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

To produce our teaser trailer and ancillary tasks we had to consider a variety of codes and conventions for the slasher horror genre, to ensure that all our products would be successful and appeal to our target audience.

TEASER TRAILER

Costuming and Make-Up

The attire worn in psychological horror films would involve the ‘evil girl’ to wear plain white or grey dresses. Therefore to avoid confusion and concentrate on the slasher look, films such as ‘The Abandoned’, 'The Exorcist' and ‘Saw’ together inspired us to create our costumes and realistic make-up. The key similarities we found were; to have normal clothes, such as a t-shirt and jeans, and to completely tear the pieces apart covering them in blood and dirt. The make-up, to make the ‘evil girl’ appear like a corpse took a principle usually used in psychological films. However we have developed this, using the pure white coloured skin commonly seen in films such as 'The Ring' we mixed this with facial blood cuts and white eyes (lenses) seen in slasher horror films. We challenged the slasher genre however, by choosing not to use a mask for the villain, which is a convention often seen. We wanted the audience to be aware of the evil girl, but still only showed her in quick flashes so that they could not gain the full picture.

INSPIRATION:                                                                                       FINAL PRODUCT:

 

Location

From watching and deconstructing numerous films, we found that an important convention was to highlight isolation through location. Abandoned buildings and houses emphasise this idea of isolation and the unknown. After location scouting in our local area, we found a site which had a number of small abandoned buildings, including a warehouse, however it was not practical to film here due to the land waste. Through more research, we found a small derelict room at the back of a friends house, which is where we captured most of our footage of the 'evil girl'. In addition, we also found an large abandoned house, which us allowed to shoot wider shots as well as shoot scenes with the second actress as the protagonist. The environment was a perfect setting; dark, run down and isolated, it had all the key features that the location would have in 'The Abandoned', and so followed the codes and conventions of a typical horror film.

FIRST LOCATION: Small derelict room

SECOND LOCATION: Abandoned house

Sound and Editing

In horror teaser trailers, it is typical to find very fast editing with only flashes of 'graphic' images, this is usually accompanied with loud eerie music, quiet disconcerting sounds or even silence to create maximum suspense. The beginning of our trailer shows slightly longer shots, which do not reveal much, and this is matched with parallel sound which is still loud and eerie but at a much slower tempo compared to the sound used in the disequilibrium for the rest of the trailer. Once the flashes begin, the music picks up the pace and the audience begin to see the fast cut editing technique. We challenged older real media texts by choosing not to use silence or quiet sound in our trailer. This was to follow the conventions of modern horror, which use more upbeat or rock music, and so we chose to a piece of music called 'Time to Die' uploaded on YouTube which appears below:

Institutions


We looked at various different institutions, from Dark Castle to Film4, but finally decided to go with 'Twisted Pictures'. This has been a very successful institution to represent the 'Saw' saga, a very popular slasher horror film series, therefore the ideal ident to place at the beginning of our trailer.

Narrative Theories

Our trailer followed Levi-Strauss' binary opposition narrative theory. This is the theory that states that the narrative tension is based on the opposition or conflict between two characters, in this case good and evil. Exposure took this as a model and included a villain and a protagonist in its narrative, and that one side of this opposition is seen as more valued by society; the protagonist. It is about understanding the difference between both sides, which we tried to make as clear as possible through representing the protagonist as vulnerable and frightened, and the evil as danger and fear.

A theory that we challenged was Todorov's equilibrium narrative theory. This theory sets out that the trailer would start with equilibrium, a period of calm, then agents of disruption would cause disequilibrium, a period of unsettlement. The trailer would then finish with a new state of equilibrium, bringing peace to the protagonists. However, in Exposure, the beginning of our trailer does not show a clear calm or unsettlement period since the sound is loud and overpowering producing discomfort for the audience, and the dark unclear shots are parallel to this. Throughout the rest of the trailer, disequilibrium is more evident since the soundtrack becomes faster and this is accompanied by the fast cut editing, this builds the tension and anxiety felt by the audience. Therefore, our trailer does not conform to this particular theory since there is no return state of harmony towards the end.

POSTER

From looking at various existing horror posters, we identified the key forms and conventions needed to produce our own for Exposure. The Abandoned, Shutter and Saw all either used blood red or white colours for the typography. We experimented with various fonts; DaFont.com supplied us with plenty of choice to find the suitable typography. We chose to use ‘NeoPrint’ which show letters as bold, blood splattered and rough around the edges to represent the horror genre. 

