Evaluation Question 4

In what ways does your media product challenge the codes and conventions of real media products? 

My media products challenge the codes and conventions of real media products through things like sound, house styles and research. 

To begin with I had to look at the codes and conventions of real media products. I looked at trailers for films such as ‘Don’t Breathe’ and analysed them frame by frame in order to see what types of shots films use and how they are edited together. 

My product replicated some of these shots, but it also challenged them too. For example, on my final teaser poster the names of the cast were at the top which is unusual for a film with a cast that aren’t big hollywood stars. I chose to include the names on my poster because as a low budget independent horror the names of the stars will be known within the ‘indie’ community. This can be applied to Dyer’s star theory as the image of a star is often what makes the star, rather than the actual person. This means fans of these actors and actresses would be drawn to see the film purely because of the names of the stars in the film. 

Another way I challenged the conventions of real media products is through the use of a female lead. Many big films have a male with predominantly more screen time than a female lead, whereas my film has a female lead character with the most screen time in the whole trailer. In fact, males are used very sparingly in this trailer which is quite against the norm for a film, although I find it more fitting of a low budget film because indie films often subvert many hollywood stereotypes and usually have a much more complex and daring storyline rather than sticking to the hollywood norms that always make big money.  

In order to create my teaser poster I had to wait for the right opportunity, and I found a location with strong lighting, which I needed in order to create a silhouette. The test shots I took were in fact exactly the kind of pictures I was looking for when creating my teaser poster, so I used these images for the poster. This challenges the forms and conventions of a real media production as no media production would use their test shots for their teaser poster unless there was an extremely good reason for this. 

Evaluation Question 3

How did you use your media technology throughout?

In order to create an effective promotional package we had to have good hardware and software in order to make it to the most professional standard possible with no budget at all. 

The first, and arguably most important, was the Apple Mac that I used to create my final products. This came in handy for initial research which was done through the built in web browser Safari. To present the research I used programmes such as Microsoft Word, Pages, Keynote and Microsoft Powerpoint. 

I also used a Canon Digital SLR to film a major portion of my film trailer. This worked well because a tripod could be attached to the bottom for filming which allowed smooth, clean shots that didn’t contain any visible shaking or rattling. 

For another portion of my filming, as well as to take photos for my teaser poster and magazine front cover was an iPhone 6s. Although the first thoughts about shooting a film or tv show on a mobile phone would be that it would look amateur, but Apple itself has been running a competition for the last few years that sees amateur film makers shooting entire films on their iPhones and it has been very successful. The iPhone 6s was one of the first iPhones with the ability to shoot in 4K resolution, which is a higher resolution than even the Canon SLR that was used can even film in. The results were effective for the images and videos that I wished to take and overall I would say that the iPhone provided a shooting experience on par with the Digital SLR camera that we also used. The iPhone provided better low light shots than the camera and was used for the portions of the trailer that were filmed outdoors. 

Photoshop was a very important aspect of my promotional package creation. Photoshop was used exclusively to create the teaser poster and magazine front cover. Photoshop proved to be a very important because of the wide range of image manipulation tools available, for instance, the teaser poster didn’t look threatening enough to me in it’s original form so I changed the saturation, image colours and the shadows etc. in order to create a much more intimidating presence. For the magazine cover I used photoshop to remove the background so that my model was stood against a purely white background, I also used it to create the masthead for my magazine front cover as well as all the cover-lines and other elements that made up the magazine front cover. 

Final Cut Pro was the final piece of media technology that was used. This was used to cut the clips and arrange them into the right order. This is a professional movie studio editing software so it was extremely effective in delivering a professional looking result for my movie trailer. There are many text effects that work extremely well with the trailer, as well as good uses of video effects that make shots more visually appealing to the audiences. Final Cut Pro is an extremely powerful editing suite and I learned a lot about the process of video editing from using it. 

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 1