Megan's Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
 As our trailer is for a Western film (entitled ‘The Eagle’), there were many codes and conventions already in place for the genre. Due to this, we had to break conventions, if only to produce the text, due to our limited abilities. For example, there are no actual gunshots, explosions or horses in our trailer, which is a huge change from the convention of a Western movie trailer. However, we used many of them to our advantage, in order to ensure that the trailer was still recognisably Western, such as the costume and setting in places. In order to maintain the forms and conventions of a trailer, we have attempted to give a small insight into the film, but barely give anything away – after all, this is a teaser trailer. We have included the title, approximate release date and names of those involved, in order to generate interest and follow conventions. Of course, as this is simply an A2 production, we are unable to use big names in our trailer, like most do in order to create hype.


 How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
 I definitely think that our products could be more effective, but seeing as we had much difficulty with our group task for various reasons, I am pleased with how it has turned out. A clear theme is made through the combination of them, and this allows us to tie the texts together – a desired effect. We follow the colour conventions of a Western film in the ancillary texts, and of course, use the same characters and font, in order to tie them together more effectively.


What have you learned from your audience feedback?
After having been told that very stereotypical elements were expected in a Western trailer from our first questionnaire, we attempted to compile what we could of these. We included a gun shot/shoot out, train tracks and other elements that were expected in order to meet conventions. Of course, we were unable to do so with everything, such as horses, as we did not have access to that kind of thing.
From our audience feedback following the trailers creation, we found that we had succeeded in incorporating these things, and that the music to our trailer was one that had not been expected. As we used Soundtrack pro, we were limited to the components available, and found that any of the harmonica type melodies didn't work with our trailer. We were also asked to include more information in the trailer, as what was given wasn't  very good at demonstrating the narrative or makings of.


How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Many different programmes and technologies were a part of our coursework for various different reasons. Initially, we made a preliminary trailer to get used to using Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro, which were essential for the construction of our text. We also had practice with Microsoft Publisher last year, which was very useful for the production of our poster and magazine cover. Photoshop was also a large part, as we used it to edit our images and put effects on them, so that they were more recognisable as linking to the Western genre.
We used Survey Monkey in order to effectively collect information from our audience, and Youtube to look at other film trailers in order to create our own adhering to trailer conventions.  I also used Windows Movie Maker to comment on a trailer of Sherlock Holmes for our initial genre research.
For the evaluation all the way throughout the process of creating our coursework text, we used Blogger, of course. This helped us to keep up to date with what was going on, and see each other's contributions. Using this site has been very useful for exactly that reason, as it makes it possible to keep everything well ordered, and also manageable.

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

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

Magazine Cover

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

Evaluation: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Trailer

The Outtakes

Here's a peek into the process of the filming!

Official Poster

Audience Feedback

Recently, we completed drafts of our texts and we decided to e-mail these to some audiences as a way of identifying how effective the texts are, whether they have the desired effect on our audiences and where we need to improve.

Judging from the responses that we got, it seems that on the whole, the audiences were impressed with the results. One of the most common positives was that they felt that the trailer did a good job of not giving too much of the plot away and the enigma generated curiosity and intrigue. They also liked the layout, colours and fonts included in the magazine front cover and the poster as they thought that these clearly indicated the genre of the texts.

However, one of the negatives that they found was that the music was not as conventionally Western as they would have expected from a Western trailer and that it did not quite match the feel of the trailer. They also identified that they would like more information on the movie and the actors included in the trailer as we had only included information about the release date and the past works of the directors with just the one line - 'Who do you trust?' - in relation to the content of the movie in order to keep the trailer as enigmatic as possible.

So, we have responded to the constructive criticism of our audiences by including more text in the trailer with information on the cast and the directors as the audiences wanted and we are currently working on creating a new soundtrack! :)

Poster: Final Images

Here are our selection of the final images to be included in the poster:

'EAGLE'

'LORETTA'

'SHERIFF'

First of all, we decided on this image for 'Eagle' as we wanted an image that slightly concealed his face with shadows. We wanted this as, usually, across all texts - not just Western films - the hero is often shown in brighter light than the villain as light is often associated with good and the dark with bad/evil but we wanted to challenge this. We wanted to portray to the audiences the fact that he is an unconventional hero as within the storyline of the film, he is an outsider, yet, he manages to 'save the day' - conventionally, in Western movies, the 'outsider' is often the 'bad guy'.

Likewise, you can see in the 'Sheriff''s image that we have used a lot brighter lighting as he is the 'Sheriff' - a job that supposedly means that he is of good character and is capable of protecting the settlement. However, we have also created a dark shadow behind him in order to depict that he has a part of him that is hidden and dark. Also, in the image you can see that the sheriff has his hand on his gun - a show of power - and has an arrogant expression on his face as he is looking down his nose at the audience. These all hint to the audience that the Sheriff could be taking advantage of his power. Therefore, we chose this image of the Sheriff to go onto the poster.

Going back to the chosen image for 'Eagle', we have chosen to make use of an extremely low angle in order to show that he may be an unconventional hero - achieved by the use of lighting techniques - he is a hero, nonetheless. Low angles often force the audience to treat the subject with higher regard and respect. Also, we chose to have 'Eagle's arms crossed with a serious expression and against a simple background in order to portray his personality to the audience - closed off, serious and mysterious.

In 'Loretta's case, we chose to have her in the bar as her job as a bar maid predominantly the reason why she ends up in danger in the film (she overhears the Sheriff's less-than-respectable plans and the Sheriff threatens her to keep her mouth shut), so, the bar is a very important location for her. Also, she is looking into the camera with a soft gaze - letting the audience know that this character is the 'damsel' that is so often present in Western films and also in most other texts, according to Propp's theory. We also chose to have her in natural lighting as we felt that this depicted her ...

We had previously decided from our poster analysis that a lot of posters for Western films seems to have illustrated or painted effects ... So, now that we have chosen the images to be used in the poster, it's time to experiment around on Adobe Photoshop to see how we, too, can achieve the illustrated effect that was evident in so many Western posters.

Here are some of my experimentations:

 The 'Film Grain' effect ...

The 'Palette Knife' effect ...

The 'Paint Daubs' effects ...

 However, in the end the effect that I felt best achieved what we wanted was 'Poster Edges' ... So, here are the final images that will be used in the poster:

Bye Bye Georgie ...

Unfortunately, one of our group members, Georgie, has decided that this isn't the path for her and has decided to leave ... So, we just want to say 'Thank You!' for all your contribution, Georgie, you will be missed and good luck! :)