Trailer Final

Poster Final

Magazine Cover Final

Yacine question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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

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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?

Question 2

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Jenny Matthews question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Question 1

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Rashida Dixon Evaluation Question 4- How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

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Rashida Dixon Evaluation Question 3- What have you learned from from your audience feedback?

The audience feedback enabled us to see the problems there with our media products. We were able to see if our products had the desired appeal upon or target audience. The criticism we were given enabled is to make sure that our final pieces would go in the correct direction; it also help us spot mistakes that we would have not spotted ourselves.

After the audience feedback we were able to have a more clear idea of what needed to be done. It made planning for the re-shooting of scene and editing of our media products. The audience feedback enabled us to come to the decision to use a voice over to communicate some of our ideas better. As they said that the text was distracting at times.

We were able to change the magazine to make it more appealing to the audience. We removed things that they didn’t like and made feature stand out better as they told us that some things didn’t stand out enough.

Positive feedback was also helpful because it made us aware that the audience perceived the information the way that we wanted. It also enabled us to make features that they like stand out more to help draw them to our media product.

Rashida Dixon Evaluation Question 2- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

How effective is this combination of your main

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Rashida Dixon Evaluation Question 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Forms: Trailer

Genre: Comedy

Structure

Narrative:-We looked at the conventions of many comedy films, initially we looked at some British comedies such as Anvahood we then decided to look at more American Comedies about Nerds such as Revenge of The Nerds. Looking at these film trailers and many other helped us to enable some ideas for our trailer. As a result of watching these trailers we developed the concept of Nerds vs Chavs; the idea of the underdog trying to triumph over the “big dogs” seems to be very popular in many comedies about nerds. The audience in some shape or form are able to sympathy with the weaker characters characteristics and they also find joy in laughing at the misfortunes of the characters. We tried to make the idea of underdog versus the popular group by making the poplar group chavs, a group that society looks down on rather than aspire to be like. This creates more comedy.

We needed to make sure that we grabbed the audiences’ attention by giving hinting at the films narrative without giving too much away. Creating the trailer was difficult because generally the movie would already be produced so we would only need to choose clips that we believe would be relevant. However, we weren’t in this position so planning what we wanted to put in our trailers was very help.

Our trailer followed the same structure that Todorov suggested is found in many native structures; Equilibrium, disequilibrium and new equilibrium. Our trailers layout included showing a sense of equilibrium in the form of the nerds talking about their excitement of partaking in initiation, we then showed the disequilibrium by showing the nerds getting bullied by the chavs and then finally we hinting at the new equilibrium (solution) by asking open question that will leave the audience thinking about the potential solution to the film. We found this structure in all of the trailers we looked at. We found that leaving the ‘New equilibrium’ open to the audience own interpretation leaves the audience more interest in the film as they are constantly thinking about what going to happen in the end. This is what makes our trailer and others appealing. We did find that while creating the trailer for our A2 media this was the best narrative layout to follower as challenging it http://as-psychology.pbworks.com/EyewitnessTestimonycreated some problems.

Voice over:We used a voice over as we felt that in some way our material that we filmed wasn’t enough to communicate our ideas. We played with the idea of only using text within the trailer to do this however this wouldn’t have been very effective because it would have meant the audience wouldn’t have taken in the information in the same way.

Music: our music was quite up beat we found that in most comedies the music is quite upbeat normally with a strong drumbeat. In our audience feedback we found that our music wasn’t upbeat enough so we decided to add a more prominent drum beat. We used the idea from Reservoir dog walk scene to create comedic value to our film as the characters personalities contrast with the sense of seriousness the music creates.

Characters: We wanted to create characters that the audience can sympathize with. We decided that we would concentrate on the Nerds instead of the chavs. Through watching films like superbad we found out that having a ‘underdog’ was very common for these type of films which is why we decided that our trailer would focus on the idea of the weak fighting against the poor, similar to trailers such as the one for the revenge of the nerds.

Mise-en-scene: The clothing of the Nerd was very stereotypical. We kept the stereotypes because we believed that our audience which is a mainstream audience would be able to identify with the characters better from previous viewing experiences.

