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

During the research and planning for the trailer, poster and magazine cover, we looked at the conventions used and what functions they perform. For example, theatrical trailers are longer, and they have voiceovers that concentrate more on the narrative whereas teaser trailers focus more on portraying the atmosphere of the film and highlighting the stars and/or director. We needed to understand the commonalities so we that could make our production work capable of properly marketing the film.

The Trailer

We decided to go for a very common teaser trailer convention: using short clips edited at a fast tempo. We leave the title and release date highlighted at the end of our trailer to maximise the duration and drive home the main message - a common technique. Teaser trailers are increasingly found online. Online means smaller screens, lower resolution and poorer sound quality. We had to consider all this when making our trailer, as it will be shown online: for example on Apple’s trailer site and on my blog.

A teaser trailer is also supposed briefly to introduce the main characters and the basic relationships between these characters. Our trailer does this through individual ‘interviews’. These are intended to convey the personalities of the main characters in a brief snapshot. My character (Alfie) challenges the stereotypes of the main protagonist (the killer) in ‘slasher’ horror films. He is not a typical scary character. The costume – glasses, curly hair, tie and blazer – is not typically scary. However, in some ways he does conform.

In my research I did notice that the killer would generally have some sort of inner moral (at least to him) reason for why he is killing. The reason why Alfie has become a killer is because he has been bullied and become so frustrated and distraught that he has turned insane. He thinks his group will never be able to get him a passing grade and therefore he kills them all to finish it by himself. This gives the film narrative a logical rationale, allowing the audience to become more involved, and it ensures that Alfie conforms to the conventions of a mainstream ‘slasher’ movie killer.

From my research I noticed that ‘slasher’ movie killings are usually a result of an amoral action from a group of teenagers, taking drugs, underage drinking or sex, for example. In this case we have bullying and not doing your media coursework. A common theme in ‘slasher’ horror movies, I know!

We noticed that theatrical trailers generally had voiceovers but teaser trailers did not. The teasers that had a voiceover used it more for dialogue and to reinforce the text on screen. We decided not to use a voiceover because we were striving for verisimilitude and thought that a voiceover would change the mood and atmosphere of the trailer making it less scary and involving.

I would say that the teaser trailer we made both challenges and conforms to various different conventions. We tried to adopt those conventions that help to ensure that the trailer is successful in attracting audiences but we also challenged some of the stereotypes - the Alfie character and the 'interview' technique used to introduce him and the other characters, for example.

The Poster

The poster is more conventional. It uses tried and tested techniques to grab audience attention. A common technique is to have a face staring out at the audience. This engages them and draws them in. Hence our face looking directly out of a black background. Most posters have minimal wording and big, bold titling. many also have a witty strap line - we did our best with '4 eyes are better than 2'.

We felt that it was better to adopt and mimic some of the better examples out there than to try and develop our own non-conventional techniques. We used the Movie Poster Addict website to look for examples we felt were strong and dynamic and then tried to come up with our own visual montage to reflect the narrative and theme of our movie. There are quite a few examples of the types of posters we felt were strong and successful included in an

 earlier post - Researching the Poster. Here are two other examples.

Obviously we had to ensure that we incorporated all the necessary components as well, such as credits, stars, logos, certificates and so on. It was the main visual though that was hardest to get right. We needed to have something that conveyed both the menace and the slightly surreal and ironic quality of the movie. Using the blood-dripping typeface was a real aid to achieving this. I feel that we very much re-inforced the typical conventions of a horror movie poster.

The Cover

In a similar way to the poster our magazine cover uses many of the conventions and techniques employed by publishers - particularly film magazine publishers - when trying to attract readers. The title of the magazine is strong and clear so that regular readers won't miss it on the newsagents' shelves. The title of the main article movie (our movie) is prominent as well, with a very recognisable image from the movie used (the same one as in the poster). There is an overall them to the magazine for that issue - Halloween. And there are a number of other highlighted features and articles around the cover. Once again we felt that using the best of the available techniques was a better way to go than trying to challenge the conventions in any significant way. Good magazine covers work, and trying to achieve that affect whilst breaking new ground or pushing barriers would be difficult.

