Evaluation

Looking back at our course work this year I think there is definitely a lot of improvement from last year’s course work in terms of skills and efficiency in dealing with technical issues. However even with this we have still faced some difficulties such as organising our self well enough to get our filming schedules right. Also we repeated certain mistakes such as using two different types of camera to film, however this time we were much quicker to solve this issue than we were last year.

 These are frames from our teaser trailer that we think conforms to conventions and challenge conventions:

The title shot definitely conforms to conventions of Romantic Comedy Film fonts and colours because of the bright colours and also the font is very playful and informal adding to the comical elements of ROMCOMS. We also decided to add our tagline on the same shot because we wanted to link all three elements together by using the same colours and having the tagline in all three elements. This is very common for film makers to have something that links their products to its advertisement. i think this worked really well because our audience said they were able to identify this straight away as a ROM-COM, however i think we could have used a different colour background to make the pink stand out more, black for example would have highlighted the pink and make the orange easier to read but this may have perhaps gone against the genre so maybe a shade darker than white would have worked well too.

It was very important for us to make sure that people were able to remember our title so we chose a title that did not only link to our narrative but was also catchy and comical. The title created irony, the fact that someone imperfect can become perfect and this added interest to  our film. I think we could have definitely appeal more to our target audience by having the title in complete small letters, like we see in ‘twilight’, its more casual and appeals more to a younger audience just like we tried to do with our film.

I think this shot is also very conventional, usually it is popular in Romantic Comedy Films to have a close up of the two main characters together to show their affection. As we can see in the film Valentine’s Day the couple are clearly in a close up and this in a way connects the audience to their relationship, it makes them feel involved in their relationship, by doing this we stuck to conventions. however i think we could have created a better effect on the audience by having a blurred background so that the focus is completely on the characters, and the shot could have been even closer so the characters emotions would be clearer  and this would have worked better for this shot.

We used this as part of our teaser trailer, although these kind of scene is usually seen more in romance films rather than romantic comedy films but we decided to use this because we realise that ending our teaser trailer with this shot will raise the question as why he is imperfect and also the silhouette effect gives the impression that they are walking into the unknown. Apart from viewing it from this perception, this scene adds to the romance elements of  the teaser trailer and it is more likely to tease viewers to want to know why he is imperfect.  We might have over emphasised the romance elements that there wasn't enough comical elements to suggest that is a romantic comedy and this may be one of our weakness but the romance elements according to our audience feedback teases them more so we decided to leave it this way and also because it is a teaser trailer, it is not necessary for us to give too much away.

We decided to add the 'Coming Soon' to our teaser trailer because we realise that this is something we see in almost every single teaser trailer unless those who perhaps already have a set date of release. We also realised that this is part of the whole idea of teasing our audience; the fact that there is no set date provokes them to find out more information about the film.  We could have had a better effect on our audience if we stretched the length of this shot and have the voice over emphasise the ‘Coming Soon’ more to add to the excitement.  I also think we could have increased the size a little bigger and reduced the font of the ‘official’ website so it doesn’t take the focus off the ‘Coming Soon’, this would have made it more unmissable.

In my  teaser trailer research I realised that most of the teaser trailers had the ‘approved preview’ screen at the beginning of them so I suggested to my group and we decided to add this to make our teaser trailer more conventional. I think if we tried something new like creating our own approved preview screen with a different background would have given our teaser trailer more originality. I think this year we tried too hard to stick with conventions that we may have lost some originality elements to our teaser trailer. However maybe if we challenged conventions we may have lost the teaser trailer elements so I don’t think this is then a weakness.

We had our actress change twice, to represent two seasons; she was in a bright pink top in one of the scene  to represent summer and   then wore  black coat in the other to show suggest winter. We wanted to suggest that their relationship has been going on for sometime and avoiding making it look like it was all in one day. This was one of our weaknesses because we filmed everything in one day it was hard for us to suggest that it was different times, we should have filmed on different days to get a variety of weather in our film. We decided to have our actress wear pink because we wanted to suggest her femininity but at the same time we didn’t want her to look overly feminine because we wanted to show her independence too. 

When it comes to editing we used only cuts between the scenes to create some sort of fast pace teaser trailer, however we didn’t want it too fast because we wanted our audience to be familiar with our characters.  At the beginning of our teaser trailer we had shots of our Mariah’s idea of ‘Imperfect’ guys. I think this challenged convention because usually in teaser trailers, we only see the two main character, other characters are usually introduced to us in actual trailers. I think we definitely could have used more transition in our teaser trailer to give it a variety such as fades instead of using only cuts. However I think keeping the editing style simple worked better because using fades would have made it look more like a trailer than a teaser trailer.

