Evaluation Question 1:

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

Teaser Trailer.

(mid shot of our victim)

(POV shot of our killer)

Firstly, the purpose of a teaser trailer is to get the audience interested in the film within a short amount of time (usually around 1 minute) so they will only show a minimum amount of footage just to briefly outline the plot and genre but not give too much of the film away. The majority of our trailer is shots that introduce the audience to the main characters, until the build up towards the end, where we see quick paced flashback shots of the previous 8 victims being caught. The two main characters shown are the villain and victim of our film (the serial killer obsessed with homeless teenagers and his 9th victim, who is different to the others but the audience might not be sure why at this point as it's only a teaser trailer).

In order to follow the conventions of a typical teaser trailer, we completed deconstructions on existing trailers that we thought were successful in their job to intrigue and excite the audience. I also completed a deconstruction of the trailer and some research from watching the film 'Nightcrawler' as I felt it had several connections to our own film package.


We followed the structure of most teaser trailers well, including the important features such as a green screen, production company and numerous credits as well as the title of the film being placed at the end. The trailer starts off with the 'green rating screen' and we decided to rate ours as a 'restricted' film (as our production company are American), although in the UK it could be considered a 15. This is because even with it being a psychological thriller, it would still contain horror elements such as details of the murders and hopefully the audience would be frightened by the idea that a serial killer can look so ordinary and live so near by (our intention was to portray him that way). We then included a clip of the Paramount Pictures opening credit but shortened it from 20 to a few seconds to fit in with the pace of a teaser trailer and also put an effect over the top in Final Cut Pro so it wasn't too bright for a psychological thriller.

For our credits, we developed the idea of stop-motion effect writing to resemble the killer writing in his book and so Megan took individual pictures while writing out the credits and we edited them together on Final Cut. This developed the conventions of the credits typically used in psychological thrillers. However teaser trailers don't usually contain that many credits as they can take up too much of an already restricted time limit so I feel we challenged that convention slightly, by having a longer trailer and therefore more space to include credits. 

The first credit was "From the directors of 'Young Blood' and 'A+E'" and these types of credits are often used to highlight what previous films it will be similar to and therefore the audience can make a quick judgement as to whether they think they would enjoy it or not. Similarly we then used "Produced by Alice Goold, Hayley Tibbs" and "Directed by Megan Tee" for the same reason and to highlight who created the film. 

We then used our tagline "One Predator, His Prey, Their Punishment" as this often highlights the plot of the film and it is important to include it in a teaser trailer and because this was a longer credit we placed it right before the pace of the shots began to speed up towards the climax of the trailer before our final credit which was the title of the film.





In terms of sound, teaser trailers often use voice-overs from the film to play over the quick paced shots as there isn't enough time to show huge sections of dialogue. In our trailer, the beginning is a low humming noise and we placed a voice over on the top in the format of a news report to highlight the context of the film... "so far there has been a total of 8 deaths in the past 8 years". The music in teaser trailers will usually build up to the climax at the end and we followed this convention in ours. We used various background tracks and edited particular sections to help it build up. This was aided by the use of a 'cinematic boom' sound effect which was paired with the quick-paced flashback shots, a whirring metallic sound every time a credit was shown and also a high pitched eerie noise at the end.


The editing through our trailer followed the conventions of a typical thriller trailer, it started off with slower paced shots (such as the time lapses and shots of London) and then built up speed with shorter shots being used to increase tension (such as the flashback shots right at the end). These flashbacks shots were filmed using a wide variety of camera angles and in order to resemble this trait, we had to organise another filming date with our previous victims as the footage already in the trailer wasn't intriguing and exciting enough.

We challenged the conventions of locations in psychological thrillers, as by setting it in London and therefore using well known tourist attractions, the locations we chose resembled those used in urban drama films. However, as the majority of our trailer is showing our victims original equilibrium (Todorov's Narrative Theory of Equilibrium) and how our villain is going to disrupt that, most of the filming locations are going to be in urban areas.

