1. Evaluation By Lucy Whittaker and Elizabeth Simpson

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

3. Our media product uses the conventions of real media products following the horror genre as we followed the editing style of real media products; we speeded up the editing as the narrative became more intense. We also followed the colour scheme conventions for our media product as we felt that red was the best fitting colour to use for the font in our trailer as it connotates blood and violence and this is exactly what our trailer is about. Our media product’s sound follows the conventions of real media products as there is calm music whilst the story is introduced which becomes faster and louder as the horror and action occurs. We based our music around the song ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ composed by EdvardGrieg. This was the music used in the Funny Games trailer we looked at during our research. Our music was created by Sean Dreiblats, a music student at South Downs College, and his friend Jack Holland. Our version of the song is made with synthetic instruments to modernise it and to appeal to a wider audience as younger generations will be attracted by the contemporary sounds and instruments as well as older generations being attracted to the tune. This music follows media conventions for the horror genre as it is dramatic and tense and is of a classical style which is often used in horror genre, for example, The Black Swan and Psycho. Our media product follows the conventions of horror film characters, the main character is a quite and lonely man who has a secret murderous identity. Our main female character is innocent and easy to relate to, this allows the audience to sympathise with her and this sympathy draws them into the horror in the film and to scare them. We decided to use a modern panic of social networking to scare our audience more as it is a real fear.

4. Our magazine cover follows conventions of a film promotion cover as it uses the typical black, white and red colour scheme; we used a black background and red and white font. Our image was taken in the studio to ensure good lighting and high quality images, we wanted to create atmospheric lighting to show our characters personality, we lit his face from the side to create dark shadows on half of his face to illustrate the evil side to him. We chose to use a plain background to make sure that the focus is kept with our subject and not drawn to the background. We used a bold red font for the title and main article of the magazine (our film) to draw the publics attention to ensure good publicity. We created a yellow sticker-like circle to put our ‘sneak preview’ in to show the exclusivity of the contents which would keep the audiences attention. We developed conventions by creating quite a niche audience, by focusing the whole magazine on horror films; this allowed us the freedom to make the fonts, colour scheme and layout to follow a horror theme more obviously. However, we felt this was a bit over the top, looked quite unprofessional and it would limit who would be attracted to our magazine, with a more conventional colour scheme and layout our magazine will attract more people to pick it up.

5. Bold, red font Atmospherically lit images Sticker style used for exclusive preview/access Black and white font

6. Our poster challenges conventions, as it is quite plain, it has only three colours in it; black, white and red. The majority of our poster is white, which is very clinical whereas typical horror posters are dark and gloomy. It does not show much of the story line, which keeps the audience guessing the plot and keeping them interested. Our poster uses a close-up image of our main characters face; we do not show his identity in either the poster or the trailer as this adds to the mystery of our film. Our poster is a portrait image which goes against the landscape convention, whilst this has made an attractive poster, it restricts where we could use it, for example it would be well suited in a cinema or at a bus stop, but it would not work in a tube station or on a bus as shown by this animation. We would have to create separate adverts for different spaces if we were to advertise our media product properly.

7. Red blood, stands out Red and white font Dark, eerie colour scheme Bold capital letters QR barcode- Convergence of advertising Bright, light colour scheme

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

9. Our main product, the teaser trailer and our two ancillary texts, the poster and magazine cover combine well together. All three feature one main character, which enables the public to recognise him and remember where they saw him before. This will keep interest in our media product and will create a hype around it, which would lead to a higher chance of success in the cinema. They all feature the same character in the same clothing which makes him easily recognisable. In all three texts he has a moustache which is recognisable, our film name ‘Algernon’ is a name that means ‘with a moustache’ and we felt this linked well with our story. Due to the time limit and personal preference of our actor, we were unable to grow a real moustache and had to use a fake one, this made the texts look slightly comical and took away from the horror. All three follow a red theme, with red fonts throughout as well as blood in the trailer and poster whilst the magazine cover features a weapon all of which connotate the horror genre. Our media product and ancillary texts are all clean, neat and simple. Our trailer uses a bold, simple red font which narrates the imagery shown, the editing is careful and shows the story line clearly which is good for the audience as it is clear what the film is about, without being too obvious. Our poster is very clinical, white and symmetrical, the font used is square and precise which adds to the cleanliness atmosphere of the white, whilst the deep red blood splats juxtapose this hygienic feel, this blood adds a narrative to our poster but keeps it very vague.

