2. Introduction For this piece of Coursework, we had to produce a viral marketing campaign for a new movie known as “The Watcher”. This included creating a Poster, a 30 second long Teaser Trailer, and a Website. Now that we have completed this viral marketing campaign, we shall take a look and see how well we have done.
3. Planning For our planning stage, we had to produce a Risk Assessment, a Shooting Schedule, and a Call Sheet The Risk Assessment was used to ensure our exercise was safe, and to see what could have gone wrong. During filming, nothing dangerous had happened. The only thing worth mentioning was that on some filming days, we hadn’t considered how fast it would get dark, and how dark it would get. This made it very hard for us to film, and in the end we had to wait for the next day of filming. Otherwise, nothing bad happened, especially none of the items listed on the Risk Assessment
4. Shooting Schedule The Shooting Schedule was used to giver us an idea of industry standards and plan out the days where we were all free and available, and therefore available to film. It was a fairly precise Schedule, but lacked a lot of detail. We don’t believe we worked to the Shooting Schedule as well as we should have, because although we tried to keep to the Schedule, a lot of things got in the way, such as the fact Nick was ill during one of the weeks of filming, and during one week it had started snowing, which cannot be applicable to the setting of the scene being filmed. As well as this, it would have taken us a lot longer to complete the filming anyway, as we underestimated how long it would take us during the Shooting Schedule.
5. Call Sheet The Call Sheet was used to put a little more detail into the planning. It helped us decide what locations to film at, what props were necessary, and what days each particular actor was needed. Overall, this Call Sheet was not very necessary, as we didn’t really need it that much, and quite a lot of the time our Schedule backfired anyway, so the Call sheet was quite unreliable anyway. However, it did help us with the props, as we probably wouldn’t have remembered them if it weren’t for the Call Sheet.
6. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Overall, we would say that The Watcher is fairly similar to many of conventional trailers in the market. The fade in and fade out transitional effects have been used in a lot of moving products, especially from the horror genre. As well as this, the black and white theme used in the trailer is used in many other horror texts. There are many shots that have been seen a lot in existing media, including the shot of Nick's eye, and the shot of Charlotte looking at her phone. However, there are some elements of our production that do challenge the conventions of media. We believe that a lot of shots are quite innovative, including the shot of Nick cradling himself in the red room, and the zoom out shot of Nick staring at the house towards the end of the trailer. Also, we believe that the overall concept of the trailer is quite clever. Most trailers usually follow the girl around, to show that she is the Protagonist. Our trailer is different, as it shows The Watcher, the killer, as the main character.
7. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? We believe that the poster works quite well to promote the trailer. We think that if someone saw the poster, then they would probably be quite interested in it later on, and might look it up a website like YouTube. Also, if someone saw the trailer in the theatre, then the poster would catch their eye, and this would make them tell more people, and hopefully attract a larger audience.
8. These are the results from the audience questionnaire. The numbers represent a Score out of five, five being the most positive
9. What have you learned from your audience feedback? The audience feedback we have received has taught us that our teaser trailer was gripping and exciting but could have had more effects put into it during post production. The audience believed our trailer was not the best out of the group but liked the interesting character of the watcher that we created. The feedback indicated that it was fascinating to see camera shots used in the teaser trailer from the point of view of the antagonist who is the Watcher.
10. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? Whilst researching for the project we used the internet to see existing Viral Marketing campaigns as well as existing teaser trailers for ordinary films as well as horror. We watched horror movie trailers using DVDs and websites like YouTube to develop an understanding of conventions used so that we could challenge and develop these in our own trailer. During the planning and evaluating stages we used computer prgrammes to make storyboards and presentations like Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Paint to display our findings. During the editing stage, we used Serif Plus to edit captions and videos together. In order to get feedback, we placed the video on YouTube to get online feedback from the world. We were also planning on putting it on Facebook to see if our Friends liked it.
