Media Evaluation
1. In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media industry?
Our magazine cover follows some the conventions any professional magazine would. It has a left and right-hand third on our magazine, we have a colour scheme of black, white, pale blue and a pale red-orange, ‘Popcorn’ is targeted at a young teenage audience the same as the film that’s why we used pale blue and pale red as they are softer colours also they added colour to the magazine and our actress brightened it up. The main image on the magazine cover is of Saroj dressed in a sparkly dress which we think will stand out on the shelf and it will attract the attention of the views and entice our target audience in to buying theproduct. I followed the standard convention of the magazine because I know that those convention and techniques work well within the market. Big companies like Bauer and IPC use and follow them on their most successful magazine covers and make massive profits from there sales every year also to follow the conventions there is a lot of main stream magazine that I can getinspiration from.
The main image on the poster is a heart shaped montage of pictures of the two leading characters doing different poses or actions. All of the images are an orange colour they have been manipulated so that the orange tones are increased. This symbolises the warmth and love in the trailer also it fits well with the pale pink edge of the heart boarder on the poster which is there to also symbolise the warmth and love on the poster. The billing block is at the bottom of the poster the title doesn’t follow conventions and is not at the top of the page but it’s in the middle slightly off centre. We did this because we wanted the heart to be as big as we could get it and we put it just off centre so it didn’t cover the images to much but we wanted it to be noticeable so we put the star callout behind to be eye catching.
Originally we wanted our trailer to be a trailer for a romantic comedy but we established that writing comedy is very hard because one person’s humour is not the same everyone else’s therefore it makes it hard to make everyone laugh, so we had to change our trailer from a Romantic Comedy to a romantic film. We followed the conventions of continuity editing when editing our trailer, we tried to film in a professional manner and follow the basic rules like the 180° rule.In addition to this because it’s a romantic trailer we tried to use as few straight cuts as possible because straight cuts are very disjointed and they stop the flow and momentum of the trailer which is great if the trailer genre is a thriller or horror when you want your audience to jump and keep them on the edge of there seats but romance is never straight forward and as clean cut as a straight cut.We wanted to show the fluency of the narrative, of the couple growing towards each other and the progression of their relationship throughout the trailer, we found that cross fades complement the momentum and they didn’t halt the progression as much as straight cuts. The narrative of our trailer breaks conventions in the sense that the typical stereotype teen romantic film/trailer would be the girl being the geek and the boy being the popular kid but, in our film/trailer we have Kevin playing the geek and Saroj playing the popular cool kid to breakconventions and fill the gap in the market of having the boy as the popular character and the girl as the ‘geek’.
The soundtrack for our trailer isn’t very complicated we have the dialogue and our theme music, our theme music is an original composition written for this trailer. The piece of music is called kisses and its all about that ‘unexpected kiss’ or that unexpected love interest like in our trailer, its sung by a female to correspond with the trailer that its unexpected by the girl to fall for the geeky boy. In the trailer the music goes into the middle 8 early because we wanted there to be a turning point in the trailer where the boy had been rejected and he felt like he didn’t have a friend in the world and then when the song comes out of the middle 8 we have the geeky boy and the cool girl getting together and a few shots of them holding hands.
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our poster we used photos of Saroj and Kevin in their costumes, we had Kevin wearing a pair of white converse knee high socks some almost skin tight three quarter length shorts and a t-shirt that had cartoon characters on it and in some shots a pair of glasses. For Saroj it was a little more glamorous we had her wear some of her own cloths that looked modern and current we did this because you cant get more current fashion than what teenagers are wearing today to go out and impress their friends. which they wore in our trailer on our poster to show the link and branding then for our poster we used a picture of just Saroj on her own and used that to show a feature story on Saroj we did this because not manymagazines chose to cover and feature teen romantic films as the big main feature its normally the lead actor/actress of that film that they feature so we decided to take that angle with the magazine cover.
On our poster’s billing block and in our trailer I put in the logos which I created to show company branding, logos are one of the main and best ways to create company branding of a companies products. To make it look professional, I took my inspiration for my first logo from the Paramount Pictures Logo, I found out what paramount stood for which is power and influence this is what inspired my name choice, I got the name of Influence Productions then I had to think of adomineering picture like the mountains in the Paramount Pictures logo so I chose the idea of a fist. I took a picture of my own fist I imported the picture intoPhotoshop I cut out my fist then used the artistic filters in Photoshop and put a cut out filter on my fist I brightened my fist and the out the text in around it and just colour matched the text to my figures. I chose my fist because a fist is powerful and influential and power and influences is the meaning of the word paramount so I picked a symbol that I thought would represent power. For my second logo my influence was the Warner Brother’s logo what I did is I took a picture of the Warner Brothers logo and I cut it out to create a layered Photoshop file I then took out the WB from the middle of the logo and put my initials MC in the middle then I straitened the top parts off so it is more of a shield also so it isn’t copyright infringement.
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback? What do your audience think about the final product?
I have learnt that the target audience liked our trailer they said it was 'funny' 'interesting' and 'it would make me want to go and see it' the group of 15 year old boys and girls rated our trailer highly all giving above a 7 out of 10. Please See Graph 1 Bellow. When looking back on the final products I was worried that not everyone would understand that it was a Romantic Comedy and they would just find it more of a comedy but the message must have presented itself the majority of teenagers that reviewed the trailer said it was a ‘Romcom’ closely followed by the thought that it was a Romantic film. Some of them thought it was a comedy so we must have presented the genre well. Please See Graph 2 Bellow. We also showed the group our magazine cover and film poster, when asked about our magazine cover they said 'the picture make it stand out' 'the colours are nice' and 'the girl is pretty' also we asked them to rate our magazine cover. Please See Graph 3 Bellow. When we asked them about our poster they said 'love the colours', 'the pictures are lovley' and 'the heart is so cute', again we asked them to rate our film poster. Please See Graph 4 Bellow.
