My Evaluation for my media coursework.

1. EVALUATION
Judy Milner

2. 1. In what ways does your media use,
develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?
I did a lot of research into the codes and conventions of horror film trailers before
attempting to make my own one, and learnt that there is indeed a sort of template
which the majority seem to follow. There are many aspects of my trailer that follow
the conventional template.
A typical trailer for a horror film will probably have it’s own set up, a fast-paced
action sequence some mystery and a few shocks, and as a theatrical trailer it will
probably run for up to two minutes (as opposed to a teaser trailer which would be
just under a minute). With these ingredients you have the bare bones of an average
horror trailer, which is why I felt it was necessary to make myself a kind of check list
and make sure I had covered these conventions.
(Continued next slide)

3. 1: My trailer
One way that my trailer differs from professional trailers (obviously apart from the fact that I have
almost none of the resources that the professionals have) is tat I came up with this idea and shot
my footage with the intention of it becoming a trailer, and not a feature length film. When
distributors make trailers it’s out of footage that’s already been shot, and it’s never been filmed just
for the trailer.
There were three main points that I knew I had to get across, as mentioned in a previous blog
post:
■ The fact that my protagonist was moving into a new house.
■ The fact that the house was haunted.
■ And in what way the house was haunted.
In my storyboard, my plan was to have the protagonist and her friend carrying boxes into the
house to show that someone was moving in, but I realized that my house is full of furniture, and
the full, dusty bookcases would look odd in a house that had ‘just been moved into’, so that scene
was changed, but I believe it’s still quite clear that this is a new house.
My plan to show the house was haunted didn’t change at all from the planning to the filming stage,
it was just cut down a bit during the editing stage. My audience and teacher agreed that having
the electronics show problems was a good way to introduce the fact that the house was haunted
and the way in which it was haunted.

4. 1. My poster
For my poster I wanted to develop a vague idea I had when looking at an existing
poster for ‘the ring’; I’ve referred to ‘the ring’ quite a lot over the course of this
project, simply because I felt that it best represented the type of horror I wanted to
emulate myself: below is the poster that I am referring to. I really liked it’s simplicity
and wanted to emulate that in my own work.

5. 1. My magazine cover
I chose to make a cover for ‘Fangoria’ magazine, a magazine dedicated to all kinds
of horror films. A convention of this magazine is to use a still from the featured film
as it’s main image, instead of having a specialized photo shoot. It was quite a relief
at the time, knowing that I wouldn’t have to pull out my camera and set everything
up again, but when I chose a suitable still from my trailer I had so much trouble
getting the quality of the image right, and it still turned out to be a little bit too grainy
than I would have hoped.

6. 2. How effective is the combination of
your main product and ancillary
tasks?When creating my ancillary tasks I tried my best to make a clear, visual link between the three
pieces.
The link between my magazine cover and my trailer is probably the most obvious: as I mentioned
before, it’s a convention of ‘Fangoria’ magazine to have a still from it’s featured film as it’s main
image, so there’s the initial link. I also edited the colour scheme to match the image, helping the
overall effect. The part that I feel was least successful were the four secondary images that I used.
As I finished my trailer quite late, I didn’t have time to go and set up four separate photo-shoots for
these images and couldn’t use any copyrighted material from the internet, so I ended up using
some images that I took and edited myself that were initially for another subject. The images are
okay but in a couple of cases I feel their colours or given atmospheres don’t really match up, but
overall, I think these links are quite effective.
For the poster I chose a type-writer-like font because it was the same type of font I had used in my
trailer for the titles and endorsements, but I couldn’t use that same font in my magazine cover
because I had to choose something that worked a little bit better with the font of the name of the
magazine, which I did not create.

7. 2. Poster + Trailer + Magazine
As I mentioned before, I wanted my poster to be quite minimal, like ‘the ring’ poster
I found, and I do think that that also went quite well with my trailer.
My trailer wasn’t extremely colourful, but that’s just a symptom of the genre really,
so that fact that I didn’t use much colour goes quite well with my poster, making
them link effectively.
A query I had when making it was whether having the TV be the main focus was a
good idea or not: I wondered if I had really shown that much of the TV in my trailer?
The first eight seconds was just slowly zooming in on the screen, so personally I
think it works well.
When I thought my poster was too plain I decided to add a faint image, and ended
up using the same image as I used in the magazine cover, and I think that the fact
that the poster, the trailer, and the magazine cover all contain the same image at
some point or in some way is quite a significant link.

8. 3. What have you learnt from your
audience feedback?
My audience feedback was pretty positive, I think the thing I’m most pleased about
was that everyone who watched it seemed to understand it and got a good sense of
the storyline without knowing too much about the plot.
The most negative feedback I got on the final product was that the text flashed on
and off the screen too fast to be legible. I was trying to make it fast, because that is
one of the conventions of a trailer, but looking back I agree that it may have been
too fast once or twice. I suppose it’s harder than I imagined to find the happy
balance.
I was very pleased with all the feedback I received, it was actual quite reassuring to
know that sometimes I was being a bit too critical with myself.

9. 3. Audience Feedback
I got my audience feedback from a number of different people. The majority of it,
and all of the audience feedback recorded on my blog is from people who fit into my
target audience, which was always adolescent girls. I chose to show my work to my
friends because I know they’re honest with me and I personally know that they
enjoy horror films, so they were good people to ask.
I showed my trailer to quite a few different people without recording a response or
telling them that I wanted to write down what they liked or didn’t like. This was
mainly because I just wanted to share what I had created, but it was also interesting
to see their reactions to the trailer, and they were all genuinely positive which made
me very happy.
Despite not being in my target audience I found the feedback from my Media
Studies teacher particularly useful, he always had good advice on where I should
go whenever I got stuck with anything.

10. 4. How did you use media technologies in
the construction and research, planning
and evolution stages?
Photoshop has been my best friend throughout this project: I used it for the trailer
as well as the ancillary tasks. It came in handy for my trailer when I wanted to insert
the logo for the British Horror Film Festival, I was able to blend the image in with the
rest of my trailer quite well.
Photoshop is extremely versatile- put an image in
and you can do whatever you want with it,
making it incredibly useful to the creative side of
my work.

11. 4. iMovie
The next application that I came to have a love/hate relationship with was iMovie. I
first learnt that it wouldn’t all be smooth sailing with this program as soon as I
started using it- when I tried to upload all the footage I had filmed. Most of it came
out okay, but there were some crucial scenes that refused to upload into the
program. After days of trying to get around the problem, once I was successful
going through all the footage was actually pretty intimidating, and it wasn’t really
helped by the format of the program.
At this point this is sounding like a review of iMovie, which isn’t really necessary as
it is just a very basic editing program, and I came to a point where I had invested
too much time in it to give up and try a different one. In the end, despite how long it
took, it still worked to help me put together my trailer.

12. 4. Blogger
Blogger is quite a unique way to present coursework, and it really has been very
handy to be able to access my work from whatever computer I happened to be
using at any given time. I could only work on my creative projects on my personal
computer because of Photoshop and iMovie, but I always had something to do with
all my work online.
As I presented all my work on my blog, it was very important throughout all the
stages of my work.

13. 4. Prezi
Prezi is another way to create a presentation, but as it’s all online it’s a lot easier to
share over social media. I found Prezi particularly useful whenever I have anything
to analyze, because I liked the way you could paste, crop and comment on images
without any hassle.
My only issue was that I was not successful in embedding the Prezi on to my blog, I
was only able to put a link. This was particularly frustrating because it is something I
have managed to do before, but it seems to be quite temperamental in the way it
works.

14. 4. Slide Share
Slide share is a way of combining the pros of both Microsoft PowerPoint and Prezi,
in other words, it makes PowerPoint presentations easier to share over social
media.
This is the only time I have used slide share because I did not feel it was necessary
to make a full PowerPoint for anything else I wanted to write about, Prezi is a lot
simpler for shorter presentations.
In any case, it was good to have other options incase I didn’t have access to the
internet- you’re less likely to lose any work with slide share as you’re not saving it
online, it’s saved like a regular document until you want to put it online.

15. 4. Camera
To film my trailer I used a Panasonic HDC-SD40, which is a small, lightweight film
camera.
I had a few issues with quality, and sometimes the images
came out discoloured and dark regardless of what time of
day it was or where the light was coming from, the
darkness was always emphasized. This was a frustrating
aspect, but the camera never gave up and worked well.
Plus, as I just mentioned, it was very light weight so
positioning it and moving it around was never difficult.

16. 4. Facebook
I used Facebook to get my audience feedback because it’s very easy to use, and
some people generally tend to check it several hundred times a day so I could
connect to other people with ease.
A plus of using Facebook to gather audience feedback was that it gave the
audience some thinking space to give their answer in the own time, without having
to think of anything right on the spot, lessening the ‘ums’ and ‘errs’ that I got
whenever I tried to record a reaction.