I think our film poster is very conventional to other romantic comedy film posters. We stuck to convention by having the names of the actor and actress at the top. Usually in romantic comedy films, the stars name are put above to attract fans of the stars to go and watch the movie, we decided to imitate this in our poster. We also kept conventions by  having the billing block at the bottom alongside the date, not only is this conventional but this also avoids the date and billing block taking away the attention from the main poster. The colours we used for our poster is very typical of the genre, pink, orange and white usually symbolising happiness and femininity which our audience are.  We broke conventions however by having the two main characters sitting on the bench usually they are in action standing and looking at the camera rather than sitting. However, we could have perhaps have the image more to the middle where it is more conventional to have but our audience feedback suggested that the poster was fine the way it was so we didn't change this either.

Although we initially agreed we were going to use ‘TOTAL FILM’ as our film magazine title but we changed this during the process of making our magazine and after the feedback recieved from our audience for the first magazine cover we made. We decided to use our own Magazine title because it would be more convenient to adjust the font and colours as much as we wish and this was one of the problems we faced when we were in the process of creating our first Magazine cover. As usual we used pink and white to connect our three elements together and also to stick with typical romantic comedy film convention. We also stuck to conventions of a film magazine cover by having all our cover lines in different fonts and sizes.  Although this isn't our final version of this magazine the newer version is much similar except the issue date is changed and the underlined cover line too. Magazine covers usually have the lead actress/actor on the cover rather than both character, however they may have the other character on a different issue. We went for the whole casual look in our poster by having the two main characters sitting on the bench; we also tried to have this element on our magazine cover by taking a more natural picture of our actress and this goes against conventions because actress/actors are usually in more action pose rather than relax and I think this works well for our product. However, we could have chose a different location for our image instead of a feild to give our magazine cover a bit more glamour.

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

Our target audience research suggested that the main target audience of Romantic Comedy films is 16-24year olds and this allowed us to target our product to a more mainstream audience. Also our genre and film targeted more feminine audience therefore the reason we used colours such as pink and orange. The reason why these were our target audience was because Romantic Comedy Film narratives are usually based on modern society ideals such as being independent and having an equal say in relationships where as older audience much prefer traditional way of doing things so younger audience are much more likely to relate to the characters and their storylines. Maybe to get more accurate research on our target audience we should have done more secondary research on the internet, although we did this and the age group came down to the same result but we could have looked at more websites.

We wanted all of our three elements to link together so we chose a colour scheme that will link all three products together. We also had a tagline in both our teaser trailer and on our poster, also by having our female lead actress in all three element linked our products together. I think if we had the same font for our title in all three products this would have had a much better impact but we realise that different fonts worked well for the different products that we had.

For our teaser trailer they main difficulties we faced during the production stages was finding our main actor on time, we also had to overcome issues such as our characters being off centre however this was easy to overcome because we were much more familiar with Pinnacle this year and was much quicker to respond to this problem.

With the Magazine cover, we realised our ‘issue date’ and release date didn’t match so we had to reload it back onto Photoshop to fix this problem. and this was one of the dissadvanteges of Photoshop because some times it 'merges' ur layers together and you cannot edit seperate layers for example the title without affecting the rest of the magazine cover.  We didn’t really face any difficulty for our poster apart from having to wait till we were filming before we could take the image for it because we wanted our actors to be in character.

What have you learned from your audience feed back?
Before we submitted our work we wanted to make sure that our target audience were happy with the outcome of our Poster, Magazine Cover and Teaser Trailer. This will enable us to judge whether we followed our research into all three formats well or we needed to revisit some of them and make some adjustments.

For our Magazine and poster, we displayed it on the projector in front of our fellow peers in our Media Studies class, we figured that since most of them enjoyed romantic comedy and fell into the age range of our target audience it will be a good Idea to get feedback from them.  Although they had already seen the first drafts of both our magazine cover, poster and suggested a few changes which we took on board, we wanted to see if our revision had paid off. Last time we showed them both, their key points were the image being over posed, the lack of variety of fonts for the different subtitle and the dull colours of our Magazine Cover although we did explain the red was meant to signify love and romance but they suggested that this was too strong a colour. This time around we had a lot of positive feedback on both and most of the participants suggested they will be interested to watch it if they saw the poster or magazine cover somewhere.

For our teaser Trailer we uploaded  it onto Facebook where we are aware most of our target audience will visit because of our research into where other romantic comedy films will tease their audience.

The feedback we got was positive however there were comments about the shaky camera; they suggested that although not a major issue but quite annoying. We did acknowledge this was a mistake but after discussing it as a group we decided not to change this because it will be time consuming and the shaky camera gave it a ‘home video’ effect and a sense of reality so we decided to keep this.

