Evaluation

You should all now be wrapping up all elements of your coursework.

Reminder about marks:

Planning and Research: 20
Teaser trailer: 40
Poster: 10
Magazine: 10
Evaluation: 20

The evaluation must answer 4 essential questions:

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

This refers to the conventions of teaser trailers, film posters and magazine covers, and is not limited to genre conventions. You might consider the following prompts to answer this question:

- how long is your trailer?
- how many clips did you use?
- how much of the film narrative is revealed?
- what transitions/captions/graphics etc did you use?
- where is your trailer intended to be shown?
- In what ways do all of the above reinforce/challenge/develop the usual way of doing things of real teaser trailers?
- How did you go about designing your poster?
- What information did you include? (actors names? release date? etc)
- How did you chose the main image?
- What were your influences?
- How did you chose the name of your magazine?
- Why did you chose the colour scheme that you've used?
- Describe the creative process of laying out the cover - 

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

This question is all about the extent to which all 3 production tasks - the trailer, the poster and the magazine cover - are a unified promotional campaign.
- Who are the target audience for each of the productions? (same as each other? different?)
- How are the products targeting that audience?
- Have you used any motifs which are recognisable across all 3 products?
- Are there any other themes, enigmas or style elements (such as fonts/graphics) which unify the products?

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

For this you need to show your rough-cut or final video to as many people as possible and ask them for feedback.

- You should aim to use Youtube and/or social media to do this.
- We can also do this in class - both media and film classes are viable audience focus groups.
- You be quite critical of your work. Does the genre come across? Is a sense of the narrative established? Does it generate enigma? etc.
- How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

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

As with your AS coursework, this should be quite a technical discussion of the hardware and software you have used.

- You need to be quite detailed in discussion of technologies.
- Don't just say that you used, say, Photoshop - describe exactly how you used it, which tools, filters, blending options did you use to achieve certain effects?
- What were the limitations of the technology? - for example the hardware we use is still based on DV tapes, which require you to digitise the footage, shooting direct to SD cards would have speeded up the process.
- Discuss your use of the blog.

As always, this must be presented creatively making full use of the blog's capabilities. That means...

DON'T JUST UPLOAD A 4-PART ESSAY TO YOUR BLOG
DON'T JUST UPLOAD A POWERPOINT TO SCRIBD AND PUT THAT ON YOUR BLOG
DO - use images, video and text together
DO - use hyperlinks and tags
DO - have links to your group's blogs

LASTLY....

Your evaluation questions need to be very clearly labelled and identifiable. You could easily lose marks if they are not identified as being the evaluation.

You should also upload the finished trailer (via Youtube/Vimeo), poster and magazine to your blog clearly identified as the final versions of each along with a brief outline of your role in its production.

Audience research and reception

Group leaders! Post a summary of your group's research into the audience reception of Paranormal Activity - make sure that you consider which of the two effects models that we have studied apply to your findings

Magazine Cover Analysis

Magazine Analysis

Promotional Case Study Two: Paranormal Activity

Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007) Analyse one of the following in small groups (which should be identified in the post response) Official Trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UxLEqd074 TV spot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thuhDswyQjw Official poster (below) 1. Identify three key messages 2. Identify three examples of the distinctive use of media codes and conventions 3. Apply semiotics terms to your reading (denotation/connotation/myth; icon/index/symbol; preferred/ negotiated/reading)

Pitch

Pitch

Your group will deliver a pitch for your trailer/poster/magazine campaign on Thursday 11 October.

The pitch should include the following:

• Have bullet points and be prepared to discuss/elaborate on your idea (whole film).
• Talk about influences and sources of inspiration - use images/video to help
• Discuss the trailer idea – use images or video to help explain your ideas for production design.
• Discuss initial ideas for posters and magazine covers – sketch out how they might look.
• How will these work together as a unified campaign?... think about the visual themes and motifs which will help to create a 'brand' for the film.
• Design a short questionnaire in order to get feedback on the idea.

To be delivered by your group on THUR 11 OCT 2012

Planning and Research Task List

This is not an exhaustive list, really it's a series of prompts to get you started.

This is not AS, you should take the initiative to research what you need to research. Teaser trailers are not as formulaic as opening sequences so your research will be driven by the kind of teaser your group is going to produce.

Also what form your reasearch takes is much more up to you this time. Remember the marking criteria of "excellent use of digital technology" and "excellent level of care in presentation".

So get creative - make your blog look good. Invite people to look at it and comment on it (good use blog format).

