Trailer&Website:
www.sushkelly.co.uk/abandoned - trailer available on website
Poster:
Friday, May 11, 2012
Evaluation Question 4
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning, and evaluation stages?
For my media project, I have used many different types of media technologies. I used lots of variations of technologies so that it was easier for me to produce our product and by using so many different technologies, we were able to make our products to a better and higher standard.
To keep track of my project, I used Blogger - owned by google - used to write down anything that we did as we did it so that I can refer back to it at a later date. Using blogger has been extremely useful during my project because it has enabled me to keep up to date with what work we've already done as a group and work I've done by myself.
Blogger has helped me link posts together for example, posts, production and planning. My media tutor can also keep track on how far along in our project we are by our blogs.
Blogger was not the only online media that I used trhoughout my project, I also used common sits such as google/google images - it was easy to use and saved me a lot of hassle because I didn't have to search through numerous sites to get my research because google is so quick and handy. It helped me find images quickly and videos because it has such a defined search system - it doesn't come up with information that I don't actually want.
I have also used sites for videos like youtube because its also quick like google and helped me to find videos that i could relate to when researching horror trailers. It also helps because it comes up with suggestions that it thinks I'll be interested in and it sometimes might be something that I hadn't even thought of but that could be extremely useful.
Youtube has probably been one of the biggest helps with my project because its enabled me to upload our own work and get feedback, get videos for research and watch others videos. Google often suggests videos on youtube so when researching and planning our main product (trailer), we got lots of good ideas from youtube.
Once we'd put our video on youtube, family and friends were also able to comment and give us positive feedback on our trailer so this programme was a big help thoughout our project.
I have also used social networking sites such as facebook to my advantage because they have enabled me to put our main product and ancillary texts onto them to get feedback which has been very useful especially at the end of our project when we had last alterstions to make.
I didn't just use online media programmes throughout my project, I also used programmes that were on my computer, for example, Powerpoint and microsoft word. These were very helpful when planning our trailer and poster because we could save all our different versions and ideas onto them and then upload them onto our blogs. Powerpoint was especially helpful when we were in the making process of our project because we could screenshot what we were doing and then paste it onto powerpoint and save it as an image and upload it onto our blog later.
To capture our video clips we use our Sony Handy cam, because it is easy to use with good active electronic image stabilization and a built-in USB cable for quick uploads. It gives us nice clear videos and also has very clear results, it’s also nice and compact which is good for travelling and hand-held shots. The camera we are using to take still images is called a Nikon D40, this is a brilliant small compact camera, and is very efficient. It has a 6MP and the images look very good.
To edit our trailer, we used windows live movie maker. Now, we would have loved to use imovie but unfortunately the apple computer that we had wouldn't read the video clips so after several attamepts, we had to use another microsoft programme.
It wasn't all bad, this programme enabled us to decide what order to put the clips, crop the clips, add sound effects, add voice overs and special effects.
In my opinion, the evaluation process was made much more easy and interesting because I had so many advance technologies such as google and blogger meaning I could evaluate on my blog and then use images from google to illustrate what I was talking about.
I am pleased with my overall project and progress and I feel this was all made possible and easier by all of these varying media programmes, they have been a great help and have taken alot of pressure off me and my group!!
Evaluation Question 2
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I think that our main product and two ancillary texts work brilliantly together!! They're all consistent in the images, characters, logos and titles that have been used in/on them. Each of them are linked together for example, you can watch the trailer and get the poster on the website, the poster advertises the trailer and the trailer benefits the website and the poster. We've used the same text throughout for example, in the title: ABANDONED - this way, they all have equivalent meaning and are all as powerful, they're isn;t a stronger font.
All three products have something dark and dreary about them which works really effectively meaning that they all give off the same vibe - scary!!
The main colours that we have used are black and white because it has a better effect on the viewer - we know this from our feedback.
In our trailer, website and poster, the main character is shown on all of them, linking all three together - this is because this is who the audience wants tosee the most of.
We've used the same sub-logo - 'watch terror unfold' throughout.
'
Coming Soon' is also used on our trailer, poster and website.
It would be handy to note that although all these thing are used throughtout, they aren't just put there to make things look better, they all have meanings of their own and benefit our main product and the other two highly, they all help to bring thre reader/viewer in and make their interest in the products higher - if their interest is more then they're more likely to look at all three products rather than just the trailer.
Overall, I think that the combination of our main product and ancillary texts is very effective! It entises our target audience and each individual product has a different effect for a different audience for example, our trailer is aimed at 15 year olds mainly but the website and the poster are thinsg that are more likely to be seen by more people than just our audience thus giving the trailer more viewers and then those people will want to go and see the actual film!!
Evaluation Question 1
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
When starting our project, we did alot of research into what conventions trailers have and what different conventions different genre trailers had.
After researching into different genre's, we decided on our genre: horror.
So when we started our trailer, we already knew what conventions most horror trailers had for example, quick, sudden clips, flashing images, sound effects, dark clips etc.
We wanted our trailer to have some conventions of real media products but at the same time, we wanted our trailer to be unique and different and in order to do this, we thought we would challenge some of the normal conventions for example, music - we don't have music in our trailer because we thought that if it was more quiet, people would be on edge. Most trailers have music inthe background and the music's pace and tempo usually climbs at more scary points so the audience know that its about to get more scary or end - by not putting music in our trailer, people won't know what's about to happen and when.
We also knew that if the trailer is successful and people want more before the actual film, that this is when web-pages and created. we followed all the ordinary conventions when making our webpage because we thought that if it was to look professional, then we would need to. We didn't follow all conventions in our trailer because we wanted it to be different but with our website, after doing more research into webpages, we knew that if our webpage was too different, it wouldn't be realistic. We also knew that the most important part of our webpage, trailer and poster was that it said when it would be released.