We also had a criticism about the voice over being a little flat, although this is very important but we felt like making the voice over too comical will take away the romance in the Teaser Trailer. However we chose to lengthen the time spam of our title in our tear trailer and the ‘Coming Soon’ after a few people suggested it was too short. We figured this is very important because wanted our audience to be familiar with our title and to be teased by the 'Coming Soon'. Over all we had really positive feedback most people said it was teasing because they we not sure why the main character was imperfect and wanted to watch more to find out.

We also designed a questionnaire where we were able to preview our teaser trailer before we submitted it to our teacher along side with our poster and magazine Cover.

Our questions entailed:

1.       How old are you?

2.       Do you feel all three products suggest the Romantic Comedy genre?

3.       Are the images on the Magazine and Poster appropriate for our film?

4.       Do you feel the font works on each of these products?

5.       Would you go and see the film after seeing these three products?

6.       Which products do feel appeals to you most?

7.       Are there any improvement you would suggest?

Most of the questions had the same response where all our peers was happy with our products and fell into the same age range. Except question seven and eight, these answers was generally down to personal choice and also question eight was a open question and individual response differed.

For the open question we had one person comment about the lack of emphasises on the ‘prejudice’, although we did at the beginning consider including something that related to why he was ‘imperfect’ but we decided against it because we felt we will be giving too much away and the whole point of a teaser trailer is to keep our audience guessing and wondering.

We also had a comment about where we placed our variety of shots in our teaser trailer from our teacher; we definatly could have spread out our shot to give it more variety, for example from a close up to a long shot instead of close up to another close up. However she acknowledge she was not our target audience so we decided to ask the class if they felt this was an issue but they were happy with where everything was so we decided not to change this either.

Over all, we adjusted certain things in our teaser trailer such as the length of the title but we didn’t have any major criticism that we felt will cost us a lot of marks so we are happy with the result.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planing and evaluation stage?

Having a younger target audience was a great advantage to us because it allowed us to use the latest social networking site and other current media technologies.  The technologies we used in our planning, production and evaluating stage include:

• Pinnacle Studio, we used this in the editing stage, we also being more familiar with this software from last year was a bonus to us because editing was much faster this year and this gave us the opportunity to have enough time to ask for audience feedback. However the disadvantage of this software is that work can easily be lost if the computer crushes and unlike Microsoft, there isnt a recovering tool if your work wasnt already saved.
• We used blogger to record all the process of our development, planning, post-production stage of our course work and evaluation, this enabled us to keep track of our progress and share the experience of our production with other groups. Although this website is very useful but the tools available for us to use when typing isnt enough so sometimes we have to write on Microsoft Word and then copy and paste onto blogger and this can sometimes be irretating.
• Facebook being a very popular networking site enabled us to post our final product in order for our target audience to give us feedback on what to improve and what they like about our product. We are aware that Facebook can also have its issues with privacy and Hacking so we asked the permision of our actor in order to do this.
• We also used Edirols and Flip Cameras to record our voice over and video our animatic, these two devices are very portable and made it easy for us to carry it around the school instead of having an actual camera which would have been more of a handful. However with an Edirol, you have to have to plug headphones into it in other to hear back at what you have done and this was one of the the disadvantages.

Over all this year was much easier in terms of being familiar with the process of our production; however we have had to deal with some difficulties in other to have a polished product. I could go back and repeat this process I will make sure  that we filmed our teaser trailer first before anything to give us the chance to get it to a very high standard, however saying this I think our product this year is definitely a step up from last year.

As a group we have all played a major part in acheiving our target, we found our we music from a copy right free website provided by the Howard School where I study Film Studies and with permission from my teacher we were able to use this wesite to download our music. I think my filming skills has definetley improved this year, during the filming proccess i was able to direct the characters to where the should be which was harder last year. We were also able to take decisions much better this year and really pulled together as a group.

Developing Skills from AS to A2

AS was a huge foundation which helped equipped me and my group for all the challenges that awaited us in A2.  Our skills has developed vastly since our last project at AS. Last year we had problems adjusting quickly after a hiccup for example when we had a few continuity errors in our film, it really dampened our team spirit but this year the major thing for us was a backup plan, always having something planned just in case something went wrong!

We were also very quickly able to suggest how well different camera shots and angle will work for different things this year, for example, we know that a wide shot is recommended if we are trying to show location and a high angle is good to portray that some one is inferior. Although I knew the basics at AS stage but I didn’t not fully appreciate how these film language helps sends a message across without dialogue or subtitles. In our film this year we used close-ups to show the emotions on both characters faces, this allows the audience to see how happy they are together, close up worked better for that frame because if we used a long shot the focus will be taken away from their facial expression.

Last year the major downfall for us was continuity error, this year it was one of our top of our priority, we made sure that we filmed every thing separately and at least three times to make sure we didn’t have to come back and do it another day . even with this we made sure that we took pictures of what our characters looked like and what they were wearing so it would make it easier for us to repeat the same look if necessary.