•Research – trailers/posters/magazine covers

•Treatment

•Storyboard

•Script

•Pitch presentation

•Audience Research

•Props/Costume list (evidence of organisation)

•Production schedule

•Shot list

•Call sheets & actor release forms

Media Language Analysis

This is your analysis of the technical construction of a teaser trailer.

Your teaser trailer will ultimately be graded on how convincing it is. To make it convincing, you need to investigate the conventions of real ones.

Here are some questions you need to consider:

• How long is it?
• How many clips does it include?
• What type of transitions are used between clips?
• Roughly how long is each clip?
• What logos and institutional information are included?
• What other text appears?... (often just a release date & web address with teasers)
• Discuss the graphics and SFX
• Discuss the soundtrack - voiceovers? what mood does it create? etc
• What about the typography of the film title? How does it reinforce the genre/themes of the film?

It's a good idea to find a teaser trailer in the same genre as the trailer you intend to produce. Essentially you can use the answers to all of the above questions to form a template for your own trailer.

Promotion Case One: The Shining

Select one of the four promotional artefacts

Identify the key messages explain how they have been constructed using semiotic and medium-specific vocabulary

Consider what is being offered and how your expectations are being managed

Who is the target audience?

The Official Cinematic Trailer on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b726feAhdU

The Original TV “spot”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQY2PkzkiN8&feature=related

The Saul Bass poster
 http://wellmedicated.com/showcase/saul-bass-jack-of-all-trades/

The alternative cinematic release poster
http://www.allposters.co.uk/-sp/The-Shining-Posters_i2923025_.htm

Upload your notes with the link or annoted poster when completed

Film Poster

When researching film posters part of what you are looking for is how it communicates the brand of the film and how it is unified with the trailer and magazine cover.... but part of it is also just getting ideas for your own poster.

So here's how to completely rip off an existing idea (no one will ever know hee hee!).

I was sitting at one of the Macs in H120 trying to think of what makes a good poster. The answer was staring me in the face - literally. I was looking at the poster for Capote on the wall right in front of me, which I think is actually a DVD cover - it doesn't really matter for the purpose of this post, but it looks something like this:

So I searched for an image of a man in a similar pose. You will have to use your own photography, but doing a quick search this is what I found:

Then I thought - I need a background.... I wanted to get that same low horizon idea from the Capote poster and after a bit of searching I found this:

This was perfect because it stes up a kind of blue colour scheme. Here's the resulting poster with some notes:

This took me about an hour including all the searching and downloading.... if it was all original photography it would get an A... but probably not full marks - even copying real media will only get you so far. It's a bit blank and could be cleverer.

You should start thinking about your film and print work.

Come see me for more detail on how to achieve these effects.

THE BRIEF

Present a promotion package for a new film which includes

1. A teaser trailer (30-90 seconds) - (40 marks – group production)
2. A Film Magazine cover featuring your film (10 marks – individual production)
3. A Poster for your film (10 marks – individual production)

As usual you also have to present planning and research on a blog (20 marks) and an evaluation (20 marks)./ Both of these MUST be done individually. The best place to start is looking at teaser trailers.

DON'T plan on making a full theatrical trailer, which can be anything from 2 - 4 minutes - because that is not what the brief asks for. Teaser trailers can be very creative. They sometimes don't even feature any footage from the film. They often just raise awareness of a film in a clever way. A classic example of a teaser is this one for The Dark Knight done with sound-bites from the film and graphics.
Another creative way of raising film awareness - especially for a highly anticipated "movie event" such as Prometheus is to shoot extra footage (not intended for the film) in order to present mini-stories based on the audience's expectations of the narrative.... What does that mean?... First look at the tradition style teaser trailer for Prometheus. It cuts film footage together with a new sound track to make the film appear very exciting...

Now look at these two "virals" for the same film. A viral is a short film you hope will be passed around and shared by your fanbase, spreading in the fashion of a virus. This is a very cheap means of distribution - it doesn't cost anything, unlike a TV commercial. The trick is to make the teaser something unusual and creative... something worthy of passing on to a friend. These two teasers don't feature any footage from the film:


Fine - you may say - but you will not be able to produce anything like this as it would take a huge budget... so have a look at this example. This is the kind of thing you could easily produce... First look at the full theatrical trailer for this American Indie film Blue Ridge


Now observe how this is turned into a shorter more stylised teaser:
You should look at lots of trailers to get an idea what you want to produce. A good place to start is this website - http://www.traileraddict.com.As usual you should start a blog to record all your research. In the title have some combination of your name and G324 Advanced Portfolio.