Candidate details

Name: Kate Longley

Candidate Number: 5067

Centre Name: Wilmington Grammar School for Girls

Centre Number: 61119

AS Work

Here is a link to my AS coursework

http://www.katelongley.blogspot.co.uk/

Final Products

Magazine Front Cover

Poster

Trailer

Evaluation Question 4

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

There are many programmes used in making our final trailer/poster/magazine cover. There were different programmes for different aspects throughout the production which are shown below.

Research

When researching other trailers we needed to use YouTube so we were able to look at any type of trailer we wished to and then we were also available to put it onto our blogs easily.

For research into other posters and magazines Google was the best search engine to use as I simply have to put a title of a magazine on Google Photos and all of their front covers appeared and showed a varied variety. This was the same with the poster I just had to put a name of a film I was searching and it came up with all the posters that film had made.

Filming the trailer 

To film the trailer we were first given a camera by the school called a Canon fs406 Video Camera however after using this and fitting a  film together we found out that the quality of the clips were not very good and made the clips very blurry.

However luckily we used my Canon 500D one day as we had forgotten the other camera and discovered it took a much clearer clip. After we realised this we then re-shot everything with this camera.

Making the trailer

At first we were using Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 as it was easy to use and worked well with the Canon Video Camera. However due to our change in video equipment this software did not let us upload our clips, so there for we had to change.

We changed to MoviePlus X3 which was very different the that of Premiere Elements and we had to re-learn how to use it. However this programme was very helpful to us and uploaded our clips with no problem.

The other programme we used was one called ZamZar. This allowed us to upload our background music/soundtrack onto the computer and apply it to our trailer.

Making the ancillary products

To make both the poster and magazine front cover, Adobe Photoshop was used. This programme made it very easy to edit the colours of the photos and also add extra parts in, eg the text on both products or the three extra photos on the left hand side on the magazine front cover. Due to using it in my AS tasks it meant I was able to edit the products easier whenever I wished to.

The Canon 500D was also needed to make the ancillary tasks as it produces a high quality photo which is what we wanted to be able to get the best photos we could to use on our products.

Showing my work

To show the work that has been produced and how it has been done I uploaded all my work onto Blogger as it can easily be seen by the public. You are able to put text, photos, videos, links and many more all onto posts. It is easy to set the layout to how each person wishes it to and to make it easy to find specific things.

I used this website in some of my posts as it shows lots of photos but does not take up a lot of room and you can set your own pace on how fast the photos go.

This is an animated website which you can produce posters easily on anything you want and have all types of photos and text on it, either using your own or adding from the selection they have.

I used the programme called Slideshare that you can upload documents such as powerpoint presentations and then upload them onto your blog, this way the person reading it can look through it at there own pace.

Evaluation Question 3

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

To answer this question I decided that I would ask a random group of people aged between 15 -19 from my school questions about all three products to learn there feedback and what they really think about the products. The questions I will be asking them are:

-Which of the three products were your favourite? Why?

-What was your favourite part of the trailer? Why?

-What was your least favourite part of the trailer? Why?

-Do all the products have a clear link with each other? How?

-Would you say you were the right target audience for the products? Why?

By asking these 5 questions it covers all aspects of the products and I get negatives and positives.

From the film above I have found out that the only negative parts of the trailer were that in the field as they did not understand why it was so quite for so long and believed there needed to be dialogue over the top to explain. Apart from that I am very pleased with the outcome of the feedback as they enjoyed the rest of the trailer, especially that of the staircase and 'Lily' in the cupboard.
I am also very pleased that all three products link well together as that was my main worry. However because the magazine and poster have photos from actual clips in the trailer and the colours, especially red, they link together very well and were impressed with the three products.


Other ways I got feedback was by putting the trailer on Facebook and gaining comments on it. I have already done a post earlier on this and this link will take you directly there:
http://www.katelongley2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/not-finsihedfeedback-for-final-trialer.html
From it you can easily see that the majority of people really enjoyed the stairs scene as well and one person was even scared from the trailer! Which we thought was great news!


