Evaluation

Here is the Youtube link to my evaluation regarding my A2 media productions. This includes 4 key questions which are answered in my evaluation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmbRLglgN2A

Finished trailer & production

This is the link to the finished trailer for 'The Dark Room'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriuAAZ1f2Y 

Here are some of the screenshots of the production process of creating our horror trailer.

In this shot you can see how we have incorporated a green-screen to show our audience if the trailer/film is aged restricted. However we chose to take this feature out because it is an American feature that you see in films distributed by an American conglomerate. We are creating a British film and didn't want to incorporate this feature as we have already involved the 'Paramount Pictures' logo as this is the company we want to distribute our film.

This next section shows the production logo which again we have changed as it doesn't work with the theme of the trailer. Also it was too long, by the time we had seen both logos it was almost 30 seconds of the trailer gone so we had to delete this section and spread every thing out so the audience doesn't get bored of watching productions logo for the first part of the trailer.

This is a shot of the near middle part of the trailer, this is of the killer and shows how he overpowers the woman which follows the typical common conventions of horror movies. This also shows in the left corner the production of the trailer and how we cut each individual section to make sure it was fully effective and was useful in the trailer. Each section plays its part.

The next two images show how we edited the sound control and colour correction. With the sound we needed to use a temporary song track while we constructed sounds and music in GarageBand on the Macs. The song "Bring me to life by - Evanescene" and this provided a basis for our trailer. We couldn't use this track anyway due to copyright laws as we don't have permission to use the song and this would cause problems if we were to use it anyway.

With the colour correction, the original colour was too light and needed to be darkened and changed. When doing this we changed quite a lot of things and we also sped up the cars to make it seem like they were moving quicker because the effect was really good and we needed also to shorten the clip too.

This last screenshot shows the sound correction being changed and what we have done to it by the bar on the left side. We tried to use as much footage as possible to make it look as effective and conventional as possible.

Audience Research

Here is a Prezi showing the results to the audience research surveys that I have done. I have combined 2 surveys before and after the creation of the products (ancillary texts). The surveys show both positive and negative feedback from my target audience which has proved to be very helpful.

Critical reflection of film poster

This is my completed version of my film poster for 'The Dark Room'. As the genre of the film is a psychological thriller/horror but more along the lines of horror but with a twist. I really like the design of the poster however it doesn't really look like a horror film. Although that was the point as I wanted to show that it was a psychological thriller as well as a horror. The image is suppose to mess with the mind and make the audience think about what the film could be about. I wanted the poster to show the curiosity and secrets that the film involved. However as I stated before it doesn't look like a horror. The typography is short and snappy, although the bottom of the poster isn't as clear as I wanted it to be. Also the colour isn't very clear either, but because of the leaves the colour was very difficult to get right and green was the only colour that allowed the text to be readable. 

The image appeals to a male and female target audience and theorist Laura Mulvey one stated that women are seen as 'objects of sexual desire', I made sure the woman was visually attractive to appeal to a male audience and as she is wearing a corset and minimal clothing. This would also appeal to a female target audience because of the design and the fact that the star vehicle is a woman. 

Additional features such as the social networking symbols and the paramount logo could have been better a little bigger because it is quite hard to make out what it is. Also the website for the film could of been cleared too because it could help with the promotion of the film. If I had the chance to do this again I would slightly change the the colour and sizing of the text. 

Another thing I also picked up on was the fact that she is located in the woods and the title on the poster is 'The Dark Room' this could potentially confuse or make audience wonder why she is in the woods when the film is called 'The Dark Room'. However it is more symbolic, as she has opened a box full of old keys and the keys are the key to the 'Dark Room', she holds the keys that hold the secrets and this would be revealed in the film/trailer. This is why I have included 'The key to all the secrets' as the tagline to entice the target audience. 