Last year we spent quite sometimes going back and re-filming bits because of simple mistakes that we could have simply edited on Facebook. For example we had an issues with lighting in our AS course work where some of our footage was brighter than some, instead of adjusting the tone we decided to re-film again. This year we are more familiar with Pinnacle and we are far more advance in using the tools than we were and I think this is down to all the mistakes we made at AS level and how we learnt from them.

This year our preparation stage was also much better than last year, our research was very focus on what we wanted to find out instead of generalising our research, for example, in our research of film posters we didn’t just look at film posters in generally but rather looked into Romantic Comedy films poster, last year although our research was very good because we covered a range of things but we were very general with our research.

Over all I think we have improved a lot from last year and we are much more matured in our knowledge of Media Technology both theoretically and practically and our knowledge of media theories and how it actually fits into narrative has increased vastly. Last year we got a very good overall grade for AS Course work and there was a lot of work to be done in other to maintain the good grade and I think our experience with AS definitely helped us through.

Audience Feedback and revision

Before we submitted our work we wanted to make sure that our target audience were happy with the outcome of our Poster, Magazine Cover and Teaser Trailer. This will enable us to judge whether we followed our research into all three formats well or we needed to revisit some of them and make some adjustments.

For our Magazine and poster, we displayed it on the projector in front of our fellow peers in our Media Studies class, we figured that since most of them enjoyed romantic comedy and fell into the age range of our target audience it will be a good Idea to get feedback from them.  Although they had already seen the first draft s of both our magazine cover, poster and suggested a few changes which we took on board, we wanted to see if our revision had paid off. Last time we showed them both, their key points were the image being over posed, the lack of variety of fonts for the different subtitle and the dull colours of our magazine although we did explain the red was meant to signify love and romance. This time around we had a lot of positive feedback on both and most of the participants suggested they will be interested to watch it if they saw the poster or magazine cover somewhere.

For our teaser Trailer we uploaded  it onto Facebook where we are aware most of our target audience will visit because of our research into where other romantic comedy films will tease their audience.

For our teaser Trailer we uploaded it onto Facebook where we are aware most of our target audience will visit because of our research into where other romantic comedy films will tease their audience.

The feedback we got was positive however there were comments about the shaky camera; they suggested that although not a major issue but quite annoying. We did acknowledge this was a mistake but after discussing it as a group we decided not to change this because it will be time consuming and the shaky camera gave it a ‘home video’ effect and a sense of reality so we decided to keep this.

We also had a criticism about the voice over being a little flat, although this is very important but we felt like making the voice over too comical will take away the romance in the Teaser Trailer. However we chose to lengthen the time spam of our title in our tear trailer and the ‘Coming Soon’ after a few people suggested it was too short. We figured this is very important because wanted our audience to be familiar with our title. Over we had really positive feedback most people said it was teasing because they we not sure why the main character was imperfect and wanted to watch more to find out.

We also designed a questionnaire where we were able to preview our teaser trailer before we submitted it to our teacher along side with our poster and magazine Cover.

Our questions entailed:

1.       How old are you?

2.       Do you feel all three products suggest the Romantic Comedy genre?

3.       Are the images on the Magazine and Poster appropriate for our film?

4.       Do you feel the font works on each of these products?

5.       Would you go and see the film after seeing these three products?

6.       Which products do feel appeals to you most?

7.       Are there any improvement you would suggest?

Most of the questions had the same response were all our peers was happy with our products and fell into the same age range. Except question seven and eight where answers was generally down to personal choice and also question eight was a open question and individual response differed.

For the open question we had one person comment about the lack of emphasises on the ‘prejudice’, although we did at the beginning consider to including something that related to why he was ‘imperfect’ but we decided against it because we felt we will be giving too much away and the whole point of a teaser trailer is to keep our audience guessing and wondering.

We also had a comment on where we placed our variety of shots from our teacher but she acknowledge she was not our target audience so we decided to ask the class if they felt this was an issue but they were happy with where everything was so we decided not to change this.

Over all, we adjusted certain things in our teaser trailer such as the length of the title but we didn’t have any major criticism that we felt will cost us a lot of marks so we are happy with the result.

Finished Poster

With our final draft of our poster we stuck with our original idea of having our two main characters on the bench. However instead of having the title next to the couple on the bench as intended we moved it to the bottom of the image because we felt like putting it beside the image would leave it too crowded. We felt like it would make more of an impact in a bigger font and in the middle of the page, this idea was also suggested to us by our audience when we asked for feedback, they also said it was more readable underneath the image rather than next to the bench.

Initially the size of our billing block was quite big and it didn’t look right on the poster, so after asking for audience feedback on it they suggested that it will be best if we resized the font  so we took this advice on board and resized the font. After doing this we realised that it looked much better smaller and this gave a bit of space allowance for our tagline.

