Rachael's Evaluation

For my media project I worked in a group of two with a girl called Lauren Crook to produce a teaser trailer for a film. We gave an equal contribution to the entire project and both took part in the planning, filming and editing of out project so that we gained equal experience with everything we used. The final product we produced was a teaser trailer for a film called ‘Emissary’ and also a film poster and the cover of a magazine featuring an interview with our films star.

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

The genre of our teaser trailer is action adventure which is a very popular genre with audiences. 16 of the top 20 best selling films of all time fall into the action adventure genre which shows this genre also appeals to our target audience as they are the main cinema goers so are going to watch more action adventure films. The conventions of the action adventure genre which we have featured in our teaser trailer are fight scenes, special effects, heroes and villains, weapons and stunts. We were particularly inspired by the films Catwoman and Charlie's angels. This is because both of these films follow the same genre of our film and their main protagonists are female as ours is.




It was vital to use these typical elements so the genre of our film could be established in our teaser trailer and so that the right audience was attracted to our film. Our teaser trailer also falls into the sub-genre of a spy film as the protagonist works for MI5 and the plot is centred around a mission she has. Our film is a twist on the typical action adventure film as the protagonist is female who is very independent and sassy and the lead part is usually played by a male. Also, females are usually depicted in films as the ‘damsel in distress’ who needs to be saved. Or according to Propp there is a ‘princess’ who is the reward, which is usually a woman. This provides the audience with the “same but different” – Nick Lacey. Bringing something new to a genre has to be done so that the audience doesn’t become bored with seeing the same thing over and over again. Our film has used the typical conventions of a teaser trailer as it raises awareness for the film and builds up expectations. It also ends with the phrase ‘coming soon’ which is usually featured in a teaser trailer as it is made a long time before a film is set to be released, or sometimes even whilst a film is still being made. Our poster and film magazine also raise awareness about the film and so fulfil the requirements of these products. Our film magazine also includes our actress on the front to increase sales as the stars of films are usually admired and aspired to. Our actress is also featured on the front as the cover is the main advertisement for a magazine and represents the film as a whole. The film poster again usually shows a films protagonist in order to get across a brand image and build excitement for a film.

These are some shots which I have chosen from our final teaser trailer which I think work particularly well.
1 - This shot is used to establish our character who obviously takes care of her appearance as she is putting make up. Only her eye can be seen and at the beginning to make her seem more mysterious. There is also some shots of her getting ready and putting lipstick on. This makes the audience want to watch on as they want to find out who this woman is. There is also a shot of her putting a knife in her shoe making her seem dangerous and also quite sassy. At the beginning, there is also a shot of a car skidding which establishes the genre as cars are used a lot in action adventure and spy films.
2 - This shot fully establishes our character as the camera tracks up her as she gets out of a car. Now the audience know who she is they still want to know more about her from this point. She also looks very dangerous and seductive which is what her character is about. She is also wearing her red lipstick, which is her signature look which is consistent throughout our branding campaign.
3 - This shot was taken from a roof and is at a low angle, making the actress look more powerful and dominating.
4 - In this shot, we tracked around Grace (our actress) as she was tied up to emphasize the fact she is in trouble and also create a more disorientating feel.
5 - This is a fight scene, which there are quite a few of in the teaser trailer, to emphasize the genre and create more of a fast pace. In the fight scenes we used green screening which works quite well.
6 - This shot is of a man carrying a briefcase, which creates enigmas as there are quite a few shots of it and the audience want to know what is inside. This would be answered if people go and watch the film.
7 - Grace looks very strong and dominating in this shot as it is straight on and the camera is looking right down the barrel of the gun. This shot creates more enigma's making people want to watch the film more.
8 - In this shot our actress looks straight into the camera and looks very worried, which creates more enigmas as the audience want to know why. This is the last shot used before the title screen appears which gives a feeling that a bomb is about to go off, through the use of the countdown clock from the beginning reaching one.
9 - This is the coming soon title which is typical of a teaser trailer as it raises awareness for the film and often released before a release date is known.
10 - This is the countdown clock which is used in flashes throughout our trailer to show that our actress is against the clock and create more of a fast exciting pace.

