Evaluation - First Draft

This is our first draft of our evaluation, as of yet we haven't divided it up into sections to make the script for our video commentary.

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

We created a teaser trailer for a film based in the coming of age genre. From our initial brainstorming of the characteristics and past films of this genre, we developed a plot synopsis that is based on the films ‘Elephant’ and ‘The Breakfast Club:’ that due to a high school shooting, a group of four different students, who wouldn’t usually have anything to do with each other, hide together, and try to coexist in hope of survival.

Our teaser trailer challenged one of the forms of this type of media text, its length. Teaser trailers are most commonly in a time frame of thirty seconds to one minute; the length of ours is two minutes and twelve seconds, more than double. The reason for this is that our trailer slowly builds up pace from the point of equilibrium, to the point of disturbance, slowly increasing pace to match the intensity of the dramatic sequences of struggle, and climaxing to a cliff-hanger, whilst featuring as little dialogue as possible. This follows the other conventions of a teaser trailer, such as how much characterization is revealed and the change of pace to encourage audience response, however, our shots are longer, adding to the length of the trailer.

A form of our trailer that does not follow conventions however is the ellipsis; we frequently and consistently used fades to create an idea of events being missed out, and using more fades, in a shorter space of time to increase the pace of the trailer.

We compared our teaser trailers length to that of the James Cameron Science Fiction film ‘Avatar’ (2009), which is also notable for its unusual length. It also retains characteristics of building-pace, and minimal character revelation.

We decided to use codes that would be clearly recognisable to our target audience off the lower tier of 16-25 years. The references, or ‘cliques’ that we used to refer to our characters in the poster; ‘Geek,’ ‘Jock,’ ‘Plastic’ and ‘Rebel’ are colloquial phrases used by the current generation of teenagers, and so could be identified with easily. We matched the clothes with these names, to bolster these stereotyped codes, as well as using props such as cigarettes for the rebel character, and glasses for the geek character.

Following the plot being partially based on the coming-of-age film ‘The Breakfast Club,’ the primary two borrowed elements were the entire setting being in a school, and the character forms, which are archetypes for ours. For example the repressed and violent natured ‘John Bender,’ is the basis for the character ‘Rob,’ and the athletic and protective ‘Andrew Clark,’ is the basis for the character ‘Conor.’

Our promotional poster follows many if not most of the conventions for a marketing poster, which is the inclusion of a title, a tag line, credits and a tentative released date, however it challenges the conventions in ways such as the minimalistic design. A lot of designs often have more detail, whereas ours have block colours and shapes, and there is nothing in terms of critical response. We did this so that the poster appealed more as a teaser poster, and in terms of a marketing view, we would print a more detailed poster in the future.

For our magazine cover, where the dramatic design of the promotional poster draws the audience attention, we preferred to give the characters more of a presence in the magazine cover, making a link with the trailer. Additionally, it was also essential to meet the conventions of our chosen magazines brand identity and house design, which gave us less freedom in our design. With this however, we were still able to make a design based solution, which emphasized the stress of our characters.

A further, and very significant way in which our trailer and plot challenges conventions, is that the films that ours is based on are all American, and it is unusual to see a British Coming-Of-Age film that is entirely set in a school.

The poster also includes an inter-textual reference to ‘The Breakfast Club’ poster, which is the unusually long tag-line, another challenge to the typical, short and eye-catching tag lines featured on most Hollywood blockbuster poster, featuring a more detailed but still vivid idea of the plot, making up for the lack of detail aesthetically.

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

We tried to keep our teaser trailer and two ancillary texts as relevant and related to each other as we possibly could. The foremost design element that is present in each of the three media texts is the title ‘The Way That We Are,’ which is presented in the same font in all three, to keep the brand identity related and recognisable, however we have made the title larger and bolder where appropriate, such as in the poster, and at the end of the trailer, larger than all the other pieces of text.

The second piece of criteria is the consistency of the themes of ‘disturbance’ and ‘darkness’ through the three media texts: in the trailer, this is shown in the latter scenes, as the characters react to the perpetrators presence and argue with each other. In the magazine cover, this is shown in the distorted image of connor and anneli, whose expressions and body language convey stress, worry and fear. In the promotional poster, the silhoutte of a hooded gunman looks ominous and has connotations with youth violence. A further denotation that is common among the texts is the allusion to, but not direct or clear revelation of the gunman.

The only recognisable issue is the lack of connection between the poster and the magazine cover, which have little relation, besides the title. We originally intended to create a poster, which featured a photographed version of the final shot of the trailer, with each character cowering against a wall, whilst the silhouette of the gunman looms above them at the door. Due to absences of characters, we were do this photo shoot, so we alternatively took a more design based approach, and decided to make the gunman character the central focus. On the other hand, as previously stated, the detailed tagline, which gives a general idea of the main characters, compensates for this, and makes the link between the main storyline about the clique characters and background of the story, about a gunman attacking a school.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From our audience feedback we determined that we needed to add more titles to break up the shots, and even improve the idea of an increased pace to add intensity, which we applied at the beginning middle and end.

Some of our audience feedback remarked a disagreement with some of the long shots we used, although this was an essential element to our trailer: we used these shots predominantly during the shots with the gunman to create a distance from this element of the storyline, and more of a focus of the four main characters.

The audience also thought that the use of fades was too much, however we could not see anyplace’s to remove them, because we needed the fades in all the places where they helped dramatically with continuity.

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

From the earliest planning stages, we used new media technologies to help develop our trailer as easily and efficiently as possible.

Most significantly, our primary source of research material was the internet; websites such as wikipedia, imdb and pearl and dean allowing us to research relevant plot-lines, marketing ploys and audience demographics to allows us to effectively prepare how our trailer and ancillary texts would effectively influence target markets.

During the development our plotline, we created an animatic storyboard to help us visually realize how our trailer would flow, and we did so using the slideshow capabilities of Microsoft PowerPoint. We were also able to upload this animatic to our blog.

The construction process provided the most opportunities to use media technology, we used DV Cameras to film our shots, as well the program Apple Final Cut Express to cut together our shots, and transitions, titles amongst other effects to make the trailer flow and improve the continuity that otherwise lacks from a series of cut together shots.

The graphics elements that appear throughout our trailer could not be created by final cut alone as the capabilities were not diverse enough, so we turned to Apple Livetype and Adobe Illustrator, to create more developed and appropriate titles, that matched the story line and aesthetic.

Subsequently to the rough and finished cuts of the trailer, the website Youtube proved a useful tool to preview the trailer to its audience, from which we were able to get feedback.

Designing our ancillary texts, we made extensive use of the programs Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as photography to model our shooter, which we then altered into a vector illustration.

Challenging The Teaser Length - Inspiration

The final cut of our teaser trailer is considerably longer than the common teaser trailer, which generally lasts between 30 seconds and 1 minute, challenging the convention. The main argument for this is that in our trailer, time is needed to present the characterizations, and their state of separation, and being brought together in the shooting, whilst building up the intensity from the point of equilibrium to the point of disturbance, through to the cliffhanger ending.

Our inspiration for our trailers length is the teaser trailer for the science fiction film Avatar (2009,) which had an unusually lengthy time of approximately two minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYurk_p-4-Q

(Embedding disabled)

The trailer, like ours gives a basic characterization, and spends alot of the time presenting the more dramatic action sequences and the mise-en-scene, which is an important part of the genre.

The most comparable element is the way it slowly increases pace and intensity.

Poster - Final Design

We decided this was going to be the final design for our poster.

The final design differs to the original idea, which was to use a shot of the main characters against the wall with the silhouette of the gunman in the window. We then decided to change it by taking inspiration from the poster from the film 'choke'. Similarly to ours it features block colours to add a dramatic effect. The poster emphasises the gunman rather than the main characters as his appearances in the trailer are always mysterious and shows the darker side to the film. The minimal effect we used on the poster, by not showing any real shots from the film, lures the audience to want to know more about the film and go to see it.

We originally wanted to use a more violent colour for the background such as red, but this proved to be too harsh and confused the meaning of the film. We decided blue was a much more suitable colour as it reflects struggle and survival. We kept the gunman in black to convey the dark, evil side of the character, also the contrast between the light blue in the background and the dark figure of the character presents the two sides of the film.

Promotional Magazine Cover - Final Design

This is our final design for our 'Little White Lies,' 'The Way That We Are Issue.' The varying covers of this independent film magazine are stylized in different ways, some incorporating pencil drawing, pop-art, and vector images. So we decided to try and stylize ours in a similar way.

We took a photograph of two of the films main 'clique' characters and put them together, reflecting the final scene of the trailer, in a distressed state, in hiding. When then imported this photograph into photoshop, altering the background to a whitewash.

We then applied varying layers of filters, such as sketch filters to our photograph to add some texture and define the foreground characters.

The focus on the foreground characters and their distressed stance and expressions reflects the darker themes of the film, whilst the light tone reflects the focus on the 'good,' 'moral' and 'heroic' characters of the film.

Promotional Poster - Final Design

This is the final design for our promotional poster.

The original design was meant to feature a full-size photograph of each of the four 'clique' characters sitting by the doorway, with the silhoutte of the gunman in the window. Unfortunately due to unavailability of cast members, we altered the design.

This design is a hommage to the poster design for the film 'Choke,' which similarly to ours, features only shapes and solid colours to give allusions to certain ideas. This poster creates an allusion to the gunman character, who in the trailer is not revealed, and is constantly shrouded in someway.

This is more apt as a teaser poster than the original design, as it alludes to the certain themes of the film: 'teen violence,' 'darkness,' 'struggle,' but does not present any overt details of the visuals of the film.

We initially experimented with a red background, to allude to blood and violence, but this proved too harsh, considering the film focusses on the characters that are trying to survive, protect and do good with each other, so we decided a lighter, and less harsh blue would better reflect this plot element.

Other than the background, we decided not to add any colour, to maintain the dark and ominous sense the poster conveys to its audience.

Although the title font 'Comic Sans,' is a very generic font, and appears quite light hearted when the film is about fear and struggles. We felt the font illustrates the ideals that the film portrays, such as social coherence, love and understanding of the main characters. The font, coupled with the image alluding to the gunman combines these two ideas to illustrate the unique concept of our film through the poster. Furthermore, this font is a common one to find used in school documents, as noted by our media technician Simon, and so is apt to include in a film related to events in a school.

Poster Idea

For the film poster we wanted to do something that captured the most tense moment of the trailer. The idea of this is, so it catches the eye and makes people look and read it. We decided we were going to use one of the last shots in the trailer where all the main characters are lined up against the wall hiding. We thought this is effective as the emotions on the characters' faces states the situation they're all in, and the fact they are in the situation together. We could also incorporate a company logo, release date and star rating.

Little White Lies - Magazine Cover

Since we have decided to make a 'Little White Lies' magazine cover for our film, I have decided to collect some examples, to explore their unique compositions, which are often minimalistic and rich in colour, creating some sense of pop-art.