Media studies evaluation questions

1. Media studies evaluation questions By Lois Zoppi, Meline Nabuurs and Claire-Louise Middleton any text written in black is a group contribution

2. Question one: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

3. Genres offer a set of expectations that create a clear idea, for the audience, about what is possible in the film’s diegesis (Nick Lacey Introduction to film 2005). He also comments that all those who consume films understand genre (although they may not use the term). Essentially what he is saying is that people familiarise themselves with the “norms” of genres and although they may not be aware of what the genre is or what genre is in general they can know what to expect and know what they expect from the film. Essentially this diagram shows that there is a clear relationship between the production companies and the audience. The audience expects standards and certain conventions form a film and the production companies know what their specific audience expects and wants producer Audience Film Our piece follows the generic conventions of fantasy films quite closely ; we are informed of these conventions through our research, research we acquired through watching numerous fantasy trailers, analysing poster conventions and various film magazines

4. The conventional characters in fantasy films often follow a simple good and evil role pattern, which relates to theorist Levi Strauss’s work on binary opposition. The protagonist can be either male or female, and are often in groups of siblings or friends, sometimes with parental figures as well. The characters usually have some sort of connection with each other so that injury or death have more impact on the viewer.

5. Giving characters clear roles and personalities means the focus is more on the events in the film, as fantasy films are more about action rather than psychology. Conventional female characters would have long, blonde hair, signifying purity and innocence; brunette girls in these films are more involved with action in the film. In our piece, we have chosen an actor with blonde hair to fit into this convention. This website was of particular use during this research: http://www.filmsite.org/fantasyfilms.html

6. Predictably, fantasy films include lots of non-human characters, commonly with anthropomorphic features, who can be either good or bad characters. Examples in existing films would be Mr. Tumnus from ‘The Chronicals of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’, Andrew Adamson, 2005, as well as Aslan, and the white rabbit in the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ films. I put a lot of thought into these characters.

7. The various animals were chosen for their symbolism, for instance the stag – an animal signifying power – is the character with the intent of overthrowing evil in the film. The lion, as in The Chronicles of Narnia, is often portrayed as wise, insightful character. I have talked about the costumes made for these characters in more detail in the post, ‘Costumes’ [27/11/10].

8. Our character, Madison, complies with conventional characterisation as she is a blonde girl and despite her young age she is courageous, as she sets out to cure her fear on her own. In the book ‘Introduction to Film’ by Nick Lacey, it’s said that ‘audiences usually simultaneously want something familiar ... and a small degree of novelty [the difference]’; although we have followed a lot of the conventions apparent in fantasy films, we have challenged some as well. For instance, the presence of parents or other family members. We have not shown nor mentioned anyone related to our main character Madison, but the scenes set in real life are centred around two sisters, which brings in the family element in another way, so while it is not a chief element in our film it is still there in a subtle way. However, the characters in the ‘Narnia’ films are apart from their parents from the beginning due to it being set during the war, so our film in a way relates to this.

9. We have used several fantasy conventions in our media piece. In most fantasy films the characters used are children, to portray some sort of innocence, and we have used a young blonde girl as a main character, like in Alice in Wonderland. We have tried to emphasize our young characters age and innocence by dressing her in nightwear through the whole film, which of course include pink fluffy slippers.

10. Every fantasy film has a bad character, and ours is 'the Karawan'. In our trailer this character wears a mask which has black feathers all around it which we have used because black is typically a 'bad guy' colour. We also have nice characters, dressed up in neutral colours so that the costumes don't give away too much information.

11. Most well known fantasy films use a forest as an important location, Harry Potter has the 'dark forest' which is a place where all mysterious and mostly dangerous creatures hide which is an important location throughout all of the films. Alice runs away through a forest and falls into a tree which lands her in Wonderland, and a door leads the children in Narnia to a magical forest which beholds magical creatures and a lot of snow.