After deciding on the colour scheme for our magazine and the teaser trailer we decided to have the same for our poster so it would be easier for our audience to recognise that the three elements belong to the same film. Fonts used for ROM-COM are usually quite informal unlike the ones you get on thriller posters or horror; they have more serious fonts to reflect the genre of the film.



The overall concept behing our promotional package

With the promotional side of our package, we figured that the most important thing about recognition it’s having something that is unique about our teaser trailer, poster and magazine. In our research we noticed that identifying your target audience and what they want to see is one of the crucial information we need to have at the back of our mind when producing our package. So with this knowledge we came up with a tag line ‘Love makes the imperfect perfect’, with this tag line on our poster and in our teaser trailer enabled our film to be recognised as a Romantic Comedy.

 We also looked at our narrative for the movie and decided that due to the controversy surrounding Maria’s perfect guy it would be a good idea to show this in our title. By calling our film ‘Imperfect Mr Perfect’ not only does it suggest the narrative but also gives a humorous feel to our movie which is gives away the genre of our movie.

The actual narrative of our film came after we chose a name for our film, although we had a similar narrative to this but the title did not fit well into that narrative as it fits in this one so we decided to improve our narrative to go with both our title and to challenge convention of having a one race lead characters in a film.

In our research we realised that colour scheme in romantic comedies we bright and vibrant colours such as pink, white and purple and we wanted to stick with this convention so we chose the same colours, pink, white and orange to use for our title, tag line in our teaser trailer, magazine and poster. These colours were also used in the clothing of our characters to emphasise the fact that the movie is a ‘feel good’ light hearted Romantic comedy and this is what our target audience expect to see in the product and to gain the interest of our target audience this was an important concept we had to include.

 Usually distributors, promoters and producers of movies uses several format of advertising before the movie is released and this increases their chances of exposing the movie enough  before the release day to increase their chance of having a major hit when they release it.  

This is particularly true of big Hollywood blockbusters, usually advertising format include, posters, viral marketing, teaser trailers and magazine covers right before the release day. I think by using three different format of advertising enhances the chances of success and by making sure that your concepts for these promotional packages takes in consideration of your target audience and genre is the most important value to keep in mind through out the production and I think our group certainly did this.

Our Editing proccess and improvement

For our editing this year we used the same editing software Pinnacle Studios to edit our movie however unlike last year the editing process of our film wasn’t as difficult as it was. Although we had a similar problem like last year whereby some of our filming was done in HD and the other on another format; we were able to quickly resolve it without it even becoming a major issue simply by using the ‘fit to screen’ tool on pinnacle to match all our shots as HD.

Another issue we faced was that some of our characters at the beginning were off centre so we simply zoomed in and adjusted the position of the frame to eliminate the extra space around the character and this was very easy to do on Pinnacle.

After adding our title, tagline and date of release we realised that the, perhaps using pink and orange may cause confusion for our audience however we decided to use it anyway because it linked back to our poster and magazine and this was our initial concept so we stuck with it.

We made sure we didn’t make the same mistake we made last year by just limiting our filming, this year we had a variety of shots just in case we needed to take shots that didn’t go with the sequence and replace it with the others. So this time when we decided we no longer wanted to use the footage of Mariah discussing her love life with her best friend we were able to replace it with scenes of Mariah and her ‘perfect guy. This was more convenient because it didn’t take as much time as the other one.

After we edited our film and designed our poster and magazine, we showed it to our peers in our class room because they fall into the age range of our target for some feedback. For our magazine cover our target audience felt like the image was over posed for a film magazine cover. So we took this advice onboard and changed our image to an image where our star looked more in character and we also chose a different background; we had a green grass background which was more fresh and romantic than our previous. 

We also faced some issues with our poster, where the side of one of the edges was slightly cut off so we slightly slanted off the other edge to make them look the same.

Overall the editing process this year was no where near as daunting as it was last year and issues were resolved quicker. Although our audience feedback did suggest that the camera was a little bit shaky, we recognise this as a mistake but wanted to portray an idea of the character being themselves and going with the flow and we think the shaky camera reflects this well although it wasn’t our initial idea.

Evaluating our filming process

Leaving our filming till last minute came with its downfalls, although we gave ourselves enough time to concentrate on our poster and magazine to get them to a high standard we only gave our self a week to film.  This wasn’t such a bad idea because we knew exactly what we wanted in our filming, what our characters were going to be wearing  and we also checked the weather for certain days to make sure it was save to film. 

We basically had all the planning done the only thing that was left was actually filming.  Although our planning for the actual filming was very detailed, we definitely could have improved on our communication skill between us and out main actor, there was several times that we planed to film during the week but either our actor got the time wrong or we were in different places at the same time.  After going through a list of boys we finally found one that had the characteristics of our character and was also committed to our filming schedules. On Friday before the February halftime we were able to film.

