Evaluation Question 1

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

Horror Trailer

• To get to grips with how a horror trailer would usually look in order to make ours effective as possible, we all deconstructed several appropriate trailers from films that linked well to our concept.
• We found that a general structure for the trailers started with equilibrium to give the audience a false sense of security followed by disequilibrium at the climax. We used this convention by beginning the trailer with the victims on a usual day before they are captured, which is when the disequilibrium begins with uncomfortable and disturbing images of their torture.
• This is also when it begins to change pace from slow to fast-paced.
• Our trailer also finishes with a scare after the title & release date which is conventional for horror (see picture below)
• Slasher horrors use lots of disgusting images including blood and gore which is achieved in our trailer through use of 'Chelsea Grin’ make-up and the action of hammering a nail into a victim’s eye (see picture below)

• We developed this convention by not showing too many shots of the actual torture as it creates a big impact when the torture is suggested and the horror is left to the imagination. (see The Loved Ones Trailer) 

• We didn’t sacrifice any gore though as we used close-up shots of live maggots covering mouldy food for added disgust. 

• Not showing too much of the storyline is important to a teaser trailer as it’s simply meant to entice the audience and develop hype before the theatrical trailer is released.
• In terms of typography for the titles, we decided to subvert the stereotype of blood-red and  chose pink to relate to the antagonist’s girly personality that makes her an unexpected villain (see below)

Antagonist

• In modern horror films, the type of character who’d be stereotyped as weak or innocent has become the villain and in some cases used to create scares, for example scary children (Orphan, The Ring).

• We decided to conform to this new trend and use a teenage girl as the antagonist which is essentially subverting the typical stereotype of a killer.
• Using a young girl as this type of villain is unexpected because of the media’s representation of women as the victims.
• It’s not unusual for the female antagonist to be sexualised, however we decided to subvert this stereotype by giving our antagonist child-like qualities that develop on the typical creepy child (done through sound of jewelry box, mise en scene and her costume)

Sound

• As part of the equilibrium at the beginning of the trailer, we used a recording of a jewellery box which conforms to child-like/creepy/chilling sounds (blog-post); we then developed the convention by reversing the sound so it became very distorted to reflect the manic main character

• Throughout trailers, a ‘booming’ noise can be heard on reveals which is what we included in our soundtrack by adding a synthesized drum beat when the titles appear 

• When looking at trailers for inspiration for a soundtrack, we found that horror trailers used layered sound effects rather than a song; therefore we did the same using Logic for the manic scenes in our trailer.

Evaluation: Question Two - How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary texts?

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

Typography

• For both the main product and the ancillary texts the title typography was consistent. We used the same font for the website, the end of the teaser trailer and the poster.  (Title)
   This keeps within part of the overall theme of all of the texts of a ‘smokey’ effect, which ties in with the birthday party, and the birthday cake with the candles smoking on the poster (Final Poster)
• The typography of the titles in the teaser trailer and the tagline in the poster (Tagline) were the same font which was a block lettering this meant that it was consistent throughout. We chose to use a bright pink colour for the typography so that it carried on the running theme of a girl’s birthday party.

Party Theme.

•  For both the poster and the website we used a picture of our antagonist holding a birthday cake, we also only lit one of the candles so that her face was partially lit however she was still easily recognizable (Poster Photoshoot). This meant that the focus was on the main protagonist and her girlish nature. Using a large picture of her staring right at the camera was also effective as it emphasised her creepy nature.
• From the mise en scene to the typography the girlish childlike party theme is consistent. Throughout the teaser trailer we focused on the mise en scene being bright, colourful and over the top especially with the ‘Birthday party’ scene (Birthday Party). 

• For the poster we had a big birthday cake with multi coloured candles which emphasised the party theme. On the website we incorporated a party invite at the top of the website (Website Typography) we also had ‘RSVP’ typed next to all of our social networking hyperlinks. This shows the girls birthday party theme is spread throughout our main product and ancillary texts.
  