12. We have used the general idea of a 'portal' which leads our character Madison to magical forest. Our portal is an old elapsed shed door, which looks scary and slightly unsafe. We have used tea lights to set out a path towards the shed. The fairytale I've written says 'Her path was lit up by fire' and because we couldn't exactly turn Lois' garden on fire, we decided to do it safe with tea lights. This turned out to be more work than expected as the wind blew out the candles every few minutes. The general idea we had was to have bright light coming through the cracks of the door, but this proved to be slightly impossible, so we have used a separate shot of light shining through a single crack in the door.

13. After our character walks through this door, she finds herself in a big, bright magical forest. The tree we have used to serve as our portal in the forest was the biggest tree there was; it was almost twice as big as all of the other trees. I have posted a picture of this tree on the blog. It looked about one and a half metres wide and I felt it had quite a magical sense to it.

14. When Madison looks into the forest she looks amazed and blows out her candle. This candle was quite an important prop because it is supposed to signify the time the story unfolds in. Our fairytale is an old story, and the tea lights and single candle Madison walks around with should convey this. The candle holder we used was quite old looking, and fit our story quite perfectly. We haven't posted a picture of it on our blog, but it is on our poster. However when she spots a necklace on the floor, she puts down her candle on the floor and leaves it there.

15. We have used several editing techniques to enhance the sense of surrealism in our trailer. Most fantasy films have brighter colours which makes the overall film look unreal. We have used this in the shots of the forest. In contrast to that we have to tried to flatten out shots of the 'normal' world, but compared to the final shots of the forest this was unnecessary. Films like Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter use darker, blue effects when the bad character is in the shot to create a colder and more hateful atmosphere. We have tried to put this in our trailer, but it looked completely out of place in contrast with the other shots. Another effect we have used is the shine effect. This makes the forest shots brighter and creates higher contrasts with the whites against any other colour.

16. Our piece was made with the intention of including as much Iconography as was possible. We have quite a few reasons for this, the first reason is so that the audience automatically recognises the genre of the film we were intending on making purely by viewing the teaser trailer, secondly so that we could fit as many of the forms and conventions of the genre we were making into just the teaser trailer, and lastly and probably most importantly because our audience is young children who thrive off of repetition of key features. These key features include things like the themes of the film, the characters and the colours and background areas these key features that are included in the iconography are the forms and conventions of the genre.

17. Within the genre of fantasy films story books are very predominant; they are often featured in fantasy films for a number of reasons, for example in the film InkHeart (Iain Softley 2008) the main storyline is about a man who can read a book and have the characters come to life. In the Harry Potter (Chris Columbus 2001) films there is always a specific spell book that needs to be found. In our piece we decided that a young girl would be having a book read to her, and as the story was being read that we would find out that the main character is not in fact the young character who is having the story read to her but in fact the young character who is the main character in the book.

18. The clothing that the characters were wearing was one of the conventions that we tried to effectively use; the main character of our piece was wearing a long tee-shirt which did look like an old fashioned night gown and a pair of slippers. This was one of the ways we reached the convention of having old fashioned aspects of the film. another way that we reached this convention was via the general story line of a young girl wondering off on her own for a long time, in the current time most parents do not let young children wonder off on their own as there is too much fear of the world, however in “old fashioned” times people had nothing to worry about, and it was a carefree worry-free world and that is why we decided to go with this convention in that respect. Lastly we tried to make it look old fashioned is by having the young main character holding a candle in an old fashioned candle holder. These ideas come from such films as Alice in wonderland (Tim Burton 2010) which begins with a very old fashioned scene in which the all characters use a posh, and old English style of lexis, they are all dressed in old fashioned ball gowns and suits and the main character is arriving at her engagement party that she does not know about and to someone she doesn’t even really like.