The things I would improve on the trailer are minor tweaks that I would do if I had more time really nothing major I don’t think, I would rerecord and dub the majority of Kevin’s dialogue because some of it when it was recorded was clipping on the way in and some of it was just unusable, the only other improvements I would make would be to the title and the logos there is just a few tweaks that looking back on after rendering and burning to disc I have noticed I think it was just a case of looking at it with fresh eyes and taking the break from editing.
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
This project was the first time I have used the cameras in our media suite so learning to use them was a challenge. There are different aspects of the camera that can be affected by the smallest things like the exposure of the shot if filming on locations and there isn’t artificial lighting. If you have to cut and the redo the scene when editing you can get conflicts with continuity regarding the natural light, for example if a cloud moves in the sky and blocks the light or if the clouds in the shot and then moves or if piecing two shot together the cloud my even disappear.
Setting the cameras up was fairly easy you just have to make sure if using a tripod that it is level and secure preparing the cameras to film takes a little bit more brain power because you have to thing about the white balance of what your filming, this is so when editing the colours are all right and the same as everything you film. In order for this to be the same what you have to do is hold a white bit of paper up where your filming then zoom right into it so all you can see is white then adjust the white balance so its as white as you can get it making sure its not gone to far either side of green and blue. After which, you change the expose which is how much light is going into the lens and you can amplify that in the camera to make it seem brighter and also you can gate it to make it darker again. The final thing from the visual side is just getting the camera in focus I recommended that the auto focus was turned off because it focuses on the thing moving in the shot not necessarily what you want it to focus on, so it was just a case of focusing the camera. Finally it is connecting and testing the sound devices, on some shots I used two tie clip radio mic which pick up directions sound so they are good if you want clear dialogue of just on or two people, we were restricted to a maximum of two radio mic at any given time because the cameras only have to XLR inputs on them, for some shots I used a boom arm with a condenser mic on the end of it which was set to hypercardioid mode because I wanted it to be more directional then the only thing left to do is to connect the headphones and balance out the sound levels so its not to loud or quiet.
On to editing this project was also the first time I used Adobe’s Premiere Pro software out of our group I took on role of editor because I felt most comfortable sitting in front of the Apple Mac and I have experience with using ProTools and audio editing software. I could see past all of the daunting boxes on the screen and I edited the first clips and found it great to use so I took on the role of editor while Kevin took on the role of producer. Kevin and I made our thoughts, storyboards and ideas into reality using the effects and tools in Premiere Pro. In the editing room I would take the tape from the camera and run the footage off the tape into Premiere Pro were I would create individual .mov files of each clip I would then sit down with Kevin and we would watch each clip and find the best clips out of all the ones shot then I would import them into the trailer premiere pro session then I would manipulate them into where I thought they should go.
As a team we had team meetings about our ideas and visions of the trailer in our heads, me and Kevin would sit in the editing room and Kevin would say what he liked and what he didn’t like and the other members of the group would come in and I would show them my visions and Kevin’s visions and we would have a discussion on what we thought worked best and why then I would edited the clips into how we had decided, for example I said that the clip with Saroj Jessica and Beth walking through the common room should have audio on it and Kevin didn’t think it should so I took the audio off it and showed it to the group then put the audio back on it and again presented it to the group and after looking at both clips Kevin, Dannielle and Abbie all agreed with me that having the audio works better and it adds a nice change to the clip.
Once I had I rough idea what clips were going where I used the video effect tools and the transitions to create the transitions between shot, also I used tools like speed and duration to create the slow motion shots and rather using the dip to black video transition I used the opacity to create the dips to black because I felt that you have more control on what you do because you select the key frames so you control the speed. Also in the editing I had to create all of the titles, for the first love title I had to create it in Photoshop then save it as a .png not a .psd so that I could place it on the title frame in Premiere Pro because the titles in Premiere Pro default to a black back round because there is nothing on the underneath of it so once I had the first love logo in I created a text box and I put the date in the title frame.
In additions to this I create the title sequence at the end using Adobe After Effects what I had to do was open up my logos again in Photoshop which is were I created them and save then as logos/.png file then import them into After Effects and the what I did every two seconds I set a key frame and changed angle of the object on the X axis by 25% each time until I got it to do a full rotation then I exported that sequence first and then created a new composition and put my second logo in there this time I changed the size of the image every to seconds then once it was full size I exported the sequence then imported that into my Premiere Pro session and then changed the speed of the logos so they flowed much faster I then used a cross fade so it looks like the influence production logo punches the Marcus Cameron production logo out of the way.
For the audio editing I used ProTools, I have been using ProTools for nearly 5 years so I am very familiar with it but this was the first time I used it to edit audio whist having the frames on a timeline so I could see were the music needed to be changed and cut also I used it to compress some of the dialogue. Along side ProTools and Premiere Pro I used Adobe sound booth to clean up some of the dialogue because in ProTools I didn’t have the plug-ins to do the clip removal also I used it purely for easy so I didn’t have to unlink the audio then export it our of premiere pro the import it into ProTools to then work on it to the export it then to re-import it and then link it back to the video clip so I just used Sound Booth because it will run along side premiere pro and it is just a case of clicking a button and you’ve got the audio out sorted and in again in no time at all. As I mentioned earlier, I edited the soundtrack to emphasise the meaning in the narrative.
I used blogspot.com for my research, planning and evaluation so I could access my work anywhere that has the internet also I used it so I could embed file trailers and pictures into my work, blogspot.com is a totally interactive service. In conclusion to this I feel that my editing skills have developed massively and this has allowed me to become much more creative in our narrative and a product which I am proud of.
