Monday 9 May 2011

The "NEW" Poster FINAL

Ancillary Task 3






http://www.wix.com/davis2m/a2-coursework-website

Main Task - Trailer

Ancillary Task 2

Here is the final poster;

Production - Request for Permission to Film Fitness centre.

As our trailer plan explains, we will be filming one scene’s in a public fitness centre. There are a few in our area, and our group has chosen to use the one at QE School in Wimborne, as one member of our group, Phoebe, used to be a student there, and the layout of their fitness centre fits the layout we have pictured.

However, as it is a public fitness centre, and is not owned by us or our school, we sent them a request to film via email.

"Dear Sirs,

We are a group of A2 Media Studies students from Ringwood School. For our coursework, we would like to use your fitness centre to shoot one scene. We would aim to film within the space of one hour, and there would be a group of four. (One actress, three production.) Would this be possible?

Kind regards,

Melanie Davis, Oliver Kent, and Phoebe Ward"

We received a polite response the next day, informing us that we will be able to film at the fitness centre, provided that we give them two weeks' notice and come before lunch, as this is their least busy time.

Production - Website








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

In what ways does your media product use, develop, challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Over the course of the production process we have looked in detail at the “other” side of the modelling industry and how this type of work can course massive amounts of stress and unknown payments. For instance, during my personal research I have watched the channel 4 Series “the modelling agency”, which followed the lives of an organisation which dealt with the problems in their lives. Moreover our trailer/film is a clear representation of how models strive to be famous and successful, for this I did research in “vogue” magazine to see how the job processes work. As well as this myself and group have found when studying the conventions in typical buntly film/ trailers that the back ground music will often start slow and rise to a peek, to try and engage the audience to go and watch the trailer.   
Our research has played a massive part in the success of our , therefore we looked at a number of trailers i.e. the Social Network, was used extensively, personally I found to importance of rising the tension and making a plot that starts fairly boring into a fast pace exciting film, this is really important and therefore been a top priority to archive in the editing of the trailer another trailer we used a lot is from 2010 film “twelve”, this gave us a clear insight into a real trailer with the same gene and potential for our idea/project. One of the main features we really liked from twelve was the use of flashbacks, we have taken this on board and used in our trailer.
With these ideas and plans in place we went onto start the real filming, working our way through the script and filming, trying to include all the necessary shots and sequence’s and not going off task which happened on accessions. The editing properly the make or break stage of the whole project. The research for our tasks included looking at similar websites, magazines and trailers. Moreover this research demonstrated how the closely it influenced the work. 

The planning and research for our poster was inspired by the Calvin Klein company, there wide use of black and white gives the poster an adult feel. Which fits into the target market. Also the black and white makes the posters around the girl feel as if nothing else is important, only her body and trying to make it perfect. We decided to keep the colour the same for the stomach the same because it enothisies it and forces the audience to engage with this idea.

EVALUATION 2. How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product
and Ancillary Texts?
As a promotional package overall, I think the combination of our main product and ancillary tasks is very effective.

Across all three products, we have used a minimalistic and exposing aesthetic, as we are representing our film, which is an exposé style drama about the modeling industry. We needed to make this clear to our target audience (females 18-34, cosmopolitan, with an interest in the fashion industries), and from our research we were able to understand icons of this theme; such as minimalism, powerful images, and references to fashion houses. To produce the best representation of our film, we considered all of these elements and incorporated the most representative into all three of our products.

Using a predominately monochromatic palette for our teaser poster and website were how we achieved our minimalistic aesthetic, and the stark images used in our teaser poster and trailer supported the exposé style we have attempted to achieve with our film. We downloaded the minimalistic Calvin Klein font and created a title for our film in Adobe Photoshop CS3 which we were able to use across all if our products, to enhance the references our film contains to the real fashion industries and stories for our audience.

Using the same title font across all of our products also acted as a constant, to make it clear to audience that each piece of material is promoting the same film.

As well as being consistent in style as a set, each piece of material also has its own strengths as a promotional tool, which, when combined, enables the whole package to have covered three different styles of advertising for three slightly different consumers. Should our film be being released, the teaser poster would be the first piece of promotional material released. It's simplicity allows for even the more passive members of our target audience to be able to consume the strong iconic image and the basic information we provide with little concentration.

Our trailer would be next to be released, developing upon the initial interest our teaser poster would have created by providing more information for members of our target audience who are a little more focussed. Finally, our website would be available for members of our target audience who have developed a strong interest in our film and would like to research more information. We, as a group, feel that the three stages of promotion our package establishes combined is very effective in reaching out to our target audience and creates the best chance of our film's success.

Our trailer and ancillary texts work together well as they all keep to the original idea and all focus well when published together, for instance the film is a fairly dark natured film and this policy works well for all three ancillary tasks. The film is will be finished by YouTube

EVALUATION 3



Over the course of the project, I think we have done overall, the main video (Trailer) product and ancillary tasks are closely linked and work well.


Each of the three individual products have a strong and link with the representation of the film; the genre in not new and have been used before, however I think we have made a gene which would normally quite boring a fast pace trailer, this genre exposes the drama and lifestyle of the modelling industry. From the start we quickly decided that the target audience is; females 18-34, we then went onto research the necessary icons on this theme and genre, such as focusing on the appealing that would draw in the right audience.  We then considered all of these elements and incorporated the most representative into all three of our products.   

Using all the research for our teaser poster and website were how we achieved our minimalistic aesthetic, and the stark images used in our teaser poster and trailer supported the exposé style we have attempted to achieve with our film. 

We downloaded the similar Calvin Klein font and created a title for our film in Adobe Photoshop CS3 which we were able to use across all if our products, to enhance the references our film contains to the real fashion industries and stories for our audience. Personally I found the poster the most enjoyable to design and make, because I have worked in the graphic industry, if I did go onto work in the media world I would decently be keen to focus on Photoshop work, rather than real/core filming

Using the same title font across all of our products also acted as a constant, to make it clear to audience that each piece of material is promoting the same film.

As well as being consistent in style as a set, each piece of material also has its own strengths as a promotional tool, which, when combined, enables the whole package to have covered three different styles of advertising for three slightly different consumers. Should our film be being released, the teaser poster would be the first piece of promotional material released. Its simplicity allows for even the more passive members of our target audience to be able to consume the strong iconic image and the basic information we provide with little concentration.

Next, our trailer would be next to be released, expanding upon the interest that would have already built up, our teaser poster would have created by providing more information for members of our target audience who are a little more focussed and loyal fans for the fillm. Finally, our website would be available for members of our target audience who have developed a strong interest in our film and would like to research more information. After the film realised we would use the website for expanding the DVD sells. We, as a group, feel that the three stages of promotion our package establishes combined is very effective in reaching out to our target audience and creates the best chance of our film's success





EVALUTION 4

Question 4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? Stage 1




Over the course of the project, myself and the group have used a variety of media technologies to simplify the research, production, and evaluation stages, and to produce the best possible final project.

From the beginning, I have been using the Google-owned blogging platform Blogger to record my process. This has been excellent way of publishing our data, as it has enabled me to keep a record of all of my research for future reference and to pace myself with my planning and production work.


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The website's comments featured has enabled my teachers and my peers to offer me instant feedback on my work, which was very much appreciated during the planning stages as it helped me to better understand which future production techniques were going to target our film's demographic the best.

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One of the most useful tools has been too able to tag posts as I made them is something that I have found useful during the production stages, as I have been able to jump to particular sets of posts to and analyse our planning and production progress.



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Other sources of online media also contributed a lot to my research and use of technologies and our work towards our project. Overall Google was my main search engine, because it is the one that I find the quickest/easiest to use and that produces the best, most relevant, results. By searching a lot and braking down the keywords used in the film's theme, I was able to find a great deal of online content that contributed towards our research and planning.

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For instance last year, we also used other blog websites such as WordPress to find more specific results and similar ideas which we could use. For example, when creating our mood board we found most of the pictures on Tumblr. Another aspect WordPress lead me to other examples of film updates during the production process, we were able to use this as a template to ensure ours as professional as possible.