19. Another way in which we have followed the conventions is that we have followed the character roles as are depicted in the theory of PROPP. The theory of PROPP is that you can divide characters in fantasy films into eight rolls which are as follows: the Villain is the Karawan, he is the character which causes all the mayhem and destruction in the film the hero is Madison as she is the main character who goes on a journey and rescues the “princess” the donor would be Abban as he is the person that drops the necklace that the hero finds and then tells the story and offers to help in return for the necklace back. the helper would be Abban as he aids the hero through her journey to rescue the “princess” the princess would be Madison’s mother, as she is the character that is the reward for Madison’s bravery the father is the lion character who as he is the one who rewards Madison for her bravery the dispatcher would be the girl who is having a story read to her, because if the story wasn’t being read there would be no adventure the false hero would be The Karawan as he is the only “villain character”

20. We haven’t only tried to follow the conventions of the trailer, but have also focused a lot of time on the other two media texts that we have created which are the magazine cover and the poster. These two texts also have very clear forms and conventions of their own, for example with the magazine one of the most important conventions we had to think about was whether we were making it for the right magazine or not, for example it wouldn’t make any sense for us to put our film as the front cover of Empire Magazine because it wouldn’t reach our target audience, but having it as the front cover of Little White Lies does make sense as it is much more likely to reach our target audience, even if they personally read it themselves they will probably hear about it via word of mouth in the end.

21. Similar actions took place when thinking about our poster; we wanted to capture as much interest as we possibly could with our poster as it is the thing that will ultimately make our audience decide that they want to see the film. We looked at quite a few posters and found some generic conventions these were for example bright colours, a tag line, information about the people involved in the making of the film and pictures of people and things that hold a significant importance to the film, we took these ideas and used them when creating our poster so that it looked good enough to be the main promotion feature of our promotion package.

22. Question two: How effective is the combination of you main product and ancillary texts?

23. When we were making all three of our media texts we had in mind a clear idea of what kind of image we wanted to create with them, the image we wanted create was one of childlike innocence, that in theory, most children can relate to. This childlike innocence that we wanted to create was one in which the believed that what was happening in the film could happen in real life, and those who are too old to believe that this could actually happen would wish that it could.

24. We have shown our main character Madison on both our magazine cover and poster. For the poster, this is very much in line with the conventions of fantasy film’s printed media, which have changed very little over the years. They usually feature the main character in the middle of the poster, often in some kind of action pose, while the supporting characters take on a more neutral pose. The title is generally around the centre of the poster, large in size and either in gold or silver. The different images of the characters are softly layered over each other, the colours in the background featuring yellows and blues mostly. I have made a detailed blog post about the conventions of fantasy posters, under ‘Poster analysis’ [30/01/11]. By keeping our image of Madison the same, or at least similar on both the poster and magazine cover, we have made a brand image that will make our film more memorable. We chose to use an image from a significant point in the film: when Madison first walks into another world that is a captivating part of the story and would hopefully put some sense of curiosity into a viewer. I made use of very recognisable iconography on the poster: the pocket watch. While clocks themselves have many connotations, films like ‘Alice in Wonderland’, Clyde Geronimi, 1951, have secured them as fantasy icons. To reference Nick Lacey’s ‘Introduction to Film’ again, sounds as well as images are associated with specific genres; I have discussed the iconic sounds I included in the soundtrack for our teaser trailer in post ‘Soundtrack’ [14/01/11].

25. Web 2.0 is a very effective tool for film promotion. For our film, we have considered quite a few options, and have decided on making use of social networking sites, the like of which are prolific in the advertisement of many products aside and as well as films. Another, relatively new technology is apps, commonly used on iPhones. As we thought it was unlikely that children of seven years old would have their own iPhone, parents could download the apps themselves for their children if they owned one. Social sites like Facebook and MySpace would be good, but one that is used more by younger people like Bebo perhaps, would be of more use to us. Statistics compiled on this site: http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-media-stats/2009-social-network-analysis-report/#bebo suggests that 45% of users on Bebo are between the ages of 0-17 which covers our ideal audience. Also, information in the UK Film Council’s annual report for 2007-08 state that 31% of 7-14 year olds visit the cinema once a month, showing that as an age group they are quite involved with film and would probably be looking out for releases.

