A2 Media studies : April 2017

Transcript:

In what ways does your media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media product.

Conventions of real horror teaser are embedded in our media product; to make the media product realistic and entertaining for the target audience.

Firstly, the title of any horror film discloses much of the plot. For example, in the film ‘Forest’, the characters went in the ‘forest’ where the story began and ended, as it took the role of an antagonist. Even in other horror film: ‘The Conjuring’, ‘Poltergeist’, ‘The Cabin in the Woods’, all these films was based around the concept what their title displayed. In our case, we implied the same concept as our film is called ‘Cursed’, which conveys the film is about the protagonist being cursed and vice versa. The title of a film is certainly important because it is a way of revealing the plot to the audience as well as, determining the first impression towards the audience because if a title is catchy and interesting the film will effortlessly attracts the audiences.

Furthermore, the location used in our media product is a forestry place, conforming to the location of real media products. This is because films are usually based either inside a house or outside in an isolated area such as a forest, graveyard or dark road. In a film ‘The Orphanage’ (2008), its main location is the orphanage, which was isolated from the civilised society. ‘The forest’ is a film based in a remote forest. This kind of locations connote to the feeling of the characters in the film, like the protagonist or the antagonist’s feeling of being deserted or lonely. As our media product is also located in a typical setting of the forest. The main reason behind this idea is to create an eerie setting for the scenes in the film; the natural lighting will also be dark as a result of the trees blocking the sunlight making it possible to film during the day time. Majority of the horror films are located inside a haunted building, however there are only few film whose main setting is based outside like ‘The Blair Witch Project’ or ‘The Forest’. Thus, we are able to challenge the convention of horror film constantly being set inside a run down and sinister buildings. Moreover, the setting used for our media product helps to clearly deliver any bizarre or unexpected situations. For example, in the media product it contained some scenes of the protagonist running in the forest making the character look vulnerable and defenceless. These scenes are put together in a montage to build tension by making the audience feel anxious of how the protagonist might get caught or foreshadowing that something is going to happen. Most teasers start with an establishing shot of their main setting to make the audience aware that the place is special and most important scenes will take part in that location. An establishing shot is also included in the media product as a way of showing the audience the main location and to start the teaser with a chilling start because the establishing shot is of a dark and mysterious forest, which will engross the audience from the beginning.

The media product does not contain any male character, which challenges the convention of a horror film due to the fact that most female characters rely on the male characters and during the absence of the male character they use phallic symbol to protect themselves, for example in ‘Friday the 13^th’ a female character uses a weapon to protect herself as there was no presence of a male character. Even though, the protagonist is portrayed as fragile and incapable of fighting back, she is ‘the final girl’ (Clover) and the protagonist, which subverts from the stereotype of how only male characters are presented as the protagonist.

Finally, in terms of mise-en-scene the media product has used props that are conventional of a horror film such props are blood and the use of dark costumes. The blood is used to connote danger and vulnerability towards the character who has been hurt, in this case the protagonist. In the film ‘The Taxes Chainsaw Massacre’ a lot of blood was used to make the audience feel uncomfortable and frightened for the character but can also be perceived as sadistic voyeurism as some audience will enjoy the violence and the character being murdered. The costumes used for the antagonist is dark to connote evil and portray sinister vibe to make the audience feel hatred and fear the evil spirit.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text?

The ancillary text consists of magazine front cover and film poster. For these two ancillary texts, my original plan was to get images off the teaser trailer but wasn’t promoting the film as it wasn’t suitable for these texts, especially in terms of quality and professionalism. Therefore, this led us to set up a photo shoot, which allowed me to have a variety of high quality images with different angles and characters. I used images of antagonist for both of the text, and I came to this decision through my research as most of the magazine front cover and film poster contained the texts’ antagonist to as this would be more effective to attract the targeted audience rather than the use of protagonist. Few examples are ‘Empire’ promoted ‘The dark knight’ through the use of Joker, a classic film is ‘Psycho’ were they have also used the antagonist to promote the film. A film poster also mostly uses antagonist or the protagonist’s anxious facial expression with sinister symbols and shadows at the background.

When my teaser trailer is combined with the ancillary texts it is very effective as the ancillary texts have successfully portrayed the conventions of horror film to attract the target audience. The use of antagonist as the main model for both the text has allowed it to have an eerie atmosphere and make the overall media product effective and professional through the different effects used in the media product. My magazine cover’s main image is shot through b a low angle to portray the characters’ dominance and the effect of having a cracked skin is also added to make the overall image unpleasant. These effects allow the images to have a link with the teaser trailer because of its disturbing storyline. Moreover, the font styles are bold to make it masculine to match the teaser trailers’ standard of terrifying storyline. Also the title of the film is distorted establishing convention of a horror genre. In addition, my teaser trailer contains similar bold font style constructing similarities between the two texts. However, there are some flaws in the magazine cover as the main image doesn’t look as frightening as I wanted to. This could be a result of not adding any effect in the eyes as I added for the poster. But most horror films’ magazine covers do not have too much of an intimidating main image, it could be because magazine covers contains additional cover lines such as adverts, interviews, sky lines, master head and many more. Therefore, to make sure all these elements are blended together the main image shouldn’t be exaggerated as much as it should in the poster. This magazine cover is able to complement the teaser trailer as it successfully reflects on the story portrayed in the teaser trailer.

