Evaluation Question 4

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

Research

The majority of our research was carried out through online searching. Google was the sole searching engine we used to carry out this operation. We searched through out the research stages, finding hundred of horror poster, magazines to create textual analyses on to post on Blogger. Through careful examinations we began to familiarize ourselves with the conventions

of horror and what similar things we wanted to include in our own products. Also youtube was our main source of viewing horror teaser trailers. We analysed the length, mise en scene, lighting, titles and content of all trailers from old to new to gain a greater understanding of the genre.

Another form of research technology we considered at this stage was the IMAX 3D film screenings of Resident Evil Afterlife at the Odeon Greenwich. The screen is 15.5m wide x 7.76m high for maximum picture effectiveness. We organized to go and view the film on a day we did not have college in order to analyse the use of 3D zombies in horror genre/action subgenre.

http://reaction1993.blogspot.com/2010/10/research-on-zoombies.html

Finally, during the research we had to find a mean of finding the target audience's interest in the horror genre. Therefore for maximum efficiency we used online service "Surveymonkey" to create a questionnaire with a list of questions on the horror genre, posters, trailers and magazine covers. From the results we produced a detailed set of graphs using the website to analyse and study the results given.

Planning

The main form of technology, and most blatantly obvious is our Blogger account. Yet without this vital service provided by google we would not be able to post our work date by date in the correct order of creation. The account was simple to make and we all joined our own accounts as admins for editing work.

We created a facebook group after adding eachother's accounts as a means of contacting eachother. Being used to the social networks site and checking it regularly we found this was the fastest way to send work and plan meeting via the event creator.

The use of our our mobile phones was utilised in planning. When experimenting with make-up techniques, and taking images of the Imax cinema we used a state of the art Blackberry mobile to capture the shots live and simultaneously upload the images to Blogger. From the Blackberry mobiles we could also contact eachother easier through the chat and our facebook group.

State of the art Apple Mac OS version 10.6.4. was the model we used for most of our planning work, the written storyboards and filming scripts were uploaded using a scanner then imported to photoshop on the Imac computers to then post to our blog. All images were converted to Jpegs and the fast running speed ensured maximum efficiency in our work.

Production

Within the Production Technology we ascertained, we had to consider a number of factors including health and safety, handling and care of equipment and knowledge of how the equipment was used. We made sure the fake blood was non toxic and ensured that the actor was comfortable with the latex and use of contact lenses. We already had a background understanding of using the filming equipment and exercised extreme caution when handling cameras, tripods, etc. The equipment bags were used at all times, and all screws were tightly secured at all times.

When it came to the make-up technology for the zombie costume we wanted to keep the technique and materials used simple. Extensive use of the make-up technology would have resulted in an unrealistic looking horror trailer. We ordered a 1 litre bottle of fake blood, 10 blood capsules and a pair of white contact lenses off of www.amazon.co.uk along with the latex and make-up we already had for the zombie outfit. During the production these were vital for certain shots of dripping blood and close up of the zombie's face and eye.

For the majority of the still images caught for our blog posts we used the Canon 400D digital. This camera allowed us to shoot images for background pictures etc while using the main camera to shoot the film. This camera was used mainly in our production process. The camera was an efficient tool within our media product as it was easy to adjust to different environment by changing the white balance and exposure for quality images

When it came to the filming of our trailer we utilised the state of the art Canon 7d. This professional production tool is capable of changing the forecast and filming in High Definition video that can be imported to both Final Cut and Youtube for efficient editing and audience feedback. The advantage of a High Definition filming instrument is also that most modern contemporary media film and television productions are now available in HD.

Post Production

We used Adobe Photoshop when creating both the Magazine Cover and Film Poster. The softwares use of layers allowed us to deal with the titles, background, foreground and filters of the images on different levels allowing us to seamlessly create professional horror products. The dodge tool and burn tool were used to great effect in the magazine cover as they allowed us to darken or highlight the shadow in the subject's face to contrast with he ow-key lighting of the rest of the image. The titles were inserted alongside the image using a varied amount of horror and professional film fonts, from hear we could edit the size, spacing and alignment of texts on both products.