Overall I think we did a pretty good job of it all, considering time and budget limitations. I think we tied in the trailer to the poster fairly well, considering we had a change of heart late on, and delivered a fairly professional teaser trailer that conforms to the primary conventions of a ‘slasher’ horror movie trailer, whilst we challenged some of the conventions through the use of a-typical protagonist. The trailer is short, punchy, atmospheric and clearly gets over the message: that a great new ‘slasher’ movie called Attack of The Nerds is coming out on October 31^st. The poster and cover are strong visually and work well in our opinion.

The movie is aimed at a target audience of people aged 15 and above. Filmworks also want the movie to appeal to independent, creative and aspiring adults. The intention is to have produced a trailer, poster and cover that fulfil both those objectives. I believe we have done that. The nature of the movie is an almost automatic lure to teenagers – who love ‘slasher’ movies. By using less conventional film techniques and effects when shooting and incorporating those shots into the trailer, with highly atmospheric music and little additional audio, other than brief dialogue snippets the trailer should also appeal to the ‘art house’ movie crowd – in a similar way to the Blair Witch Project.

What have we learnt from our audience feedback

In my opinion the way that we handled the questionnaires was quite professional and organised.

I think that the questions were useful and there weren't too many. It was good that we put the results into a spreadsheet as this made the results easier to analyse and to put into pie charts, so we could gain useful information about our findings.

The results were very useful in the creation of our trailer, magazine and poster and had a good effect on the campaign as a whole.

However, we then showed some people our products and they had good points and bad points to make about our work. We took it all on board and then decided to change some things. I talked about this and what changes we made in the post 'A change in direction'. 

This piece of audience feedback was more informal as we just showed our teacher and other pupils our work in school, and asked them opinions. Ultimately it was probably the most important feedback we had had.

I also have a poll on the website, but you can only ask one question - Would you like to go and see Attack of The Nerds?Although the poll has had not enough votes to be useful yet it can still be useful in evaluating whether the marketing campaign has worked on the target audience, in that it will provide me with direct audience feedback.

Another way that we achieved some audience feedback is by setting up a new facebook group for Attack Of The Nerd. We did this as facebook is a young social networking site that many people in our target audience, teenagers 15 and above, will use. The Facebook group has been very successful in achieving some real audience feedback from our target audience. We got some really positive feedback from our trailer and now we have 65 members. One of the main outcomes of the feedback is that it gave us confidence that we really had successfully targeted our target audience.

The Facebook group was useful in weighing up how effective our campaign might be with our target audience. Here are some of the comments made about the trailer.

Evaluating the combination of my main product and ancillary texts

When I review the main product and the ancillary texts, the trailer, poster and magazine cover, I feel that as a team we have delivered on the brief. We have created a movie concept that appeals to teenagers and the art-house audience, and we have delivered a teaser trailer that successfully conveys this to those target audiences and that commands attention. The overall image is of a movie that will be scary but that has sufficient 'alternative' production values that it will attract an audience beyond the core 'horror' movie crowd.

The trailer was probably the hardest piece to put together, as the production process and techniques for filming, audio recording, mixing and editing were really new experiences for me. I know that we could do more with more time but all in all I am pleased with the end result. I wanted to ensure that the trailer would work online and simplicity seemed to be the key to this. 30 seconds is not a long time and we ended up with a 60 second trailer. You still can't get too much information over in that time so you have to focus on conveying an overall impression of the movie: the style, atmosphere and directorial feel. You also need to get the main marketing message over: a great new slasher horror movie with a difference called Attack of The Nerds is coming out on October 31st.

Putting the poster and magazine cover together was something I was more used to doing: working with Adobe Photoshop to work on the image and to lay out the 2 documents. I think that we have really delivered a professional result here. A really striking central image to draw the eye that, when combined with the title in the typeface we have chosen, successfully conveys the correct marketing message: this is a scary slasher horror movie with a difference. The image, with the wierd techie glasses, ties in to the Nerd in the title. I believe the poster would stand out and successfully draw attention and create interest and demand.