Poster.
The conventions of a  film poster are

• Making the genre easily identified
• A small glimpse of the narrative
• Including the main characters of the film 
• A date or time of the films release
• Information of the production company and directors at the bottom
• Reviews of the films from respected publications.
• The title of the film clearly shown
• A tag line linking to the question

We have conformed to most of these conventions, we include the main character and she is seen to be different as her Polaroid is larger than the others and the fact that she is in colour and the other girls are in black and white. 

We also looked at the conventions of psychological thriller posters and did some deconstructions we found that  they often included a large face in that is prominent in the poster. For example this is seen in Lucy, shutter island and Black Swan.

Also the genre is quite clear as we have used predominately dark colours especially towards the edges which eludes to the darkness in the narrative. The hands around the face of the protagonist also reveals the narrative to the audience this is also reinforced with the title and tag line. The polaroids of the girls are also quite an important aspect of the narrative. We also researched this and looked at the possible ways in which we could use the polaroids. We were inspired by Momento which is another psychological thriller which uses polaroids in its posters.

Although we do subvert the convention of including the psychologically disturbed individual, we did this as we wanted to keep the hunter quite mysterious and focus on the vulnerability of the protagonist. We also subvert the golden rule which has the area that your eye is immediately drawn to at the top of the triangle. 

We also conform to showing the important information such as the production company and all the people involved in the film such as the casting director and actors. We also included a hashtag which is also linked to our website.

Website

When we first thought about creating our website we looked into other professional film websites to see what some of the typical conventions and features that were included that we could therefore include in our own. We also looked at previous A2 websites to see what layouts worked best and what generally was good and bad about them.

We found that for our website we must ensure that it is:

• suitable for our target audience
• had our teaser trailer embedded and starts playing automatically
• clear title of the film
• suitable colour scheme and text colours
• social network links
• user friendly, not complicated
• critics reviews
• production companies
• age rating

Planning.
For our website we started off by drawing up some initial ideas to what our website could look like. With this we also ensured that we had all of the conventions and elements of a website included in our own and also our deconstructions of previous films (Akeldama, Final Destination, Dead Footage) we were able to see what elements were effective on a website and other that did not work so well.


Development.
We developed our website by using a background that is appropriate for our genre and ties into our narrative. We have included the Polaroid pictures which can be seen a constant throughout our trailer which involves our protagonist's past victims. However, our protagonist's potentially next victim is not displayed on our website this was intention to allow for our teaser trailer's conventions of having a restricted narrative so that our narrative could be enigmatic and entice our audience further. We also included our teaser trailer embedded into our website which is another convention of a website for a theatrical film and also to allow the teaser trailer to play automatically when the website loaded.

We also had to include social media links which were active onto our website's design. The defualt for these links (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Blogger) were very different to the atmosphere of the rest of the website and also to our trailer. Instead of adding these default links to our website we decided to put them onto the bottom of the Polaroid pictures and created these as 'photo buttons' so that they could lead to a link. This allowed for our website to be user friendly as the links are clearly displayed to our audience and it also stays within our colour scheme and genre conventions.

Our buttons which connected to our other pages and social networking links allowed us to develop on the typical conventions of websites, as these are essential to the website's design. We have manipulated them to allow for our constant use of the Polaroid pictures to still continue and so that it keep in line with our other products and genre.

Evaluation Question 2:

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

Final Trailer:

 Final Poster:

 Final Website:

Typography:  

(website)

(poster)

After creating the credits for our teaser trailer by hand to get the stop motion effect, we realised we wouldn't be able to do the same for our poster and our website. We chose to look at various handwriting fonts on Photoshop that we would be able to use instead and came across "Crimes Times Six" which we liked as it looked scribbled and messy which worked with our character and the shot of him writing in the trailer. This was simple enough for the poster however when it came to including it on our website we were unable to use the specific font. Thankfully Megan managed to save it without a background and so we were able to import the title onto the website as an image as she explained in this blog post.