  

Horror Theme

• Although we had a ‘party theme’ throughout all three products, our genre is horror/slasher, which meant that those elements had to consistent throughout too.
• 

  Grotesque elements were consistent throughout, as in trailer we filmed food which had live maggots covering it. (Mouldy Food)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   For both the poster and the website we used the picture of our main antagonist holding a mouldy and old cake which enhanced the gruesome elements.
• On our website we focused more on the party elements of our trailer with the party invite, so horror elements were not a main focus.

Evaluation Question 3 – What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our social message we wanted to our teaser trailer to convey to our audience was the stress placed on young people, the pressure of being popular.
To develop this theme into a more concise concept for a film idea we researched our target audience to see what they would want.

• We distributed a survey amongst teenagers within the age bracket of 16 to 19, as this is who we chose to be our target audience.
• Gained a better understanding of what our demographic would expect from our chosen genre of slasher horror.
• The purpose of our survey was to use it to start developing specific ideas for our trailer which our target audience would find appealing.
• Some questions we asked were supportive of our previous research, for example asking about female antagonist was reflective of our deconstructions into horror films with female killers such as Jennifer's body and The loved ones.
• The survey was a way to help decide how we should storyboard our trailer, fast or slow paced and what the main focus should be; characters, locations or action. 
• We decided to gradually build pace from slow to increasingly fast, further trailer deconstructions like The Hunger games showed this to be a convention also.
• We did not know where our main focus should be but from audience feedback we were surprised to see that our audience wanted an establishment of characters within the trailer alongside action.
• We formed our storyboard around this idea as at the start of our trailer we have shown our victims as well as antagonist before fast paced torturous action building towards the end of the trailer. 
• One thing we chose to ignore from the results was the audience’s preferred age of the victims which was mixed ages. 
• Our original concept of having a ‘family’ as the victims fitted the majority of the audience’s opinion however casting was difficult and unreliable so we decided to have teenage victims as they were more accessible actors so went about casting 'friends'.
• The questions which assisted us the most were mise en scene, music and location as they helped narrow down the specifics of our trailer.
• Unsure of location of our trailer, whether it be set exteriorly or internally, and if more than one location would be needed 
• Audience response was that both exteriorly and internally locations wanted to be seen. 
• We followed this, so the first half of the trailer establishing characters was outside in our chosen exterior location and the torture scenes in an internal dungeon location reflecting the forced confinement of the victims and their entrapment.

Music 

• We were unsure of what music would be suited to the trailer and so this was an area in particular we wanted to see our target audience’s response.
• 53% voted slow, creepy music would be most effective so we used jewellery box music which was very unsettling alongside torture. 
• 51% of our audience said that screaming sound effects would be most appropriate, so we used this sound effect to end the trailer.
• Also found this to be conventional of horror trailers to leave the audience with a jumpy scare.
• We wanted our trailer as it was going to be fast paced jump cuts to be visually exciting so our mise en scene needed to be effective.
• We researched whether our audience would find face make up effective to create a scary, horrifying effect. 
• The result being 90% made us continue with this idea and test different make up looks to see which would work best, one being face paint and the other 3D gel.
• Our final make up looks as though a smile has been cut into the victims face, this created the most horrific, gruesome result.

The audience feedback was helpful in assisting our decisions about what our trailer should consist of and how it should look in order to be an effective horror trailer which is appealing to its target audience.

Amy Freeman

Evaluation Question 4- How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Sound

•         We used You Tube to research sound in teaser trailers and find any conventions or inspirations when carrying out  deconstructions 
•         You Tube  was also used in conjunction with  Sound Cloud   to search for uncopyrighted music and sound effects that we later planned to edit and fit to our trailer. However, we did not find any that were appropriate and therefore went on to develop our own sounds.
•          We used LogicPro to layer and combine individual sounds and recorded an audio file of a Music Box  as this was specific and unique to our teaser trailer and fitted with the opening shots of our antagonist playing with a music box as well as reflecting the child like themes. During postproduction we rewound the sound and edited speed in order to create distortion and add horror aspects too the innocent sound.

