Evaluation Questions

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

In our film we didn’t want to use a typical clown costume for our killer’s outfit because we thought that it was too cliché and we wanted to try something different. We took the route of the Joker’s outfit from the film The Dark Knight. The Joker wore casual clothes which made him look like an ordinary man, apart from the make-up which defined him as a clown. This brought a sense of realism to our film and made our killer character more like a twisted human being than a clown. For our magazine front cover we used Empire magazine as a template. We included the usually stuff such as a price, barcode, date, issue number etc in an attempt to make the magazine look as official as possible. We looked at several old Empire magazines and laid out our film magazine just like the lay out Empire use. It was daytime when we shot our film however the fact that it was shot within someone’s home made it a lot scarier because the killer was actually inside the house. However, the film magazine background is dark and sinister but I don’t think that the audience will pay much attention to the contrast. We used bright colours and put the title of the film (‘Frown’) on our film poster in an attempt to create a sense of playfulness. We’re trying to confuse the audience because we want them to get mixed impressions so they go on to research in on the web and find out more about it, kind of like viral marketing. Our trailer contains scary music through out and has a jumpy bit towards the end which does genuinely make the audience jump. We used the company Lions Gate Entertainment in our trailer because they traditionally make horror films especially the Saw series. Also we used the Twisted Pictures production company in our trailer because they have worked with the Saw series and other horror films. As you can see we have followed the Saw series closely because it has been largely successful and are on target to release their eighth film in the series.

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

Our film varied a little to the two ancillary texts that we used. Our film’s genre was horror so when we edited our film we included disturbing music, with suspending camera shots and a part which makes you jump. However, the trailer was shot in broad daylight. This was to emphasise the fact our film was different to most horror films and that our killer character struck at day as well as night. Our ancillary texts were dark and gloomy however we did try to use bright colours in both of them to try and make the clown character seem a slightly mental. The film poster is extremely teasing, showing only a pair of clown shoes and the title. The film magazine won’t have a full review on it either, just a little section of what they think the film is about. As mentioned earlier, we want our audience to find out about the film themselves and to be left in the dark about it, similar to how Paranormal Activity played with their audience. We were sticking to bright colours and dark backgrounds for both our ancillary texts and parts of the clown were shown on the two different pieces e.g. the clowns head for the film magazine cover and its feet for the poster.

3. What have you learned from your audience feed back?

When we showed our trailer to our classmates for the first time the first initial response was that they thought it was scary which is what we wanted to achieve seeing as our trailer is of the horror genre. The feedback we got from our classmates were positive and they thought that some of our camera shots where very spooky, particularly the scene where our killer character is in view of a mirror in the background and then disappears discretely. They also thought the use of a notorious producing company and the fact that we used credits made our trailer look very professional. A couple of classmates also liked our use of transitions with the text throughout the trailer, liking the fact that the trailer flowed throughout without any stops or delays. There were the comments that we were looking for. We did receive some constructive criticism about our use of sound effects throughout the trailer. A couple of classmates said that they thought the sound effects were too noisy for their liking and that some where louder than others. We therefore re-checked all of our sound effects throughout our film and changed them to make them sound better.

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

In the first stages of our film we had to research and plan. To do this we used mainly computers. We went on hundreds of websites looking up different films, companies, actors/actresses etc in an attempt to help construct our teaser trailer. We also purchased a couple of film magazines in an attempt to get used to the structure of their front covers for our ancillary text. We went to the cinema a couple of times whilst in the research stages of our film and looked at several scary trailers before the film such as Saw VI and Paranormal Activity.
When filming we used a state of the art camera and tripod to capture all the scenes for our trailer. We then took our tape into the editing suite and began capturing and editing our trailer on the editing computer. We used my iPod Touch to record several sound effects and then we used a program called Sound Edit to capture all of sounds. We then placed the captured sounds into the correct places.
When it came to the blogging part of the project we used programs such as Microsoft Word and Publisher. We also used Windows Movie Maker to create our story bored. All the photos were uploaded from cameras and phones via USB slots in our computers.