26. In our media products we have used a few stills from our trailer. The overall sense of our trailer should be adventurous as our characters starts a journey and the music swells up lightly throughout the whole thing. The beginning is quite calm and that is the sense I have decided to go for creating the magazine cover. I have tried out a few different stills but decided that the shot in which she first walks into the forest sets the best 'feel' for the whole film. I have edited it to be black and white, which gives an overall calm feeling to the whole thing. I've kept the features on the magazine to a minimum by only slowing the magazine's logo and one headline. In my research I saw that most covers by Little white lies have an edition title, for example they have a Kick ass edition, this is why I have called our magazine cover 'The Madison issue'. I have used simple white text for this, however that wasn't our initial idea. We wanted the headline to 'shine' like the text in our trailer does, make it look as if there was light shining right through it. After a few hours of experimenting on Photoshop we realised that we couldn't make it look like we wanted to, and decided to just keep it simple with plain text. I have used a filter over our image, because this made it look unnatural and made it look slightly mysterious.

27. The other products which we have created to complete the package are the film poster and iphone apps. We have done some quick research into book covers because our film is supposedly based on a novel. While researching fantasy film posters we found out that they often include images of all of the most important characters, with the main character in the middle of the poster. Directly below the main characters picture there is often the film title, sometimes followed by some sort of catchy phrase. The corners often show a few location shots, such as the dark forest on a Harry Potter poster. Lois has tried her best to create a poster like this, which wasn't easy because all we had were screen shots of the trailer, but even with the lack of material I think she did very well. The main picture on the poster is the same picture I have used to the magazine cover because it seems like a good idea to give the audience one main picture to relate our film to. Claire has researched and created our film promotion plan. Her plan was to show short trailers in cinema's and on television between 6 and 8, a time when family's often watch TV together. This would make a lot of sense because our film is aimed at younger children and their families, and as far as I know young children don't spend a lot of time on the internet browsing for films to watch.

28. We managed to succeed at creating the right image for our film this by having bright welcoming colours, by having both friendly and bad characters, and by having a young, female character being brave and grown up. We also wanted to emphasize the innocence of the film by making it so that you don’t have to think too hard to understand it, because the main themes is the film and explained and are emphasized via the iconography of the film. Web 2.0 is going to be the main feature of advertisement for our film, and we are going to do this in a wide variety of ways. Firstly we were going to use an idea from another films promotion which would be the make yourself an avatar (James Cameron 2009) which was an advert that was at the side of the FaceBook page and you could literally make yourself look like an avatar, we were going to do our own version of this where girls could literally put their face in the place of Madison’s, and also put a quiz on FaceBook which would in the end tell you which character you are from the film. Although we have decided to do this on FaceBook we have also decided to put this on MySpace and bebo, as bebo is aimed more towards younger children we also decided that it would be a good idea to put up a link to watch the trailer on it and to have pop up adverts that link you to the website. We also decided to make an app for the IPod touch and IPad which would be called the Madison the adventure game, we decided to do this as it is good promotion to have a Lite version which we would give away for free and only allow you to play a bit of the game, this is going to make the audience more likely to want to buy the full version of the game and see the film.

29. Question three: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

30. We have all gotten audience feedback in different ways are have shown it to a different audience, we got audience feedback from other media students which Lois Zoppi and Meline Nabuurs wrote about on our blog, and Claire-Louise Middleton and Lois Zoppi asked people who were more likely to be our target audience and wrote about it on our blog.

31. I used a questionnaire for my audience feedback. I posed constructive comments, which can be read in my post ‘Rushes Feedback’ [14/01/11] that would help us construct a more successful teaser trailer. The feedback in that post is based on our rushes and many points made were taken forward as we edited our piece. To get a realistic picture of the effectiveness of our footage, I asked people of varying ages ranging from 12 to 40. Choosing people of these ages created a ‘model family’ that reflected our target audience and thus the feedback we received was relevant. Our second set of audience feedback was in the form of notes made from watching several screenings of the near-finished product. This feedback can be seen on the blog under ‘Audience Feedback’ [24/01/11], which is concentrated on sound and titles.

