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

Below I have chosen 4 screen frames from both media products and my groups teaser trailer, some of the shots were chosen due to their similarites of mise-en-scene, camera shots and angles, I have also chosen some based on the types of characters you can see in the shot. I will compare and analyse each of the shots from real horror trailers with my own stills from my group's teaser horror trailer 'Alice'.

A 'teaser trailer' is produced to grasp the audience into wanting to see more, it gives the audience the first glance at what is to come in later months, our teaser trailer was made to show glimpses of what would happen in the real film, but we mixed the shots around in a random order so the audience didnt have an idea of what a possible outcome to the film would be, this keeps the enticed into seeing the film. In a horror teaser trailer, you want to shock, scare, play on the common fears the audience share, once you have then hooked them on the idea of seeing the film, the feature length trailer is later released to sustain their interest. We wanted to show the audience scenes of the little girl in the past and present, but we didnt want to give away any plot ideas. For example, you see shots of the little girl Skipping in the snow at night on her own, this scares the audience and plays on their fears of a ghostly little girl, it makes them look at little girl in a more fearful way, and if they see someone who looks familiar it would remind them of their fear. We decided to reveal possible other main characters throughout the film in different situation, it is very confusing because you do not know what their role is yet and what they are actually doing in the shots, for all the audience knows they could be good or evil.

We wanted to create certain enigmas throughout the teaser trailer using different characters in threatening and non threatening situations, and even placing the little girl in demonic poses to scare the audience and send a chill down their spine. When we had recieved audience feedback for our first draft teaser trailer, we realised that it didnt make much sense and so we added the little girl into it alot more, including images and vocal sounds from her. We also structured it and timed each shot smoother to link in well with the music. Once the audience had seen our next attempt at the trailer it was clearer to them what was happening and that there was actually a structured storyline, including subtitles to cancel out audience confusion.

The music used help to set the ambience of the darker shots, it also helped to relate the shots together. We included some background noise interuption during some of the shots to show that a ghost was involved, e.g sometimes there is white noise interruption when ghosts are nearby. We tried to mix some music together in garage band but we decided to instead rip some music from a horror soundtrack cd and edit them into a different composition. We also managed to get effect such as our fire effect by striking a match and recording the sound. The music was at quite a slow tempo to go with the flowing shots, it sounded very dreary and therfore creepy when the little girl was walking past the camera. we included sound cuts for moments such as screaming and at the end of the trailer when it was fading out so that the moment of silence could sink into the audiences mind.

We decided not to have dialogue in our trailer and to instead just use subtitles and sound effect, sticking to the conventional standard horror trailer theme where a voiceover is rare. We used many diegetic sounds such as footsteps, screaming, laughing, etc. If we had more time i think we could have developed better threatening audio to chill the audience. instead of the dialogue sound we used the subtitled, it worked effectively but sometimes lingered on screen for far too long which a voiceover maybe could have fixed.

Trailer shot familarities

To create our trailer we had to look at many different shots in other film trailers and media sources, when I researched this I also tried to find similar shots including the ages of the characters in the shot, I couldn't find them all the time but it made it easier to picture the shots in our own teaser trailer if we could.

1. The first shot I have found which are similar relates to the little girl skipping away in our trailer, I had to search for lots of clips on youtube to find what I thought were realistic targets to what i wanted the little girl to look like during the scene. Overall we managed to make the scene creepy, managing to film it at night whilst it had been snowing on a haunted looking winter evening which was perfect. Whilst the scene is running you hear the little girl singing 'ring a ring a rosies' which we intened to send a chill down the audiences spine.

2. The second shot I gatahered from the trailer 'The last exorcism' involving a possesed innocent girl who turns demonic, the look in her eyes is what I aimed for, the deadly glare into the face of the audience, making them watch wondering what will happen, most of the time the audience are just waiting for a jumpy moment and are relieved when nothing happens, it just creates alot of suspense and I wished that upon our trailer. In our shot we managed to get a glint of light in the little girls eyes which looked horrifying in the darkness, we panned it across he face and it was so effective in making the audience fear her.

3. The shot we got for the little girl holding the match in the dark, was part of the story plot, showing her with the match as a ghost. The little girl had died in a fire and from what the audience see, they may think that she caused it and her spirit wasn't at rest. I didn't think we contrasted our shot well and that it was too light, I would have preferred it if the match was just below her face and you could just see her face, like when a ghost story is being told and the torch in shone into the storytellers face. The media shot i found i thought would have been very good but could have been better suited if it was a facial shot.