The only difficulty we faced that day was finding enough time to film all the different location we chose for our film because our actor had other commitments and we should have arranged for an earlier day that was suitable for both our actor and us. However, even with this difficulty we were still able to film all the different sections we needed. 

In our teaser trailer research we recognised that teaser trailers usually consist of shots from different location and this is especially typical of romantic comedies. We wanted to include this in our teaser trailer because we identified tat this will show the stages of the relationship between the two main characters. We also kept the convention of having the two main character in the teaser trailer, although sometime teaser trailers include other characters, we decided not to do this because we would give too much away than intended.

Although this wasn’t necessarily breaking convention, but sometimes teaser trailers tend to have some sort of diegetic dialogue between the character but we decided against this and opted for a voice over instead, the only dialogue in the teaser trailer, is our female character saying ‘No’ to settling for ‘less’ we included this purely for humour so our audience would be able to recognise our teaser trailer as a romantic comedy.
We stuck to conventions by having range of different shots including, long shots, medium shots and close ups to give our teaser trailer a variety and keep it more interesting. By making sure that we stick to the time scale of 60seconds we kept convention because teaser trailers are short and the aim is to attract viewers’ interest without giving too much way.

We decided for our teaser trailer we were going to have five different guys at the beginning to suggest her difficulty in settling for less than what she wants and we are also recording a voice over for our teaser trailer to make this clear. We filmed this section separately from the main one with her and the lead male actor because we didn’t have to worry about continuity, we only needed five seconds of filming for each boy so we did this while we were doing our magazine cover and this was easier and convenient for us.

During our filming process we took still images for both our poster image and as evidence of filming.  We had already drafted out our poster but was just left with uploading the picture onto the poster to make it complete.  Over all it has been along process to get to the filming process but once we started filming, we were able to complete it on time.

Using new technologies in our production

As media technologies advance rapidly every time, it is important that we use new media technologies to get familiar with some of these technologies especially new social networking site such as Youtube, Facebook and twitter. We have used a range of technologist in both our research stage, production stage and post-production stage.

For my research of teaser trailer I used Youtube where I had access to a range of different romantic comedy film teaser trailers, with research of audio-visual materials Youtube is one of the best sites to use because of its popularity across the world, distributors and producers are more likely to put their teaser trailers on Youtube because they know they can reach their audience easily. This is especially true of Romantic Comedies, because they target the youth more they are aware that these sort of website are more likely to attract the youth because is current.

For our planning, we used a Flip- camera to video our animatic-story board, this was very convenient for us because Flip-cameras are more portable and easier to download audio-visual recordings from it than an actual video cameras. With a Flip-camera it has its own USB cable attached to it and it was much easier for us to download our videoed storyboard onto pinnacle and edit it into an animatic. This also broadened our knowledge on substituting one technology for the other in order to make it more convenient for us.

We also used an Edirol to record our voice over for our film. Just like Flip-cameras Edirols are also very portable and this made it easier for us to carry it around the school, however the only disadvantage we had with the Edirol is that when we recorded the voice over for our film we couldn’t play it back to make sure it was good enough, we needed a head phones or a USB cable to do this, so we had to do some recording several times before we were able to get it right.

During our production stage we used Pinnacle Studio to edit our teaser trailer, this editing programme that we were much familiar with because we used it for our AS coursework too. However this time we were not afraid to use the range of editing materials that was available to us.

For we have decided to post our final edited teaser trailer on Facebook to get feedback because we are targeting youth from 16-24 and we are aware that this age group are more likely to visit these sites especially our own peers.

We have used a variety of different new media technology during our plan stage and we are intending to do the same for our post production stage. Although this is for our course work but it is has also widened our knowledge of media technologies as individual.

Font and Title analysis

Although we said that we were going to keep the same font for our title on the poster, magazine and in the teaser trailer, we diverted from this idea because although certain fonts worked on one media format like the magazine but when we used the same font in the teaser trailer it didn’t work as well. So instead we decided to use the same colours to avoid it looking too different and also by having the tagline in all three formats we still kept the similarities between the three elements.

In our research of magazine cover we identified that it was a convention for a magazine cover to have different font for all the different subtitles on it, so in order to follow this convention we used different fonts for the different stories on the magazine cover. With our title, we made sure it was big and clear on or three media format in order to grab our viewers and readers attention an we made it distinctive to all the other subtitles.

Applying media theories to our work

In a contemporary society, stories created by the media are usually based on current issues faced by society especially stories and narrative for movies do tend to have modern ideals. With this comes post-modernist theories, one of the major topics for post-modernist is consumerism and how we have become a society of ‘must have it all!’ this is clearly reflected in the Romantic Comedies ‘Confessions of a shopaholic’ where the main character’s obsession with shopping gets in her way of achieving her goals.  The Narrative of ‘Confession of a shopaholic’ very much fits into the concept of consumerism. With this knowledge of theorists, theories and how narratives structure links in to them I think our products can definitely fit into theories such as feminists and postmodernism.