The magazine cover is a slightly different challenge. It needs to work as a magazine cover as well as successfully promote the movie. It has different content requirements from the poster and requires a different layout approach, as it needs to work close up and needs to inform about other contents of the magazine to attract the potential reader in the newsagent. Magazine publishers like to have images of people/faces looking out at the reader on their front cover, as these have been shown to increase 'pick-up'. That is why we changed our image in the poster to one of Lima's face looking out directly at the viewer. then, when we use the core image and title on the magazine cover it will work well to sell the magazine.

The research on Film and DVD magazines really helped us gain an understanding of how the best ones work and why. It also made us realise what we would have to include on the cover to make it appear to be a real cover and so it would demonstrate to the Filmworks production company how our marketing materials could be used in this way.

One of the understandings I gained during the whole process was how inter-linked the process of developing the different materials is. You need a narrative to work out what to include in the trailer, but also to give you a title for the movie. You need a title for the poster and also to help you create the right image for the poster. You need the image used to work on a magazine cover.

As we worked on one of the products we would constantly have to refer to the others, and frequently would have to go back to the others to edit them to make them all work together. Overall I feel we did a pretty good job of bringing them all together and that they deliver a suitable professional media package for Filmworks.

Of course the marketing campaign is more than just the 3 components we created - it is about how they are used and where they are deployed. There needs to be a synergy to the whole campaign so that it hangs together and each part works to maintain and grow the 'buzz' and interest. It helps to have a USP.

Our USP is 'classic slasher horror movie with surreal twist' and I think that we successfully put that message over. But we would want to ensure that the campaign as a whole was properly co-ordinated. The trailer should appear in cinemas before films that are likely to appeal to our target audience. The trailer should also be used as a web marketing tool - using viral techniques and special interest forums to generate word of mouth in advance of release. Possibly a TV advertising campaign could be developed, though the budget would be high for this.

The poster could be used in cinema foyers and on billboard poster sites (bus shelters, tube and rail stations, bus sides, etc.). It could also be used as a press advertisement in magazines and newspapers that are relevant to our target audience.

A strong component of any marketing campaign is PR. Making sure that Film magazines (and others) highlight the film is a key part of that. By designing a cover that shows how effective the cover could be is a great aid in this process. But ultimately good PR comes down to creating and providing materials and press releases that are attractive to the publishers and broadcasters so that they will want to help you to promote the film because they believe that the 'story' will be of interest to their readers. This will create the necessary buzz.

Of course, with stars like Jake Kirby in the movie that should be rather easier! But having a different kind of slasher movie also helps - having a techno weedy nerd as the killer provides a useful hook on which to hang articles. Having Jake Kirby play that weedy nerd just makes it all the more fascinating.

With the right timing and placement the campaign as a whole could generate real awareness and interest ahead of the launch.

Evaluation of new media technologies used

We used a whole range of different technologies during the production and research for this project, without which the task would have been very much harder, if not impossible - certainly within the time available.

During the research and planning we used the internet (primarily using Google) a lot to review examples of trailers, posters and film magazine covers, so as to understand what the key conventions are and what make them work well. Google is a fantastic tool for carrying out research. It is amazing what you can find out there on the world wide web. Google images alone provided a whole range of movie posters for us to look at.

I also used a website called Box which allows free storage of files where I can store up to a gigabyte worth for anyone to access in the world. I did not know about the box website before this campaign and it could come in very useful in future situations.

We used Microsoft Word to take notes on our findings from our research and to create our plans for the progress of the project. Microsoft Word is the most common word processor application used and has become a part of almost all our lives. It allows one to write, edit and lay our work very quickly - although it does still have some annoying quirks when it tries to auto-format stuff you don't want formatted. We also used Microsoft Word to create our questionnaire.

We used Microsoft Excel to capture the results of the questionnaire and to analyse them, create charts etc. Excel is a great tool for this. It has some really powerful data analysis tools, although to be truthful we didn't really scratch the surface of what it can do. It also has some great charting tools, which make it really easy to take some numbers, tables etc. and convert them into a good looking chart which displays the numbers as an image. This is important as some people find images (charts) a much better way of gaining an understanding of what the numbers really mean and imply.

