A2 Media Studies Advanced Portfolio: Evaluation

Chris Pass

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

Trailer My trailer is fairly conventional.

One of the things I have done is have the production company mentioned which appears quite early in the trailer.

I have also put the director’s name on the trailer and a previous film made by him as well.

Another very conventional thing I have done is to have the title at the end of the trailer which I’ve seen in many trailers.

An unconventional feature however is that I have not put ‘Coming Soon’ or a release date on the trailer of any kind, but I did on my poster so if I was to make any improvements this would be one of the things I would do.

My media product uses conventional media products, such as my trailer having a poster and DVD (cover) to go with it. I’ve tried to make my products quite conventional by researching real products and taking inspiration.

An example of this can be shown on the right on my DVD cover, where on the spine of the cover I have put the symbol to show that it is a DVD; this can be seen on real products as well. I have also put an age rating which is conventional on DVD covers.

Another conventional feature in my products is the use of a film slogan, films generally have some sort of slogan and so does mine and it is applied on my poster, DVD cover and trailer.

My DVD cover has an unconventional front part of it; it is common for there to only be a single image taking up the whole of the front but in mine I am using two certain images to show the contrast between sorrow and anger.

It is a conventional feature that I have used images taken from the trailer footage itself.

DVD Cover

My poster uses conventional and unconventional features.

In comparison to the real media products below, the poster for The Dark Knight and Terminator 2; my product shares a few conventional similarities.

The most obvious conventional similarity is the use of a single image which takes up the whole of the poster.

Another similarity is the title is towards the bottom but on mine, it isn’t as low down.

Another similarity is the actor’s name on the top which is seen on many film posters.

My film poster has the film slogan on it which also appears on all three of my media products and it can also be seen on the Terminator 2 poster where it says “It’s nothing personal” just above the title.

My poster also shares another conventional feature with The Dark Knight poster with “Coming Soon” which is seen on film posters very often.

An unconventional feature is that my poster has no mention of producing companies or directors.

Poster

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

Poster DVD Cover Trailer

My main product and ancillary texts share certain features to combine all of them together.

One of the things that appears on all of them is the film slogan which links them together.

Another common thing is that they all share a similar colour scheme, the use of quite dark and negative colours also binds them together.

Something else is that the protagonist appears in all of them in the images and trailer footage.

The title is the main thing that combines them together as it stands out and the same title is seen in all three products.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback helped me to improve my products and I learnt how useful it is.

A good first example of how it helped me was in my film poster development; as you can see on the right there is stage 1, the earlier version of my poster but when I got audience feedback I saw other things I could add to make it more appealing. I went from just having a single image and title to having the film slogan, “Coming Soon 2011” and a film review as well which was a good improvement.

Stage 1 (earlier poster) Finished poster

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

I have used a variety of different technologies in the making of my media products.

A piece of hardware I have used is a video camera which I used to record the footage for my film trailer and from that footage I got the images which I used in my DVD cover and poster. The camera also made me think about different things such as lighting, framing and different shots; I think however for lighting I could have used different locations because there was a slight lack of light in some of the shots which I was later told in audience feedback.

I have used three different software programs as well; I used Fireworks to edit and create my DVD cover and poster. I have used Pinnacle to edit my footage to make my film trailer and finally I used Windows Movie Maker to take still images from the footage as I was unable to require them with screenshots.

Finally I have used websites to help me share my media products, get feedback and present them. Blogger was the most important website in this because it was there I uploaded the material for my products, the research, planning and final products themselves. I have also used Slideshare which has allowed me to share and upload PowerPoint presentations. Another site I have used is Vimeo to upload my videos which I could then embed onto Blogger.