Monday 27 February 2012

Jenny Matthews Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Jenny Matthews Question 3: What have you learned from from your audience feedback?


Audience feedback has been very helpful when creating the trailer, plus also when creating the ancillary texts (poster and magazine cover). Without audience feedback it is very difficult to decide whether the decisions that
are being made are correct decisions about our products and trailer.

Magazine:

Firstly the magazine cover was very challenging, however after many different drafts of the magazine cover we finally managed to come up with a magazine cover that was very effective in achieving the goal of fitting with the comedy convention and our other pieces.

This was one of the first of our magazine drafts without the background and cover lines, the second image is with coverlines, plus our final magazine cover is at the end:



Through audience feedback from
my A2 level media class, we realised that this magazine cover needed quite a few adjustments, which
are as follows below:
  • The colours to be more associated with comedy, in other words more yellows, and other light colours as the image is too dark and does not appear to fit it with the conventions of the genre.
  • The second adjustment was to be made on the colour and quality of the image, therefore when creating our final product the images presented are much clearer and show another one of the main characters.
  • Where there is the free poster inside offer, the red shape and drips tend to look like blood, which once again does not fit in well to the comedy genre, therefore we changed this to a basic circle shape and changed the colour to a light grey.
  • The 'Who Let the Nerds Out?' title did not appear to have any connection to our other pieces, due to this reason we made a decision to carry out the title in the same font throughout each piece
To the right is the final magazine cover;

As you can see many changes have been made in order to adapt to the audience feed back as much as possible. The bar code position has also changed as the positioning now is more accurate to the bar code placement on a mainstream film magazine.

This is shown also in popular film magazines such as Empire:












Trailer:

The trailer had many different stages and different scenes, therefore it was sometimes difficult to get across the narrative as well as manage editing e.t.c

Our media class helped us with this task by giving feedback on ways in which the trailer could be improved. Issues that were raised was that there wasn't a clear sense of narrative and sequencing, the music in some ways needed to be altered in order to fit in better with the scenes, it was unclear that each of the characters at the beginning were using a webcam, plus that it was hard to identify character personalities. We overcame these issues by:

  • There was more character involvement, for example we can see the nerds having some form of interaction with the other members of their school, plus them getting chased.
  • An effect was added using iMovie in order to show that they were all using their webcam to interact with each other, which made it clear that they were in a group conversation.
  • When showing the characters names there is a clip of each character so that we can identify with them, plus see their specific traits e.g. clumsy.
  • The music changed during the 'Reservoir Dogs' scene, allowing it to be obvious that this scene was one to be remembered.
  • Another difference we made to the trailer was adding a voice over, in order to once again ensure the narrative was clear and understandable to the audience.

Poster:

The poster had many different transformations, even in terms of paper orientation. At first it began as landscape then portrait. The reason we decided to make our poster portrait is that it is more conventional of a comedy poster, it is very rare to have a landscape poster and since our package was mainstream, it was advisable we go for the conventional orientation.

Advise on our poster was that there should be a clue of narrative involved, because once again it was difficult to see the plot, clear imagery, change of background colour as previously we had a grey background. To overcome these we:

  • Involved a 'chav' character in order to show that within the film there will be a conflict between the characters, she also is holding a fire extinguisher near his head so you can see they are in battle by their stance.
  • The background colour in now a pale yellow, therefore contrasts with the negative picture so you can tell there will also be some light-hearted attributed to the film, also the characters have an effect on them which make them look almost like a cartoon which again promotes the comedy genre.
  • There is also subtle font in the background displaying nerd names such as nerd, geek, loser and other nicknames, these have been toned down so that they are hidden well with the pale yellow backing.


Jenny Matthews Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?