32. I showed the trailer, poster and magazine front cover to one nine year old and two eleven year olds all three of which were female because they are the most important age group of our target audience, I then showed the three media texts to the girl’s mothers whom are aged 30 and 34 because they would also be part of our target audience as they would be the people who would be taking their children to the cinema to see the film and be buying the other merchandise that is linked to the film. From the three girls we got three different types of a response, one of the eleven year olds said that she didn’t quite understand what was going on, she got the gist of the storyline and this was enough but there were things that she didn’t understand, we did discuss that this may have been because she isn’t a very strong reader and maybe couldn’t read what the title cards said, as they do explain quite a bit of the narrative. From this bit of feedback we concluded that it may be more important to have the title cards on screen for a slightly longer time and cut out some of the unimportant footage, which is an acceptable thing to do in order to affectively reach our target audience. She did however comment positively on the use of bright exaggerated colours she commented on the fact that they interested her and held her attention, she said that they were exciting and made it clear that it was going to be a “magical film”

33. The second eleven year old said that she could obviously tell that the film was a fantasy, because of the music, the title cards (not only what they said but also the font and colours in which they were written) the non-human characters, the bright and over exaggerated colours and lastly because of the voice over, she said that the voice over really fitted in with the fantasy genre and the fairy tale theme. She also said that the poster is the type of poster that would make her want to see the film The eight year old said that the trailer was fun and enjoyable, which correctly goes with the themes we wanted to create with it, she wasn’t as excited about the magazine front cover, as a group we discussed this but in general we though that it was ok if the younger members of our target audience weren't very interested in the magazine front cover as that is the piece that is aimed more at the parents. She seemed to really enjoy the poster however , this was mostly because it was brightly coloured and very child accessible which was exactly what we were going for. The thirty year old who was the first of the mothers that I showed the three pieces to said that the trailer looked like the sort of film that she would happily take her children to see at the cinema, she said it looked like a film hat they could all enjoy together as a family as there are aspects that could entertain the whole family and keep them all interested. This is good because we wanted to aim for such a wide target audience. She also agreed that the poster was one that both of her children would be interested in, which is something that is rare because of their age difference and different interests, which also is what we wanted to aim for when making the pieces

34. The thirty year old who was the first of the mothers that I showed the three pieces to said that the trailer looked like the sort of film that she would happily take her children to see at the cinema, she said it looked like a film hat they could all enjoy together as a family as there are aspects that could entertain the whole family and keep them all interested. This is good because we wanted to aim for such a wide target audience. She also agreed that the poster was one that both of her children would be interested in, which is something that is rare because of their age difference and different interests, which also is what we wanted to aim for when making the pieces she also liked the magazine cover, she said that if she liked the way a film looks in a magazine she would be more likely to take her children to see it at the cinema, she said that the front cover was creative and quite original and was visually appealing to her. The thirty four year old held a slightly different opinion, she said that it looked like one of the film that the children should go and see with their friends as it would not be appealing to the rest of the family. This was a bit baffling as we had tried to hard to appeal to such a broad audience, however we did conclude that this wasn't really a big deal because there was always going to be people who weren't going to be interested by our film because not everyone is interested by the same genres. However she did feel that the poster was visually pleasing, because of the use of bright colours and how there is a mixture of different stills which are all interesting in some way. She said that the magazine front cover was very good visually although she thought that maybe it would be better if there was slightly more information on the film on the front cover, this however didn't fit into the generic conventions so it didn't really worry us that much.

35. When our group went away for half term we put our rough cut on youtube so that we could show this to friends and family to receive helpful feedback. After the first viewing we had a few comments which were quite helpful. The first one was that we were trying to put too much narrative in our trailer. We had already noticed this, as it seemed we were trying to put our whole film into a short 1 minute trailer. This made it seem more like an opening sequence. A very important comment was that there was little difference between the real world and the magical world. This resulted in trying out different effects to try and get a more surrealistic feel to the shots in the forest. We ended up using various effects like the shine, enhanced colours and higher contrast, which together created a very satisfying result. At first it was very hard to tell which character was good and which character was bad. We've tried our best to fix this with some editing techniques, for example making the shot of the bad guy cross over with the voice over which talks about nightmares.