The other way I have gained Feedback is by simply asking people what they thought of the product. I asked my mum, dad and close friend what they thought (and to tell me truthfully) and they said:
Dad
"Thought the film was funny as I was in it. But seriously, maybe a little out of focus but when watched but on YouTube it was much clearer. Saw with the lights out and it did make me jump once. Poster is me so cannot say too much except great legs. Magazine cover I feel is convincing."
Mum
"The trailer is very professional - the only part I thought could be improved was the conversation between Kate and Jeni.  Georgie was great in the cupboard and that was an extremely effective part of the trailer - gave me the chills!  I preferred the poster to the magazine cover - sometimes less is more but both documents give a good feel of what the film is all about and that it will not be comfortable watching."
Dean
"I think the magazine cover looks very professional and well designed. The poster is a bit basic but still effective. I watched you film the trailer and I'm really impressed with how it turned out, definitely had me scared once or twice!"

I also asked my media teachers what they thought about all three products as they would be the best people to ask as they would be very honest about all three products:
"The movie is quiet scary and that is no small feat. But I don't like the part where there is a conversation.  The poster is great fun. The magazine is the weakest of the three but still has relative merit".

"Right…..

I really like the choice of music to set the scene and create the atmosphere. The contrast of day and night works to highlight time periods and I am very aware there is a presence in the woods who really shouldn’t be there!

Georgina is a very convincing actress and the scenes we see of her ‘locked up’ or ‘seized’ have the right balance lighting wise. She is half in shadow and the gag in her mouth and ropes around her wrists add to the scene. The scream at the end is quite chilling and leave the audience with a cliffhanger; we are intrigued what happens to her or if the other girls featured will be ‘seized’ too.

For me, the shadow on the stairs and the pace the person climbs the stairs further builds the tension. You have used the legs in the poster again highlighting the fact that s/he is an unknown menace. Georgina is the main focus of the magazine and the fact that you have chosen these two striking images hook the audience in.

Finally, I would be too scared to see the actual film as I am a complete wimp when it comes to horror movies but this proves your trailer is successful in establishing a genre as well as having an impact on its audience.

Well done!"

From all of the feedback gathered from a varied audience of all ages I gained a lot more positives than negatives. Although looking back there are things that could have been done to make the trailer much better (such as adding different clips in the talking scene or re-arranging the clips so it would make more sense) overall the feedback was good and people seemed to be very pleased with the overall results of all three products

Evaluation Question 2

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

Evaluation question 2

View more presentations from jessikate11.

Evaluation Question 1

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

Below is a programme called Glogster.com. I came across this website as another group in my media class has used it and after asking if they minded me using it (as no one else I know has used it for their media products) and fortunately there saying yes I have made three posters which answer this question on each product.

To see full size hover over the right hand corner or each poster and click 'view full size'.

Comparing products

With both the magazine and poster I used other products to give me ideas on how to make our products. By doing this I was able to make the magazine a lot easier than if I started from scratch and it also showed me what would work well with my photo.

POSTER

We got our initial idea from 'The Sixth Sense' poster. As you can see we made the main focus of the person (in our case the legs of a person) very dark and almost black. Then the outside made into deep red and orange colours. Although on 'The Sixth Sense' poster it is only in the middle of the page with a black background we all felt that we needed the whole of the page to be taken up by the legs and therefor had no room for the black background. We did not copy the text for the poster as ours is very different. Where as they have 6 different words to explain the whole film we needed 2 lines in a sentence structure to do ours. Also we added the small print text at the bottom of our poster. Although this is not seen in the other poster we believed we needed some text at the bottom and by looking at other Sixth Sense posters and other film posters, many do have this small text at the bottom. By comparing these posters it can easily be seen that we have used elements from it but also used our own ideas to create it.

Magazine

With the magazine cover it is a lot more obvious where I have got my ideas from. Although at first I was not going to use the Empire magazine cover after researching and discovering this one it seemed the clever thing to do to use this as my initial idea. This is because both pictures have women on the right hand side and both are slightly curved over. The text on both products as you can see are very similar by having different sizes to show the importance of each bit (the more important the bigger the text). Also to do with text the 'Transformers 2's' section has a blue background to stand out and it shows very clearly what film Megan Fox is appearing in. Empire used the colour scheme of light blue, on mine I have stayed with the red which links with the dress and 'M'. I have also used the idea of putting the three pictures on the left hand side showing what else is in the magazine. I stayed with the red theme by putting the text in red and the rest in white. However although there are many things that are the same I have put a few differences on my cover. Where the bar code is on the Empire one I felt it did not look right on mine so I decided the put it on the right hand corner with the price and date next to it. Also my title is different to that of Empire's where it is very bold and goes behind the picture of Megan Fox I wanted mine to stand out against the photo so made the background black and fade into the photo causing my title to stand out against the cover and not be hidden.

