Media Studies A2Maheni Short

Final Evaluation

Evaluating and analysing my main final product and ancillary

tasks

Our media product uses forms and conventions of real products on the market by way of a lot of factors. When thinking of the genre that we wanted our trailer to be, we were thinking about how we could portray the classic story of Hansel and Gretel in a new, but not totally different way. For this, we settled on Thriller, a genre that had ways that the story could be told in the same way, but still gave us the freedom to add whatever we felt was necessary for us to be able to communicate what we wanted to our target audience. Using the conventions of thriller, we knew that we should use dark lighting and colours, fast paced movement, point of view camera angles, all of which we did in fact use and we feel it made our trailer much more high quality.

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

media products?media products?

By shooting our trailer in black and white, it added to the idea of mystery and suspense, creating shadows and a “fear of the unknown” for the audience.

When researching media products of a similar genre to mine, I decided to watch the trailers for:-Alice in Wonderland-Taken-Snow White and the HuntsmanI felt that these trailers were the most fitting to our genres of thriller and fantasy. Snow White and the Huntsman was chosen on the basis of the film industry being able to take a very classic fairytale and manipulate it to suit a modern audience, while still keeping the traditional elements of the story in tact. This was something that we hoped to achieve in our own trailer.

One trailer we took a lot of our inspiration from was Taken, as this was the closest to what we wanted to show through our own trailer. I noticed their use of fast paced movement and shaky camera angles, both of which we tried to incorporate into our trailer. We thought that these two elements of the Thriller genre were important to us portraying the tone that we wanted to our audience. The music and sound effects were also very important as we wanted to appeal to as many senses as possible; having prominent sound effects being played in surround sound would be another element that would bring the genre of Thriller to life.

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

When I was researching similar media products, I found that the trailer, poster and magazine front cover all shared cohesion; this is something that I tried to replicate when creating my ancillary tasks. I realised that there had to be some sort of link between the three media formats, most prominently a familiar picture of character.

I think that my ancillary tasks were extremely effective in showing this connection; they were all cohesive and really portrayed the right message that was set out in the first place; the genres of Thriller and Fantasy were clearly portrayed within the three platforms a

What have you learned from your audience What have you learned from your audience feedback?feedback?

A lot of the feedback we got form our audience was positive, although we did get some constructive criticism as well, and they gave some pointer as to how we could improve even more on our trailer, to make it a real feature that would be shown in a cinema before a film. The constructive feedback we got was;

- Sometimes the storyline was not clear

- The camera movements at times were too shaky and it was hard to understand what was going on as the camera was just following the two cast members around

Positives were:

-The ending with the witch was a clear plot twist and gave some cohesion and a nice end point to conclude the story

-Some people liked the shaky camera movement and thought it added to the story and the genre of Thriller (which was our intention with this decision in the first place)

-The use of a black and white filter also brought back the idea of Thriller; it made the whole trailer a lot more dark and mysterious (another original intention)

-Our use of sound effects was also good; the exaggerated heartbeat for example was used extremely effectively and made the genre and story all the more apparent for the audience

I think I’ve learned maybe not to take the conventions of certain genres too literally and to maybe make it a little less abstract when it comes to portraying your concepts and ideas. There was some difficulty in trying to convey the message we wanted to the audience as they had some questions about the actual story after the trailer was finished; the whole point of a trailer is to fill in your audience before they watch the film and I don not think that our trailer did this effectively. I think that if I were to do it again, I would think of a clearer concept or directors vision that would be easier to communicate to an audience.

How did you use new media technologies in the How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation construction and research, planning and evaluation

stages?stages?During the research and planning stage of my media project I used a lot of media technologies to aid my researching further so I could analyse similar media product in relation to what I wanted mine to be. I think the most effective was YouTube, an online video database that I used to search for trailers of a similar genre. This was a great tool for finding the specific trailers that I wanted and it was easy to go back and watch them as many times as I wanted and needed to without having to save or download them personally. This technology helped me greatly in the planning stage of making my media product. During the physical process of creating the product I of course used a lot of technologies like Final Cut Pro for Apple iMac, Adobe PhotoShop CS3 and Adobe InDesign. I found Final Cut Pro extremely effective for selecting and editing certain parts of my recorded footage as it was quite simple to use once I knew the basics.