2. How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary texts?

Branding is very important as it is used to advertise a film. Through Branding you create an image which links the audience to the film. This image is repeated so that audiences have it fixed in their minds. To create a successful brand it needs to be consistent throughout the range of products we are promoting. Branding is about creating an image that people link to a particular type of product. Our main brand image is promoting strong, independent women which is very consistent throughout all of our products. Our film logo is the word ‘Emissary’ in white capitals. However we highlighted the word ‘Miss’ in red, implying that the protagonist in the film is female and also the colour red has the connotations of danger and also passion which is the brand image we wanted to create as our lead actress is dangerous but also quite seductive. This brand image is portrayed throughout our products as in the teaser trailer our actress is wearing red lipstick all the time which keeps the same connotations, she also uses a gun and there are fight scenes. The countdown we have used in the teaser trailer is also in a red font and the final title is keeping with the red and black colour scheme. Our poster again uses the same colour scheme of red, white and black and the only colour in the image is the actresses red lips to show her independence but also how sassy she is. Her gun can also be seen very clearly, again implying danger. The film magazine keeps the same colour scheme again, but the actress is wearing her own clothes as she is doing an interview about the film but she is still standing quite independently and the red around her give the same brand image as the poster and teaser trailer. We decided our film would be more suited to a Hollywood film as they make a lot of action adventure films, unlike British films which tend to focus more on social realism. Hollywood films also use a lot of special effects and the classical narrative system, like our film. The media institution which we believe would distribute our film is 20th century fox as they have produced films such as X-men and Elektra which fit into the same genre as our own film. Brands work because they turn a product into something unique and special and people can relate to it, and I believe our film brand image does this well.

This is the teaser trailer and poster for x men 3-the last stand. This film is also made by the institution 20th Century Fox and it is of a similar genre to our own film. The poster is similar to our own as it contains the main protagonist, Wolverine as the main focus of the image. However, we can only see his claw hand with 3 claws, signifying the third film. But this film is well established unlike our own film so a hand and an X in the background can easily show that this is the third X men film. The release date is also at the bottom, like our poster. The teaser trailer is very similar to our own as it is very fast paced and shows highlights from the film to establish the genre and brand image. It also contains a lot of action scenes and fighting and the film logo at the end, as our own teaser trailer does.

3.What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We decided our target audience would be young adults of around 16-25 as these are the main cinema goers and we feel our film would be more suited to this age group. As most of the top grossing films are action adventure and this is the age group which most go to the cinema, this must be a popular genre with 16-25 year olds. We also aimed our product mainly at females as the main protagonist is a female who is very strong and independent, however it also appeals to men through our genre. Our product is aimed at all classes and races and using Young and Rubicon’s audience theory our target audience is mainstreamers which are the largest section of the market. Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs our product will give a feeling of self actualization and also let people escape from their everyday lives and also feel like they know the characters. Our film would also have a secondary audience of families and children like exciting, cheesy films and adults also find action adventure films exciting so this audience would also like our film.

We asked people from our target audience to fill in a questionnaire after watching our teaser trailer and also our poster and magazine cover and these were the results of what people said.

From these marks it seems that our product was very well recieved with most people giving all of our products at least an 8. Our poster was even given 2 10's showing that people from our target audience understand and would go and see our film and our products have the correct functions and brand image.

From this audience feedback we can see what has worked well in our teaser trailer, such as the conventions we had included for the action adventure/spy genre, things like cars and fighting. People also liked the realistic fighting and the countdown clock adding a fast paced element. People thought the green screen could have been better but to perfect this a much higher budget than what we had would have been needed.

These are some examples of the questionnaires we gave out during our audience feedback and we had some very positive comments. People said they liked the fast pace to the teaser trailer and also the way our actress looks into the camera at the end to establish the main character, which is very typical in film trailers.The second questionnaire was regarding our ancillary tasks, our film poster and magazine. We again had some positive comments about these with people saying they were very typical of a poster and magazine by grabbing your attention and having the films protagonist as the main focus. People said the poster was slightly pixelated but this was because of all the effects we had put on the image to just have her lips in red. People also said they can clearly see the brand image of an independent, sassy female from the way she is standing, the use of the gun and her red lips standing out.

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

The first computer website which we used in the research and planning stages of our project was the website www.blogger.com which allowed us to post everything we were planning on doing and making us able to look back upon it when constructing our media product. It is also useful for documenting everything which inspired us or anything used in the construction of our project. It is also possible for videos and photos to be uploaded giving more of a visual connection. However it did take a very long time for videos to be uploaded and it was difficult to edit your blog posts. The post you create also looks different on the actual page, sometimes making it difficult to follow. It is also not possible for music files to be uploaded to a blog, so instead it took us a while to have to put them into iMovie. Other websites which were used in our planning and construction were www.youtube.com in order to find relevant teaser trailers for inspiration. We also used youtube to upload our final teaser trailer onto our blog we were having difficulties uploading it straight from our computer, so putting it onto youtube first made the process quicker. We also used www.google.com quite a lot in order to find branding campaigns for films and also for finding backgrounds to use on our green screening. We also used this website to find other suitable research from other websites. We also looked on some music download websites to try to find a song for our teaser trailer but found it difficult to find anything. To find some fonts to use for our film logo and ancillary tasks we looked on the website www.dafont.com which is full of lots of different fonts in different categories, however it does take a while to find the one you are looking for. We found a font called ‘Sansation’ to use for our logo and one called ‘digital 7’ to use in our teaser trailer as the countdown clock and also on our poster. For our magazine we took inspiration for total film and used quite slim capitals for our fonts. We found 2 to use called ‘Walkway’ and ‘Old sans Black.’ We also used the website www.IMDB.com in order to find research on inspirational films such as Charlie’s angels and X-men.
When selecting our music we listened to some CD’s using iTunes which was very easy to use and found some songs we wanted to put onto our blog. In order to do this we had to upload the songs onto the computer programme iMovie and then add the title of the song so people knew what it was called. It was then in the suitable format to be able to upload it to our blog. When constructing our teaser trailer we used a DV camera and also a tripod to make our shots smoother. The cameras are very compact making them easy to film with, and from lots of different angles. All the sound recorded also can be heard very well, but we did not use any diegetic sound in our teaser trailer, just the soundtrack. However the footage looks quite grainy and a lot of shots are not very well lit so some of the shots we did at night are quite hard to see. Lighting was also a problem for when we used green screening as some of the green was still left in the background when it came to editing so we had to increase the softness of the background, leaving a bright blur around the actresses we used with green screening and also making the background a bit distorted. This could not be helped as we did not have the correct lighting equipment needed to create good green screening. We also used a Lumix digital stills camera to take photos for our poster and film magazine. These pictures came out well but are a bit pixelated on our final pieces. We also used the digital camera to take some pictures to use as a background for our green screen looking over a city at night. These pictures again came out well but I would have liked if the camera could zoom in more so I could have got a better view.

