4. How did you use new media technologies throughout the project?

Internet
The internet was one of the main technologies used when both producing our trailer and in research. Its a key part in most people's everyday lives and the tech is progressing every day.



- Blogger: Obviously this is one of the main things we have used on the interent, it makes it possible for us to account everything we have done step by step with all kinds of clever features.
- Youtube: This is another popular interent site which has made our cousrework accesable for viewers all over the world. We have used it to upload everything we have produced on imovie [here] making it available for people to watch and for comments to be left. Also Youtube has been helpful in the research process, alowing us to look at real life trailers and analyse them in great detail. It has also helped us with technical issues, we have used it to watch tutorials and learn how to use other computer programs.
- Social Networking Sites: The only social network site we have used is facebook and this is due to the forever changing interent trends and facebook being the most popular at the moment. Our target audience is teenagers and young adults who are the main users of sites like this so made it perfect for us to get relevant feedback and reviews. It has helped us make key decisions throughout our project by posting questions online and working with the comments people left.
-Google: Google is the only search engine we used through the project, helping us with research and getting reliable information. But we also used google maps which allowed us to publish a map to our blog [here] and show people looking at the blog where we have been on our travels and which locations we scouted.
- Other: A few other sites on the internet which we used were Scribd - which allowed us to upload word documents so they were visable to those reading the blog. Slideshare - similar to scribd but for powerpoints and online slideshows. Finally we used Amazon - when researching music for our trailer we searched for soundtracks and were able to listen to clips of music on their site.

Digital Camera
Using a video camera was new for both of us, but we used it to film all our footage for the trailer. We used a selction of different cameras depending on where we were and also we had a underwater case with a special camera for certain scenes. The selection allowed us to chose which camera we needed when and which would be the best for different purposes. Without these cameras we would not have had a trailer and they turned out to be relativley easy to use.

Imovie
We used imovie for all the editing on our trailer. At first it was hard to use, as we had never worked with it before, but we got used to it and anything we struggled with we searched online and watched tutorials as I explained above. imovie gave us the power to produce a professional looking trailer with a wide variety of editing techniques. Some of the main elements we used were the transitional effects like fade and cross dissolve as well as things like overlaying text and lighting filters. These all came in really helpful when making our trailer look realistic and fit well with the horror conventions.

Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop is the program we used for producing our poster [here] and magazine covers [here]. It is highly used by producers and designers in the media industry and therefore good for making our products look realistic. We had both had previous experience with Photoshop so were quite advanceed when using it. It allowed us to alter and manipulate photos and layer text and other images over the top. This was one of the most important programs in our coursework as it made our ancillary products.

Blackberry Mobile
Finally the last technology we used was Colleens Blackberry. We didn't use it much but it did come in handy when we needed the interent whilst being outside the classroom and on location. Also we used it to record some voice overs which we were going to overlay on the trailer but didn't end up using. The quality was very good though and we wished we had experimented with this earlier on.

I think we used quite a few different media technologies throughout the production and research process, some newer than other. We can happily say that each and everyone played a key role in our project and without them it would have been extremely difficult.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout the process of our coursework we have blogged the steps, many of which include audience feedback which has helped us develop and finalise our ideas. [see example here] Audience feedback is a key part of any pre-production process, it can help you make sure what your doing is working well and appealing to the right target audience. It helps you review your work from different angles and develop it for the better.

For most of our feedback we asked the other students in our class, they are the correct age for our target audience of teenagers and young adults. This means we are getting the opinion we want and will know what needs changing to appeal to our selected audience. Also the students in our class are familiar with the media and have experience with the tasks we were set so gave us a critical view of our work.

The first pieces of feedback we received and one of the most important was for our storyline. We published some ideas onto a Facebook note and invited lots of people who would be part of our target audience. We asked them which storyline looked the most interesting and had the most potential in order for us to decide which to choose. This really helped as we got a realistic view on what we were producing and knew that if we followed the majorities advice it would be successful in entertaining our chosen audience. This was also good because we were unsure of what storyline to use, torn between a few... so this decided it for us.