Trailer: Our trailers plot is conventional in the way that our main inspiration was Paranormal Activity: house possesed by 'spirit' or something along similar lines, person becomes possesed by house or spirit.
HOWEVER: We thought that it would be interesting to have a boy (Matt) being possesed as opposed to following the main convention of the vulnerable girl. We decided to have the girl as the survivor and a boy as the possesed person - we thought this would be different and unique.
Another convention of horror trailers is click flashy clips - we followed this because its a good convention to have inour trailer, otherwise it wouldn't work as well and wouldn't be as scary
Website: Our webpage follows pretty much every convention that webpages have.
Below are a list of the conventions that we agreed on:
Webpages: Our website:
Trailer on site YES
Downloads available YES
Fancy preloader NO
Links to social networking sites YES
Explanation of trailer (plot) YES
Characters, producers atc YES
As you can see, we follow almost every convention on our website - we think this is the best way! The onlt conventionwe don't have is a fancy pre-loader, this is because our website loads relatively quickly so we didn't need one.
Poster: When researching posters for horror movies, we had to look at different sub-genres because all posters for different sub-genres have a big difference in their appearance.
We found out that slasher horrors usually have theme colours: black and red (for blood),
and that paranormal/supernatural horrors have dark posters with variations depending on what happens in the film/trailer.
Overall, I think our poster, trailer and website follow conventions of real media products but only to a certain extent but this is for the best in my opinion and from our audience feedback, it proves that this has worked well for us because almost all our feedback was positive so obviously, following and not following conventions of real media products has paid off!!
Evaluation Question 3
Our target audience was teenagers, aged 15 and upwards so in order to get feedback, we asked people in our class and people at home in the right age range but we also thought it would be a good idea to put it on youtube and facebook because people at that age visit those sites daily.
As our trailer was only recently finished, we knew that it would be difficult to get enough comments and feedback on youtube but we thought it was still worth a shot.
Its only been on for a week or so but we've had 41 views, unfortunately however, we've only had two comments and only one of them has been actual positive feedback as you can see below:
The feedback that we got was positive, its not that clear on the image but it says:
'This is actually really good! I like the sounds/effects you have added into the video, they fit in really well :)'
We were pleased with this feedback as we weren't so sure about the sound effects but this made us feel much better about our trailer and sound effects in it!
We also got feedback from our parents and friends which was helpful.
After receiving the feedback on our trailer, website and poster, there was a few things we had to change. People suggested that we made a few alterations to our poster as they didn't think it looked too professional but people couldn't quite 'put their finger on what it was that needed changing' so we had a play about and ended up with what we thought was a much better product.
After changing our poster, we then showed family and friends again and they said it looked much better and more professional. the majority of the feedback we got was positive:
'Looks really good, I would go and watch the film if I saw this poster'
'The actress looks genuinely distressed which makes the poster and film believable'
All in all, we were pretty pleased with our feedback that we got and other than alterating the poster slightly, there wasn't any other changes that we felt we had to make.
People said that they were most impressed with our website and that it was the one out of the three products that was most realistic, not that the others weren't but that this was the one out of them all that they thought was the most professional - we were pleased with this feedback as it reassured our confidence in our webpage!!
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Friday, May 4, 2012
Website in the making
As one of our options, we chose to make a webpage to go with our trailer and poster.
From our research, we know that most webpages for trailers have links to social networking sites eg - twitter, facebook and youtube - So we knew we had to make sure our page had those things too.
We've used the same picture throughout (my face) so that our products are consistent so we used the same one again for our webpage as the background but edited it much more so that it was the same picture but looked completely different.
Making the Webpage.
First to make the background for our site, we took the original image and dragged it into photoshop so it was ready for editing. Then we de-saturated it - making the photo look weak, pale, wash-out and dull. We did this so that the 'survivor' looked all of the above so it fitted that particular scene in our trailer. We wanted our target audience to be able to tell how 'she' was feeling and by de-saturating the image, we achieved that.
Next, we added another layer - another copy of our image on top - and used colour dodge tool: washes out colours on image. We used this so again, the survivor looked washed out and tired.
The Colour Dodge blending mode decreases the contrast to brighten the base colour.
We then used divide layer which allows us to split up the two previous images and add other colour layers such as shadow or black and white to change the overall image.
In this case, we added white to make the face look paler and more frightened.
After that, we developed a footer - the bottom bit with the writing - we did this so that we could write who the website and trailer was made by and other details. After researching other webpages for trailers, we knew that this was necessary.
We also added an effect off photoshop called 'ghost' which is the people/shadows that you can see behind to the left of my face.
We thought this looked good, almost like these three figures were haunting the survivor which makes the target audience more curious about the trailer.
The next step was to place the trailer onto the website, we did this on 'HTML'.
However, at the point of making our website, we hadn't quite finished our trailer so we used an example one off youtube for the time being and then added our title at a later date.
We also added text on the bottom of the footer saying 'follow us if you dare' to add suspense. As we haven't made a facebook or twitter page for our brief, we haven't linked these to any sites.
We then added all final touches while the webpage was up and running.
We added 'downloads' so that our target audience could print or download posters for ABANDONED straight off the site.
We added a '15' certificate so people know that they have to be age 15 to view our trailer.
We also moved the social networks and text to the top of the site so that we could fit more information into the footer.
The site we used to make our website was called Dreamweaver HTML, we used this because after using an apple computer to make a website for GCSE IT, we ere already aware of how it worked and how to get it up and running on the internet.
Our site name - www.sushkelly.co.uk/abandoned - its called 'sushkelly' because of the name that the computer was logged into already and we couldn't change it because we didn't want to risk losing all our work.
Overall, we're quite proud of our webpage for our trailer. We think it looks quite professional.
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