Our story can be compare with feminists ideas in the sense that although our main character Mariah is independent and wouldn’t settle for less she still wants to conform to traditional values of settling down with her ‘perfect guy’ and this is on of the concept of feminists especially liberal feminists, although the position of women has improved marriage is still very much a big value that girls dream of having.

We also tried to pass on the message that one person idea of perfect isn’t always for everyone this is also known as the hypodermic syringe theory, where by messages are immediately are passed through media formats to audience. Our tag line “love makes the imperfect perfect” also connotes this idea of perfection varies from person to person. To measure whether our message has been received by our audience we are designing a questionnaire to see if our audience get this view of our film.

teaser trailer research

Although we had researched teaser trailers, most of our research had mainly been based on actual trailers rather than teaser trailer so we decided to do another research mainly based on teaser trailer. In my research,  i found an Internet website about teaser trailers that outlined that sometimes  most of the footage in  teaser trailers were not actually footage from the actual film but rather footage that had been recorded before the production the movie. The average time spam of teaser trailers are usually 25-60seconds and this is true of the ones i had found on 'teaser trailer.com'.




http://teaser-trailer.com/movie/youth-in-revolt/
The first teaser trailer i watched was 'Youth In Revolt', this teaser trailer was mainly of the main character Nick Twisp, talking about creating his 'supplementary personality'. the teaser trailer is very simple and its only 34seconds long and doesn't show any elements of romance in it  about from the dialogue so the viewer has no idea what genre this belong to, in fact i thought it was a thriller movie. There is no voice over in this teaser trailer just digetic dialogue, we only see a few cuts which is quite strange but all in one location. The background sound is very low key and calm. Over all i don't think this teaser trailer really does the the movie justice.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axdkgTiu2_w


'What Women Want'
This teaser trailer is very conventional, it has lots of cuts and in each we see the main character. At the beginning we get a quick shot of the production company 'Paramount Picture'. The plot of the movie is adopted really well into the teaser trailer and this is mainly down to the voice over, the story is basically about a guy who is able to read women's minds after an accident. In this teaser trailer there is a non diegetic background sound, however it chances when it gets the shot of the two romantically involved characters suggesting their relationship. The Teaser trailer is only 33seconds long, however unlike the previous teaser trailer, the genre of this movie is very clear and there is enough shots showing the different characters in the film which is helpful for marketing because viewers would be able to see their favourite actors/actresses which will encourage them to go and watch the movie, this was one of the things we found out in our audience research.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evk_npxSSjo
'Valentines Day'
I really like this teaser trailer, just like 'What Women Want', this trailer has lots of cuts, however no voice over just dialogue of the characters which works well because we are still able to see whats going on and we are aware that everything is themed around valentines day. This film is packed with Hollywood stars especially does recognised in Romantic Comedies, and we see all this actors and actresses in this teaser trailer, and at the end we see shots of names of the stars such  s Jessica Alba, Julia Roberts, Aston Kutcher, etc this in itself enhances the marketing because target audience are going to want to see it. The background sound is current, was a number one hip hop hit and this is more likely to catch the attention of the audience. Also by putting all the stars in the teaser trailer it would instantly  attract audience especially those who love this actors/actresses. In the teaser trailer it stated 'Producers of Pretty Woman'. This movie is one of the best Romantic comedies of all times and any one who enjoyed it would want to watch this movie.




after watching teaser trailers and actual trailers i have noticed that the difference between the two is that trailers are much more longer and more detailed than teaser trailers. Some teaser trailers barely tells the story and most teaser trailers have their production companies at the beginning. We have decided to take all this to consideration.

1st Magazine Cover Draft

We kept our first magazine cover very basic, we used a close-up image of our lead female actress. During the processing stage of our magazine cover we realised that the colour of the top of our actress was black and this is very unconventional for a romantic comedy, we also realised that you could see her bra straps and this is very unprofessional so we decided to eliminate this image in exchange for another image. So we made sure that this mistake wasn't repeated and that the colour of our actress's dress was quite bright.

In our researched we noticed that different fonts were used for different subtitle to differentiate each topic area on the cover. With this knowledge we decided to adopt this into our own magazine cover, we also realised in our research that there was nothing wrong with having the image slightly covering the title if it was a recognised brand. We were unable to have information on either side of the image because there wasn't enough space left for us to do so and this made the magazine look incomplete.

 

The idea behind us having a Red and White colour scheme was to give our magazine cover a romantic appeal, however this backfired and we decided to change it to a more conventional colour which is Pink!Originally we decided to use 'TOTAL FILM' as our master head but after re-designing the magazine cover we decided to adopt our own magazine title because this will enable us to change the size and the font as we wish rather than sticking to its original form. 

