Evaluation

There are many ways in which our media product develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products, for example the conventions we used were:
-For or movie poster we used conventions of a horror genere tha would be used in today to give the real effect of a real movie poster to attract the audience.
- With our film magazine we got several conventions of exsisting product magazines for example the two magazines I analysed which are Empire and Fangoria magazine as they are popular film magazines which attract my target audience as it is horror.
- There are the obvious conventions like the setting of a horror film, which in my research i found out a dark isolated scene is mostly used to show its away from the rest of the world making the protagonist feel alone and can't get help in anyway as no one is around.
- The conventions of music, editing and camera shots are just as important as this is what gives mot of the effect towards a horror trailer. For example with the music and sounds, its dark, orchestral music to put the audience on edge. With camera shots, we used a lot of high angled tilts to show the power balance, and the same with low shots. We also used tracking shots to follow people when running to give a good effect and make it almost feel like the audience is running with the character.
- Film noir was also used in our trailer for example on the scene with the acid pouring on the boy it didn't show the acid itself falling onto his face, this therefore isn't showing any disturbing images therefore it is aimed at our target audience 15+ as there isn't too much blood and gore.
- Our group also got the ides from a study theory from Vladimir Propp in 1969, as we used several stereotypes of characters which are used most in media products today. The most common characters would be: The protagonist, the villain/killer/ghost, the dispatcher/counsellor and not forgetting the helper/friend who thinks normally the protagonist is just crazy.

We also had conventions we developed to make our product more effective and suit the target audience these were:
- The theory of equilibrim we used his conventions however not to its fall protentional for example instead of starting with the state of equilibrium we started with the protagonists childhood trauma that then leads the audience into the main part of the story. The equilibrium is obvious when the protagonist has bgan her new life and this is disrupted when she moves back to her home town which she then regrets when seeing the ghost of the boy she killed, she has to face her fears and stop it from destroying her life.
- In our horror magazine we had to develop the convention that the font should be in the center of the page not the top left which we originally did but we found the images on the page just took away the attraction from the main title. So therefore we took this into account and enlarged the font and put it central therefore the target audience would notice the title when first looking at the page, then notice the main images. As we found in research the masthead is very important to a magazine, as this is what would be rememberable with the reader on every adition.

This image is a good example of how our trailer follows a traditional horror film, with the protagonist looking at their reflection in the mirror, with the killer/ghost/villian behind them.

When me and my group showed people our final product to get audience fedback, we showed the magazine cover, the film poster and the actual film trailer itself, it helped us consider things to make them better and target our audience more effectively.
With the magazine, I learnt that the audience thought it was pretty effective and it grabbed the readers attention however you have to be careful to make sure it fits the genre of my trailer. The audience also suggested keeping to a horror colour scheme so these were reds and blacks to keep the magazine dark and mysterious. Overall the audience feedbck was mostly positve and there was very little criticisms, I got a few suggestions on how to change a few things just to give it that bit more of a boost for example with the film tralier, people suggested putting the boys ghostly face over the spilt beaker in the flashback to make the audience on edge and feel as if they know something terrible is about to happen. To just having the spilt beaker, it doesn't give the same effect as the audience have no idea if his dead or what actually happend to him in the flashback. We took that into acount from the audience and changed it which made the whole flashback look a lot better.


This project helped me to work better in a group and work together by taking eachothers ideas and putting them together to make the final product look at its best we could do. It also helped me to be scheduled with my time for example with the filming we had to be organised when we were going to film certain parts of the trailer, which is why we had a film schedule. Not only has it helped me to be more organised within working with a group, it also taught me how to use the media technologies. Before doing this project i couldn't use a lot of the technologies i found them very difficult, now I am able to use them alot better for an example premiere pro is the program we used to edit and cut our filming to make it more effective, after working with my group and finding out how to use the program better, I found it so much easier to use and then abled me to help edit the film more and put in my own ideas. This program is also a good one to use, because of all the tools you could use make your trailer look a lot more profesional this is why me and my group chose to use this one.
Another program I used for our project was photoshop which I used to create the magazine front cover and film poster, I found this more easier to use as i had used it before the year before for my year 12 project which was to design a magazine front cover, double page spreed and contents page. Therefore i new about most of the tools to use to give the best effect on the magazine cover and film poster to target our specific audience. I also used photoshop to edit captions within our trailer, so this program was good for many uses, its also simple and easy to adapt to, it has many functions to make it look very effective. These were the only two programs we used for our whole project, however we come to conclusion we did not want to use sound-booth for the audio track, the reasons were it takes alot longer to understand and would take a lot longer when we wouldn't have all the time to focus mostly on the audio track, so we just edited the music on premiere pro as then it would already be with the film its self. Howevere there was a disadvantage with this, sound-booth had a lot more functions and tools I could have used as it is a specialist program for editing and cutting music but again we needed the more time to edit the filming. The most important technology we used was a digital camera and a video camera. We used the video camera to capture our footage for our trailer, and the digital camera to take photos for the film poster and magazine cover. This was probably the most important piece of media technology that we used because this is what made our project work. Another important piece of technology we used was the computer macs at school, because these computers have all the programs on and without it or using a normal computer it would have been 10x harder. There were also other technologies like websights for example dafont helped me and my group out a lot whilst in the making of the products this is because it was usefull for getting a font to fit the horror genre instead of using a boring simple font already on the computers, as these wouldn't attract the audience in such a big way.
I feel that without the use of media technologies we would not have been able to produce the products that we did to our full potential, if at all.


