Evaluation Question 1

Iconography: We challenged typical horror iconography such as using typical murder weapons, for example knives, by using our own kind of murder weapons, such as broken drum sticks and guitar leads, which also symbolizes our themes. We thought by challenging these conventions of horror, we would be able to have this as a unique selling point.

Protagonist: In a lot of horror films villains are the protagonists, through the use of enigma codes, the protagonists are often kept hidden in trailers. An example of this is saw. Our trailer also makes our villain look big and blacked out, even though saw itself doesn’t do this, a lot of other horror films do, for example Halloween.

Sound: The non-diagetic use of sound in our trailer, adheres to typical horror trailers, this is used to create a tense atmosphere, which is typical to the horror genre. The soundtrack we chose is used to go with fast pace shots, so that the tempo of the trailer would be fast, which is also a convention of horror trailers, we see this in trailers such as Friday the 13^th, Halloween and I spit on your grave.

Setting: We chose to shoot most of our scenes in the void, we thought that the void would be good because it adheres to conventions of trailer because it is shot in a place that is far away from society, which bring up themes such as isolation. This is done because it makes the audience feel as though they’re not in touch with the real world, examples of this are not only from recent films, such as Friday the 13^th, but also from older horror films such as Psycho and The Shining.

Stock characters: our trailer challenges burtons theory as we do not have all the usual stock characters that are shown in most horror films, for example, our trailer doesn’t have a jock and popular girl, we chose to challenge the conventions of a horror trailer because these characters are primarily used in American films. Our trailer, however, does adhere to mulveys male gaze, this happens when we see the girl who is about to get killed looking vulnerable and maybe slightly under-cloathed. We chose to do this because our target audience was made up of mostly makes and we thought this would help promote or sell our trailer.

Themes: The main themes are shown through binary opposites, such as success vs failure. These are clearly shown in our trailer with the x-factor like footage and which is also shown through our tagline “if you can’t be famous, be infamous”

Evaluation question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

iMovie
iMovie is where the whole editing process took place. Here we were able to crop clips, add sound to our trailer and use titles. I thought that using iMovie took a couple of hours to get the hang of, but after getting the hang of it, it became useful. We had a few challenges during the editing process, such as actually developing our trailer to tell a story. We had to discard the first edit of our trailer because of this, however, after many hours of hard work, we managed to make a trailer that not only we were happy with but actually told a story and had conventions of trailers.

Blogger
I used blogger throughout the whole course, primarily to show the different stages I had to go through to be able to make the final trailer. On blogger, I developed my ways of expressing my work, for example, use of slideshare, soundcloud, hyperlinks, images and scribd. Using various ways of expressing my work, shows that I have developed my skills in using digital technologies.

Garageband

I used garageband automation to manipulate frequency levels of a song used in our trailer. Research in to automation allowed me to develop my skills in garageband, which meant I was able to quickly change mood and atmosphere in my trailer. For example, in a murder scene, the diagetic sound is made to sound as if it is non-diagetic, I was able to do this through maniuplating frequency levels in garageband.

Photoshop
Photoshop was one of the main digital technologies used. We used it to create our logo, production comany, magazine and poster. During our AS course we were required to create a music magazine cover, contents page and double page feature article using photoshop the skills learnt were vary basic and were simply introducing us to the programme due to myself and many of my other classmates not having any previous experience with the programme. However, during our A2 course we were required to produce a magazine front cover and a film poster using photoshop. My previous skills were used and developed in terms of using more layer styles to create a more professional look, manipulating layers by changing the colour levels, changing the brighness, huge etc and finallly extracting and adding a series of images to my final product. 






From these skills we were able to create these: 

Slideshare
Slideshare has enabled me to express powerpoints I have made in an advanced way on my blog.

Examples of me using slideshare in my blog:

Celtx
Before this year, I had never heard of celtx and had no idea how to use it. We had a lesson in school where we were to features of celtx and how we should use it to create our screen plays. Celtx was key prior to the filming process, it enabled us to do risk assessments, production schedule, screen play etc. Celtx is used in the professional industry to create screen plays. 