During the production of the poster and magazine camera we used a digital Kodak stills camera to take the primary image used as the basis for the two artworks. We then downloaded the pictures onto an Apple Macintosh computer and used iPhoto to view them and pick the one we wanted to use.

We used Adobe Photoshop to work on the image, to clean it up and create the core image. We could have used Adobe InDesign to lay out the poster and cover but we decided to stay within Adobe Photoshop, especially as we were working on just single page documents. We are all more comfortable working with Photoshop and using the layers really helps with putting the documents together, especially when you are combining text and images. Photoshop is a really amazing piece of software and it allows anyone to access exactly the same tools that the professionals use. Frankly you could do almost anything you could want to do with a still image or a single page document. I love it.

To film the trailer we used a Sony Digital video camera with a microphone attached. We used a tripod so as to keep the camera steady. The camera was very simple to use and we used all the automatic features (focus, aperture, etc.) because we do not have the expertise to use the manual settings. The camera did not produce the high quality footage that a professional crew would be used to, but considering our low level of expertise it was probably perfect for us.

After filming we uploaded all the footage (the rushes) to the Macintosh computer and reviewed it in iMovie. We edited the whole trailer in iMovie. We imported still images for the start and endframes and music for the backing sound track (which we found on a royalty free music site). iMovie is a great application for us. It does not have all the high functionality of applications like Final Cut Pro, but it is much simpler to use and has more than enough for our needs. We needed something that would allow us to put something together quickly at reasonable quality and iMovie was perfect for that. I also used iMovie to record a video answer to a question on my blog.

Furthermore, for the evaluation process I created this blog using Blogger.com as you can see. I also used a USB microphone to upload an audio file to the blog. Blogger.com is a great site to use to create a blog. It is pretty straightforward to use if you just want the basics. Some things were a little trickier like embedding a YouTube movie and providing a link to a word document (in the end I had to create the document as a GoogleDoc and then link to that), but overall it was a really brilliant tool for the job.

We also created a Facebook Group for sharing our ideas and work with others, which helped with audience feedback. The very fact that we could show people a trailer, a poster and a magazine cover on a site demonstrates how all the media are so rapidly converging.

At the end of the process I can safely say that I have learnt a lot about the use of new media technologies and new media overall. One major factor for me is that less than 5 or 6 years ago it would not have been possible to undertake a project like this with the time and budget constraints we had and the lack of much previous experience.

The technologies we used were all readily available and affordable and yet in most instances were either the same as those used by professionals or not far short of it. The actual production processes have become much more straightforward due to the use of digital tools. 10 years ago the idea of walking around with a 60 second trailer master edit on a thing that fits in your pocket (my USB drive) and cost £15 would have seemed almost like science fiction.

All the software used was on one computer - the Mac, so it was easy to incorporate the same elements in the multiple media we produced. There was no scanning or file format conversions needed, it all just worked together so neatly.

Of course, these advances in technology are something my generation tends to take for granted, we have grown up with them after all - we all our comfortable with watching a movie on TV, DVD, a computer, a Playstation, an iPhone, a whatever comes next. We are saturated with imagery and information like never before but are so conversant with all the media types and so unconcerned with the specific channel being used that we forget that for many they are still considered very separate. Of course we don't use them exactly the same and you can't create for them all in exactly the same way but you can re-purpose so readily that you can make a multi-media campaign very much more readily than was possible in the past - despite there being so many more media.

Electronic Evaluation: Video answer to 'Evaluate the combination of your main product and ancillary texts'

Here is another type of electronic evaluation that i have included. It is a short video describing the combination of my main product's and ancillary texts.

Directors Commentary

Here is an audio file of a directors commentary for our teaser trailer. Explaining what shots we used and why, the sound effects and what we thought were good shots utilised in the making of this teaser trailer.

Different Stages Of My Film Magazine Cover

Here are the 3 different stages of production that we went through to get a final magazine cover that we were happy with. We decided to do multiple stages of production so that we could get feedback on the previous stages and make corrections and adhere to the audience feedback from students 15+. This is because teenagers 15 and above are our target audience.

The first stage:

The second stage:

The final stage of production: