Evaluation: How did you use media technologies in the contruction and research, planning and evaluation stages

Media technologies were a very important part of the research stage more than the planning, for each of my pieces. Using the website YouTube, i was able to download and post trailers of existing films of which i was going to analyse. YouTube is a site which can be regarded as both a film makers best friend and worst enemy. Because while a film maker can generate publicity and develop an advertising campaign on YouTube for a film to create hype and expectation, YouTube can also be used to post segments of the film on their, or even the entire film in small ten minute pieces. Despite this however YouTube can also house a lot of user generated content, bringing into the ideas of we media as it can be seen on their that people have created their own short films, animations and even written their own songs which have generated millions of hits on the site.

YouTube as a website served its uses for me in the research and evaluation stages as it allowed me to obtain the trailers that i want and download them allowing me to post them on the blog with my analysis, and it allowed me to upload my final piece onto YouTube to get more audience feedback from people.

The other huge Internet factors used throughout this course was of course the blog, which was where i have posted all my items for the world to see.

Another site which proved invaluable were IMDB (Internet movies database). IMDB proved a very useful sight in finding out information about the films which i was going to analyse in the research stage and helped me choose which film trailers to look at for ideas on the conventions on the trailers. IMDB also helped me find the posters which i was going to use as my style models for my finished piece.

Media technologies which were used not involving the Internet would be programs that were used for editing, these were Adobe Premiere Pro a video editing software and GIMP a photo shop style image editing software package.

Premiere pro served to be the primary tool used in the video editing as it provided all the necessary clip selection and arrangement options i needed to take the parts of my film from the raw footage and arrange them in the order of which i wanted them to be in.

GIMP provided the means of which i needed to edit the images, it uses all the features of Adobe photo shop it allowed me to cut out the foreground and background images from my original photos and paste them together into one image featuring customized text for the film title and tag lines.

Evaluation: What have I learned from my audience feedback

Due to the lack of posting during the course i did not receive much feedback from my posts, however after putting the video up onto YouTube i have had a few comments on there about the good features of the trailer and how it could be improved for next time.

While i did not receive much feedback, what i did receive was useful in identifying the good and the bad points of my main task and ancillary texts and show how they could be improved.

The comments which i did receive were mostly from my media class and other media students in the school who provided useful input and information about how my project was shaping up and what it was going to be in their minds.

During the planning stage for my trailer i posted a list of events which i wanted to happen during the trailer, i made the list as detailed as i could including the camera angles and speed of editing which i wanted to use. One of my friends, Ronan JD Sullivan commented on this post and told me his thoughts, he said "its really clear in my head how it all would look", he also made a suggestion that i "have the characters facing each other in a split clip". While i did not get to make a split clip for my final scene, i did take his comment and used it to expand upon my ideas and come up with a shorter trailer for easy editing.

The feedback that i received after posting all the pieces onto the blog allowed me to see what i had done wrong and how i could improve it for next time, or how it could have been edited to look better. The comments told me how i could improve the spacing on the poster, and how i could have used more sound effects on the trailer such as using a build up effect before the main title music set it.

Evaluation: How effective is the combination of the main product and the ancillary tasks

The combination of all three tasks was a very good one, they proved effective in reaching their audience of teenage viewers who need a laugh and like physical comedy. It is effective as the three tasks show consistency throughout the course.

An example of this consistency can be seen in the typeface that i used, called Agent Orange, i found it to be quite effective at showing a funnier side to the titles, the typeface used is a very important aspect of a trailer. Whereas a horror trailer may use a font which is worn down or bloody my trailer had to use one which could be associated with comedy.

Agent Orange is a 3D font which is can only be block filled red with the filling tool when it is used as an image, if it is coloured using the text colour it only outlines red. I was looking for one which resembled the font used in films such as "EPIC MOVIE" as that was a 3D one which looked comical. While Agent Orange did not match my needs perfectly it seemed to satisfy the one who saw it. The font was used consistently throughout the course in everything which was meant to be directly related to the films title such as the captions and titles in the trailer, the main title on the poster of "luggage boys" and the words "Luggage Boy" in the magazine front cover, or the title at the end of the trailer.

The audience are then able to make a connection between the main title which is written in Agent Orange and anything else written in the same font as being important to the plot i.e. the titles on the trailer "thrills" "spills etc.

Obviously i have used the main characters, Alex and Nathan, in all three of the pieces. They appear as the centre head of each of the pieces.

Evaluation: In what ways does your product use or challenge forms and conventions of real media products

With everything out of the way it is now time to finish and evaluate my current job thus far.

The genre which i chose to do for this course was one which i had not seen much of in the entire A2 exemplar work which i had seen on the OCR websites for good, high marked work. The horror genre which everyone else seems to have done was not what i wanted to do, it seemed too easy to as a horror trailer is a quite simple (no offense to those who did horror) trailer to make. While a horror trailer did seem like a good idea at first i decided that i wanted a challenge, i wanted to do a comedy film.