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Moreover, we discovered such news stories in print media, and also on online magazines and the online blogs of print magazines; the benefit of using online magazines is that their news sections can be updated in an instant, so we were able to incorporate more current issues into our plot than if we relied on the stories print media, which has a delay of up to a month or even a quarter with fashion magazines, which was important to us to be able to create the most interesting promotional product to attract audiences.

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As you probably already know YouTube has been useful to us in both our research and evaluation stages. We were able to use YouTube, alongside other video hosting sites, to watch and gain ideas from other trailers to better understand the conventions of trailers targeted towards our market.

However, we could have perhaps used the site better by creating a group account, so that we could "favourite" the trailers and clips we found the most interesting to store them for future reference.

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We also used YouTube to upload our trailer onto the school account, at various stages of its production, to be able to share the link to receive audience feedback, and as a finished product for us to evaluate.

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We often chose to share the links to the snippets of our trailer in progress, as well as links to our poster and website in their various stages of production, on social networking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter. This was so that we could receive instant responses to be able to build on their criticism straight away. We did this when publishing a questionnaire about the genre. Besides this Facebook connected us with our peers, who are around the same age as our target demographic, and Twitter, being linked to my fashion blog, was able to connect us with users of the same interests as our target demographic.



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The next stage of the project was to create our promotional pack to a level that we were satisfied with, I personally did a lot of research into real existing media products  which gave me a clear insight in the our target audience and make sure the film trailer fits the purpose. We used a variety of software to present this research for readers of our blog and for our own ease of reading.
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Another one of the most important tools for me was Adobe's Photoshop CS5, which I used to create a mood board of my image based research which served as inspiration to the direction of our film for our group during the planning and production stages. Therefore the knowledge we gained using it in the early stages of the project meant we then went onto use it a lot in poster making.


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However, when we started planning and production, our group became quite reliant on media technologies. We used Microsoft's word processing program Word to draft out and write up our original plot, before turning it into a storyboard which I animated with Sony Vegas Pro 9.0. To film, we required detailed and professional full scripts for our scenes with dialogue, which we wrote up using online based script writing software Scripped. Then Mel chose to write up our shooting script for all of our scenes on the word processing software that comes as a part of the Docs To Go app on her Apple iPad, so that, whilst filming, we could carry it with us and make necessary amendments neatly.

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To film, we used a (video camera). As a lot of our interior scenes were shot after dark, and therefore in unnatural lighting, it would have been better had we used more professional lights, because, when we came to edit, we found that some scenes came out a little dim. Although we were able to correct some of our lighting issues with various color correction settings on Adobe Premier Pro CS3, this did not help the overall quality of the shots' aesthetic.



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As well as Adobe Premier Pro, we used other editing software such as Adobe After Effects and Particle Illusion to create our "Second Life Productions" intro. These softwares were very useful to us, as their variety of potential effects enabled us to be as creative as we liked with our intro, and create our exact vision.
Adobe Premier Pro was perfect for the editing of our film, because the non linear editing method, which allows us to access each frame of our footage direct without scrubbing, has made the process far easier. The software's set of video effects and transitions were sufficient for us to make our trailer more pleasing and interesting to the eye, however, had we been more confident with some of them, there was perhaps more that we could have done. For example, correcting the crooked framing of some of the scenes which we filmed in tighter indoor spaces.

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Overall looking back at the whole process the best part was the design of the website using and the design of the poster, because I really enjoy using these
technologies. I have found Prezi to be the most useful, as it's flowing transitions between added information has allowed me to create a visual effect of the flowing process of our planning and production.

Therefore social networking has given us direct communication with our audience, to be able to receive their evaluative comments from the perspective of an external critic.

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Despite feeling that we have used media technologies well throughout this project, I could have perhaps used even more to make it easier for myself.

Mel have internet access and social networking applications on my phone, which has given us a constant updates and keep track of the blogs and communicate with my audience on the go.


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Also, whilst Mel has Sony Vegas Pro 9.0 on Mel’s home computer, we do not have Adobe Premier Pro; project files are not transferrable between the two, hence, having Premier at home would have made the editing process much faster. Having Photoshop both at school and at home has really supported the group, meaning that we were able to forces on the project in our own time, than rather stay for long periods in school, because noticed how much easier it was for me to make changes to our poster and graphics as soon as we received feedback both inside and outside of school.