Final Trailer

Final Poster

Final Magazine Cover

Evaluation Conor Sturgess Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use,develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Title of film

The layout of words used in our film title hints to our audience the film narrative will be developed around the life of a teacher. The crossed out word ‘Right’ shows her occupation aspect. However this design could cause issues among our audience as they may not know the official spelling of the film title. But we chose to do this so we could challenge one aspect of conventional films, therefore making our film more intriguing. 

Setting and location

Since our film trailer was based around the life of a teacher, we found it fitting to incorporate our school for the majority of our camera shots. For example, the use of students being placed within the midground and background of our camera shots would bring the conventional school atmosphere to life. Although, I feel we should have developed more of our main characters life outside the school. This is because one dominated atmosphere fades away from most conventional films. But since we did not own any cameras of our own, it was difficult to film some more personal footage.

Costumes

After researching what the majority of our own student teachers would wear, we felt it was ideal to stick to the conventional smart but casual outfits teachers wear. Yet we developed the use of our character costume. Later within the trailer when she starts to get her life right we begin to use a motif of glasses to be the symbolic meaning that her life is becoming sorted and organised. I particularly like the smart glasses motif as its a very subtle, but powerful symbolise her life becoming right

Camera shots

After part of our product research we noted many British trailers such as Happy Go Lucky have center frame shots. We decided to incorporate and use this into our film trailer to stick to the conventional British drama. We also in somewhat developed this shot as we tilted the camera angle following our actress as she left, rather than cutting to another shot. We did this because we felt it gave a much stronger understanding of our film. We wanted our audience to understand that our film isn't going to be mainstream, nor packed with action, but more slow paced and dominated upon one character's life.

Music

The music within our trailer stays true to our genres conventional use of music. We chose 3 instruments, this allows our audience to relate the music to the character. Likewise with Happy go lucky, the choice of music used gives you an understanding of the characters personality, and this is a method we wished to shadow.

Editing

Editing in our film trailer was important to create links for our audience to our genre. Our film is involved around the life of an ordinary teacher who struggles with day-to-day issues, this meant it was vital our editing was slow paced rather than fast. We found slow paced scenes would allow our audience to become attached to the character; which is typically seen in many conventional British Drama films.

Evaluation Conor Sturgess Question 2 - How effective is the combination of yourmain product and ancillary texts?

        

Typography

The combination of our main product title and our ancillary text titles share a connection within typography. To begin with, they both focus on the two colours white and red. I believe these colours are effective as they give a strong appeal to the female audience, hinting that love will be part of the film narrative.

Secondly, we used the same font and design on our magazine and poster. We particularly found this more effective as it made our film more recognisable and eye drawing to our audience. We also felt that repeating this our film narrative was made more clear. As the crossed out Wright and the chalkboard font implied school will play a heavy role on our film.

  

Location

We felt it was essential to create a relationship with our film poster which linked to the film trailer. This is why we positioned our actress in a location which made her seem trapped and surrounded by school buildings. We found this particularly effective as it is a subtle hint to what narrative plot you should expect to see within the trailer / film.

Release Date

We chose to release our film on January 1st, and used this date on both Trailer and Poster. We found this date effective as it links with our main characters story plot; which is to slowly become more efficient and organised within your life.

However, we decided not to place this date onto our film magazine. This is because our magazine won’t be producing film reviews till they have been released, therefore it was seen unnecessary.

Tagline

We chose to use the tagline ‘When holding it together is the best you can do’. We believe this tagline was very effective. It gave a strong connection to our poster image, as she is struggling to hold a pile of folders; the folders being the symbolic sign of her life falling apart.

Production Company

We placed the Foxlight Production company on our poster and film trailer. We found this to be effective as it would encourage anyone who is familiar with the production company to watch the film, therefore widening our audience.

Evaluation Conor Sturgess Question 3 - What have you learnt from your audiencefeedback

Evaluation Conor Sturgess Question 4 - How did you use media technologies in theconstruction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Raye Douglas - Q4 How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Raye Douglas - Q3 What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Initial Audience Feedback     Production Feedback       Evaluation Feedback

Trailer

We first interviewed a few people when showing them two trailers: 'Trainspotting' and 'This is England'. We wanted their feedback on the genre and asked them questions about things they liked and things they didn't. After this we came to a decision that we would choose the genre British Realist Drama and with locations though it could be about a teacher. After deciding this we interviewed a focus group of student teachers. We showed them the trailer for 'Happy Go Lucky'. We found out that they didn't like how the plot was unrealistic to a teachers lifestyle when showing her at school. As we wanted to make the story 'realistic' and truthful to a the representation of teachers we made the story-line more simple and focused on the real struggles of teachers. I feel we successfully showed realistic struggles of teachers for example showing her marking work, struggling with students and asking for help.

When choosing shots to add to the trailer we have two ones we liked from a scene of Flora and Conor laughing on a bench however when we asked a focus group in our media class which one they thought
we should add they suggested we cut them both. I felt this was a good decision as the shots were too messy in the background or the laughter looked forced. 

 We then re-filmed the shots after setting up the camera and choosing a 4 second clip from a 4 minute shot. This gave us the shot we wanted as it was realistic fitting our research from the focus group. This also hinted at a possible romantic relationship between the two to fit a larger target audience as most said they liked a sub genre of romance. It made our original genre change slightly but i thought it worked well as it gave the audience a bit more interest to watch the film.
I feel like our audience feedback had a huge influence on our final product. The most effective research was the focus group of teachers asking what they liked in a Drama about teachers- feedback straight from our target market as we then knew what ideas to have for shots to convey a particular kind of lifestyle.


Film Poster
( ENTER PHOTO OF POSTER)
Our group showed a film poster of 'Happy Go Lucky' to several people who the majority said they liked the cartoon like title as it reminded them of a school like theme. After this feedback we made our title on our film poster a cartoon like font. This made the title look like a logo so therefore was easily recognizable and when we wrote the title on our magazine we could use the 'logo' for our film.

During audience feedback they also said they would have liked the cover star in the 'Happy Go Lucky' poster to be a cartoon. We tried to make this effect on our poster however decided it didn't fit our genre as well and could look too cartoon comic like.

We got our class to analyse our poster when we were half way through the process of it. They didn't like the photo and thought the background was too messy for a film poster. On Photoshop we then blurred the background and kept floras face in focus bringing the attention on her and altogether easier to write headlines on a clearer background. This reminded me of the 'Happy Go Lucky' poster and i liked the outcome of our poster after we blurred the background. 
I think the feedback we recieved from the magazine was mixed. Some thought the film genre was clear but others thought it was slightly american and was a Romantic Comedy. This could have been from the bright colours used in the photo and the fact our central character was very attractive hinting that she could be attracting someone in the film. To imporve i think we could have had a photo of her with not such a yellow background and less make up on making the audience have sympathy for her.


Film Magazine
(ENTER PHOTO OF FILM MAGAZINE)
Our audience preferred independent magazines 'Little White Lies' and 'Sight and Sound'. They liked the simple look of the covers and the simple portraits of the cover stars on magazine 'Sight & Sound'. They also said they liked the way the masthead was not straight across the center. We applied this to our magazine cover and it gave it a more sleek sophisticated look that would appeal to an older audience. This worked well as our target audience is 16-50 years old.

We asked AS media students their opinions on our magazines. We didn't tell them the genre of our magazine cover as we wanted a truthful uninfluenced answer. They said our original masthead made it look very posh and simple which we liked however looked like the style for a make up magazine. We then changed it to look more like an art magazine rather than a mainstream lifestyle magazine. I preferred the masthead for our final idea as it looked like it suited our genre more and could be easily recognized as a logo. The brush stroke of the font makes it look more artistic. The red font gave it a more classic look and all together made it less mainstream and more independent.
I really like our final product. I think our headlines reach ou taget market of young women and men perfectly and the feedback from our masthead made us change it for the better to look more artistic.
Over all i am very pleased with the feeback we have got from our poster. The biggest comments were on the photo of our cover star as it was done with an SLR camera and lighting and a background that looked very professional. It was clear and direct.
(ENTER PHOTO OF FLORA - THE CLEAN ONE FOR THE MAGAZINE)

Raye Douglas - Q2 How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Raye Douglas - Q1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Flora Clarke, Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Flora Clarke, Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Initial audience Research

Film Trailers

We started off the whole process by deciding our genre, it took a while to warm to a British Realist Film but in the end we found it was the best one for us. Originally we started looking at films like Train-spotting and This is England and did got lots of audience feedback which we filmed and posted on the blog. However, from this we understood that had we made a more 'actiony' fast paced trailer it would have attracted a younger mainly teenage audience and we wanted a broader audience that could fit many ages.

We took a focus group of teachers and showed them two trailers.