Final cut was the key to editing software when it came to post-production technology. With an already sound background knowledge in editing the group dissected and cut their way through various used and unused footage as displayed on our youtube account. Using the left hand screen we could analyse the imported footage, choose which section we wanted and drag it into the sequence timeline on the left hand side. Once all of the footage was arranged and cut, the main editing stage had to be addressed. We imported over the soundtrack created by Micah from garageband then again, carefully cut the remaining footage to match the beat of the score. We decided to use the colour corrector, desaturate and noise filters for the flashback sequences under the video filter tools. We also used a "Fade in Fade Out" Dissolve on various shots to symbolise the passing of time and to fade into the ending title sequences. Once the editing stage was done we used Final Cut to import our high definition trailer straight to our youtube account: http://www.youtube.com/user/ReactionsProduction

Motion was the software we used to create the two title sequences of our Teaser Trailer. For the first Epidemic sequence we imported the same font that was used in our film poster for continuity and to keep within horror conventions. We then used a "Noise" filter combined with a "Bad TV" filter for a typical horror effect that helped to impact at the conclusion of our trailer. The second title screen simply sates the date of release in cinemas along with the film website, an information page. In both title sequences we used the base colour of the font in red and the same filters. The second title sequence utilises a Times New Roman font to contrast with the "Epidemic" font.

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?



To start getting our feedback we began to advertise online on youtube.com on our user account which we created for Reactions Production. Since YouTube was launched in 2005 it has been incredibly popular and it’s a free way for people to upload their videos and watch anything from a movie to music video. The site allows people to comment what they think, give it the thumbs up or down and also give it a star rating.YouTube would provide us with anonymous comments and allow more people of all ages, locations etc to view out trailer and allow us to get more reliable feedback as they wouldn’t have to worry about offending us as they wouldn’t know us. Our trailer was available here as well as extra shots that hadn’t made the cut. YouTube was our first stage of promotion. Sadly although youtube is a huge site and we expected to get a variety of comments we only received one commenting that it was "subtle but effective".



We also had other ideas on how to promote, one of which was the huge social networking site Facebook, this would be a good way to promote as Facebook is expanding rapidly and huge amounts of the population use the site. As typical teenagers of today Facebook was the main way we socialise as it’s free and easy to use so this was our main way of promotion. We posted our trailer on Facebook as well as our magazine and poster and tagged each member on the trailer so that all our friends could view the trailer. We asked them to comment on the trailer and provide negative and positive feedback. Our poster got the most positive comments and it was clear this was our stronger piece of work. However we took into account that most people on facebook are our friends and may not want to be completely honest as they didn’t want to offend us.

Statistics of where our film is watched

On facebook you can become a fan for almost anything, we saw this as a gap for us and a good way to promote. We created a fan page for Reactions Productions and placed our trailer along with images on the page to promote our work. A lot of good films today have fan pages and it is a great way to create publicity. We choose our display picture carefully as so attract people and make them more intrigued, this is why we used our poster as our display picture as it was our stronger piece of media. We posted our trailer on our own pages as well as the unused shots as we noticed they were getting a lot of views on YouTube, and were becoming popular because of their comical nature.

Once we had uploaded our images and trailer onto Facebook we began to look at other students work to see what they had been doing, we noticed that some had created a website as we would have liked to have done this if we had more time. Also some groups had created a DVD design and a Xbox 360 design for their film, this was a good idea that they had used as it shows they have kept up to date with technology.

Technology is improving all the time, and the latest addition is the Blackberry. As a lot of young people today use Blackberry’s and our age range for our work is young people we decided to send out a broadcast promoting our film. The conferences you can have on Blackberry had been a very useful way to communicate as a group so we decided this would be a useful tool to use. We also sent out our magazine, poster and youtube link to a select amount of people on Blackberry Broadcast as so to get some ideas of what they thought, as we knew a lot of people that studied media and had now progressed on we asked them as we knew their feedback would be useful.

With the feedback we got, we had the impression that the trailer seemed to drag a little and if we has more time we would have cut it down to make it more short and snappy. We had a lot of unused footage which has given us more ideas of what we could have used in our trailer and if we had more time we would have filmed some extra shots to use instead of the ones we had maybe used before. The feedback from our Broadcast On Blackberry also showed positive feedback for our Magazine and Poster also and the negative feedback seemed to be the same throughout all our feedback participants. 

