Our media trailer "The Opiate" follows many examples of real codes and conventions used in real media texts. Starting with the genre itself, our production follows a typical horror sub genre including themes such as the idea of a 'global crisis' and 'zombie attacks'. At the beginning of our research we analysed films that abided by the same conventions which influenced our final production and our ancillary tasks (magazine and poster.)The way in which we created and edited our texts uses forms and conventions of typical examples we researched and analysed; our film plot was influenced by the movie "28 days later" using the same themes, costume, props (e.g. blood and dirty shirts), and location (London) .

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

• We researched codes and conventions of teaser trailers and followed the same style that they are constructed in; a set of interesting clips formed in an ambiguous nature in order to tease the target audience. Like most teaser trailers, the release date and director are not revealed - just the film title is.

• We looked at the ‘SAW V’ official teaser trailer and we similarly displayed the film title at the end of the teaser lingering in a moving text.

Our magazine cover was greatly influenced by the Empire magazine covers and virus magazine as we used the same visual style/ layout , colour themes and the same positioning of the protagonist in the background photo.

This Empire magazine promoting the film Batman The Dark Knight starring Heath Ledger as The Joker was our

main inspiration. Although Batman is more of an action packed thriller we used the green and red colours as the red represented the

rage and the green for the greed of the zombies in our trailer. Also a key feature on magazine covers is a tag line. For this Empire

cover the tag line is 'He's a Cold Blooded, Mass-murdering Clown'. For ours we decided on 'This July Something is about to go Terribly

Wrong' as this was part of the voice over in our trailer.

We looked at horror magazines such as ‘Virus’ to get an understanding of the typical layout for a horror

magazine cover. Instead of using a full promotional photo like Empire did, we chose to hide the identity of our protagonist as this is

the style that relates more to a horror. We know this from our research into magazine covers such as ‘Virus’ and ‘Gorezone’ where the

protagonist isn't clearly seen, nor makes eye contact with the viewer. This gives a sense of 'the unknown' and lack of identity leaving

the viewer with their own ideas on fear.

MAGAZINE COVER

Dark ambiguity... image is not clear

Colours, layout + features

FILM POSTER

• Similar to the film poster for the movie ‘Feast’, we constructed our poster following the same style, colours, context and photo contrast to enhance the movies genre. The lack of clarity makes the protagonist ambiguous – a reoccurring theme in horror movies.

The thing that set our trailer apart from the ones which we have analysed is the age and ethnicity of the demographic our films aimed at. The themes of party drugs, teenage disappearances, a fully teenage cast and a black protagonist are not apparent in other films we have researched into.

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

• Whilst planning and creating our main product and ancillary tasks, it was clear that the presence of certain motif’s and themes mirrored in each of the pieces would be vital to creating a sense of brand image. Motif’s and themes such as blood, gore and darkness are represented in each of our ancillary tasks, meaning that a kind of ‘brand image’ is created for prospective audiences to recognise, establishing a relationship between the brand and the film.

• Examples of this can be seen in various marketing campaigns for successful horror movies, one of the most famous being the marketing campaigns for the SAW series.

• When looking at the range of different posters for each installment in the saga, the repeated ideas and motif’s become quickly apparent. The use of white, often clinical backgrounds is used to contrast the gore of features such as disconnected limbs, blood laden operating instruments and almost iconic images of the various characters featured in the film. As well as this, text fonts and colour repeated to create uniformity amongst the posters.

• One of the main motif’s of our ancillary tasks and our main task is the feature of blood, as it features heavily within our trailer and within the apocalyptic sub-genre of horror. Additionally, the use of dark, predominantly black backgrounds also features heavily throughout our products.

• Overall, the visual style of our products echoes throughout our ancillary tasks and our main product. The repetition of these motifs helps to create a brand image that the audience can associate and attach to the film, which helps to promote the film as people may talk about with with friends. This is important, as viral marketing is now one of the quickest ways to create ‘buzz’ around a film before it is released

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

• In order to get audience feedback we produced an online questionnaire (http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=horror-trailer-feedback) to see what the public thought of our trailer. We shared the link on facebook and twitter so that others could take the quiz. We also picked people at random around the college to watch the trailer and take the quiz. After 30 people we recorded the results and print screened the pie charts.

0% didn’t like it which is positive.

Majority of people found it very

interesting over just interesting. However

we took on board that it might not be liked by every age

and gender.

Most people found the story/plot good

rather than very good. This may be because the plot

wasn’t clear enough in the voiceover or

how we put the trailer together.

This answer got the most range of answers. Majority described it as

gripping.

One or two people may have described it as ineffective

because it wasn’t their idea of a horror.

We only got 15% describing it as

scary which is ok as we understand

that the first half of the trailer was slow

and a bit boring.

Majority of the votes were yes however we asked why some said

no.

Some people said it wasn’t their idea of a horror because apart from them spitting blood there wasn’t much else, there

wasn’t any real gore.

We were aiming for it to be a teaser trailer however

some saw it as a theatrical trailer.

We think that the public may have mistaken it for a

theatrical trailer as they aren’t too sure of the differences between the two.

Some didn’t see all of it as

realistic. This may be because

of the lack or gore and graphic

scenes.

We are glad that people thought at least parts of our

trailer were realistic.

This is a clear result. We are glad

that this was 100% yes.

One or two people said the voiceover was

ineffective. This may be because it wasn’t clear what he was saying or that the voice didn’t fit the conventions of a

horror trailer voiceover.

Majority of people voted effective.

This was our most important question as we wanted to get the audiences’ view on what they’d change

about our trailer. Some said they would

change something about the trailer and

we asked what.

The 22% that said they’d change

something about our trailer talked

about the voice of Alex not being

loud/clear enough. Also someone said

the start of the trailer was too slow however our idea

was to create suspense so the

zombie scenes had a bigger impact.

However we might have

underestimated the length of the

beginning as some said they thought it was a thriller and

they would change that about our

trailer.

We didn’t expect a majority of 10/10 as our trailer wasn’t going to

be perfect for everyone but these results were

pleasing.

The people that voted 6/10 may

have been the ones that had the opinion some things needed changing or it

wasn’t their taste of a trailer or a

movie.

• We received one comment on our online questionnaire comment page. The bad points in the comment suggested that our genre bent over to the thriller/horror genre instead of just horror like instructed to. It also suggested that our medical terms,( the use of the drug methamphetamine) was unrealistic.

• The good points were that our teaser was effective and appealing, and the uses of props and mise en scene were good. They also said that our music fitted well and added to tension building.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and

evaluation stages?• Like last years coursework we used blogger to present our

work, safari to research real media products to analyse and final cut pro to edit our recordings. Also like last year, we were not allowed to take the college video cameras off campus and as we thought that would limit our teaser trailers plot, we used my dads HD canon hf2000 camera. Although we thought this would be to our advantage we had extreme difficulties importing the HD files on to any editing software. we tried final cut pro, adobe on a pc, and even windows movie maker. In the end we tried to compress the 30 odd MTS files into avi files which didn't work, then mp4 which did work on final cut pro but lessened the image quality. it took a really long time but it was worth it in the end.

• I used the same video camera on photo mode to create the location and prop stills prior and during filming.

• I used an online copyright free music sharing website to download our horror trailer music.

• To edit our film poster and magazine, we used adobe photoshop cs3.

• To create this evaluation slide show, we used key note and then downloaded in onto www.slideshare.net which converts the presentation into an online html presentation.