Second magazine idea

I felt that my first idea did not link particularly well with the Total Film front cover and I felt that there was too much extra space that needed something there. So I decided to try and make it different so it looked better. I searched on Google to find a magazine front cover that had the same styled photograph as I had and found this one from Empire (a magazine I had already looked into slightly). This photo links better with mine as both girls are on their right hand side with a blank space on the left. So instead of re-doing everything I have decided the keep the photo as it is (black and white with specific pieces in colour) and change the layout of the text to fit better.

The first thing I did was to change the text font and size so it would look like the one above. I changed the title of the magazine as well as it just did not look like a magazine title and the font I used was not right. I tried to link the two as much as possible within the text as I believe it would look so much better.

However the title does not look very professional so I changed the text again to a sharp edged one (like Empire) and it looks much better. I also used photos from last years AS task from the girl band 'Sweetheat' which I made up. I uploaded three of the best pictures, one of each girl, and put them in the bottom left corner. I also underneath them put a red stripe.

I then added more text over the three pictures are the bottom so people new what they were about and moved the bar code to the bottom as I believe the right bottom corner needed something, but not big, and by adding that and the date and price it filled the gap but not overpoweringly.

However there was a slight problem with the text in the left hand corner it was very hard to read. So what I did was I changed the text colours around slightly but also changed the pictures around as I realised it was the yellow shirt that was causing the problem so by putting that at the end where no text was over the top it solved the problem. I also thought you could not see the title as clearly as you should so I made the top section black and fade into the picture after the title and as you can see the title stands out dramatically more than before.

I believe this is much better than my first try at the front cover and am very pleased with the end product. Here it is again but in large so it can be seen a lot easier.

First magazine idea

When it came to making the magazine front cover our group decided to split up and produce our own ones as we all had different ideas on what we wanted to do.

My first idea was to use the Total Film magazine with the film Inception on the front as I liked the layout of the magazine the more I looked at it, when I first saw this front cover I did not believe the layout worked well but now looking at it again I feel it does as it was the first magazine front cover I thought of meaning if I used some of the techniques used on my magazine it could make mine remember-able as well.

With this magazine in mind I started to create my own version of it. I decided that although there were photoshoots to produce a photo for the front cover I decided to go back and use one of the photos where 'Lily' is in the cupboard as it links with the trailer as it is a scene from it. Also the emotions on her face are really strong and you believe she is scared and looking out for someone. I also added a title to the cover, I used 'Filmedia' as it is featured in the poster an trailer as the producers of the trailer and believed it would work well as a film magazine name.

From there I changed the text to Weathered SF (the same text which has been used in the other two products) and put it in bold to make it stand out more, I also changed the 'M' in the title to be bigger than the rest so it stands out more and also helps to show that the 'M' is for the end of film and beginning of media.

The next part that I wanted to do was to make certain parts stand out in colour. I wanted her red dress and the brown shoes to be the only thing in colour on the picture and the rest to be in black and white. To capture that look made the photo black and white and then uploaded the photo again and kept it normal colours. I then used the 'Selection Bruch' and went around the shows and dress and selected all that I wanted/needed to.

Then all I had to do was copy the selection, make a new layer in front of the old one on the black and white (original) photo and paste it in, and because the shoes and dress were in the exact same position it meant the colours went straight onto the sections I wanted them too.

However there was a down side to doing it this way, as you can see below where the two photos have overlapped there are some places I have missed/there are white marks along sections which do not look right. To fix this I decided to use the 'Smudging' tool to go all around the outside of both the dress and shoes so they both blend in better with the black and white photo.

Now that the photo was finished I could move on to change the font to the right colour that was needed. I played around with some colours until I finally decided on the bottom one and changed the 'M' to the same red as the dress.

The last bit I needed to do was add more text onto the page. I put all the subheadings in the same colour as the 'M' and therefor the dress, and the rest in white as it stands out against the dark background. I also needed to add a bar code onto the front cover.

Although this is my finished product I do not believe it is very good. I an happy with the photo and the editing of it, but I feel there is too much empty space and do not know what to do with it. Also it does not link as well as I first hoped with the Inception magazine. Because of this I am going to produce another magazine front cover and research into another magazine.