•  Using iMovie, we then inserted our sound and cut the sound to fit to the image of the trailer.

   Typography

•          To create the main title Title  we used website “myfonts.com” and downloaded the original font. Using Photo Shop we edited the font with “smudge” and “blur” effects to distort it and achieve a smokey effect, which was very effective and consistent with the birthday party theme, especially for the poster as it works parallel to the image of the birthday cake.

•         When creating typography for the tag lines and titles, we had followed conventions found in our research and chose the colour red. However, we felt that we could challenge these forms and pursue our girly child like themes by making the titles a hot pink colour.  Too add a horror aspect, we used a satin effect which creates effects and adds tone to the typography.

        Internet

•  During research and planning we used many websites such as IMDB, You Tube and Sound Cloud. For Construction our teaser trailer, website and poster we used My fonts, Wix.com and iPiccy. We have used Blogger to document all of this research and production.
• Website iPiccy editing tools such as contrast made our Poster  vibrant, fitting with the party theme.

• Wix.com allowed us to make a user friendly website as well as adding feeds from social networking sites such as Twitter , conforming to modern conventions of having links to social networking sites and helping us to appeal to our young audience by using similar technologies to them.

Equipment

•  We used Studio Lighting lamps when filming at our interior dungeon location, as there was no natural lighting. We carried out Video Tests to determine which type of lighting would be most appropriate for each scene. This allowed us to create shadows and glares adding to the horror aspect of our teaser trailer. 
• We filmed some of the apple bobbing torture scene using an underwater camera Underwater Camera   as we thought that this would be effective for showing the agony of the victim as well as disorientating the audience from an unusual angle. However, when editing we found that shots were too close due to the depth of the container that we used. Despite refilming several times and trying different containers and methods, we were unsuccessful and therefore used small snippets of the underwater shots combined with mid shots of the victims head being forced into the apple bobbing bowl.

 

Making a soundtrack.

• For part of our trailer we wanted to make a sound track from scratch so that it was completely original. For this we used 'LogicPro' so that we could make and combine different sounds to make a track.
• To start with we used a keyboard to make certain sounds, the track had to be around 20 seconds long so we started with an underlying sound as a bass. 
• We then started experimenting with different sounds from the keyboard by changing the pitch and style of sound. On 'Logic' you are able to change the settings so that you press down on a key on the keyboard and it makes a completely different sound for example, a bell ringing. 
• We then downloaded different sound effects e.g. Saw-FX, which was sawing sound, we repeated this sound so that the horror effect was enhanced.
  
• There was a total of 15 individual sound effects which we edited together to make our soundtrack, and for some of them we synthesised the sound, or added a deeper bass so that is sounded creepier. For the 'Bassline3' (see above) we increased the volume so that it became a deeper bass sound.                                                                                        For some of the sounds I layered them over each other so that the soundtrack increased its intensity as the trailer went on.
•  

Website: Adding Image, Typography and Twitter Feed

To make navigating more user friendly I used the "Advanced Styles" menu to highlight a link in a different colour when the mouse scrolls over it. Originally, I chose red to conform to horror conventions  but after discussion we changed this to a hot pink colour to play on the themes of our girly antagonist.

Adding an Image

Using the "add" option I selected "image without frame" and uploaded from our file of photos from the shoot for the poster.

We chose to use a different picture from the poster that was not overly edited but was still effective for making the audience feel uncomfortable.

I then used the dragging tools to make the picture very large and positioned it at the side of our webpage.

Adding Typography

I used the same process for adding our title as I did for adding the image. 

Add> Image> Image without Frame

When positioning the typography I chose the option of "send to back" as the black background of the image slightly overlapped the other text on the homepage.

Twitter Feed

Social convergence are a common convention on all film websites and we had already added links to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pintrest, Google Plus and RRS.

