In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Throughout the majority of our text we challenged the traditional conventions of real media products, to give our film a slight twist to others, modernise the horror/slasher genre with binary oppositions.
For example, we used a female as the antagonist, perhaps showing a feminist style approach to the genre. We felt it would make the plot a more interesting one, and as we are all females making the product, it made it easier to produce for us, as the antagonist was simply one of the 3 of us. Also i feel using a brunette as the antagonist worked well as stereotypically final girls are brunettes, signifying power and independence, brunettes always seem to come across as reserved, which would also be a feature of a killer. It may also fool people as they will think she is the final girl rather than the killer.
This could also create male gaze having a female killer - such as in jennifers body, having a female antagonist worked to their advantage and appeals to males and females as a film.
We followed the convention of having a young teenage cast for a horror, as they are the main target audience, in which films as such appeal to as they can relate to the situation more, and find genres like this much more entertaining than other age groups do. As we are also teenagers we felt it would be easier to have a cast this age group as we can ask friends to be the actors/actresses and we can also use ourselves.
Although we do have a part youth cast of 13 years old which we did struggle to get hold of, and also people wont relate to this age group, but we only used them for the opening few minutes of the film, creating the vital part of the storyline. We also felt it had intertextual links to other films such as Nightmare on Elm Street with the young girls singing a song creating a spooky feel, young children seem to often be used in horrors as a signifier of horror such as in The Unborn, The Ring, The Sixth Sense etc.
We also used another binary opposition for the voice over, as it is usually a male deep voice, strong and powerful to attract attention. But as we have a mostly female cast and a female killer we thought we could do it with a twist by using a female voice over, we still had to make it quite powerful, but we feel it will still connote a horror film.
Using a male as the final boy rather than having a final girl also we did to challenge the conventions of a horror film, and it gave the film a main male figure which without, wouldnt really have one and would connote a slight rom-com style chick flick film, as for example in the sex and the city trailer it was all females until the last 20 seconds where a male figure comes into shot. This is not what we wanted to create as we want a wide target audience of males and females. We felt this could also give a female gaze to the film, having a strong independent man in the picture may help raise the female audience.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Our original poster lacked many details which common magazines have, our initial magazine had 2 images on either side of the poster, which is very unconventional for a poster and is quite confusing for the audience. The big blocks of colour made the poster look unprofessional, it also didn't have enough detail and links to other films of the same genre. The Masthead also wasnt large enough.
Although some effective devices were used, such as the fonts connotes the horror genre well and the red colouring signifying blood also does the same. The name of the magazine also worked well as the word panic can be linked in to tension, and a signifier of watching scary films.
As our original magazine lacked the detail and looks of an effective mag. we decided to redo it, and added much more detail to it, such as the price, in £ and $, and also the month of release. The masthead now is right across the top and is covered by part of the picture on the front, which attracts more attention to it.
Using just the one picture is much more common, we especially took one rather than getting a still, so we could get the exact style we wanted rather than being limited to shots from the trailer.
We also used intertextual links to other films such as jennifers body, saw VI, and Giallo to make it look more realistic. Alot of the links to other things inside the magazine was found from other front covers when i was doing research into what went onto the cover. And is also the same target audience as what our film is aimed at.
The magazine was featured in the trailer, with a review of the film. Which we thought was a very affective marketing device as perhaps followers of the magazine would then be more likely to watch the film.
We felt making a horror magazine rather than a magazine for all genres was more suitable as the majority of horrors are low budget and made by indies, so would be unlikely to have our film on the front cover of magazines such as Empire.
Our other ancillary text was a film poster, we began with a teaser poster with a limited amount of information on it, just to attract an audience, it had a blue tint to it to signify the horror genre and the girls face was normal on one side and more spooky on the other, creating a juxtaposition between the 2 and connoting the girl may be a major part of the plot, either being the protagonist or antagonist. Our tagline we used also links into the storyline, and is in serif font to signify again that it is a horror. We also put the blog adress at the bottom as a potential marketing device to make audiences find out more. This poster leaves alot to the audiences imagination and creating a narrative enigma which is what we wanted to achieve.
Our second poster we reused the pictures from the initial magazine as we realised we could still use them to our advantage, we created several copies of the young girls image at different levels of opacity to signify the progression in time. We added much more detail to this one, with all producers, editors, etc at the bottom of the poster, incase their is anyone who could bring a following.
We used the tagline from the trailer 'their are 2 sides to every story' to link them together as another potential marketing device.
An issue with the poster still is that the older actress is in black and white and the younger is in colour, which confuses the progression in time and would have looked much more effective either all in black and white or the other way round, the images are almost too juxtaposed to show that they are meant to be the same girl.