4. We needed an effective scream and screaming pose for our trailer because after the scream it goes dead silence for a few seconds. We needed this to be perfect to build suspense. The picture I managed to find had the right facial expression we were looking for, we just managed to get the correct dark setting and echoing scream in the surroundings of an old basement to finalise our realistic target. The scene we created was much better than I first thought it would be due to the fact that we didnt have too many places that were dark to film during the day which could contrast a horror atmosphere. It was very hard for our whole group to get together during the evening to film some shots.

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

The role of the distributor is very important to gain interest and public awareness of a film; they have to compete with not only other leisure activities but also other distributors. All distributors have aim to gain the attention of their target audience, they must persuade and throw out thier point that the audiences must see this film and that it will be brilliant, they do this by their advertising, publicity and promotion campaigns. To reach most of there target audience the campaign used must be as cost-effective as possible. By having a number of different publicity methods and advertisement you can reach more audiences, as every audience may be influenced to see a film from different methods, for example, some audience members may see the film poster which leads them into watching the teaser trailer soon after. No matter, what type of advertisement they see, all the advertisement campaigns must engage the audience and interest them into wanting to know more about the upcoming film. This could be if there is a key actor involved or even a director who is reknown for fantastic films. Reviews play a big part in this advertising campaign as they cater to such a huge audience around the country they can give it a positive review and people will go regardless of seeing a trailer, it could just be a word or phrase such as 'The must see film this year'. If someone sees a poster first, there will need to be key information on it that will tell the audience of the film, it must include its title , the release date, a tag-line, and even a website link so that they could further research the film online, looking at pictures and further trailers whilst they are there. Different age groups react to different advertising, the main users for my own target audience would be student/young adults/teenagers - A huge proportion of cinema users are in the age range of 15-24, they are likely to react to teaser trailers, internet websites, film posters, an d reviews in magazines. I think that effective films trailers to our generation contain quick flashy enigma's which confuse us into wanting to know what happens. The main image of a film poster must relate directly to one of the most memorable factors of the film, it could relate to the theme, genre, stars, or setting. In my film poster, I used the image of a little girl who the audience would start to instantly associate with the title of the film 'Alice' she looks really creepy, in my opinion not much can beat a little girl in a horror movie because they are known as the innocent ones, when they are involved in death it suddenly worries the audience. I wanted the audience to watch the trailer, remember her face and think wow that will be interesting to watch, I wonder if it will scare me. In our trailer we started it off as normal and throughout made the clips jumbled so the audience wouldn't have a clue what part they were seeing, meaning they would need to watch the film to actually understand. This means that the audience may ask lots of questions about what is happening. The types of clips seen in the teaser trailer need to be exciting, keeping the audience on the edge of thier seat, maybe including a few jumpy moments and rounding it off with a cold heartless moment, in ours the little girl walks across the screen and dissapears towards the other side, we hear a scary laugh from her as she dissapears into silence and ends. The poster is normally introduced into the public months before the teaser trailer to let the audiences know that a new film is going to be coming out, afterwards, the teaser trailer and many other advertisement devices are released to keep the audience interested in seeing your film. In terms of advertising a film, you would need to go to the next level, above and beyond other distribution companies, using advertising techniques to cater to the mass audience. I have chosen to make the film a certificate 15 this is so will be mid age range and suitable to all most teenagers, if I made a certificate 18 I may lose students and teenagers under the age, whereas if it was made to be a certification 12A you could lose the interest of the older teenagers and young adults. The trailer me and my group created was intended to confuse and keep the audience questioning the film, like all good teaser trailers should. Films such as the blair witch project were done using a handy cam, using minimal money to film and it was a multimillion success. Paranormal Activity was advertised to look as real as possible, to make it look as though a couple had set up a camera in their home and caught a ghost or prescence on camera. In a viral market campaign, you would firstly advertise by images, video clips, flash games, texts and so on, You would set up a website to provide all this information but also spread the information over other popular sites such as youtube, facebook, twitter, where it will be followed in mass quantities. The first step is to get people to start talking about the film, and then you could further release posters, teaser trailers, it is all about creating excitment and advertising the film in a brand new way. The full length trailer would be released nearer the release date, maybe advertisement on television could push thye sales and film viewing on box office release, some films are mainly marketed over the internet and through posters as tv campaigns cost a lot of money. The trailer works well with the design of the poster and film magazine as I decided to use the child character 'Alice' from the teaser trailer as the main face on the poster and magazine. All the products are visually very dark but contrast the theme of fire, using blacks, oranges and yellows around the girl. The lighting around the little girl on my final poster and my draft make her seem creepy and very satanic. When taking the images for the film poster and magazine I used flash photography ona dark background so i could edit the lighting around the girls body. In the trailer we used alot of light and darkness around the girl to show how innocent she is and to the potray her evil side. We didn't use any make-up on the little girl because we wanted her to be traditional, but using light effects we could make her ghostly, white and make her eyes shine as if she was posessed. For the poster I took a picture of a girl in my class for her body shape then photoshopped the little girls head on top, blending it in which surprisingly worked much better than I thought it would. For the horror genre we decided to use white text on a black background instead of traditional red for blood, this is because we wanted to link it in with the ghostly theme. I stuck with black and white text over my magazine cover and poster so I did not use too many different colours because it would have made it too distracting. The tag-line on my poster ‘The spirit remains’ relates to the teaser trailer and the imagery of the little girl, the poster and magazine promote the iconic ghostly child imagery which can be seen throughout the trailer. I chose to focus on the little girls face in my ancillary products to give it focus and attention from the audience, which makes the audience feel on edge from the invasion of personal space, as the ghost is right in front of your face, watching you.