Further through our production process we got some more feedback on font ideas. We got a selection of fonts from online which we thought we were going to use and handed a questionnaire to the class for a response. At the time this seemed really important and we got a good amount of feedback but in the end we decided against using a pre-made font. I suppose the questionnaire did help as we got some negative feedback, helping us move away from these type faces but i think we would have gone with the handmade lettering either way.

The final piece of feedback we received was on our trailer itself and towards the end of the project. We showed our trailer to the class on the projector screen and handed out a survey for them to fill out as they watched. This was quite a key piece of information for me and colleen as it helped us know what needed changing for the final version of our trailer, making sure it was perfect and picking up things we my not have seen ourselves. As we showed it to our potential target audience we got realistic feedback and response for who we aimed it at. This meant we could finish our trailer with other peoples views in mind.

Finally we produced this poll which is on our main blog for people to rate our trailer. Just experimenting with different technologies to get a realistic representation of how people felt about our trailer. I think we should have done this earlier in the project to know if it was good enough and if people liked it. Also we could have posted this on Facebook or other social networking sites to get a response from the youth who are the majority using these sites.

Rate our trailer! What would you rate our trailer out of 5? 1 2 3 4 5 view results

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

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

View more presentations from brionymiller.

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

With our product we have created three media products - a trailer, a poster and a magazine cover. They use and challenge the types of conventions seen in real media products.

(clicking the picture opens a new window to it's Youtube video trailer)

Like any other producer, we researched into other existing products and used them as influences within our work, trailers in particular which we used were films such as; The Strangers The Ring and The Blair Witch Project, two of which were analysed in detail here

From these existing products, we have gained the knowledge of typical horror trailer conventions including the stereotypical damsel in distress character, a running scene through a forest and a male killer along with the usual editorial themes of fast editing, dark lighting, scary music, costumes etc etc. However, in keeping with some of the conventions, we have the typical fast editing, jumpy music, scary cut clothing and the typical element of narrative theory of Todorv and Propp.
Todorv focused on story not the character and believed that most stories followed the structure of;

equilibrium .... disequilibrium .... new equilibrium

                   (normality)                   (disruption)                     (closer - better version of normality)

This theory can be seen in our trailer with the flickering of holding hands which could be interpreted as the normality, along with the calm music, however when a sense of disequilibrium is introduced, (shots of the killer) things start to look wrong and the trailer picks up on the music and fast shots to give a sense of panic and disruption to the people and audience watching.

However this all talks about how we have followed the typical conventions of a trailer and not how we have challenged them; something that our trailer does quite well. 

• Female killer - our main character is female which challenges the normal horror convention of a masculine killer. This is new and different for viewers, some may see it as empowering femininity and it gives a new angle to watch from. Changing certain elements makes the trailer much more interesting.
• Beach setting - instead of going for the typical dark forest scenes, we have used a beach for the majority of our trailer. This is a place which most people are familiar with so the audience can relate and it starts to become more realistic. We wanted to do something which isn't over done and we felt this was original as well as quite creepy. The water is dark and aggressive which may fit with horror conventions but the seaside is usually a happy place so this conflicts this, intriguing viewers.
• Daylight - In our trailer, most of it is filmed in the daytime, this may seem odd as horror films are usually very dark and shadowy. Our film is more about getting inside the characters minds and it didn't need to be dark to do this. we have got some dark scenes which creates a good contrast with the daylight... but having a lighter film may be more appealing to certain viewers.

So we have challenged the media forms and conventions as well as sticking to them. We think we have a good combination or new and old, developing on from traditional horror movies. We have done this because people do not want to see the same old films over and over, youths want new and exciting. Out film trailer isn't cliche and we wanted to produce something like this to intrigue and interest the audience. We believe we have done this and think our trailer appeals well to our target audience by challenging media conventions.