THE FOLLOWINGA2 Level evaluation

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

Our media product uses conventions of real media products because when starting the project, we evaluated existing films and used techniques that prove successful and interpreted them into our movie. ‘District 9’ a film by TriStar, developed success for their film by Viral Marketing.

Viral Marketing is when a production company tries to introduce a film to real life, as if it is actually happening. To create Viral Marketing for our film, We designed our website so that it looked like a news webpage. We did this to make people believe the kidnapping was real.

Our film cohered with frequent stories about young girls being abducted after relationships being built via social networking sites. Young people are regularly reminded to not speak to anyone they do not know over the internet. We created a social networking account for our victim, Sarah Bassett, as we believe it adds to the viral idea of our film. By creating a Facebook profile for the victim, an audience can look at the victims information, to make them feel like they know her on a more personal level, and in effect give them a more powerful feel when they watch the film, as they will feel like they know the girl before she was kidnapped.

Our film is typical, as in real life, it is more common for a female to be abducted, rather than a male. We have adopted this into our film to make it seem real. Females are normally the victim in horror films, as opposed to Males.

Our film is called ‘The Following’. We named our film this is as when someone thinks of someone being followed, typically the most common thought is a girl being followed by a man. This makes the audience think they already know a little bit about the film without even having watched it.

Our film uses conventions from film critic, Carol Clover. Carol Clover wrote an article called ‘Men, Women and Chainsaw's . In this article she proposed a theory of the ‘Final Girl’ in modern cinema. The final girl is intelligent, strong, makes better decisions and is commonly sexually desirable. Our film also uses conventions from the film critic Laura Mulvey, who introduced the theory of the ‘Male Gaze’. We used a lot of shots in our teaser trailer of the stalker looking at the victim. This fits in with Mulvey’s theory as she proposed that women in films are seen as objects to be looked at.

In horror films, a production company will often try to make the audience feel like they, along with the characters in the film, could be a victim. We challenged this convention, and in our teaser trailer put the audience in both the protagonists point of view, and the antagonist. We use camera shots that involve point of view shots from the stalker looking upon the victim. But we also used footage from the victims point of view. We did this to make the audience not only feel what it is like in the victims position, but also to make them feel like they are on the antagonists’ side. This will develop a personal relationship between the audience and the characters, as if they are responsible for what happens on screen.

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

In our media film, we tried to link the website to the film. To do so we designed our website to be like a news website. So the teaser trailer that is linked to a news report, will then direct the viewer to our website. This will make the viewer think that the news website is real, and think the incident has happened.

This idea ties in with the Viral theme of our trailer. We gained this idea as the film ‘District 9’ also made its website seem real and tie in with the teaser trailer. The feeling that the event is real and actually happened will make viewers want to go and see the film.

Making our website viral we think is a good decision as Viral Marketing has been proved as a successful technique to make a film well received by an audience. Although, our idea of a news report doesn’t tie in with our teaser trailer or our poster. Although the website is about the girl going missing, the website is related to a news report that we had in our second teaser trailer, and not our newest, finished teaser trailer.

Our website was developed whilst making our second teaser trailer which is why it is related to the news report. We have since then changed our idea but we believe it will still relate well with our new trailer. Our website will try to build the same personal level between the audience and the characters in the film as the Social Networking account did. By creating a website that looks so realistic, and very subtle in advertising the film, the audience might read the online missing person report and feel as if they are involved with the film, as they know her through the social networking, and then seeing her being reported as missing. Although we have kept the same idea for the website, our poster idea has changed along with changing our teaser trailer. For our last attempt, the poster was going to relate to the news report and news website by making it a ‘Missing Person’ poster. However we changed our poster to a more conventional scary poster.

Our movie poster took inspiration from ‘Chucky’. We used this as inspiration as Chucky is a thriller, the same genre as our film. So our film has conventions similar to this film. Also, we know this type of poster is successful as Chucky is a successful film.

