Evaluation Question
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We researched many trailers in the style of our genre, psychological thriller, or trailers with similar themes. One of the trailers we deconstructed was the 'Trust' trailer which is about a girl who is targeted by an online predator. This shares similar themes to our trailer and both use modern technology as a key feature.
We researched the codes and conventions of trailers and also compared the difference between theatrical trailers and teaser trailers. We found that theatrical trailers showed longer footage and told more of the story whereas teaser trailers used short, flashing clips which used hooks to draw in the audience.
This trailer of Atonement is a theatrical version and lasts 2:31. It introduces the main characters and tells a lot of the story through long clips and direct speech from the film.
This is another trailer of the same film but is a teaser trailer and a much shorter version at 1:50. This uses very little direct speech from the film, shorter clips and has a more dramatic tone to it through the music which engages the audience more quickly.
All teaser trailers contain an ident, release date, title, a moment of disequilibrium and a hook. Our genre always contains a stereotypical female teenage victim who is usually blonde. This was confirmed after we sent out a questionnaire result to our target audience and the result showed that a blonde victim was most popular.
We also used real media texts as inspiration for our piece. Modern technology is constantly evolving and has been rapidly increasing in the last 10 years. As technology evolves, people's fears also grow as hackers become more sophisticated and online predators become more frequent. We read many news articles which involve online pedophiles and children on social networking sites and decided to use this idea as a basis behind our plot.
As well as being a thriller, we wanted our piece to act as a warning and make people more aware about online safety and the dangers of anonymity online.
This is a leaflet I found at a doctor's surgery which is a warning about Peeping Tom's. It caught my eye amongst other leaflets because of the eye which stand out on the front. It shows that it is a series issue and one which is becoming more common as more children are using the internet freely and unsupervised.
We found that all of our questionnaire responses from our earlier post answered yes to the question 'have you ever used a webcam' and many also said they did not always know the recipient. We decided to develop the idea of unknown identity and the risk of online predators by having an unknown killer who isn't revealed until the end of the film. We wanted to show how easy it is to have a hidden identity and hide behind the safety of the internet. To do this we only showed shots from the back of the killer and by having stereotypical usernames such as sexybabe101. We also developed the idea of webcams by filming a lot of our scenes on an Apple Mac webcam which gave a realistic and authentic look.
The use of webcams also developed our shots as we were able to use match on action using 2 cameras and 2 angles.
As the mise en scene of the girls bedroom was a crucial part of our film in order to create the desired ambiance and representation of the girl we decided to design our own bedroom. We took an empty room which was still being built and developed and brought in our own furniture and items to create the exact look we wanted. We developed the bedroom from stereotypical to a promiscuous girls bedroom using a few items such as a book, dressing gown and magazine. This is a representation of a teenage girl in her late teens who is sexual and comfortable in her self and with the person on webcam. This is similar to the film Megan is Missing where her bedroom can be seen.
The end of our trailer challenges the traditional codes and conventions of our genre as it is unexpected and shocking and continues to use the idea of unknown identities. We chose to show the hanging legs at the end to keep the audience in suspense and use the traditional convention of a hook but play on the idea by keeping the identity of the victim hidden. We decided to show one victim the whole way through but used the flashing scene followed by the legs to suggest there is other victims.
As well as our trailer we also had two ancillary tasks which would be used to compliment and advertise our trailer which were a poster and a webpage.
We deconstructed many webpages and found that all contained the trailer to the film they were advertising and therefore we decided to put our trailer onto our homepage. As well as this we found they were visual and interactive so we added our initial flashing scene to our webpage as the opening screen which would immediately interest our audience. This was inspired by both the "When a stranger calls" and Disturbia websites which uses the interactive websites to engage their audience. The key features of official movie websites were;
We started our poster by drawing some initial designs using ideas from our initial storyboard. We looked at several posters from our most influential films and liked the simplicity from "When a Stranger Calls" and their use of the black background and phone as the central image. We experimented with our poster designs and came up with one which was inspired by the "Chatroom" poster which used a pixelated mosaic as a background. We thought this poster worked well but we needed to add a few key conventions of a poster, the release date, website and credits. We also designed two different versions to suit different locations and audiences. However when we printed our poster and enlarged it we found that it was pixelated and over complicated so we decided to develop one of our earlier designs which was based on the "When a stranger calls" poster.
We believe this poster is more creative and effective as it is simple and focuses more on the killings as well as the technological themes by placing the hanging legs inside a computer.