Also the text could have been in a wider range of colours, as with the background, perhaps if there was a hint of red within the text, simply in the name of the film it would have signified much more that the film was a horror, as at the moment it could be linked into films such as Donnie Darko, and The Butterfly Effect.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
The first feedback we got was from our media class, which is all in all our target audience for the film, so worked perfectly under the circumstances, we firstly wanted to know whether the idea of the girl being possessed when left in the woods by her friends, or captured and tortured was a better idea, the majority of the class felt the first idea was much too confusing to follow, and would be much harder for us as a group to film it well and effectively, the second idea made much more sense as she then had more of a reason to want to come back for revenge. This also links in to the 'accidental death' in I know what you did last summer
We then as a group were torn between the idea of having the face of the killer shown in the trailer, and made clear who it is, or having a mask, or something to hide their identity, everyone felt that hiding their identity would make a better storyline and create a narrative enigma for the audience and give them more reason to want to watch it.
For the killings we weren't sure what weapons to go for, and whether to go for traditional weapons or more fallic objects that would link into the female gender.
So we decided on using somebody washing their face, somebody being strangled by a scarf and somebody being dragged from under a bed. The majority link in in some way to the female gender, but are still scary and appealing to males and females.
We were also told to have a male as the final boy, to create more of a narrative enigma for who the killer is, as people will assume it is the boy rather than the girl.
After taking some practice footage and showing it to the class, the main issue that arose was lighting, most of the shots lacked visual quality as the shots were too dark, and the majority we had to reshoot.
Everyone thought the bath shot was effective, and the sink shot, although we needed to add another shot in of the killer coming towards her, a kind of 'over the shoulder' shot.
The car scene people also said we needed a closer shot as she was being strangled to create more tension and more of a match on action sequence. They also said we needed something more than a hand such as a scarf to attract more attention, which worked much better when shooting it a second time.
People also found it hard to grasp the link between the beginning of the film and then the second half, especially with the new male character making an appearance, to make it easier to follow we took a shot of the male character going into his locker, seen with the killers mask who abused the young girl earlier on, connoting he is the killer.
When we had produced our rough cut, we then again asked for feedback, we were told our tagline needed to be in 3 shots as there are 3 main killings, which would attract more attention to the killings.
We also had to produce some stills of shots towards the beginning of the trailer as they were too short and were hard to take in and we needed to create more exposition for the audience. Then we had to make the majority of the shots towards the end much faster pace to raise heartbeat and take breath away.
Our final audience feedback was that the trailer would be much more effective with a voice over, which at the time we didnt have much time to do. We decided on using a female voice over as a binary opposition and to fit in with the rest of the film, we felt it may also attract to both males and females for male gaze and the feminism aspect of it.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evalutation stages?
The main technology we have all used throughout our coursework is Blogger which made it very easy to plan ideas, edit sections and add bits to them and was also easily accessible wherever you are, i feel it makes the coursework look much more presentable and professional.
Sites such as Scribd and Photobucket helped to upload images and documents to back up important points. And are also easy to share between the group.
Google in general also helped me with much of my research, without the internet and things such as wikipedia my coursework would lack many vital details. Although i did get a large amount of information from books.
Photoshop was absolutely vital in making both posters and the magazine. I already new how to use many features on it but feel i am now at a much higher level of knowing how to make things stand out and look good on it. It has so many features you can produce almost anything you want at a high standard on it.
iMovie 06 was also very useful, as we didnt know many skills for using final cut express 4 we did a large amount of it on iMovie which we had already learnt everything from the year before, it is extremely easy to upload clips, cut them and link them together with transitions and adding sound. Although if we used Final Cut for the majority of it we would have come out with a more effective professional final piece we didnt have the amount of time it would have taken us to grasp the basics on it so felt it wasnt worth the hassle.
We used iDVD 06 for burning the final cut to a dvd, which is made simple for those who have never used it before and you can produce a nice opening screen with stills of the film and the name of it etc. although you could not go into as much detail as scene selection etc.
Audio software such as iTunes and Garageband we used to record our soundtrack which was produced by someone who volunteered within school on iTunes which as we produced our own music to fit in with the genre and cuts within the trailer think it should add a boost to our final peice and make it look more professional.
We used a portable digital recorder for the voice over and the girl singing at the start as it was high quality sound and very easy to record and upload.
For all of our recording of the film we used a DV Camcorder, which we had used the year before so new how to use straight away, it is a simple camera which you can change the settings on depending on what lighting et. your in to give the best shot. And picks up sound well which we found important for a trailer.
We used a scanner to upload many important things for the progress of our trailer, such as the storyboard and post preduction scheduale. Which helps us keep track of what we want to change or what we need to do next etc.
We did the majority of work on mac computers, especially the actual trailer itself as we dont have access to iMovie 06 or photoshop on our normal PC's , although alot of the blogging i did on my own computer as i can access it whenever i am free.
Social networking sites such as facebook helped us get much needed feedback on our rough cut and other scenes, as it is mostly that age range we all have on facebook..so helped get ideas from many different point of views.
