Media A2 Production

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.