My film poster

For my film poster design I used the images I had taken of the little girl sitting with the match by her face, the image I chose was cropped down and edited on photoshop so I just had her face as the main attraction. I found it hard placing my image around the poster and decided to center it at the top of the page, with the body dropping down the centre of the page into the darkness. Having the image in this position made the poster interesting, I based this image from a game poster I saw called 'Fear' involving a ghostly demonic little girl. I added several shadows into the images so the light was focused alot more inot the girls face, also making it look as if the girl was backed into a dark corner hiding? or waiting? the poster creates and enigma as to if she is scared or an actual threat. I also added a black background layer as most typical horror posters use black backgrounds Orange/brown and yellow text on the front. In small print at the bottom I used white and brown to highlight the actors, release date and production companies. For the main wording 'Alice', I used the shadow tool at different angles until I found the perfect lighting for my text. I used the colour yellow to link in with the theme of fire and to cross over with the black and orange colours around the rest of the poster, it was much more effective. I was inspired by a game poster called 'fear' because my prior knowledge to it was that it was a horror genre game using a young demon girl, it suited our trailer and it looked specific to what I was looking for whcih a movie poster couldnt give me. I created my own production company logo called CEEJ using the first initial from each member in my group, Charlie, Emma, Emma, James, I made the logo quite fast but I think it worked out very well, it was simple and blended well colourwise with the rest of the poster.

My magazine cover

The main image on the cover of my magazine was the little girl alice up close. I placed her spread over the whole page but focusing it on the right hand side of the poster. I used a blur effect on the image and the magazine title text so that ti looked burnt, again connecting the magazine cover with the theme of fire.
Another way I connected it to its theme was by adding flames into the background on the left hand side of the page which i had left a gap, it looks as if the little girl is being engulfed by the flames. I included small footers at the bottom of the magazine highlighting other big horror movies which would be featured inside the magazine. I used the white text because it was much more effective across the background and it highlighted the key feature of the magazine.

The poster and magazine both promote the film trailer my group created in terms of design and contents, my magazine promotes the film by offering up backstage information and interviews on the film, the poster also helps promote the trailer by including productions company logos and names of the cast and crew involved in the film, it also shows a film website link that can help promote the film and give audiences more information about it before the film is actually released. It outlines an initial release date for the film so the audience can get excitied if they like the trailer.

Alice movie poster

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

During the construction of my blog, horror trailer and film posters, I have used alot of different technology and equipment, some less high tech than others but equally important. What I am going to discuss is how I used these and how we and others have benefitted from them.

One of the most important programs for me during media editing has to be Photoshop, it would have made it virtually impossible to compose some of the images for my poster and magazine cover without it as it enabled me to place layer upon layer of different textures and images upon each other. The program provides so many different and effective ways of transforming images using filter effects, brush tools, shapes, shadowing, etc, without these incredible tools it wouldn't have been possible to break down my original image and compose a brand new one with a completely new horror effect. I also used photoshop to make a shot by shot trailer analysis of a film called 'The last exorcism' which is used in my planning on the road to the creation of our own horror trailer.