More research into magazine front covers

In my first research I looked mainly at the big sections such as the photo used and the main text on it. However I did not look into pricing of the magazine, bar code or dates and although they are only small aspects they are very important as well. I will look into Empire and Total Film again and see how they have put these three sections in their magazines.

Empire
With this magazine all the bar codes are on the left hand side or in the bottom left corner. Also the date and price is always at the top in between the 'M'. This means that the customer always knows where the price is and when it comes out. The Gif below shows 5 of Empire's magazine front covers and all show this same layout. There are one or two exceptions to this, however it is literally only 1 or 2 as every other cover I have seen looks like the ones below.


Total Film
Total Film and Empire are very similar in the fact they put the bar codes mainly on the left hand side or left bottom corner and also interestingly they both have the price and date inbetween the letter 'M'. Total Film also have the issue number here showing how many magazines they have produced. Below are more examplesto show this.



Price research
To put a price on my magazine I have decided to use other magazines as a guide.

All these are from Empire's magazine, unfortunaly I could not get any from Total Film as they all came up blurry. But from looking at these prices you can see that changed but stay around the price of £3.10-£3.90. I saw it depends who is on the front page and also if any posters are in the magazine which make the prices go up. I have decided to put my magazine to £3.90 as that is the majority that Empire's magazine is and also I will have lots of pages in my magazine.

Second photoshoot for magazine

We all decided that the first shots were no good so instead I went out and took some more photographs of 'Lily' but this time in the red dress she wore in the trailer. I decided to do it outside as it would link with the beginning scene where she got abducted. Below are the four best photos from the 30 I took.

This first photo did not look right at all , this was because her hair was straight and done nicely whereas it should be messy. Also she does not look scared enough. The picture on the right is better as her hair is messed up more, as though she has be struggling, but she is smiling instead of looking terrified.

These two photos were slightly better and she looks more scared than the first two. However the one on the right you can slightly see a bin in the background, which at the time I did not notice and the one of the left, although lots better then that of the others, still did not look right and looked to fake to be used on the cover.

Creating the poster

We all decided that this was going to be our initial photo which we would edit to create our poster.

The first thing we did to edit it was to change the contrast and lighting of the whole picture so it was more of a red/deep orange around the legs and the legs itself were almost if not completely black. This made the legs stand out a lot more against these deep colours.

The next part we edited was the actual background, because as you can see above there are odd white patches in the background on the left hand side that we did not want, but instead wanted it all one colour so at first we decided to make it all white to see what it looked like. However as you can see below that did not work our as well as we first thought it would.

So instead we used the 'clone' tool to pick out an orange from the colours already there and use that instead and cover all of the white section in that deep orange. And as you can see below it looks much better than before and produces a shadow like image because of the darkness of the colour.

The next step was to add our text onto the poster. We used the same text as we used in the trailer, as it then links together more, we put the Seized in big block capitals and in a light brown so it can be seen. We then added the smaller text below, which was also in our trailer, but in a white so it stands out against everything else.

The last bit we needed the add was the small print text that ran along the bottom of the poster. We looked in detail at other sixth sense posters to see what they wrote at the bottom (at the one we were looking at before did not have this writing) and decided that we would use most of the text at the end of the trailer, saying who produced and made it, and put that at the bottom of the poster.

 To complete the look we added an extra few mm to the bottom of our poster and used the 'clone' tool again to copy other sections of the carpet. This was done for two reasons, the first was because in the picture above you can slightly see the ridge of the other carpet from another room so we wanted to remove that if we could. The other reason was we felt it was too squashed at the bottom and it looked as though he was standing on top of the text. By making it slightly longer we were able to fix this problem and also have room to put a website at the bottom.

However after looking at it and discussing it with a teacher and other students we believed that there needed to be something more on the poster. We decided the play around with the white text as we felt that the poster does not really tell anyone what the trailer is about. In the end we added the text below and we all feel that it tells people what it is about without giving too much away.

Second photos for poster

After deciding we were going to use the shots of the abductors feet as our poster picture, I went back home and took lots more pictures. I used three different affects: Nightview, Portrait and No Flash to create three different photos. This was so we had a varied selection that we could choose from.

 

 

 

We decided that the last photos (using Not Flash) were best suited as we needed the body to be black and the outside bright, which is what these photos do. So with some editing in Photoshop we could create the photo we need. I also took some photos of the abductor holding a knife by his side (pictures below) however we realised that if we used these photos it would not link with the ending of the trailer and he is not holding one, for the reason on continuity we decided against using any of these photos.