1. A2 Level Evaluation By Thomas Cousins

2. Introduction For my A2 level coursework, we were asked to create a teaser trailer for a film that we had to make up. I worked in a small group of 3. The title of our film was “Last Call Of The Damned”. Our film was a horror/thriller that was designed to make you jump. We based our film about a man who got killed by a gang, and then he comes back from the dead and takes on a “Grim Reaper” type character and seeks revenge on the gang that killed him.

3. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? I believe that my teaser trailer has conformed to many conventions of real media products. If you compare it to teaser trailers of current films, you will see many similarities. Such as we created our own logos of production companies and we added in credits for the film. Other techniques such as editing have been used in our teaser trailer and all professional teaser trailers have had editing done to them.

4. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? For our teaser trailer we created a website and a poster to help advertise our teaser trailer. We linked the poster and the website to the trailer really well and make it really clear what they were advertising. We also set up a Facebook group as part of our viral marketing campaign. This enabled us to get the views and opinions of a lot of people to help us improve and add things to our project. The viral marketing side of the campaign proved to be very successful as we have managed to accumulate a lot of interest in our project. The marketing using the poster method wasn’t as successful as the viral marketing campaign, but it still helped attract some interest.

5. What have you learned from your audience feedback? We managed to generate quite a lot of audience feedback from group feedback sessions that we managed to video and the through the Facebook group where they could add comments to our work. We were then able to look at the suggestions that the audience had made and if we liked the proposals then we would change the trailer slightly to match the suggestions. One suggestion that was made by audience feedback was that one of the scenes where there was someone jumping on to another person, the camera angle wasn’t ideal so we cut that part out of the trailer.

6. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? In our media production, my group used various new media technologies. Technologies such as creating a website for our film and setting up a Facebook group. The Facebook group proved to be really popular with people commenting on our video uploads throughout our editing stages. These comments have helped us improve our production and help meet the needs of our target audience. The Facebook group has also allowed us to generate interest among the public, our group currently has 49 members with more and more members being added each time. The website that we created was there to help advertise our production and has created some amount of interest but it was a challenge getting people to look at the website in the first place, so we had to send out posters to help advertise this website, but the Facebook group was the technology that managed to generate the most amount of interest of all of the advertising technologies.