36. The second viewing we had was during our lesson and the only comment that I can recall was that our magical characters didn't look very convincing. Honestly I think this was a very stupid comment. Of course it is very difficult to create convincing and realistic fantasy characters when you don’t have a few million pounds to spend on it. Lois has spend a lot of time on creating the masks used in our media piece and we were all satisfied with her creations. The thing we found comfort in was that our media class isn't even close to our target audience and the characters will look a lot more realistic to young children then it does to people our age, who are used to seeing the best effects created by million pounds worth of equipment.

37. Question four: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluating stages?

38. We have used a variety of media technologies to create our promotion package. During the research stage we used the Internet extensively, watching trailers and documentary extracts on Youtube, using the blogs to discuss the development of our work and referring to numerous websites to further extend our research. Whilst filming we made use of the digital cameras to film and sound equipment to capture audio, as well as an SLR stills camera to get images for a transition idea we wanted to try out, but in the end didn’t use.

39. I used Garageband to create our soundtrack, which is a relatively simple mixing program that has similarities to the editing software we used for the visuals. I recorded each track into Garageband and then took time to put appropriate effects on and choose the right instrument to use. As with the voice-over, I used volume levels to make sure the music was emphasised in the right places once put over the trailer. I was making the soundtrack in time to the visuals so it would fit better overall. We decided this way, although it was a lot more complicated, would be better for our piece as most of the fantasy soundtracks we looked up on websites such as www.freeplaymusic.com didn’t sound right.

40. For our poster and magazine cover we used Photoshop; I spent quite a lot of time on this program to create our poster, and I used a lot of the tools on it. The colours I chose to enhance were the greens of the forest, which is a main location in the film and also yellows that signify the lights that we had coming out of the shed, also of course because yellow is a common colour used in fantasy posters. I bleached out some of the shots to add to the light effect, using normal brushes but altering their settings to get stronger effects. I used a lot of different layers to put the different images together to tie in with the montage-like conventions of fantasy posters. All of the images I used in the poster were from our footage, so while that meant that they were all relevant, the quality was quite a problem. As our poster would be printed A3 size, the images would pixelate a lot and the effectiveness of the poster would fall significantly.

41. We have all created our individual initial research powerpoint about the fantasy genre. Personally I'm not very good with powerpoint so decided to just stick to the basics of the research. Most of the information I had was from the internet, the rest is what I found out by myself by watching fantasy films. We have used various technologies to create our trailer as it is now. We have used special recording equipment for our voice over, recorded in Lois' house during our first day of shooting. Later we used this equipment in the forest to record some background sounds, which we later dismissed to give the music full attention. The soundtrack we use in our trailer is created from scratch by Lois on her laptop, using a special software which makes your keyboard function like a piano. We exported our trailer onto Lois' usb so that she could take it home and create the perfect soundtrack to fit all of the events in our trailer. I'm not sure how it works because I don't have these kinds of programs on my laptop, but I'm sure she will tell you all about it.

42. We have used different ways of communicating as a group such as emailing and texting during half terms when I was back home in Holland and the rest of my group was here in England. The media technology which plays the biggest role in our whole project would be the general idea of web 2.0, by this I mean posting our rushes and rough cuts on youtube and in this way enabled friends and family to view and comment on our trailer. The last presentational method we will use as a project group is powerpoint. We have decided to all do our individual evaluation questions, but cover different things in depth and later putting all of our answers together into one large powerpoint.

43. When we were editing the footage we used the editing program AdobePremier, this software was good for editing as it allowed us to do a number of things to our footage to turn it more into a fantasy. From this software we were able to change the order, length and transitions of the different shots. It allowed us to put our own music and sounds over the footage. We used these tools to our advantage, as because we were making a fantasy we needed over exaggerated colours which we were able to do using this software.