My media product i believe uses the forms and conventions of a comedy trailer quite well, it balances the values of quick comedic gags with a small amount of back story thrown in.

With one of the trailers which i analysed, Youth in Revolt, it showed a small piece of back story narrated over to provide the audience with a clear idea of what is going on, after the initial bombshell of why the characters motivations are revealed, the background music, which suits it perfectly, kicks in and the audience are shown a series of well timed and executed comedic acts to reel them in to watch the film.
My trailer follows the same style of their trailer by providing the audience with some clips from before the motivations are revealed with some captions and titles to inform the audience of what was going on, as in Youth in Revolt, once the bombshell has been dropped the music sets in and this is followed by a series of comedic gag which do not give away much about the plot and still keeps the audience entertained, in this way do i believe that my media trailer follows the conventions of a comedy film trailer.



The music that i used in my trailer i thought challenged the conventions of a comedy trailer, quite often in trailers you will get music which relates back to the plot line itself, going back to Youth in Revolt with Bon Jovi and You Give Love a Bad Name, it relates back to the ideas of having your heart broken and doing something about it.



In my trailer, i used a piece of music which does suit the comedy genre but it is a modern take on a classical piece. The Russian Dance from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker is a good piece of music to put fast physical comedy gags to and generally suits the comedy genre, unfortunately in modern times the classical music has gone out of fashion in trailers unless they are based in ancient wars or action films. Comedy trailers now tend to focus on music which relates back to the topic it is focusing on. I decided that my trailer would focus on the comedic gags more than the story and as such i needed to use a piece of music like the Russian Dance. Luckily i was able to find an uncopyrighted source who had remixed the song for a more modern era on the electric guitar which suited my trailer perfectly. So rather than have music which had a point, my background music was purely for comedic effect.

All three Final Pieces

While all three pieces are already on the blog i felt like it would be useful if they were all in one post together for any last minute comments

Magazine cover development and final piece

Once I had my style model for the film magazine and i knew what i was going to base my magazine off i had to use some more of the images i had captured during the filming of the trailer itself to create another photoshopped image to use on the front of my magazine.

These were the two images which would be the main building blocks of my magazine front cover. This cover would look more like a combination of both faces molded together into one, i.e. half of each of the characters faces would be put together and presented as one being on the front of the magazine despite it looking like two different people.

This would involve using the GIMP software again in order to get the cutouts of both faces and fuse them together onto the same canvas much like the last one. The image fusing process did not take very long and was very simple to do, after a few text adjustments with the font "agent orange" eventually the two became one and gave way into the image below.

This image would then be added onto a balnk publication in the program publisher and used as part of a magazine front cover, the tagline reads "there can be only one..." parodying the highlander tagline for comedic effect.

The magazine was laid out in publisher for the images and text to all be added to later on, the magazine itself would be called "FILM ROULETTE" as it suggests that it deals with all sorts of films be the the high winners such as Avatar or the low loosers such as Clash of the Titans.

After looking extensivly at many different varients of the Empire magazine i determined that the best way to lay the magazine out would be to have small section at the top for the magazines selling line, date and price. The main section would house the magazine title and main film story and then have a small bit at the bottom with 2 or 3 smaller stories to take up space. All the images used in the magazine were manipulated in some way to make them my own.

What follows is the magazine itself.

The Magazine uses the white background effectively by making use of the black and red text, with the fade in effect at the bottom from where the smaller stories are. All the smaller stories are then housed in a cartoon film reel strip in each of the frames.

Although the title of the film is Luggage Boys, the tagline says "there can be only one", therefore it is only logical there can only be one Luggage Boy. The magazine is not advertising the film directly, it is hosting an interview with the stars of the film and the fact that the two have fused into one backs up the statement "there can be only one....LUGGAGE BOY"

Film Magazine analysis

The film magazine which i am going to be analysing is an issue of the magazine Empire, which primarly focuses on new films which have just been released or hot new titles which the magazine thinks will get their readers interested. It is a good example as it is one of the only magazines focuses on everything in the cinema from British cinema to Bollywood, there is something for every film lover in that magazine.



The main image is pulled into focus and is considered a higher priority than the title to the reader as the main image of the film sin city serves to block out part of the title for the magazine, it makes good use of the image which it has obtained by blowing it up to make it stand out and not allowing it to be dwarfed even by its own title.

It uses big bold text in order to grab the readers eye and puts it in white to make it stand out fromt he rest of the magazine. The title however is in the signature red of Empire which is an eye grabbing colour on almost any background, this is a good move especially on colours such as dark blue, black or white because the colour really stands out and speaks the the audience about what is being advertised e.g. as shown here it is a dark blue with the red title suggests a film which is quite action packed and possibly thriller in some parts, as does with a white background it would suggest something calming and possibly funny.

Another point i quite like about Empire is that it does not just devote an entire front page just to one fiom, it does split the page, allbeit a little unfairly, but it uses a comical film reel to place images of other films and stories to use later on the magazine, this is a feature which i plan on using on my magazine as it would allow for more films to be advertised on the front page of my magazine cover.