Polaroids: 

(trailer)

One of the main features of our promotional package is the use of Polaroids during the trailer and also on the poster and website. In the trailer, the physical Polaroids have been positioned in the killers book with him stroking the pictures. They are also flashed up at the end in chronological order as the tension builds up.

(poster) 

We knew we wanted the Polaroids to be the focus of our poster after deconstructing 'Memento' posters and so drafted numerous versions where they were scattered across the poster. Finally we decided to use a different image of our victim Emily, and so we organised a photoshoot where we preferred the shot of her with the gloves covering her mouth. We then had to import that onto Photoshop to edit out the background and change the format of it. Similarly for the poster, I went on a website  and edited all the images so they were black and white and had the Polaroid border around the edge before adding them to the poster.

(website)

(website) 

For the website,  we decided to use the Polaroids as links to social media and the other pages of the website. Megan succeeded in editing the Polaroids so that when the mouse rolls over the image it flashes.

On one side of the trailer are the links to 'home', 'cast', 'gallery' and 'cast' whereas the other side is links to social media, however when we used wording it didn't look as effective as the original logos although they needed to be edited to make it darker.

Colour Scheme:

(release date on poster)

Due to the killer's book being a significant aspect to highlight his psychological issues and his obsession with the homeless teenagers, we had to make sure the book we chose was suitable. The pages were a brown, coffee colour and we wanted this to be featured when choosing the colour of some of the typography on our poster.

(scribbly handwriting in book)

Similarly the colour scheme of our products is predominantly dark, dull colours such as black, white and brown, including typography, choosing to have the Polaroids black and white and the brick background, which we had to edit to make it more darker. However, when looking at the Polaroid for the 9th victim, we decided to have that in colour to show to the audience that she is still alive and along with this we edited the graffiti background (where he finds her in the trailer) behind her to make it stand out against the others even more.


Images:

(background used for poster and website)

In our final versions of the poster and website, we chose a brick background to add to the urban

(one of the few shots of our killer)

element of living on the streets but in a draft of the website we had the option of using an edited picture of our victim, however we decided against this as it wouldn't fit in with the poster. Even so, our victim is still heavily featured in the trailer and the poster whereas the killer is only included in the trailer, as we didn't want to reveal too much about him in the promotional package. Similarly we used the Polaroids to express the psychological, obsessive side of our killer and so to highlight the genre, we felt these needed to be featured in all three media products. However we didn't include the dates of their deaths (as seen in the trailer) choosing instead to have the tagline as the captions on the poster and to use the picture itself as links to other pages for our website.

Overall I feel the combination of our trailer, poster and website is effective in its purpose of promoting the film. It should be clear the audience that our film is a psychological thriller with a focus on serial killers and obsession.

Evaluation question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
We decided that we wanted to create a psychological thriller based around a serial killer as we were inspired by the psychological genre through films such as Seven, Side effects, Stoker and Silence of the lambs. We came up with the idea of the killer being obsessed by homeless people and wanting to rid the earth of them. Our target audience is people aged 15 to 22 and to gage their opinion on the title and tag line we created a survey monkey. We posted the survey to social media and got some of our peers to fill it out. We created a quick synopsis of the film idea before our target audience answered the questions. We took the most popular of these to use as our final title and tag line.

After we finished our first draft of the trailer we got feedback from social media that our sound did not build up enough, there wasn't as much tension built as we would have liked. We then edited the sound to include booms when the killer was shown and cut some of the non-deigetic sound from earlier in the trailer to make it build up more. Also the trailer was a little too long than a normal teaser trailer so we cut it down shots that we thought were unnecessary such as some establishing shots of the location as they did not add anything to the audiences understanding of the narrative.

We also had comments that one of the scenes of the killer in his house was not as effective as it could be because of the lighting and the mise en scene, so we had to reshoot this. We found that the second time that we shot this the lighting was much more effective. 