Critical reflection of film magazine

Here is my final magazine cover that is distributing 'The Dark Room' to my target audience. It is distributing many different films but the headline, major film is 'The Dark Room'. I think that my magazine cover looks really effective and does the job it is suppose to do. Although I think it could be improved as when I was analysing other magazine film covers, for example, Inception, the design in the background was really effective and really said something about the film. It looked very technical which represented what the film was like which I though was really effective. I think the colour balance could be improved as well as the background. Although I think it portrays what the film  is about and represents that it is a horror genre. When creating my SurveyMonkey I asked the target audience what would appeal to them on a magazine and I also asked them particular features, colours and images they would prefer to see. Occasionally I had to go against my target audience because not everything they wanted went with the design of the cover. I took into consideration everything the target audience wanted and applied as much as I could to the cover.

As the genre was horror the magazine had to represent this. I did this through the colours and images. Although the typography could have been better in terms of representation of horror. I think the masthead is very effective and the title of the film, however the block white doesn't look as effective as it could of done. Although the magazine was not just representing horror, it was distributing other genres. Because of this I think the cover can get away with the text and typography design as it is not just horror that it is portraying. Many other magazines don't feature very much text on the covers, this held me back a little as I was stuck on what to include on the magazine cover. I analysed some magazines with lots of text and some without. I chose to go in between as my target audience mentioned what they wanted to see on the cover and it wasn't minimalistic text they wanted to see but a range of different pieces of information, instead of a mass amount that could potentially clash the magazine. If I were to do this again I would definitely make sure I changed the colour and style of the main text, by making it stand out differently and in a different font.

Usually magazine covers feature only one star vehicle that is the main character in the film that is being distributed. Although I have potentially broken this convention as I have seen magazines that have more than one person on the cover. I thought this would be really effective on the cover as it shows what the film is about and how interesting it look, that it makes the audience intrigued and want to know more. I’m not fully satisfied with the image so if I had the chance to do the cover again I would change quite a few things. One of which would be the 'stamp' in the bottom left of the cover. It has too much text and doesn't seem to fit in right with the whole horror concept. The idea of the stamp is really good but I would have preferred to have had a faded image in the background of the stamp or patterns.  

I had problems with the masthead before as it became merged to the image and when I wanted to make it bigger the image increased in size too. This resulted in creating a new one and re-doing the main image. When the masthead was completed and on the cover I needed to increase its size but this made it look wrong and a little pixilated. This resulted in me having the masthead a little smaller that originally though. Although I do think it takes up 1/8th of the page which is very conventional. After doing this the masthead and main image looked really good together and after that I just added additional features and tried to make them fit in as well as possible. Overall if I had the chance to do things differently I would, although I don't think I have done a bad job.

Completed Magazine Cover

This is the finished version of my film magazine. After many attempts of trying to get the colour correction right I now finally have the finished product. This took many steps to create. For the text I used an online site called UrbanFonts to get the best looking fonts for my magazine. I didn't want to use too many different fonts as the cover would then clash and look too busy, as it is quite busy now. I took the all the images myself and two of them are studio images and the other two are off site photoshoots. I really like the top bar which shows different images to highlight the different films that are out soon for the audience to see. I know how to use Photoshop quite well so cropping, editing and adding effects didn't take too long as I knew how to previously do those kinds of features. I then added the barcode, price and issue number on to follow conventions. I added additional features to the cover as I had quite a lot of empty space which needed to be filled. After all these were completed I had my finished magazine film cover. Which was produced to what my target audience wanted, by my SurveyMonkey results.

Original images

I have done many photoshoots for this project and have used many different images. I have created a few mock ideas and used the same images a few times and other that are completely different. Here are some of original images that I have used to create my poster and magazine cover.

 

 

Both of these images were used in the magazine cover and poster. However I could not use two images that were similar to each other because it would not look very effective. I have edited these images quite a lot because these original images look a little saturated so I used Photoshop to make the images look harsh and more like the horror genre.

 

 

This is the original image used for my final image for the horror/psycological thriller film poster. This was taken in the woods near Lanhydrock and it is to symbolise hidden secrets by using a small box filled with old rusted keys.