Our focus group was four female student teachers which helped a lot seen as that was the main character in our plot. We took a lot from them and they were helpful in all aspects of production, for feedback, inspiration and ideas.

Our audience was mainly female at the beginning of production so we added a male character so that the male part of our audience could relate to him. In the beginning we thought about making him gay but we realised this would make our audience ever more prominently female.

Our focus group we women in their early 20s but we wanted to branch to a larger audience. We wanted people as young as 15 to be able to come to our film. We wanted to be able to have the freedom to include strong language and in the beginning we thought we might wish to show the main character being severely depressed so we made our trailer certificate 15. In hindsight it needn’t have been so high but it seemed like the safest option at the time.

During the interview our focus group told us that they wanted to see more films about teachers that told the truth about what life was really like. This made us think that there weren’t enough film about real teachers out there and so there was a potential ‘gap in the market’. 

Action Taken

Happy Go Lucky

•  Didn't get an understanding of the plot so we used lots of mainstream formal conventions to make ours more understandable
• Didn't hear the music we -we made ours loud throughout but kept the beat down so as not to distracts from the rest of the trailer
• Found main character un-relatable and annoying –tried to make our character more relatable

Overall they wanted to see some sort of progression within the trailer. We then added this to our trailer by ordering the shots to make it appear as it life gets better for our main character.

Another year

• Enjoyed the ‘true-to-life’ plot –we tried to mirror this in our own trailer, keep the film independent helped us to do this as the idea of a low budget made us have to cut back on things like after effects.
• Characters seemed like real people –we wanted to get people from many different walks of life so we tried to make this clear. However by concentrating on this our film has now come across as quite racially narrow. In the trailer none of the main characters are black or Asian.
• Each character had their own plot line which made it more interesting –we tried to make it appear as though each character had more to say each of them had their own life that they had their own problems in, this was another way of keeping in true to life.

Overall this film came out best so we decided to shape our film around this trailer yet make it approachable to a younger audience with changes to the plot.

Film Posters

Our initial audience research showed us that most of our target audience go to the cinema to watch films so we created a theatrical poster.

Our audience research showed us that films that mix of animation and real images drew in the most audiences for our genre. We showed our focus group two posters- 

Our focus group told us they thought, the 'cartoony' elements made the characters seem in their own little world. However we didn't want to make our film feel in anyway ‘childrensy’ so used our original image and blurred the background, the writing on top of the image was the part that gave our poster the more animated feel.

Our focus group loved the bright colours and easy to read writing on the theatrical posters for ‘Life is Sweet’ and ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’. However they didn't like how the reviews were on the top section of the poster. We took all this into account when designing ours, using bright colours and a font that stands out but we made our reviews smaller and less prominent as our focus group told us that the reviews are not what would draw them to go and see a film of this genre. 

Magazine Covers

The majority of our audience preferred the independent look of magazines like sight and sound and little white lies. They wanted a magazine that focussed more on the arty side to films and wanted to be able to get a grasp of character from the picture.

We showed them two covers for independent magazines and asked them to tell us their likes and dislikes of both:

Likes:

• Portrait shot of the character focusing on expression
• Just a few subheadings to get an idea of what was inside the magazine without having to read loads
•  Some sort of ‘puff’ attracted them to read the magazine
•  The bright colours of banner
•  The banner being small- meant they could focus more on the actual image

Dislikes:

•  The black and white image- although they liked the shot they told us that the bleak colours wouldn’t attract their eyes if it were on the shelf
• ‘Clint Eastwood’- they wanted the film title to be the first thing they saw and not the actors name.

Likes:

•  Again the portrait image was popular
• They liked that fact that the eyes, despite not being a focal point to the cover, were very bold and drew them into the image
•  The banner links into the colour scheme without overshadowing the image.

      Dislikes:

• The writing covering the face was hard to read
•  They wanted to be able to see a little more clothing to get more of a sence of character
•  The cartoon like image made them feel as though the film was animated, all of them having seen black swan they said that had they seen this cover before hand they would have been less inclined to see the film
•   Despite not being much writing it completely covers the image which made them feel claustrophobic- they needed more blank space

From all of this we had a few key things we then knew we should include and disclude from our cover; the writing, not a lot, need to be positioned where it did not ditract from the image yet still your eye was drawn to it. Th image needed to be close up yet still give a sense of character using codes of clothing. The banner needed to be to the side and not too big but still be something that your eyes would be drawn to look at.