I think the combination of the trailer, film poster and magazine cover worked well together, this is because the film poster on its own wouldn't be enough to promote the film as the audience like to a little more about the film before actually getting round to seeing it and thats the same with the magazine cover. Also the film trailer itself would'nt be enough because again it would attract our target audience however due to audience feedback, most said they would'nt see the film if they just saw the trailer as there wasn't enough information and they would like to know a little bit more about the film itself. So alone all of these products would'nt advertise the fil effectively, although when they are all combined together they are very effectively advertise also to a wider audience, because our target audience are likely to read magazines and likely to go to the cinema more and see our film poster which therefore the target audience would get drawn in and watch the trailer itself. we have incorporated synergy into our project, both the trailer and ancillary texts have the same horror conventions and therefore compliment one another and would all be associated easily. We also put synergy into our project because we used very similar fonts in all three of the products, which helped create the synergy, and of course the images can also be associated with one another. We wanted to promote the face of the villain and the protagonist so that our audience would be familiar with the actors. We also ceated synergy with the film poster because the image we used is an actual image used in the trailer, this gives the audience more of a feel towards the film itself and where some of the film will be based, which is a grave yard. It also gives the horror film feel to our target audience.

Overall me and my group were quite pleased with how the film trailer, film poster and magazine cover combined together.

In conclusion I found that mine and my groups project was very successful and i'm happy with our overal success, this is due to the qulity of the audience feedback as we didn't get many negatives on the whole thing. However if we had longer to change anything with our products I would make a few changes for example with on shot within the film trailer, were the ghost/boy suddenly shows up next to the tomb stone, i'd make it so the tomb stone was the same colour as it changes very slightly when the boy shows up next to it. I would also re-do the shot when the ghost shows up facing the protagonist as there is a slight movement with the protagonist when the ghost shows up, and its meant to be still.
With the magazine, I again wouldn't change much however I would get a little clearer main picture of the ghost as I think it blends in abit too much and its abit blury however i'm happy with the cover overall along with my group and target audience.

poster and magazine feedback

In order to get feedback for the poster and magazine cover we had to do it differently to the film trailer, so we printed large copies onto A4 and went to harlow with them, to show the public when they walked past. We tried to ask people around our target audience to get more honest opinion and so it wasn't biased. With the magazine cover we asked people between the ages 15-30 if they regularly read magazines and if they were interested in horror films. We therefore asked series of questions an example of one was "would you consider buying this magazine by looking a the cover if it was a similar price to its competitors" a lot of the target audience said they would flick through the rest of the magazine before buying but most people said they would put in the same consideration as they would for a popular magazine.

It was different for the movie poster, me and my group stood outside the cinema with our large A2 posters and asked our target audience if they are interested in horror films, most said yes so then we asked if they would watch the film after looking at the poster, most said they would have to see the trailer to this film before totally watching it however they thought the poster was very effective and would grab there attention to the film, most said it was very mysterious which they liked.

Overall me and my group were pleased with this feedback as a lot it was very positive. We seemed to have targeted our audience well with all three pieces, the trailer, film poster and magazine.

Trailer feedback

After we succesfully finished our group film trailer, we thought we would get feedback from our final project therefore we posted it on social networking sites such as facebook.com and youtube and waited for comments and feedback, this enables us to find out what we could have done better or things people liked about it. We used these websights because they are most popular used at our target audience age which is 15+.
From our feedback, overall the comments were posotive and we didn't get any negative comments as our target audience were overall impressed by our final trailer. However we did get some questions asked about our trailer, these were things like when the release date was, implying that the trailer was authentic and the audience thought it was real this is a very posotive question and shows our group work to get a successful trailer worked and is appealing to our target audience.
Overall i am very pleased with our audience feedback for me and my groups trailer as it turned more successful than i thought it would. I'm also glad I didn't have to change anything to my video.