To enhance our photographs we used the programme Photoshop. I have used this programme before so knew the basics of how to use it but this experience enhanced them. For our poster we wanted to have the only colour in the image we used to be her red lips and so we used a de-saturation filter and rubbed out the saturation on her lips, making this the only colour in the image. I liked how this turned out as it gave the poster a ‘sin city’ feel and it looked even better when we highly saturated the image to make her lips stand out. When we had done this we thought the roof around our actress didn’t look right and so we used one of the pictures from the city view at night as the background instead. To do this I used the lasso tool to cut around Grace our actress and copied and pasted this image onto the night time background. This looked a lot better and also keeping the background in colour works well. For our film magazine we did something similar but I cut around Grace and placed the image onto a white background making it look like a studio shot. When trying to find the total film logo for our magazine the only one we could find was very pixelated and so using Photoshop we used the lasso tool to cut around the logo, allowing us to recreate it, but not pixelised. Photoshop is very complicated unless you know how to use it and we maybe could have made our images look better if the programme wasn’t so difficult to use. To put our poster and magazine together we used the programme InDesign which allowed us to create a very realistic looking magazine and poster. I already had some experience with InDesign and it is fairly easy to use, however some of your pictures can look pixelated if they are not the right size and they have to be resized using another programme which is quite tedious.

Final Cut Express majorly helped us when creating our teaser trailer as it allowed us to place all of our footage together and there were lots of different effects and techniques which were used to enhance our work. For example we used the ‘Chroma Keyer’ effect to use our green screen and also the ‘Matte Choker’ to soften the edges around our actors on the green screen. As we had a low budget we couldn't light our green screening properly but some of the effects you could use on final cut express like the ones above really helped us to use the footage we had to its full potential so final cut express helped a lot here. To create the green screen we had to place our clip over a background and click it using the chroma keyer so it started to cut away at the image. But it didn't get rid of all of it due to our poor lighting, so we had to use more of the options on the chroma keyer to get rid of as much as the green screen as possible and remove some of the grain around the image. It is also very easy to organize your footage and cut out the bits you don't need. You could also zoom into your clips and cut out parts around the edge you didn't want. This helped a lot when using our green screen as you could still see some of the outside wall on our footage. Some of the darker clips could also be brightened so they could be seen better. We also used fade effects on some of our transitions like for example the transition from the title to the coming soon. We also used colour grading to make our footage look less grainy and to give it more of a ‘Hollywood’ feel. A negative point to Final Cut Express is that if you want to move some clips around to see how they would look in different places, it cuts the clips that you place it over instead of moving them along so you have to keep moving the clips to fit them in. Also, things can look different in the browser and the viewer which can become quite confusing. Also, when we were trying to create the numbers for our countdown they wouldn't go where we wanted them to so we had to make them using Photoshop, however when we put them into Final Cut Express they were very easy to move around and change the size of.

5. Conclusion

Overall, I believe our products have turned out very well. Lauren and I both contributed equally to all of the parts of research, planning and construction and I believe we have created a teaser trailer which is very close to a real product. I believe Lauren was very good at coming up with ideas and I was good at the more technical side of things, such as editing and using Photoshop. I believe our filming schedule could have been a bit more organised as we had to keep cancelling and rescheduling due to people not being available to shoot. But apart from this I believe everything went very well. Our teaser trailer works well at raising awareness for the film and I particularly like the shots on the roof and the shot tracking around Grace tied up. I also like the clock counting down as it creates a very tense, fast paced feel. Due to a low budget, we didn't have the funds to use proper lighting equipment for our green screening. But we wanted to try something different and I think it still works well. I particularly liked working with Final Cut Express as I had never used it before so it was a completely new experience and there were lots of different effects and transitions to use. But overall I think this project has gone very well with us encountering very few problems.