EVALUATIONJudy Milner

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

I did a lot of research into the codes and conventions of horror film trailers before attempting to make my own one, and learnt that there is indeed a sort of template which the majority seem to follow. There are many aspects of my trailer that follow the conventional template.A typical trailer for a horror film will probably have it’s own set up, a fast-paced action sequence some mystery and a few shocks, and as a theatrical trailer it will probably run for up to two minutes (as opposed to a teaser trailer which would be just under a minute). With these ingredients you have the bare bones of an average horror trailer, which is why I felt it was necessary to make myself a kind of check list and make sure I had covered these conventions.

(Continued next slide)

1: My trailerOne way that my trailer differs from professional trailers (obviously apart from the fact that I have almost none of the resources that the professionals have) is tat I came up with this idea and shot my footage with the intention of it becoming a trailer, and not a feature length film. When distributors make trailers it’s out of footage that’s already been shot, and it’s never been filmed just for the trailer.There were three main points that I knew I had to get across, as mentioned in a previous blog post:

■ The fact that my protagonist was moving into a new house.

■ The fact that the house was haunted.

■ And in what way the house was haunted.

In my storyboard, my plan was to have the protagonist and her friend carrying boxes into the house to show that someone was moving in, but I realized that my house is full of furniture, and the full, dusty bookcases would look odd in a house that had ‘just been moved into’, so that scene was changed, but I believe it’s still quite clear that this is a new house.My plan to show the house was haunted didn’t change at all from the planning to the filming stage, it was just cut down a bit during the editing stage. My audience and teacher agreed that having the electronics show problems was a good way to introduce the fact that the house was haunted and the way in which it was haunted.

1. My poster

For my poster I wanted to develop a vague idea I had when looking at an existing poster for ‘the ring’; I’ve referred to ‘the ring’ quite a lot over the course of this project, simply because I felt that it best represented the type of horror I wanted to emulate myself: below is the poster that I am referring to. I really liked it’s simplicity and wanted to emulate that in my own work.

1. My magazine coverI chose to make a cover for ‘Fangoria’ magazine, a magazine dedicated to all kinds of horror films. A convention of this magazine is to use a still from the featured film as it’s main image, instead of having a specialized photo shoot. It was quite a relief at the time, knowing that I wouldn’t have to pull out my camera and set everything up again, but when I chose a suitable still from my trailer I had so much trouble getting the quality of the image right, and it still turned out to be a little bit too grainy than I would have hoped.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?When creating my ancillary tasks I tried my best to make a clear, visual link between the three pieces.

The link between my magazine cover and my trailer is probably the most obvious: as I mentioned before, it’s a convention of ‘Fangoria’ magazine to have a still from it’s featured film as it’s main image, so there’s the initial link. I also edited the colour scheme to match the image, helping the overall effect. The part that I feel was least successful were the four secondary images that I used. As I finished my trailer quite late, I didn’t have time to go and set up four separate photo-shoots for these images and couldn’t use any copyrighted material from the internet, so I ended up using some images that I took and edited myself that were initially for another subject. The images are okay but in a couple of cases I feel their colours or given atmospheres don’t really match up, but overall, I think these links are quite effective.

For the poster I chose a type-writer-like font because it was the same type of font I had used in my trailer for the titles and endorsements, but I couldn’t use that same font in my magazine cover because I had to choose something that worked a little bit better with the font of the name of the magazine, which I did not create.

2. Poster + Trailer + MagazineAs I mentioned before, I wanted my poster to be quite minimal, like ‘the ring’ poster I found, and I do think that that also went quite well with my trailer.

My trailer wasn’t extremely colourful, but that’s just a symptom of the genre really, so that fact that I didn’t use much colour goes quite well with my poster, making them link effectively.

A query I had when making it was whether having the TV be the main focus was a good idea or not: I wondered if I had really shown that much of the TV in my trailer? The first eight seconds was just slowly zooming in on the screen, so personally I think it works well.

When I thought my poster was too plain I decided to add a faint image, and ended up using the same image as I used in the magazine cover, and I think that the fact that the poster, the trailer, and the magazine cover all contain the same image at some point or in some way is quite a significant link.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?My audience feedback was pretty positive, I think the thing I’m most pleased about was that everyone who watched it seemed to understand it and got a good sense of the storyline without knowing too much about the plot.