Camera work

At AS we had very basic knowledge of using a camera; any experience we had was probably from using our phones, therefore, during our prelim task, footage that was shot wasn't of the highest quality. At A2, we had more advanced cameras, allowing us to capture more professional shots. We were able to do this by being taught how to properly use a camera, for example, we were taught how to use focus, zoom and that we had to pay more attention to appeture and the lighting around us. This shows that we went from a very basic knowledge of camera work, to a much more advanced level, this was shwon through our trailer.

Evaluation question 3: What have you learned from audience feedback?

Audience feedback

This is an award we recieved from channel 4 for the most original sound effects.

What I have learnt from audience feedback: 

• Our trailer could be improved by using a wider variety of shot types, for example, shot reverse shot during conversation. 
• Sound was used very well in our trailer.
• Our trailer could be improved by making it clearer what the trailer is actually about, however, I also have learnt that we used titles well to tell the story.
• We could improve our shot transitions during the editing process.
• Our characters are developed well, therefore appealing more to a target audience.

All in all, I have learnt that our trailer could be improved in many ways, but we had good editing, it was shot well and sound was used very well.

Some feedback from facebook 

Whilst making our trailer, we were getting feedback from friends to see if the plot to our trailer actually made sense or if anything needed to be done to improve it. At first our audience told us that it looked good but the plot wasn't clear, from this we learnt that we had to go back and develop the plot more through a few extra shots and more titling. After we did this we showed it to them again to see if the plot had been developed, they told us that the titles worked really well to tell the story and were used well. This audience feedback taught me how it's possible to tell a story not only through shots, but also through titling. Furthermore, we were told that the music was used very well to create an atmosphere and to increase the tempo of the trailer.

After getting audience from the people from channel 4 and from  younger age group, such as mine, I have learnt that our trailer is more suitable for the younger age group. This can be taken as good and bad, our main target audience was for 15-25 year olds, so our trailer did appeal to our target audience, but it would've been nice to have had a wider variety.

Some people weren't able to tell what some of our characters roles were, for example the girl who gets killed, people weren't able to understand why she was in the trailer. After watching it a few times, i've realised that it actually isn't very clear on who she is. I learnt that every character who is shown in a trailer has to be introduced in one way or another and she wasn't, next time I would be more clear on who the character is and what her actual role is.

Evaluation question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The font of our logo has been kept consistent so that it becomes more recognisable to our target audience; the magazine, poster and trailer all have the same logo. Our magazine uses a different font, the purpose of this is because the magazine is independent from the trailer; the magazine is used to advertise our trailer. The image on our poster is also the last shot that we use, this image is linked to our target audience which is teenagers (mostly boys). We purposefully adehered to mulverys male gaze theory, as we thought it would help promote our trailer. The setting and colours used in our poster are certainly represantative of horror; the setting is in a dark area, which also creates a sense of mystery, but mostly frightens the audience. Also our title is red and black which are the most common used colour of fonts for horror titles. We did consider using iconography in our poster, however we decided that the image of a vulnerable girl would be better for promotion. We did, however, use the main horror iconography in our magazine; a mask. Our unique selling points weren't used effectively in our magazine and poster. Looking back now, maybe we should've used our USP's  more in our poster and magazine, however, we have used a lot of enigma codes, which also effectively intrigue the audience. In our poster, the themes are hinted at through the sub-heading 'If you cant be famous, be infamous' this hints at theme success vs failure. This can be used well to promote our trailer.

Death Jam: Official trailer

Magazine: Final draft

Our magazine was based on the famous magazines 'Empire' & 'Total Film'. The magazines purpose is to reach out to a wider audience. We used the typical codes and conventions to do this. 

Filming day 7

Today was our last filming day. We managed to finish everything that was needed to do. Today's filming day may have been the most important, because the scene that was filmed today will be the scene that sets the tone and atmosphere in our trailer. The filming took place at Angelia's house, we filmed a scene of a phone conversation between me and sekander.