We then took feedback from a focus group and found that the genre was quite easily identified but that the narrative was slightly unclear as we did not include any dead bodies "narrative was a little bit confusing" At this point we were unable to re-film so we couldn't include any more clues such as body parts. Although others disagreed and thought that the fact that we only gave clues to the narrative was effective and made them as audience want to see it "As I was unsure of the storyline, it makes me want to watch it" Also the restrictions on the length of the trailer due to its form, a teaser trailer, meant that we could not reveal too much of the narrative.  Some of the focus group couldn't understand that the girls were killed although this was explicitly explained in a news report on the radio at the beginning of the trailer. Our peers found the typography most effective and thought that it worked well with the killers journal "Amazing, the hand written words were so good"

We also created a survey and posted it to social media to gain some criticism although this did not get many responses. We found that the area that our peers thought needed most work was the lighting although we were not able to change this in post production. We also took feedback on the most effective parts of the trailer.  

Overall we found the audience feedback to be useful in changing the trailer slightly so that it was the most effective it could be to an audience. We found that using the surveys to gain the opinion on things such as the title and tag line was very useful as we could get direct feedback from our target audience. Next time we will get feedback from our target audience earlier so that if we need to re-film anything then we can. 

Evaluation Question 4

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

Teaser Trailer.

Voice Over.

Within our trailer we wanted a voice over of a news radio programme explaining and establishing some of our narrative. We used Logic to record this in the a sound booth to make sure it sounded as professional as possible.
 
Although, we did have to record this voice over many times due to sometimes having problems with the microphone or the headphones not working so our speaker didn't know is some cases when to start speaking.

When we had recorded our voice over we put the frequency of the sound to a low pitch, this gave it a radio like effect where the sound was slightly fuzzy and muffled. This we then used in parallel to our footage which was very effective as we lined up the sound with when the radio was turned off in our trailer.

Filming.

Within our filming for our teaser trailer we wanted to include multiple different editing techniques to allow for our genre of a psychological thriller to come across as well as the actual footage that we shot.

 

Time Lapses.

Before we headed out to film we looked into different locations around London which would be effective and easy to film, we went off and took pictures on our phones and cameras to gain an idea of different locations we could use and we also looked on Google maps and Google images to see if we could find places which were further away for us to use. We chose three locations to film time lapse shots (Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross Station, The Golden Jubilee Bridge) which involved us setting up our Nikon D3100 on our tripod for an establishing shot and filming for ten minutes to ensure that we had enough footage to use and chose from in editing on Final Cut Pro.

Once we had filmed these we imported the footage into Final Cut Pro and sped the timing of the footage. We did this by reforming the speed of the footage gradually to ensure that the footage would not drop any frames and run smoothly.

Once we had sped up all three of our time lapses we decided to cut one out and also only pick under a minute of the other two as this was enough to establish our locations to our audience and was effective.

Flashback Shots.

We also wanted to film flashback shots of out protagonist's past victims to establish our narrative further. To make our shots look like they have already occurred we sped up the timings on Final Cut Pro slightly in the same way that we did with our time lapse shots and also added a slight earthquake effect onto the footage to give it a shaky effect to build tension.

We also adjusted the colouring of these shots to make them look more dull in comparison with the rest of our trailer. We did this on Final Cut Pro when we clicked onto the footage it gave us the option to change the colouring. Once we changed one clip we could then match the colouring of that finished one to the others so that they all matched and this gave it the effect that these were all flashback shots.

Wording of Titles and Tagline.

As we were filming and editing our teaser trailer we began to think up some initial ideas which our tagline and also film title could be. We came up with some initial ideas after also looking at professional film titles and taglines which were also of the psychological thriller genre but could not decide which ones would be most effective for our teaser trailer.