The most negative feedback I got on the final product was that the text flashed on and off the screen too fast to be legible. I was trying to make it fast, because that is one of the conventions of a trailer, but looking back I agree that it may have been too fast once or twice. I suppose it’s harder than I imagined to find the happy balance.

I was very pleased with all the feedback I received, it was actual quite reassuring to know that sometimes I was being a bit too critical with myself.

3. Audience FeedbackI got my audience feedback from a number of different people. The majority of it, and all of the audience feedback recorded on my blog is from people who fit into my target audience, which was always adolescent girls. I chose to show my work to my friends because I know they’re honest with me and I personally know that they enjoy horror films, so they were good people to ask.

I showed my trailer to quite a few different people without recording a response or telling them that I wanted to write down what they liked or didn’t like. This was mainly because I just wanted to share what I had created, but it was also interesting to see their reactions to the trailer, and they were all genuinely positive which made me very happy.

Despite not being in my target audience I found the feedback from my Media Studies teacher particularly useful, he always had good advice on where I should go whenever I got stuck with anything.

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evolution stages?Photoshop has been my best friend throughout this project: I used it for the trailer as well as the ancillary tasks. It came in handy for my trailer when I wanted to insert the logo for the British Horror Film Festival, I was able to blend the image in with the rest of my trailer quite well.

Photoshop is extremely versatile- put an image in and you can do whatever you want with it, making it incredibly useful to the creative side of my work.

4. iMovieThe next application that I came to have a love/hate relationship with was iMovie. I first learnt that it wouldn’t all be smooth sailing with this program as soon as I started using it- when I tried to upload all the footage I had filmed. Most of it came out okay, but there were some crucial scenes that refused to upload into the program. After days of trying to get around the problem, once I was successful going through all the footage was actually pretty intimidating, and it wasn’t really helped by the format of the program.

At this point this is sounding like a review of iMovie, which isn’t really necessary as it is just a very basic editing program, and I came to a point where I had invested too much time in it to give up and try a different one. In the end, despite how long it took, it still worked to help me put together my trailer.

4. BloggerBlogger is quite a unique way to present coursework, and it really has been very handy to be able to access my work from whatever computer I happened to be using at any given time. I could only work on my creative projects on my personal computer because of Photoshop and iMovie, but I always had something to do with all my work online.

As I presented all my work on my blog, it was very important throughout all the stages of my work.

4. PreziPrezi is another way to create a presentation, but as it’s all online it’s a lot easier to share over social media. I found Prezi particularly useful whenever I have anything to analyze, because I liked the way you could paste, crop and comment on images without any hassle.

My only issue was that I was not successful in embedding the Prezi on to my blog, I was only able to put a link. This was particularly frustrating because it is something I have managed to do before, but it seems to be quite temperamental in the way it works.

4. Slide ShareSlide share is a way of combining the pros of both Microsoft PowerPoint and Prezi, in other words, it makes PowerPoint presentations easier to share over social media.

This is the only time I have used slide share because I did not feel it was necessary to make a full PowerPoint for anything else I wanted to write about, Prezi is a lot simpler for shorter presentations.

In any case, it was good to have other options incase I didn’t have access to the internet- you’re less likely to lose any work with slide share as you’re not saving it online, it’s saved like a regular document until you want to put it online.

4. CameraTo film my trailer I used a Panasonic HDC-SD40, which is a small, lightweight film camera.

I had a few issues with quality, and sometimes the images came out discoloured and dark regardless of what time of day it was or where the light was coming from, the darkness was always emphasized. This was a frustrating aspect, but the camera never gave up and worked well. Plus, as I just mentioned, it was very light weight so positioning it and moving it around was never difficult.

4. FacebookI used Facebook to get my audience feedback because it’s very easy to use, and some people generally tend to check it several hundred times a day so I could connect to other people with ease.

A plus of using Facebook to gather audience feedback was that it gave the audience some thinking space to give their answer in the own time, without having to think of anything right on the spot, lessening the ‘ums’ and ‘errs’ that I got whenever I tried to record a reaction.