However, we felt that because of the increasing power and popularity of social networking, we should have a live twitter feed on our homepage.

Firstly, I created a Twitter account for bitter sweet using the film poster as a picture and writing a short bio.

Using the "Add" feature I selected "Social Networking" and "Twitter Feed"

I connected this to our twitter by inserting the username of the Bitter Sweet twitter page, selected the number of tweets to be shown (5 as to not take up too much room) and positioned the feed on the Homepage.

Website Plan

The criteria for our website:

• User Friendly
• Trailer must play automatically on homepage
• Only fit to one web page

This image shows the planned layout and colours of our homepage on the website.

• Black background- conforms to conventions of horror genre and plain allows other creative features to show up well.
• Image of antagonist- will be large at side of page, divereting the audiences attention and create the feeling of being watched. Will also use a similar image to the poster to create continuity.
• Typography- The same used on the poster makes it consistant and recognisable.
• Other Text- "You are invited to Lucy's" "Birthday Party" "RSVP here..."ned as small white font. We have now decided to make a simple typography for this text that will be the same as our tag line on our poster. This will be consistant in a hot pink colour, playing on the horror conventions of using subliminal red and adapting it to fit with the girly personality of our antagonist.
• Links to social convergance- a common convention all film website, ideal for us to connect with a young audience using social networking.
• Trailer playing automatically- making the website user friendly and a useful way of intreauging the audience and ensuring that they see the trailer.
• Critic quotes- a common convention of all film websites to create hype about the film by reassuring and persuading the audience.

Website typography

For the website we needed to create typography for the quotes and also additional titles.

I used the same font design as the poster for the additional titles 'You're invited to Lucy's birthday party'.

I once again used Photoshop to edit this title to look the same as the tagline on the poster and trailer. This kept the titles consistent throughout all the products we have created.

For the quotes they needed stand out against the black background so thought white would do this best but I used the satin effect on Photoshop once again to create the tonal effect so the text didn't look so flat.
The font is in italics which highlights more so that it has been quoted. 


Amy Freeman

Final website

Our final website includes the same image, typography and bright pink colour scheme as the poster to keep a sense of continuity and consistency. 

After looking into other film websites we noticed they include lots of social networking links so we included Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and Google+ links. 
As well as this a twitter feed showing current tweets made about Bitter Sweet. 

Another convention is to have quotes about the film and ratings displayed on the website.

This is the website address for our film website which promotes our teaser trailer.

http://amyamydaisylibby.wix.com/bittersweet

Amy Freeman

Music Box.

• For part of the sound we recorded a music box playing. It was a traditional music box which played a child like tune. This helped our trailer conform to the stereotype that child like music is played to make something become creepier. There were two music box sounds we could have chosen, the first being the pink one which is being used in the teaser trailer as it is more girly.
• For the second music box we recorded the sound as it was a better lullaby which was more appropriate to use in our trailer.
• At first we recorded almost 30 seconds of the music, however we only needed to use around 5 seconds so we split the sound clip until we had just the right amount and it began and finished at an appropriate point. 
• We decided to place the sound of the music box playing as the production company was fading out, so we started the tune quietly and increased the volume as different clips started playing.
  
  
  Reversed music box.
• Half way through we added a synthesised drum beat which was played alongside the opening credits 'It's all fun and games' when this is played we reversed the music box sound so that it became scarier, we also increased the volume so that it built up suspense for what was coming.
  

Winder on the music box.

• For part of our sound within our trailer we decided to record the music box being wound up. With this sound we placed it at the beginning of our trailer when the production company 'Twisted Pictures' was being played. To make the winding sound more repetitive we split the whole clip until we only had a small sound clip, and copied and paste it next to each other so the same sound was repeated.
• Once we had our initial sound we were able to experiment with the placement of the sound. As our production company was 'Twisted Pictures' we placed the winding alongside when the wire wound round the screw.
• We then changed the pitch and volume of each clip so that at the beginning the sound slowly fades in and slowly increases the volume so it builds up the suspense of what is going to happen after the production company.