My posters’ main image has a dispersion effect around the image to make the face stand out; this places great empathises on the sinister facial expression. This expression is strengthened through the effect of making the eyes all black, which represents evilness and danger, also small white reflection is added to allow the eyes to look more realistic and make the eye balls have a round shape instead of it the boring flat looking image. The texts contained in the poster are quite bold with additional cracking effect for the title for the film. This allows the poster to relate with the magazine cover as well as the trailer itself. In all these media text the film titles’ colour is white making each other link with one another and the consistency of using white could be a way of representing the film itself.

These promotional package acts as synergy to effectively attract my targeted audience. This is because the promotional package is promoted across cross media platform, allowing the audience to easily access the product, especially as a result of technological convergence.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

As I was unsure as to what kind of font and images to add to the print media products, I carried out a survey to gain market research feedback. This allowed me to gain some ideas of what is appealing to my target audience, leading my ancillary text to contain specific elements. Some ideas were to have the antagonist as the main image for both texts and the bold title. These data helped me find the target audiences’ likes and dislikes in media text, which meant I would mostly be adding what the audience found the most appealing to make my media text meet customer satisfaction. Moreover, for the teaser trailer the data highly recommended to include montage and slow motion scenes. We made sure these factors were in our teaser trailer, which gained positive audience feedback. These feedback links with the uses and gratification theory because such features promote entertainment, which meets the audience’s needs.

After finishing our rough cut we showed it to a group of teenagers who were classified in our targeted group. The feedbacks were positive and negative, which encouraged us to make some changes in the sound by increasing the volume of background music, to build tension and allow some scenes to become more disturbing than before.

After the scenes were edited according to the intended narrative structure, it was shown to another set of audience, who ranged in the category of our target audience. Their feedbacks were to amend the size and speed of the text in our teaser trailer. By making use of this feedback, we made the fonts bigger and the speed was slowed to make sure the audience were able to read it properly in the time given. Also, we expanded on this by making the font size the same when beginning and ending for each text when it zoomed in to have consistency throughout the teaser trailer.

Our teaser trailer was further shown to our teacher, a real producer and real editor. They gave us additional feedback to improve the teaser trailer. Some feedbacks were the background sound didn’t allow the next scene to flow as the duration was till the end of the scene. So we made the duration longer and added a sound transition of fading out which extended to the next scene to make the two scenes flow together. When the protagonist was screaming her voice wasn’t loud enough thus we added sound effect by making the scream louder. Also, before we had an effect of losing signal which was taken out as it wasn’t able to associate with rest of the scenes which took place in the forest. After removing the effect we made different scenes have a glitch effect and adding transition of addictive dissolve to make it flow smoothly. We also added a symbol of death during the scene where the protagonist was hugging her knee, which didn’t blend well with the main scene, therefore had to be taken out. By taking in account of all these feedback we were able to improve our teaser trailer drastically making it look appealing to the target audience as well as professional.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stage?

Technological convergence played a huge role during the construction and research stage, as the use of social media such as ‘Instagram’ and ‘Tumbler’ was quite useful to gain ideas for different effects used in the magazine cover, and poster. For the teaser trailer, YouTube is where we gained our inspiration by watching teaser for horror films such as the ‘Forest’, ‘Insidious’ and many more. YouTube was one of the most important media technology which helped me throughout the process of constructing all the media text because when I wasn’t sure of how certain things worked in software such as ‘Adobe Premiere Pro’ for the teaser trailer and ‘Photoshop’, which was the first time using it to construct print media and film title for teaser trailer, whose problem was solved through YouTube tutorials. Google was used for the majority of the time to search for information on different effects that could be used for the media text and for mood board, which helped influence different ideas for my media text.

For editing we used two different software, for the montage we used ‘IMovie’ because IMovie was easier and we did experiment to discovery if there was much difference between the two software. ‘Premiere pro’ was used for the rest of the teaser trailer because it was much more sophisticated due to its variety of effects. We imported copyright free sound tracks but also recorder our voice form the ‘voice recorder’ for breathing sound and when calling Lucy’s name.

I have used a blog to upload all the research, planning, evaluation and the media text. In the blog I have used different websites to upload information. I have mostly used ‘Prezi’, ‘Slideshare’ and ‘daily motion’, especially for presentations and research but also uploaded through the normal blog post.

Finally, we have used YouTube to upload our teaser trailer to post it in our blog and for the evaluation I am using Premiere Pro to create a video and publish it in the blog.