10. Both the magazine cover and the poster show an obvious prop connotating the horror genre, in the magazine cover the character is holding a hammer as if he is going to hit someone with it which shows that he is the ‘baddie’ in this horror film. The poster shows our character covered in blood, which suggests there is some gore in this film and the blood around his mouth suggests something gruesome about his eating habits. Our poster and our trailer converge together as we have a put a QR barcode on poster which people can use their phones to scan and be linked to the trailer on YouTube. This convergence of the two types of advertising is modern and would target more of a younger audience as it is quite technologically advanced. This form of advertising would keep the public interested and would create more hype towards the film; this could lead to a higher success rate in the cinema. Our poster and magazine cover juxtapose each other as our poster is very clinical, bright and has connotations of gore whereas our magazine cover is very dark and sinister and has connotations of only violence. This juxtaposition would keep the audience interested in the film as they would continue guessing about the content of the film as neither give too much away.

11. Our poster could be more effective by following more conventions as this is what attracts people to the media product and challenging this might not invite people to watch our media product as they are not familiar with this form of advertising. It could be more effective if it was darker and gave away more of the film as the public would then be able to get interested in the story and want to see it in the cinema. Our magazine cover could be more effective if we had decided to create or use a more mainstream magazine with a wider audience. As we decided to create a horror film specific magazine which had a niche audience and would not appeal to everyone meaning our cover would not be a good source of advertisement as there would not be many copies created, therefore it would not be seen by many.

12. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

13. Our Feedback...

14. We decided to post our teaser trailer on Facebook to receive feedback from part of our target audience and our peers. We felt this would be a good source of feedback as it would be quick and easy to do. However, many of the comments we got were not very helpful and commented on the trailer itself rather than the footage, editing, sound etc. We did receive two useful comments one being extreme criticism of our storyline and the acting and the other complimenting the editing and music. The feedback we received was not useful in evaluating our media product and we were unsure whether to alter it. From the useful feedback we received we realised that the footage we used was not the best but because of the time limit we would have been unable to re-shoot for better quality footage. We felt that the editing, timing, narrative and music did not need to be changed, so no improvements were made.

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

16. During the research stage of our media coursework we used only the internet. We used Google to search for examples of other films, posters and magazine covers and then used websites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and IMDB to find out information about the real media products. We also used the Blue peter website to find a receipe for fake blood. We used the slideshare website to upload short presentations of our experimentation with the fake blood to illustrate our development into our research. We used blogger to document our work week to week to show our experimentation and development through-out the course.

17. During the construction stage of our media coursework we used a video camera to record our footage and we used iMovie to organise our clips and to construct our trailer, the video camera we used was not as higher quality as we would have liked and therefore lowered the quality of our footage. iMovie was simple and easy to use and we quickly adapted using it. Ableton live was used to create the music for our trailer. We used a DSLR camera to shoot our images for our two ancillary tasks as this allowed us the ability to take high quality images which would work well in a larger format, for example, A2 size. We used a studio to take our pictures and this allowed us to create atmospheric lighting to display more of our main characters personality in our images. We are both A2 Photography students so we had access and experience with this equipment, this made it very easy for us to create these images. We used Photoshop to edit our images and to create our magazine cover as we felt more comfortable using this program as we are both more familiar with how it works and the editing techniques available than we are with Indesign. We used Indesign to create our movie poster as we knew how we wanted the layout to be and felt that Indesign has better tools for measurements and aligning which would be necessary in our poster design. We also used barcodesinc generator to create a QR code to link to our trailer which we placed on our poster, this created a convergence of the two types of advertising and produced a nice synergy between our main product and ancillary texts.

18. For our evaluation stage we used CBS advertising website to create an animation of our poster at a tube station to give a realistic feel of what our ancillary text would look like in real advertising positions. This showed us that our poster would only be successful in certain positions. We also used facebook to gather feedback which we found was not the best method to receive feedback as most people did not leave constructive criticism which left us unsure of a true public reaction.