The Logo Of our film (see question 2)

Evaluation Question 1- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

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

Construction and research:

Media technologies used:
—IMDB (research)
—Youtube (research)
—Garageband (construction)
—iMovie (construction)

How they where used


I used IMDB to look at films that where in the same genre as the one we where doing, this gave me a good insight into the way that other producers made similar products to the one that I had to make, and also pointed me in the direction of other films of the same genre that I could analyse and get ideas from.
Youtube was also used in research as we could watch clips from films and trailers, and as we where making a trailer we could look at the way that other directors and producers had pieced together their trailers to give away information to ‘hook in’ the audience but not give too much of the film away.
Garageband was a very useful tool in the construction of the product as it enabled us to create our own soundtrack. I created the soundtrack from scratch and could use effects such as pitch control to raise or lower the tone for a few seconds to imply something about the characters being shown at the same time.
iMovie was one of the most important pieces of technology that was used because it enabled us to edit what we had shot. We could also add special effects and title slates, as well as being able to turn our short clips into a trailer.


Planning and Evaluation


—Blogger (planning)
—Social networking, Facebook (planning)
—Prezi (Evaluation)
—Powerpoint (Evaluation)

How they where used


Blogger was the foundation to the portfolio. We where constantly able to add bits of useful information or things that we had found that could generate ideas towards the product. It came in useful in the planning stage as we where able to put up a timetable of when things where to be done and who was to do what in the group.
Facebook played a part in the planning as we where all able to contact each other via the messaging service that facebook provides, this meant that we could agree on meeting times and could discuss ideas when we were not in a group.
Prezi is a useful website that allows you to create a presentation that moves about the screen and is similar to a brainstorm whilst it gives the veiwer information. Though it is useful and would help in evaluating my work one of my Prezi’s crashed online and was not able to be recovered. However it did prove to be a very useful technology to use.
Powerpoint is perhaps the easiest way to display something you wish to present. It is easy to use and and has made it easier to evaluate my work as it is all easily presented.

David Hawthorne: Question 3: What have you learned from from your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback helped us to understand exactly what it was that our audience would want to see in a film. We gave them choices as to what genre they may prefer and which type of music they would like to hear used in the film. With the audience being involved in this way it meant that we could package together a product that they have asked for and by giving them what they want we it is easier for us to see who our target audience is, and it also makes it easier to aim outr product at our target audience as we know what it is they want to see.

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

One of the most effective points to this product was the fact that we used the same logo across all three texts. We used the title of the film across all three of our products as it is like a stamp on our work that identifies it as our own and becasue it can be easily identified by our audience who can recognize that it is us.

David Hawthorne: question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Real media texts:

—They’re funny
—The script is spoken at speed, often with quick fire puns.
—Uses exaggerated acting for a comic effect.
—May have references to other films and will play on the seriousness of it.
—Certain music is in ironic fashion, for example a cheerful instrumental during a fight scene

Our product:

—Over exaggerated the acting of the nerds, for example the laughs.
—Played on the ‘reservoir dogs’ walking scene to comic effect.
—Used serious music during the walking scene, which added to the fact that the nerds couldn’t be ‘gangsta’

Develpoing the conventions of a comedy

One of the scenes from our production includes three of the ‘nerds’ who have tried to become ‘gangsta’, walking slowly along a path. This idea was taken from the film reservoir dogs where the men all walk adjacent to each other along a path. We added a piece of music over the top and added slow motion during the editing to play on the idea of a spoof or parody. Comedies use a lot of short often hard to spot spoofs or references to other films to make a scene funnier and by using this ourselves we have developed this convention.

Challenging the conventions

One of the scene from our production includes three of the ‘nerds’ who have tried to become ‘gangsta’, walking slowly along a path. This idea was taken from the film reservoir dogs where the men all walk adjacent to each other along a path. We added a piece of music over the top and added slow motion during the editing to play on the idea of a spoof or parody. Comedies use a lot of short often hard to spot spoofs or references to other films to make a scene funnier and by using this ourselves we have developed this convention.

Using GarageBand