This type of poster is successful because it is dominated by a large picture of the main characters, standing back to back. The poster has text that is smaller than the picture towards the bottom of the poster. This is effective as someone might see the image of the two people, then see the text and wonder what the poster is about. The two actors standing back-to-back is to represent the conflict in our film. We chose our actors as we believe they have good characteristics to form binary opposites. We chose a tall, dark figure as our stalker, and a small, blonde figure for our victim. The tall dark figure is good as opposed to the shorter female as we wanted to show that the antagonist is more dominant than the protagonist. We also ensured that through shooing and designing our poster that the stalker consistently wore black clothing, and our victim wore white, or lighter colour clothing. This is because usually darker colours, such as black are associated with evil, and is therefore associated with the antagonist, as opposed to the protagonist who wore light colours such as white, which is seen as an innocent and pure colour. We applied the same concepts to the hair colour of our actors, ensuring the stalker had a dark brown hair colour, relating to evil, and the victim had light blonde hair, relating to goodness.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We carried out audience feedback throughout the project so that we can find from our target audience’s point of view. Telling us what the stronger points and weaker points of our media products are. So we can improve weaker points, and take the stronger work and apply it over more of our work. We carried out audience feedback before we started production, and then carried out more audience feedback after finishing the media products.

The first time we carried out audience feedback, we pitched our idea to members of our target audience. We used the feedback to change our idea so that it satisfied the feedback given. Our group was also involved in audience feedback for other candidates work, so we could see similar work, and say what we think of others work. Then incorporate some successful ideas into our work.

After carrying out audience feedback the first time, we were told that our trailer was confusing and didn’t fit the genre we were aiming for. With the feedback we gained, we decided to rethink our teaser trailer, and chose to re-film and create a new storyboard to hopefully gain more positive remarks from our audience feedback. Problem areas that were pointed out to us during our audience feedback was that in our teaser trailer, we needed to be a lot clearer about what our film was about. A lot of our audience seemed to get confused about the storyline of our film. Also, in our original idea, and second idea we included ideas of having flashbacks. We tried to edit our footage so that was clear some scenes were of flashbacks, but a lot of our audience didn’t think this was clear. Some members of our target audience also said that our footage wasn’t very scary, and that our film failed to meet its genre. Therefore making it a bit boring. After trying to make improvements with this feedback, we got similar comments from our second teaser trailer, which led to a third rethink of idea. Although we got the same comments for our second idea, we see all the feedback as constructive and we feel, as a group, that we have covered all the issues raised in the first two attempts, and not made the mistakes in our final teaser trailer.

We created a new teaser trailer, using the information we gathered from our audience feedback. Although we feel like we covered most of the issues that were addressed to us in our audience feedback, we were not satisfied with our new teaser trailer. Our teaser trailer wasn’t scary enough still, so we decided to make the teaser trailer again, for the third time. We made a list of the improvements that we needed to make to our second teaser trailer to make it better. These improvements consisted of filming in darker conditions, as we felt this made our teaser trailer scarier. We also took into consideration the colour clothing the actors were wearing. We used a tall dark figure, wearing dark clothes as an antagonist, to represent evil. We chose a small, blonde haired lightly dressed female for our protagonist, so that she was sexually desirable to an audience and is seen as innocent as white is a colour normally associated with good.

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

We used new media technologies to research and plan our ideas by finding out real life information that can be related to our film. We used YouTube to look at examples of internet safety videos, which was very important in the production of our first two teaser trailers. We also researched, via the use of YouTube, news reports and missing person reports of people that have gone missing. This helped us produce a professional standard website, with a realistic news story. YouTube has been vital in creating the viral effect for our film, as it has allowed us to see real life examples of what we are trying to recreate in our trailer, poster and website.

MoviePlus 5 is software that has been essential in creating a professional look to our teaser trailer. MoviePlus has allowed us to manipulate and enhance our footage to make it as best as it can be. Our audience feedback gave us suggestions that more effects, careful editing, and the use of black and white would make our teaser trailer suit its genre more; MoviePlus has allowed us to take this feedback and apply it to our final product.

Social Networking is technology that through the past would rarely be used in association with a film, although we have used it as a tool to make our film viral. Our target audience spend a lot of their free time on the social networking site ‘Facebook’. We used new technology to advertise our film on this website and appeal directly to our target audience. Without this technology, we would have to rely on posters and the website alone to pull an audience to see our film. Facebook is a useful source of ‘Pull’ Media. This is when advertising goes to an audience to get their attention, rather than when an audience looks for information about our film.

To create a functional website, we used MacroMedia Dreamweaver. This software allowed us to produce our website as a html document, suitable to be put straight onto the internet. Dreamweaver has tools that can make our website fully functional and professional.