When designing the poster and deciding where to place the text we needed to use, the Golden Ratio helped us to create a professional and eye grabbing piece. This considers the layout of all agents in the poster, split into three sections horizontally/vertically; in order to the make all elements work together. The title of the film is very clearly positioned at the top of the poster and the date of release, credits and website is placed at the bottom. This is broken up by the image placed in between the text, creating the three sections.

The colour of the image itself is black and dark around the edges, using a vignetting technique, so that the main focus and colour saturation is brought to the middle. Positioned in this way, the ‘evil girl’ is crouched down in the corner of the dark room, this emphasises her vulnerability and isolated situation. Emily is being made the centre of focus; her eyes have been edited to a much brighter white, which are directed straight towards the camera. This makes the audience feel uncomfortable with the eye contact, and this is a convention used and seen in existing film posters, such as those created for The Grudge. We have followed these key elements to producing a horror poster since we thought it the most professional and effective way to attract audiences.

 

WEBSITE

The internet is the revolution of ‘new media’ and is constantly growing and changing. The increased usage due to improved availability to users has meant that the internet is the most convenient way to gain information. We analysed as a group we didn’t like about websites and what we did, so we could produce the most professional looking ancillary piece. The specific website criteria we focused on were the functionality, design, content, originality and overall effectiveness. We looked at various websites such as ‘Let Me In’, to recognise the conventions of horror film websites.

The key elements we noticed were that we needed to include links such as Home, Info, Videos, Gallery and Cast to give the audience the information they needed about the film. The font used for this needed to be clear, still represent the genre and be user friendly. The whole website is on show and there is no need to scroll down, this makes the website much more user-friendly and clearer for the audience. The image used is positioned on the right hand side of the page, this again uses the golden sectors, which splits the website into three parts, making it more attractive and drawing more attention for the audience. By adding links to the bottom right hand corner of the page, it gives the opportunity to the audience to view extra information and background or exclusive content from the cast and production of Exposure. Our Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook accounts were added in order to provide this. The trailer plays automatically, and the page is locked so that until you have seen the whole trailer, none of the links will work, we could not do this however on Wix.com since it did not provide us with this feature. We also developed our website by using star ratings with comments about the film, in order to create a successful profile for the film and to influence new visitors to the site, since it will give a good impression, therefore making them want to see the film. By following the conventions from this media text, we have produced our own website, and concentrated on all aspects of functionality, content, design and orginality.

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

It is evident that our poster, website and teaser trailer are instantly recognizable alongside each other, which is excessively important for branding purposes. The make-up and costuming of our protagonist is a clear ‘pull’ and we wanted it to feature heavily in each text.


Typography
Throughout our promotional package we used the same font and colour scheme. The font colour is red to match and bring out the blood, especially in the poster, which is the same in the website and trailer. The red, white and black colour scheme has clear connotations of death, as well as isolation and vulnerability. After researching into the different styles of font used in slasher films, which in the past has been more gory and bloody, but more recently is subverting to the modernisation of culture and is typically more simple, we selected a font that had both of these elements on dafont.

Although our typography is the same in all three texts, we used slightly different colours to match the mise en scene of the particular product. For example, the colour of the title is redder in our teaser trailer because we had to ensure it stood out and contrasted with the fast editing of the shots beforehand. On the other hand, in our poster, the focus was more on the character, and so we tried to blend the title into the background more, therefore giving it a darker colour but it is still clearly visible. The website again is not focussed on the title and more on Emily's face.


Character
Our main product, the teaser trailer, is very focused on our main protagonist and consequently we did not have to hide her in our other two ancillary texts. Although the actual photograph is different, the website and poster both show Emily as a pale, bloody character, with her eyes directed straight at the audience.  This ‘look’ is continued in our main product as it includes close-ups of her face and eyes, as well as long shots still directed at the audience. This is effective in making the audience feel uncomfortable with the close proximity of the character, at the same time not letting them in, as her eyes are abnormally white.

Poster

Website

Screen shot of trailer

In terms of the other character shown in only the teaser trailer, she is not at all featured in the other two products, meaning the audience will not recall her as a main character, which is what we wanted. We chose Emily to be the predominant character because she clearly reflects the genre with her makeup and costuming, and she is memorable.