 Aswell as using technology like the internet we also went round and asked a select amount of people what they thought of ur trailer, magazine and poster. We filmed the feedback they gave and asked them to give some negative and positive points. There responses they gave us were really useful and very honest which we much appreciated. Although the feedback was mainly the same they felt the image on the Magazine was two dark but there was a couple of respondants that didnt agree with what the others said arguing that the image had to be dark to portray the horror look. The feedback also reflected how differantly young people and adults see images and showed they liked very differant things. Whilst the younger people prefered the poster the adults tended to prefer the Magazine and this is something we would have thought about if we had the chance to do our work again.

With all the feedback we have been given we feel quiet happy about our feedback and it was more postive than we had thought. The contact lenses we had used was a really good idea and they loved them aswell as the makeup that we had spent so long on. However the comments relefected what we ourselves felt about the costume which was that we felt we had spent a lot of time on the makeup and little time on the clothing that our actors/actresses wore. We took all the feedback on board and the comments that were made we fairly similar.

Strengths Of Poster	Weaknesses Of Poster
Excellent Photography-Loved the positioning and the makeup	Maybe a bit too much blank space on the left
Loved The glow around the actor- it made the audience focus on the face more.	Consider making the font of the title bigger

Strengths Of Magazine	Weaknesses Of Magazine
Used all the typical conventions of a magazine	Felt the picture was too dark
Liked the feel of the magazine could tell it was a horror magazine, paticulaly liked the title and the text	The text at the bottom was to cramped together
Like the graphical use that was created for the eye	Didn’t like the positioning of the text
Image was in focus and looked really dark which created the typical horror atmosphere	Extra space in right middle of the page that could have been used

Evaluation Question 2

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

Having carefully planned over the months with extensive research into our chosen genre we felt that our main product and ancillary texts worked reasonably well as a promotional package for a new movie. Although it is  clearly seen that the poster supports the teaser trailer a lot more than the magazine, the poster was constructed having the same character as the one seen clearly at the end of the trailer, this shows the use of synergy, the process by which a media institution tries to use its various products to sell one another. The magazine on the other hand wasn’t made to have a similar look to the teaser trailer and poster; it showed a close up of a character that would have been infected later on in the film which would have also had a part to play in synergy when more posters and magazines would have been released.

Depending on how one would view our three products it can be argued if brand identity and continuity was appropriately used. Continuity is clearly seen between the teaser trailer and the poster in more ways than one. The protagonist is clearly visible and recognisable in both products, the form of typography is the same in both products, and also the visual style is similar since the photo for the poster was taken during the filming of the teaser trailer. The product that breaks away from the continuity like I mentioned before is the magazine front cover, when constructing the magazine we took on a kind of futuristic approach that the audience would not understand until they would have actually watched the movie.

Like any production company we wanted our teaser trailer to be available on as many media platforms as possible, this is where cross media promotion came into play. The first place we uploaded our trailer onto was youtube, and just by doing this we our trailer was now available on the internet for anyone to view, smart phones, games consoles, ipad etc.

Above is a poster of Shaun of the dead which is a zombie horror like that of our sub genre, the use of the contacts lenses on these zombies inspired us for our own zombie characters. We wanted our characters to look freshly dead, yet with the same horrifying glaring eyes of the common zombie convention. Andrew played the main antagonist of the trailer where he donned the costume of the zombie while Ashleigh became the zombie in our Magazine Cover for continuity we had them use similar make up techniques.


We used the same font of our title 'Epidemic' in our teaser trailer and our magazine it was red with a bold and deteriarated font called ‘Defused’, the deteriaration of the font that connoted danger and outbreak that related to our title ‘Epidemic'. We felt this was the best font as it stood out among all the other fonts we looked at and was very eye catching. However in our magazine the font was white and in a sans serif font in order to differentiate between the magazine brand and the film brands.

Evaluation Question 1

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

Following up on the traditional conventions of a teaser trailer, we tried not to reveal the whole story to the target audience, but left enough material within the trailer for the audience to recognise that our media products were of the horror genre. This was all for the sake of creating a buzz around the film; a typical technique used all throughout the film industry to make audiences aware of the film, as well as having them talk about the film up untill the exhibition. The poster was then constructed having in them same character as the one seen clearly at the end of the trailer, this shows the use of synergy, the process by which a media institution tries to use its various products to sell one another. The magazine on the other hand wasn’t made to have a similar look to the teaser trailer and poster; it showed an image of a character that would have been infected later on in the film which would have also had a part to play in synergy when more posters and magazines would be released leading up to that point.