To create sound for our horror trailer we decided to use the camcorder to capture it and then cut out the sound from the video, this worked extremely well and it meant that we could also cut out sound from previous recordings and edit them to sound creepier. When we added the sound we used a program called final cut pro, this is an Apple official editing product which can be expensive but can be found cheaper when use din colleges or schools, this benefitted us so much, we were able to use top editing software and it didnt cost us.

Other advantages of using final cut pro were that it was quite simple to use for beginners and was fantastic practice for future productions. Editing video clips was very easy, we were able to use the cut tool to size down larger length clips to use the exact frames we wanted from start to finish. When we had cut the video we just had to insert it onto our timeline and place it at the correct point to make it fit with our other footage, this made the timings much better and meant we could add transitions.

The transitions made the production look much more professional, it also meant we could fade in and out between shots and audio to make our trailer feel more horror like.

To get better camera angles during filming we were equipped with a tripod for our camera, this made everything much smoother to turn the camera at different speeds without shaking and ruining the capture. The tripod also made it easier to change height and how fast the tripod could move using the adjustable grips around the head of the pod.

By using web 2.0 which is basically the new interactive internet system we have adopted over the last 8 years, we are able to now upload to the internet, sell our own items, publish our own blogs and information which 10 years ago was not possible, everything was sold to us through organisations or companies. Websites I was able to use were sites such as youtube, dafont and blogger. Youtube is a video sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos, this can include music videos, tv clips and movie clips, it also advertises to its users using movie banners, premier notices for music videos and tv shows so it makes alot of money this way.

Blogger is the website i am writing my blog into, in enables me to keep a record of what I am doing and in doing this it can be uploaded for others to see, mine is based on horror so i have themed it in this way using blood, dark colours and a bloody hand. The website also lets you add pictures to your text and even video to demonstrate and explain what you are writing about. Because it is quite a social network others can comment on your work, designs,etc and is easy access for a teacher to comment on improvements that could be made. I have laid out my blog using captions which i can add to each peice of my writing, this then sorts them intoa category so when i click one of the many links at the top of my blog it connects me to that section and everything I have deemed related to that topic.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is so important to the outcome of the film because it caters to a specific audience who will want to see key elements to the genre. The idea of creating questionnaires or surveys to create initial ideas for movies and their trailers is perfect because it is simple, cheap and can be done by anyone in thier own time. The results give the producers a chance to re edit some of their material to appeal to the audience more, it can provide hints on popular music for that genre which may be used or even fonts which will be more effective. Results can also change to outcome of the overall film, changing locations, characters and props based on a majority of answers. The feedback can also change the way the film is advertised and which target audience it should be distributed for. If alot of the audience are gore fanatics, maybe alot of special effects could be used to make the experience scarier and more enjoyable.



We displayed a class set up viewing of every groups horror trailer over one of our lessons, what we were given were feedback forms to highlight key advantages and disadvantages to everyones trailers. The key demographic for horror movies in male and females is ages 17-25 so we fitted that criteria well, we had around at least 15 viewers for each trailer and after ours was viewed we were given some crucial feedback to improve the footage. I think this was a success because we were able to look at similar comments made by different groups and improve the negative aspects of our trailer, completely revamping its look so it was understandable. On the feedback form it included the positives and negatives, with the additional comment section where we got alot of honest opinions which pushed our trailer into a positive direction.
When we handed out our questionnaire to a majority of the group we turned the results into the form of a pie chart, which can be viewed on my blog, this was easier to do because we were able to see what a similar age group wanted to view or understand from our trailer.

Constructive notes from our feedback included a change in the story telling because it was unclear what was happening. Our story is based on a little girl called Alice who was involved in a house fire and refused to leave her home residing as a ghost. At first we barely acknowledged her in the trailer so it was quite confusing when the audience saw random clips of a little girl skipping. Once we had included text explaining and hinting the story it because slightly clearer to the audience what was going on. Next we decided to add extra images and clips of Alice so the viewers knew her appearance and understood her importance. It came clear to us after we got the audience feedback that the music and sound clips we used were ineffective, we decided to use more of our own created effect including a match striking for the sound of fire, background muffled voices, etc. This brought our trailer to life and when viewed again was given much more positive feedback, it was understandable, the transitions worked better, the story was backed up with text and made us feel comfortable that we had definately improved on our previous work.

CEEJ logo

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