 

Although a lot of changes has been made to our new magazine cover,  we have decided to keep the 'PLUS' because we are aware that this is very conventional on magazine covers and it gives covers some sort of diversity in the way  information is placed on there. We also decided to keep the free 'Harry Potter  film posters' because we are aware that there is a harry Potter movie coming out in the next upcoming year and its a very popular movie that can easily be recognised.

 

We have also included the names of   films that our fellow students are making on our magazine as part of upcoming movies. At the moment we are still in the process of completing both magazine and poster.

 

Our Magazine Cover

We decided to change our initial magazine cover because we felt like there were quite a few things wrong with it, for example the the font for the subtitles was too big and our teacher advised us to remove the underlining in the 'all you need to know about film' and the 'interview with Zoe dechanel'. We also had problem with the date on our magazine because we contradicted our selves by talking about films that were coming up in 2010 and then putting the issue that of the magazine as 2011. Although this poster is much better than our first because our actress look much natural and looks like she is in character but we still have bits we need to edit in order to make it perfect! We also had a few information on the magazine that was irrelevant to film  for example 'latest music', however we have decide to edit this when we come back to it after the teaser trailer. At the moment we are fully concentrating on our teaser trailer and if we have time at the end we will come back to both the magazine and poster to improve them. With the magazine cover we made sure we went with the colour theme by using pink and white. We also decided to use the same font for the title of our film on the magazine, in the trailer and on the poster. I really like the background on this poster because its very fresh and it adds to the romantic theme we are trying to portray in our film. As usually we kept the bar code away from any centre of attention to avoid it attracting more attention than it needs.
Our second Magazine Cover draft still had certain things wrong with it and with the help of our teacher and our audience whom we asked for feedback we were able to figure out how to improve it.
Although there we big improvement since the first Magazine Cover draft, such as  changing the original image we had because according to our audience feedback the first image looked more like a fashion cover picture
than a film magazine image. We also changed the layout on this magazine, putting information on both sides of the actress so that there won't be unwanted spaces left around on the cover. 

Storyboard Anamatic

For our animatic storyboard we decided to used our initial idea of story line. We edited the animatic in the way that we plan to edit our teaser trailer with all the fades and cuts in the right places. Our schedule has been really tight and the poster and magazine took a little bit more time than we imagined so we only got down to editing our animatic on Friday's twilight session. At the moment we haven't been able to decide on a background sound track for our film so we were unable to edit sound into our animatic. Our Magazine cover is completed so we have decided to start filming this upcoming week.

We have decided to have a voice over for our teaser trailer as this is very conventional for teaser trailer and  we indicated this on the audio side of our storyboard. We also decided to include the production company of our film at the beginning. We are aware that we only have sixty seconds to include as much as we can so we kept our story in the trailer simple and easy to understand, we filmed various boys showing Maria's past of 'imperfect guys' and we have a voice over which also explains what's going to happen without giving too much away. At the end we have decided to show a series of shots of Maria now with her imperfect Mr perfect. In the teaser trailer we have decided to indicate why Maria's perfect guy isn't soo perfect but to keep it a secret we give clues rather than telling the story in the voice over.

Draft of Poster

For our poster we decided to use Microsoft Publisher because the layout of the paper was exactly how we wanted. In our research of Romantic Comedy film posters, we realised that most of them tend to have colours that were linked in to the genre, for example in  horror movies red will be used to suggest danger or blood and in Romantic comedies  red will be use to signify romance and pink is used to signify happiness, love. Usually pink is usually related to girls so it appeals to much feminine viewers. In some cases the colour of the writing on the poster matches the dressing of the character on the poster. So in order to stick with conventions we chose pink and orange as the main colour for our poster. Although we haven't taken a picture yet for the poster but we have the basic outline and layout of where things should go. our title isn't on the poster because our idea is to put the title beside our main character on the bench. One of the conventions of film posters is that the name of the the actors goes at the top so we decided to go with this convention because we wanted our target audience to recognise our poster as a film poster. This was problematic to begin with because the name of our initial actress was 'Zoeey' and because the name had a 'y' at the end  it didn't fit inside the marginal line at the top and it looked odd so we decided to change the first name to 'Grabriella' which was much suited for our poster and still had the 'star apeal'.
Our billing block was at the bottom of the page as conventions suggest, however the size of the font was a little over sized for billing block so after seaking advice from our teacher we made it two sizes smaller which made it look much better. We also put the tagline of our movie on the poster because this gave our audience an idea of what to expect.We put the season of release in a big font because we realised that this is important for our audience to know and also in a way of teasing them. Looking back at our research we realised that mostly at the bottom of most film poster there is a website for people to find more information about the film.