Planning and research towards the production of our teaser trailer was taken care of surprisingly quickly, the group agreed for the sub-genre of our trailer to be about infectious zombie-like creatures. Because such a sub-genre was chosen there were many conventions that we would have liked to have changed, but if we did then we would have no longer kept the original zombie feel to our trailer. While researching the following titles: -

Dawn of the Dead (2004) – Director: Zack Snyder

Night of the Living dead (1990) – Director: Tom Savini

Shaun of the Dead – Director: Edgar Wright

28 Days Later – Director: Danny Boyle

Zombieland – Director: Ruben Fleischer

Land of the Dead – Director: George A. Romero

Resident Evil: Afterlife – Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

We took note that the key conventions that could not be changed were the costume and props. Following these titles it is clearly seen that the costumes the zombies are wearing aren’t anything special but is simply what they would have been wearing before they became a zombie. Since in most, if not all zombie titles the only way for a zombie to pass on the virus is through biting the skin, there was never any need for zombies to carry any props. These conventions were followed in our teaser trailer with the zombie wearing casual clothing and not having any props throughout the trailer, there was also an emphasis on the zombie’s mouth and teeth towards the end of the trailer, which connotes the method it uses to infect others.

Zombieland: Still image of typical zombie clothing

As seen in most zombie movies, it’s the zombies that are either chasing the humans in the open, or are hiding in the shadows ready to catch the humans off guard. Examples of this are within the following movies:

Zombieland

Night of the living dead (1990)

This was a big convention that we partially followed, but then again we developed it so that we would be able to challenge it, and while challenging this convention we also used it as a display to show the originality in our teaser trailer. So in our teaser trailer we made it so that this time there are humans that have control over their situation in this outbreak, if only a little. The way in which we achieved this was through the use of de saturation and noise. This gave the footage a kind of look that seems as if someone else was watching from behind a security camera, a convention that we have yet to find within not only a zombie horror trailer, but also any zombie horror movie.

(Adding noise to the shot gives a bad camera effect, showing a pixelated image. The de saturation effect takes away the colour in the shot, leaving a kind of greyscale.)

The use of editing within our teaser trailer was kept very traditional, following the forms and conventions of more successful titles; there were mostly quick cuts so that too much of the story doesn’t get revealed. There were limited transitions, which occurred when a shot faded out and then faded back into a shot of the zombie, but this was the limit as we felt that since it’s only a teaser trailer, too much would be released with the application of too many transactions. The shots that needed to be filmed in the day time went quite well, but there were a couple problems regarding the shots that needed to be filmed in low key light, since we couldn’t get the lighting exactly right at most angles, but this was overcome by not allowing the zombie’s face to be seen until towards the end, this gave the same effect that we were initially looking for as we do not truly see what is lurking in the shadows till the end of the trailer.

The teaser trailer setting occurs in a rundown building where the infected zombies are lurking; a zombie is seen bending down over someone and soon after a hand covered with blood is seen, which leads the audience to think that the person on the floor must have been slaughtered. The clear shots are what are going on in real time, while the shots that were made to look like a security camera showed what happened before the shots in real time. In my opinion this challenges the convention of just randomly putting together pieces of the movie to form a trailer, it seems that this is done with some trailers:

Looking at our poster it follows the typical conventions of a wide variety of horror posters, having a single character as the main, and in most cases the only focus of the movie poster. This has been seen within many horror movies such as: The Collector, Friday 13^th, Orphan and Saw 5. The character on the front cover is most likely always the one that plays the biggest part within the movie, the photos used for each of the posters all follow the convention of having the main character on the poster although they vary as they were taken from different angles. We also followed the style of these posters by keeping the photo as simple as possible, Friday 13^th not so much as there are effects that have been added to the background, but the rest of the posters all follow the convention. As well as keeping the movie poster as simple as possible, I found it just as important for the text to fit in with the photo along with the theme of the trailer, be it zombies, slasher, psychological or splatter. Friday 13^th as a slasher has a red times new roman font, which gives a sharp and defined look to the poster, the title being that shade almost seems as if it’s the same colour of blood.

The lighting on the ‘Orphan’ and ’Saw 5’ posters above are more or less spread across the photos while the lighting on the ‘Friday 13^th’ and ’The Collector’ posters is light at some parts and has low key lighting for the most parts. This is a convention that we followed as we also kept the bottom half of our posters lighting low key. This style of lighting gives an emphasis on the head of the character where the scars and eyes can be seen more clearly, challenging the conventions of other posters that only show a standard image of their main character. We developed the convention to give greater interest to the audience, as the light of the props in the background was reduced and left just visible enough to see that they are there.

As much as we would have liked to have developed our own conventions, we didn’t feel that there was much we could do. The poster is a vital part of our products, more important than the teaser trailer, if not just as important since it’s what the audience would see first before even going online to view the trailer. The audience would usually view the poster in various places that would easily catch their attention such as: billboards, buses, and also in cinemas on the walls saying ‘coming soon’. If the poster is not appealing enough to the audience, then people wouldn’t even think to go online to find and view our teaser trailer.

Overall when making a horror poster I don’t think the typical conventions should be challenged; it will vary for other genres such as action, comedy etc. But in my opinion the simplicity of the poster while keeping the mystery of the horror is what truly attracts an audience to such a poster without them actually thinking about it.

Our magazine came out very different compared to our poster, challenging the convention of the magazine advertising the movie showing something similar to what the audience already would have seen. The photo used for the magazine shows an image of what another character would have looked like further on in the film, had it actually have been produced. This would leave the audience in even more suspense as they may wonder if it is a totally different film altogether. This would encourage people to talk about the poster and the magazine almost in different ways as if they were different movies creating a ‘buzz’ around the movie. This would then lead the audience that show greater interest to go and research the movie which will lead them to finding the teaser trailer on youtube.

Updates For Febuary

As a group we have now finished our Poster, Teaser Trailer and Magazine Front Cover. As a group we worked together to complete this in time and we are pleased with the final outcome. Now we are completing and adding extra pages to the blog about what we have done as a group, and we aim to get our evaluations done by the middle of Febuary.

Updates For January

Due to weather conditions ( the problem that it got dark really early), trouble with getting wires to set the lighting up and few actors due to exams and the hype of Christmas we decided to postpone filming to the end of January. We would have liked to film in our first week back but due to exams coming up actors were low and other commitments got in the way of filming so we had no choice but to film in the middle of January. During our lesson times we continued to draw ideas for our posters and magazines and also continued to do extra research special effects makeup so that we could make our techniques even better than they were. Whilst Eliza and Micah were being creative and drawing Andrew and I researched different trailers so we could get extra ideas for ours and maybe even think of some better locations for filming then we already had.

We now plan to film the final flashback shots at the beginning of of January giving us more time to plan before hand for the shots. This will be a tight deadline but as a group we will work extra hours to ensure we complete our trailer on the deadline.

25th January : We have now filmed the last few scenes of our teaser trailer and taken the pictures we need for our magazine front cover. We filmed our last scenes in the derelict nursery and used natural lighting. We now can add in the flashback scenes planned in the storyboard into our previous footage and complete the Magazine Cover.

Lighting

Trailer Lighting

When we filmed the original scenes for our trailer in the studio we utilised the use of high key-lighting to capture all of the action of our trailer. We found it difficult to achieve the correct horror effect when the light was so bright therefore we used the dimmer switches on both of our lights for a darker more sinister effect.

At the editing stage it was decided that our shots were still too light after they had been upload to the computer there for we used the colour corrector filter on Final Cut Pro to bring out the shadow more and darken the image for a better generic horror effect.

For our flashback sequences that we filmed in the derelict nursery we decided to use a more natural source of light to contrast with the artificial light of the other shots. This way it is easier to differentiate between the two times in the trailer. We also added a grayscale filter during the editing stage to further the emphasis of the flashbacks.

Poster and Magazine Lighting

When it came to the Poster Image with our male zombie character (Andrew) we decided it was a good idea to get our images straight after the film shoot. The shoot for the poster expresses warmer tones in the mis-en-scene: reds, oranges and browns. The use of high-key lighting helped us to emphasize this.

As for the Magazine Cover Image we decided to represent our female zombie character (Ashleigh) through more colder harsher tones: whites, greys and blues. For this shoot we positioned one light below the subject on the right side to add more shadow into the image so that only the main features stood out. We also can edit the lighting on the face on Adobe Photoshop Software to bring out the more subtle tones with the dodge tool and create more shadow with the burn tool.