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We researched many trailers in the style of our genre, psychological thriller, or trailers with similar themes. One of the trailers we deconstructed was the 'Trust' trailer which is about a girl who is targeted by an online predator. This shares similar themes to our trailer and both use modern technology as a key feature.
We researched the codes and conventions of trailers and also compared the difference between theatrical trailers and teaser trailers. We found that theatrical trailers showed longer footage and told more of the story whereas teaser trailers used short, flashing clips which used hooks to draw in the audience.
This trailer of Atonement is a theatrical version and lasts 2:31. It introduces the main characters and tells a lot of the story through long clips and direct speech from the film.
This is another trailer of the same film but is a teaser trailer and a much shorter version at 1:50. This uses very little direct speech from the film, shorter clips and has a more dramatic tone to it through the music which engages the audience more quickly.
All teaser trailers contain an ident, release date, title, a moment of disequilibrium and a hook. Our genre always contains a stereotypical female teenage victim who is usually blonde. This was confirmed after we sent out a questionnaire result to our target audience and the result showed that a blonde victim was most popular.
We also used real media texts as inspiration for our piece. Modern technology is constantly evolving and has been rapidly increasing in the last 10 years. As technology evolves, people's fears also grow as hackers become more sophisticated and online predators become more frequent. We read many news articles which involve online pedophiles and children on social networking sites and decided to use this idea as a basis behind our plot.
As well as being a thriller, we wanted our piece to act as a warning and make people more aware about online safety and the dangers of anonymity online.
This is a leaflet I found at a doctor's surgery which is a warning about Peeping Tom's. It caught my eye amongst other leaflets because of the eye which stand out on the front. It shows that it is a series issue and one which is becoming more common as more children are using the internet freely and unsupervised.
We found that all of our questionnaire responses from our earlier post answered yes to the question 'have you ever used a webcam' and many also said they did not always know the recipient. We decided to develop the idea of unknown identity and the risk of online predators by having an unknown killer who isn't revealed until the end of the film. We wanted to show how easy it is to have a hidden identity and hide behind the safety of the internet. To do this we only showed shots from the back of the killer and by having stereotypical usernames such as sexybabe101. We also developed the idea of webcams by filming a lot of our scenes on an Apple Mac webcam which gave a realistic and authentic look.
The use of webcams also developed our shots as we were able to use match on action using 2 cameras and 2 angles.
 |
| Match on action shot 2 |
 |
| Match on action shot 1 |
 |
| Match on action shot 3 |
As the mise en scene of the girls bedroom was a crucial part of our film in order to create the desired ambiance and representation of the girl we decided to design our own bedroom. We took an empty room which was still being built and developed and brought in our own furniture and items to create the exact look we wanted. We developed the bedroom from stereotypical to a promiscuous girls bedroom using a few items such as a book, dressing gown and magazine. This is a representation of a teenage girl in her late teens who is sexual and comfortable in her self and with the person on webcam. This is similar to the film Megan is Missing where her bedroom can be seen.
The end of our trailer challenges the traditional codes and conventions of our genre as it is unexpected and shocking and continues to use the idea of unknown identities. We chose to show the hanging legs at the end to keep the audience in suspense and use the traditional convention of a hook but play on the idea by keeping the identity of the victim hidden. We decided to show one victim the whole way through but used the flashing scene followed by the legs to suggest there is other victims.
As well as our trailer we also had two ancillary tasks which would be used to compliment and advertise our trailer which were a poster and a webpage.
We deconstructed many webpages and found that all contained the trailer to the film they were advertising and therefore we decided to put our trailer onto our homepage. As well as this we found they were visual and interactive so we added our initial flashing scene to our webpage as the opening screen which would immediately interest our audience. This was inspired by both the "When a stranger calls" and Disturbia websites which uses the interactive websites to engage their audience. The key features of official movie websites were;
- The teaser trailer
- The release date
- Homepage
- And a merchandise section
We started our poster by drawing some initial designs using ideas from our initial storyboard. We looked at several posters from our most influential films and liked the simplicity from "When a Stranger Calls" and their use of the black background and phone as the central image. We experimented with our poster designs and came up with one which was inspired by the "Chatroom" poster which used a pixelated mosaic as a background. We thought this poster worked well but we needed to add a few key conventions of a poster, the release date, website and credits. We also designed two different versions to suit different locations and audiences. However when we printed our poster and enlarged it we found that it was pixelated and over complicated so we decided to develop one of our earlier designs which was based on the "When a stranger calls" poster.
We believe this poster is more creative and effective as it is simple and focuses more on the killings as well as the technological themes by placing the hanging legs inside a computer.
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