In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My product uses the elements of crime drama which of which the main element is usually mystery. Crime dramas have to be believable as they allow the audience to relate the story to their own situation. Such as where they live and what they do. My product uses mystery to attract the audience which is necessary for your product to be a success. The Murder of the husband in the trailer allows the audience to relate to this as everyone feels safe in their homes and my trailer plays on this as the murder takes place within the murdered husbands home.  Crime Dramas are often filmed from one side of the law e.g. police and villains. In my products case the attempt was to film it from the side of the detective.  Crime dramas are mainly a male genre which was visible from the research of the Flawless trailer in which Michael Caine is the main character and Demi Moore plays the supporting role. This is mainly seen in the Shawshank redemption trailer as the whole film is filled with male roles. This is seen in my trailer as the detective and villains are both represented by male actors. This male dominance in the genre was developed further in my trailer from use of the camera work. In the interview scene I used high angle shots on the female character to represent the weakness of the character as a widow would feel funerable after their husband had died.  I also used low angle shots on the detective in the scene to show his dominance in the scene.  I developed this further with the use of first person shots on the female character again in an attempt to show her funerability. This also adds suspense to the trailer.  Concerning the editing of the trailer I decided to use the technique of building up the action and then slowing it down again for the end of the trailer. This was used in the Flawless trailer and I felt that it would work well in my product as well as the pace quickens in the chase scene.  I felt that my product followed the codes and conventions of crime drama well in my trailer.

The titles in any trailer are used often to summarise what’s happening in the shots that appear on screen. I felt I used this technique well as I included different titles that represented what was happening on screen. I challenged this technique in the last two titles that appeared on screen as I wrote an emotional line in an attempt to attract an audience, “That will change” and “Everything.”

Overall I believe that I followed and developed many codes used in crime dramas such as mixing fast paced shots with slower scenes and fade outs and the representation of the female character and believe that I created a trailer that accurately showed a crime drama trailer.

How effective is your combination of main product and ancillary tasks.

I think that my combination of main products and ancillary tasks work well together as I have created a theme which is visible throughout my ancillary and main task.  As my production was a crime drama I decided that I would keep the colours on the trailer and ancillary tasks dark in attempt to maintain the mystery and suspense within the whole project. I felt that this also gave good continuity to my production as the ancillary task could be related to each other.  I used a similar font in my ancillary tasks as in my main task which also gives good continuity to the entire portfolio. For the image of my poster and front page I took it from the last shot in my production which adds suspense as the shot follows on with the colour scheme as it is a dark shot. This also gives good continuity to the portfolio. Overall I think that the combination of the ancillary tasks and main task give a good idea to the audience what film the tasks represent as one can be related to another.

What have you learned from your audience Feedback?

From my first audience questionnaire I learnt that overall the majority of people were interested in crime dramas which showed that I had made a good decision in the selection of genre. I also learnt that the majority of the people who filled out the questionnaire selected the storyline and the suspense were the main reasons why they watched crime dramas. This led me to attempt to create a trailer that was similar to what the audience suggested that they would like to see in a crime drama.

After the creation of my main task I created another questionnaire which allowed me to judge the success of my main task. Through this I was able to find out what age group my production appealed to which was the age group 16-25. I was able to discover that the majority of rated my trailer well which showed that my trailer was a success and fulfilled the purpose of a trailer as the majority of the audience said that they would go and watch the full picture. The titles in the trailer were also judged as a success because the majority of people stated that they were similar to those in other trailers.

How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages.

In my initial stages of research I used the internet to get information about the task.  To gather information about the task I used the internet through use of search engines such as “google” to get good background knowledge of how film trailers are visually and musically presented. I used “YouTube” to analysis and research sources in order to discover the codes and conventions of crime drama film trailers. I have used the blog website blogger as the website in which my coursework was to be presented.

As part of my research I created a questionnaire which was created using the program “Microsoft “Microsoft Office Word 2010.” After I had received my questionnaires back I used the program “Microsoft Office Excel 2010” which was ideal as the program allows you to create graphs to represent your data which made my results much more easily analysed.

In the planning stage of my coursework I used a camera to take photos of my storyboards as at the time a scanner was not available for use. After I had taken the pictures of my storyboards I used an SD 512mb card to transfer the images over onto a PC. The images were then uploaded onto blogger using its image upload feature.

The main use of technology was in the construction stages of my portfolio. I used a Sony Handycam to film my trailer as I had good knowledge on how to use this piece of hardware due to my prior use of it to help film the BBC school news report for my school. After filming the footage I captured the footage onto “Adobe Premier Pro” software. The footage was exported onto the PC using a DV cable which captured directly into the software. Using “Premier” I then cut the pieces of footage I needed from the raw footage that had been filmed on the day of filming to create one piece of film that was used in the final creation of the trailer. The software uses different layers of audio and video tracks. My Music was taken from a copyright free CD. The track that I selected was then ripped onto the PC hard drive which allowed me to drag and drop the track onto the audio timeline in Premier. To create the titles within the trailer I used the new title feature in “Premier” which allowed me drop the titles onto the visual timeline which added them to my footage. Using the opacity tool on the timeline I was able to fade in, fade out and cross fade the different pieces of footage on the timeline. In the creation of my main title at the end of the trailer I used the software “Adobe After effects.” This footage allowed me to fade in titles and then use and effect on the title to allow the title to Scatter on screen.

To construct my ancillary tasks I used the software “Serif Page Plus X3” to create a Film Poster and a Film magazine front cover. Used many different tools within “Page Plus” to create my ancillary tasks such as a 3-d title on my front cover.  To create the film title that was used on the magazine and poster I used a gradient tool to change the colour of the title from black to white from the top of the text to the bottom.  For the image on the ancillary task I used a screenshot from footage that was filmed and add it to both ancillary tasks as the image worked well in a crime drama environment.

Audience Feedback

I have collected the results from my audience feedback questionnaire below are the results.

Age

How would you rate my trailer?

This information tells me that the trailer was most popular to the age group 16-25 whereas most unpopular with the age group under 16. Both the age groups of 26-40 and 40+ are very similar in their rating of the trailer 26-40 gave two votes over the rating of 7 unlike 40+. This shows me that my trailer is most popular with young adults.

Having watched the trailer would you watch the full film?

This information shows a continuation with the rating of the trailer as the 16-25 age group is again the most positive age group.

Did you find the titles within the trailer to be similar to those in other film trailers?

This shows that the titles in my trailer went well with the audience. 

Audience feedback questionnaire

For my trailer feedback i have given out 30 questionnaires which i will use to review the success of the trailer.

Final trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j9mZ5-i0JE