Our final film trailer

Re-shoot/ Re-edit

Our group did not re-shoot anything, however we did re-edit a lot of our film trailer to make it more effective. We was lucky enough not to have to re-shoot as all of our shots first time were exactly what we wanted, it did have to take a fair few times to take when taking the shot, as something small as someone else in the shot who wasn't serposed to be there or the camera being at the wrong angle. Therefore we would re-take the shot there and then, to get a better effect for example different camera angle. Because we didn't have to re-shoot anything it gave us a lot longer to re-edit what we had to, as we had a few things we wanted to change t make it look more profestional and it is the most important process within the media. We did however have to re-edit our trailer, primarily due to audience feedback, we re-edited 5 parts of the trailer all together.
These were the most important changes we had to make when re-editing our trailer;

1) The first piece we had to re-edit was the lab shot, this is where the boy walks through the cass room, trips over someones foot, then acid spills on him, then the camera stares at an empty beaker which contained the acid then it fades. However when we edited the scene it is not in chronological order, it starts with a shot of the spilled acid that was in the beaker, this gives the audience more suspence and make the viewer understand what the scene is about. Then it is followed by the boy walking before he gets tripped up, we cut back to the beaker then the boy being tripped, back to the beaker, then the liquid spilling on him. Te finally of the beaker and fades out slowly to give a dramatic effect and know something bads now going to happen. Whilst this flas back is taking place there is talking of the protagonist and phsychologist. We also spead up this clip and gave it more panicky and put an audio track behind all of it whic is creepy.

2) The second part of editing we did was again in the same flashback, it was simple and very effective. When we first of all had the fade away from the beaker at the end of the flash back, we decided to put a ghost image of the boy with a burnt face on the top which becomes clearer on the screen as it gets darker. We decided to do this to make it clear to the audience whats just happened to the boy and make the trailer creepier. This as done by stretching and cuttng the scene with the close up face to make it a slow frame. This was then put on another video track making it the main image. We made the opacity roughly 40% thismade the beaker look like the main image and made the face look like a ghostly image.

3) The next piece of editing was the gravestone moving away from the flashback shots. This is when the killer/boy appears in front of the tombstone. The first shot is just of the tombstone on its own by a church, then the boy appears next to it looking right into the camera. We made the transition smother with a crossfade to make it look a ghostly appearence. We also had to speed this shot up to fit in with the pace of the rest of the editing as it fits in just when the protagonist is running saying "its here" it also had to fit in with our auido track. Where as before it was too slow and looked all abit messy. Therefore all we did was add a crossfade between scenes and use the stretch tool to shorten the shot.

4) The forth piece of editing was the final after the credit. This is when the killer comes towards the camera unexpectably. This is to make the audience jump and not expect this shot because its after a fadeout and all the sounds/audios stop. Then suddenly the viewer sees the killers face appear. This was initally backwards and not startling to make his movements look more unnatural we then sped the scene up to a second so that when is is seen it is almost sublminal. Also it is so the viewer doesn't have time to make out the figure of the person which is typical of most horror trailers, there is always that horrible yet quick image that mostly sticks in the audience mind. This is so it is creepier and more shocking.

5) The final piece we re-editied was the audio track. We had to make the audio more effective and fit in within our trailer. In order to make this most effective we cut the first section of the sound, we slowed it down whilst the psychologist was speaking to the protagonist this is to make it creepy and understand what they are talking about without too much rushing around because it wouldn't have fitted within that shot of the slow flash back and talking. To finish this section of editing we added an exponential fade at the end of the audio track to give the trailer a fade out as opposed to an abrupt and quick end. This therefore made the whole trailer look a lot smoother and fit well together.

Movie Editing Process

When it comes to making the film itself, editing itself is the most important process. This doesn't just go for films, its the same for magazines and any other form of media. Therefore this is a step by step of how our group did the editing.



The first step of the process was importing the video files from the camera into the premiere pro program. To do this, we simply clicked file, Import and select the files or folder which contained the clips we needed.



all of the imported clips are found in the side panel to the left of the preview window so its easier to find.



The main tool used in editing is the razor tool, this is used to cut a single clip into multiple clips, in order to move them around, edit them separately and shorten clips to give a better effect or to make it suit your video by shorterning.







this is what the clip will look like once cut, in order to move it all you need to do is drag it and drop it where you like.
There are several tools on the toolbar, the only other one i used however, was the stretch tool.
as mentioned this tool simply stretched or shortened the clip or audio track you chose, this would speed up or slow the FPS (frames per seconds) and the speed of the audio clip, speeding up the audio track would make it higher pitched whereas slowing it down would make it slower, so editing the audio is difficult and not recommended. When this must be done in order to synchronize the audio track with the video, audio transitions can be used to blend both audio clips together.






