge of how to use adobe photoshop and from that I did most of the editing for the magazine and film cover but also helping others in my group to develop more of a knowledge for the software by teaching them how to use different tools on the software to manipulate an image.

12. Research Most of the research we did for our film trailer, poster and magazine cover was done through the internet through different websites such as IMDB and youtube. Throughout some of the research we did hit a dead end and couldn’t find some trailers or posters, but we still gained strong knowledge of the topic.

13. Planning Throughout our planning we used blogger to track what we had done so far. Most of the blog is simple and easy to use although parts of our work maybe from the macs fault would not allow us to upload images from the computer. Apart from that uploading print screens and videos seemed easy to upload to it. The blog gives people an insight to what we have done as a group together or in pairs, but also gives people a chance to look at what we have done individually. I find that Blogger has been a good resource for our planning and has helped amazingly along our road of developing the final products.