Editing - Underwater

•  We used an underwater camera for the bobbing for apples drowning scene
• We wanted to use an underwater camera to show the victim and we thought it would be effective within our trailer
• When we came to edit the underwater footage we found that because the container we used was fairly shallow, the actors face was very close up and was sometimes unclear
• When editing we decided to show more footage of the actors face plunging into the water instead as this was more effective and much clearer
• We also tried reversing the footage of the actor bringing their head up from the water to see if this looked better
• We chose to include also an over the shoulder shot of the antagonist forcing the victims head under the water to show that it is bobbing for apples which reflected the torturous party element

Amy Freeman

Tag line

We feel that is necessary to have a tag line. In research we have found that most films in all genres have a tag line and for ours, as a horror, it would create further enigmas in conjunction with the name.

Here are some of our initial ideas combining the party and torture themes:

The party to die for

This party's dead

Welcome to the party

The party you can't miss

You're invited

The party you won't miss

It's all fun and games till someone gets hurt

Final Decision:

We like the cliché "It's all fun and games till someone gets hurt". However, we feel that this is too long and not catchy enough for a tag line so will use "It's all fun and games" on our poster and the longer version where appropriate such as titles and website.

Final poster design

This is our final poster design which has been edited using Adobe Photoshop and iPiccy a free online photo editing website.

I firstly edited the photo on iPiccy increasing highlights and shadows to make it look more dramatic. I also increased the vibrancy of the colours in the photo. 

All fonts were found on MyFonts and have been minipulated on Photoshop make the typography look designed and overall more professional looking. The idea of the typography was to make it look like wispy candle smoke and so I used the smudge and blur tools to achieve this look on both the title 'Bitter Sweet' and 'coming soon'.

For our tagline 'It's all fun and games' I used a simple bold font as this is what I noticed was conventional from my poster research. I put this in pink to twist the horror convention of typically having red and to suggest the girly/princessy element of our trailer. I used a satin effect on photoshop to create tone on the tagline image rather than one flat colour. By having the tagline to the positioned to the side of the image it draws the eye around the poster.

At the bottom of the poster to make it look more professional I added some production titles also.

Overall I think the poster does convey what we wanted to suggest of our trailer and does follow certain conventions to make it effective for the genre.

Amy Freeman   

Poster photoshoot

• Our final poster is having our antagonist holding a grotesque, disgusting, mouldy looking cake 
• We want our antagonist to have vibrant make up on to create a princess, girly appearance
• The antagonist will be looking directly into the camera as this will look the most scary and creepy
• Also having the antagonist bend there head down slighty created a more intense look
• The lighting for the poster will be candle light so that there are dark shadows creating enigma as to who the character is
• We varied the amount of candles lit as we found when they were all lit the surface of the cake became too bright and the detail was lost and so the mouldy surface was not noticeable
• We found having one back candle lit up the face the best and created the right amount of shadow but also lit the cake so we could see the mouldy detail
• We are pleased with the result of the photoshoot and choose one image to for our poster

Amy Freeman

Poster photoshoot - preparation

For our poster we are having a grotesque, rotten birthday cake to create the horror aspect and suggest the birthday theme. 

Stages:

• Firstly I dug parts out of the cake and then made these parts of the cake look mouldy by using green food colouring
• I used a paintbrush to apply the food colouring and also put some of it around the holes also
• I decided that there wasn't enough tone so added some brown paint to the food colouring to make a murky colour which looked more mouldy
• I made sure I did this all over the cake including the sides
• The I melted down the candles to get the wax melted down the sides of the cake
• Some of the candles melted down to stubs which looked quite effective for making it look exaggerated and grotesque
• The heat of the candles melted the icing also so it was also dripping down the sides which I didn't know would happen but looked very effective as this merged the food colouring with the icing better which made it look mouldy

Amy Freeman