We imported the audio track in the exact same way as we imported the video clip, when editing an audio clip the tracks will appear on the bottom few rows, they look like this




the top of the 3 is the main (default) audio track, the picture of the speaker in the top left corner is to toggle the mute option, i used this for all of the audio sections of the video clips i wanted silent, i dragged the audio into the second lane labelled "Audio 2" and muted that lane.
When i needed captions in between frames rather than editing them on premiere pro, i decided to create them on photoshop and import them as image files



The images are imported the same way as everything else, the images will appear with a purple square beside them, whereas an audio track will have a green square next to it and a video, will have blue.
like every other media type, the images are dragged onto the work are, under the video section alongside videos



the eye in the top left determines the visibility of the media, we used the "video 2" lane in order to change the visibility of the scenes which we want the audio of.



when the image is placed on the track it will look like this.
in the window however it will look like this






as you can see it doesnt fit the screen, which is easily solved by clicking the image, and dragging it into the correct size, like resizing an image in photoshop.when the image fits the screen, simply press the enter key and the image will stay in that position, this process was used with every picture uploaded.
transition effects between frames and images were very important and made the difference between a smooth video and a jagged, messy video, the main transitions we used were the dip to black and cross dissolve, the fade to black scenes are useful to fade into the captions and images because the background for these images are black.







effects are always just dragged onto the clip, and can be stretched out to make the effect last longer.



the title sequence at the end uses the transitions Iris box, dip to black and cross dissolves.
at the end of the audio track we have used an exponential fade to give the audio track a fade out, and to stop it from sounding so abrupt we stretched the effect to make the fade gradual.
the yellow line on the audio track determines the decibel level, for the music track we increased the decibels to roughly 5.67 making the volume higher.
The yellow line on the video layer changes the opacity, taking advantage of this allowed me to ghost an image of the killers face over an image of the corrosive beaker by putteng it under the "Video 4" layer
The video may not work very well and run slowly unless it is regularly rendered, to do this, simply press the sequence drop-down menu and press render entire work area, this will make the video run smoothly and apply all effects

Final Film poster

This is the final film poster me and my group created for out film Memoria.
We used this main image of the main protagonist in our trailer Steph looking back over her shoulder whilst standing in a grave yard which you can faintly see in the background. The image of the girl is lit up well so she stands out from the rest of the poster. The idea we put her in a grave yard goes well with the whole of our film plot, as she accidently killed a boy and she feels as if he is now haunting her. This also gives the poster a spooky effect which is what we wanted to make our audience feel a little frightened. Like the other posters i analysed i did not use over-dramatic effects but simply iconography whilst showing the setting and like the others it is a dark and/or isolated setting. The title is at the top of the page because like other poster I analysed the title is either at the top of the page or at the bottom to stand out but not take the effect away from the main image. The writing is large because this makes the title stand out and hit the audience so they recognise straight away what the film is. We also used this font because the swirls make it look mysterious, the colour is red because it makes it slightly resemble blood and goes with all our other colour schemes with the magazine cover. Also our audience agreed that it represents horror straight away just from the simple colour red. All the other writing is in a standard simple capital letter so it doesn't stand out most from the poster but it is important so you still can't miss the important facts like when its out.

Final magazine cover

This is the final magazine cover our group created. After analysing different film magazines we took this into consideration and got ideas for our one. We went with what the audience decided was the best title which was ASYLUM this was also the best option because it goes well with our specific genre which is horror. We also gave the title a spooky/gory effect with the blood dripping down from the title also using the dark red colour to give this more of the scary effect to suit our target audience. Also we stuck to a simple colour scheme which is black and reds mainly this is so the cover wouldn't be seen as too busy with too much going on, making it hard for a spacific image or headline on the cover to gab the readers eye. We decided to use one main image and then have small ones at the side, this is so the audience can tell which is the main story and what this issues magazine is going to include and give information on most. Also as this enlarged face is creepy and i faided into the background slightly it gives the cover a creepy effect showing its genre which is horror. So therefore it will straight away grab the target audience attention. We also placed red writing underneath the main image this is so the reader can straight away tell what film this is from, yet again we used the colour red to stand out and go with our colour scheme especially as the main image of the face itself is red.
The masthead is "ASYLUM" as it refers to a medical institution which is used in a lot of horror films as a setting due to the fear and horror of psychologically unstable people. These reasons paired with the feedback we got from our target audience make our reasoning for this name, the font was obtained from www.dafont.com and is called "cold night for alligators." We used this font because it gives the impression that the words are written in blood, which contributes to the iconography of a horror magazine.
We have other images on the page on the left hand side but only have two therefore it has been kept nice and simple with not alot of information on giving away the whol magazine, but enough to have the reader interested. They are horrific images which again shows more of the genre of the magazine, as researched this is typical of most horror magazines to have these srt of images on the page. A pug is used over the top of the main image on the right hand side, this is to attract the readers attention as it is bright in comparison to the rest of the magazine, it's designed to look like a sticker which has been added on after production. After doing research I have found that pretty much any magazine of any genre have pugs to show an inclusive bit o information to make the audience want to read about. They all have something different written in them, our group have "asylum greatest horror movies revealed" to attract our target audience.