To make a decision we decided to use the website 'surverymonkey' to see what our audience thought of our initial ideas. We spread this survey out across different social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr as this would give us a wide range of people within our target audience to gain opinions from. Once we had enough results that gave us a good idea of what our target audience thought would be the best film title and tagline line we discussed as group if the results were the of the best title and tagline and agreed that they were. After we collected these results and decided on which of the wordings we would use we could move onto manipulating and creating these titles for our trailer.

Film titles and credits.

When we started to look at the atmosphere we wanted to create for our film trailer we looked into what font we wanted to use which would fit well alongside our trailer genre and narrative. We firstly looked into psychological thriller film trailers for inspiration on Youtube and what kind of styles of font and wording of titles they used through the trailer. 

After looking into previous film trailers of the psychological thriller genre and since we also had our locations that we wanted to use a font that would be similar to our mise-en-scene. We also after watching a previous teaser trailer thought about using stop motion for our credits and titles within our trailer to keep the flow of it going and also keeping the mise-en-scene of our protagonist's journal and writing throughout our trailer.

At first we thought about using newspaper clippings for each letter and we experimented with this and started with creating the titles that would appear in our trailer through this method of stop motion editing.  We found that this method was effective when we completed it on Final Cut Pro. but the style of the news paper clippings wasn't as effective as it could be for our teaser trailer.

When we had put together our teaser trailer we had also decided on the wording our title, tagline and credits that we wanted to include at certain points throughout our footage. At first we
took a picture of our protagonist's journal with a border of the same mise-en-scene which is seen throughout our trailer. We picked out the font "CrimesTimesSix" from DaFont.com to use as it gave our titles a similarity with the mise-en-scene around the titles.

After completing these titles we looked at them alongside our footage but they didn't seem to flow with the trailer as they were still images. So, we went back to thinking about using stop motion but instead this time we would use the border in the protagonist's journal and hand write a line of each letter and take a picture after every line on our Nikon D3100 camera. After completing this we used Final Cut Pro again to shorten the images duration and edit them together to create the effect of someone writing out the titles. This allowed for our trailer's movement to continue and was effective as it stayed in line with our trailer's atmosphere and narrative.




Sound.

For our sound we used multiple soundtrack and effects after researching different film trailers with the same genre as ours, we looked specifically at Nightcrawler and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. After researching the different soundtracks on Google we started to search on free music sites and found the site 'Incompetech' and also downloading 'boom' sound effects off YouTube after gaining permission from the publisher.

One problem after completing the first draft of our trailer was that our sound seemed a bit messy and also did not intensify as much as we wanted it to when the footage got quicker. To correct this we took out some of the layers of sound we had put on top of our footage and went back to basics. We found a more effective soundtrack to use and also added in booms and more dramatic noises towards the end of the trailer to intensify the atmosphere for our audience.


 Poster.

For our poster we firstly researched different film posters from professional and previous A2 film trailers. Within the development of our film poster we used Photoshop heavily as it allowed us to manipulate and accommodate all of our needs effectively.

Firstly, we started by looking at the conventions of explicitly psychological thriller film posters to see how the elements they placed onto their poster were effective and also keeping to the typical conventions that we had found in other film posters. We looked mainly at the film Momento as it included the use of Polaroid pictures and allowed us to think more creatively with our own poster design.

We used the same font from DaFont of "CrimesTimesSix" to keep in line with our teaser trailer and we also included all of the credit wording and production companies which we inputed and edited on Photoshop to make the backgrounds transparent and also to change the colours of certain things like the production company to keep in line with our genre.

Website.

For our website we used the website maker "wix.com" which allows us to move around the elements freely.

We used photo buttons for our links to other pages and social networking sites to make use of our Polaroid pictures as they are a key element within our teaser trailer, poster and narrative. Our buttons to other links were also made user friendly as we allowed for a mouse over to change the effect of the Polaroid giving it a flash effect on the picture, this allowed for the audience to see where the button was.

We also made our trailer the centre of our website and allowed for it to automatically start playing so as this is a convention of a film website. We were able to embed our trailer and chose an option on "Wix.com" that allowed the trailer to play automatically.