Imagery
In our promotional package we used the same location to portray a sense of isolation. We felt using the same location was important because it coincides with the anticipated narrative of the film. The mise en scene is very dark, making Emily stand out more and to create a sense of dark imagery. We tried to use the same lighting for the teaser trailer and the photographs taken for the poster and website.

3. What have you learnt through audience feedback?

This was an important process for us to evaluate whether our media piece was successful in terms of what our audience wanted. We used a variety of online tools as well as other methods to gain the feedback.

Media Screening

The screening enabled us to gain feedback from other media students. The graphs below show the results of the questionnaire they answered. From analysing the results, we found that the audience thought that the trailer fitted the intended genre ‘perfectly well’, of which the majority correctly thought as the horror genre.

Although, the most popular sub-genre the audience established in our trailer was psychological, when it is slasher, suggesting that we did not make it evident enough that it was this sub-genre. They accurately determined that the target audience would be made up of both males and females over the age of 18.

It was evident that the audience found the props/mise-en-scene the most effective element in the trailer, especially the make-up, where some commented that it was very impressive. In addition to this, the top three most memorable moments for our audience in our trailer was the make-up, the close-up of Emily’s eyes and Emily’s character in general. This clearly demonstrates our strengths in the mise-en-scene division, which was an important horror convention in order to make it realistic and scary.

Lighting was our least most effective element in the trailer. The use of dark lighting was needed to create the right horror atmosphere, however we have learnt that it would be better to edit the brightness of our footage in post-production and film the shots in daylight conditions to avoid a grainy picture, which may be the reason for its low ranking.

Social Networking Sites

We used sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to set up pages/accounts on which we constantly uploaded updates, and posted links to our teaser trailer, which also enabled our audience to comment on what they thought. The results are shown below:

This feedback has been very positive, again highlighting the that mise-en-scene was our very strong point. But some constructive criticism has been given, for example we could have used a bigger variety of shots, but the majority stated that it was 'creepy', 'horrendous' and 'terrifying', which tells us that we did a good job in convincing our audience.

Overall, we have learnt that our genre of slasher/horror was not predominant enough, although we made sure that the mise-en-scene: make-up and costuming of the 'evil' character was the key of the trailer. It was the favourite and best element of the trailer according to our audience, however it could have been more gory to emphasise the slasher sub-genre.
The feedback we have received has helped us to make decisions during the process, the positive feedback has given us confidence for future projects, and the constructive criticism has helped us highlight which areas we would need to improve on. 

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

For both our teaser trailer and ancillary tasks, we used a range of new media technologies to achieve our final outcome.

Research and Planning

We used the internet as our main source of researching to broaden our knowledge on our target audience and existing sources of inspiration.

We created a Facebook group so we could promote any questionnaires we produced on websites such as Survey Monkey and ask for quick feedback on any makeup ideas or possible locations, along with aiming questionnaires at our target audience to explore a wider knowledge of what they wanted to see in a teaser trailer. We also created a Twitter, Flickr and YouTube account to regularly update any followers/friends.    

When designing our poster, we searched the internet for inspiration and to incorporate the typical codes and conventions of a horror film poster. To make our poster have a true concept of a horror film, we searched the internet so we could find a font that could do this for us. We found website Dafont.com which allowed us to download a font of our choice which we then included on our poster, website and teaser trailer.      

    
FONT Website: http://www.dafont.com/neoprint-m319.font
YOUTUBE Account: http://www.youtube.com/user/mediagroup7

Construction

New media technologies were used for every aspect of constructing our teaser trailer and ancillary tasks.

We used cameras to film and capture all of our scenes, including some footage taken on mobile cameras. We then uploaded this to iMovie, a video editing programme where images could be cut up and repositioned, the actual image could be manipulated with the variety of effects available and titles could also be added to produce the final product. The sound for the trailer was originally downloaded off YouTube with the permission of the composer, and we then edited it in GarageBand, a music creator and editor programme, which enabled us to make the music parallel to what was being shown on screen.

To produce our website we used website builder Wix.com, which allowed us to assemble a suitable website for our genre since it provided us with a large variety of tools. We managed to manipulate the website background image on photo editing software Photoshop, in order to get the best lighting, colours and overall look of the photograph to fit with what we had researched as a conventional website image for the horror genre.

Evaluation

We also used the popular internet sites Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to gain overall feedback on our finished piece. It allowed us to show and share our work with anyone around the world, providing us with a broad range of comments and opinions.

YouTube in particular, enabled us to see how successful our trailer 
was, which currently has over 1,700 views.