Evaluation: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

(/in progress)
First and foremost, my best exchanges were between myself and my friend Ronan, who is also on the OCR course. He'll probably appear a lot in this post, so I thought I should drop in an example of how we also shared ideas on his blog when I was involved a little in his poster design:
http://ronana2.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-poster-development.html

Audience feedback was extremely useful throughout the project, even in the research stage. The nicest thing of it all was just to feel like people were reading and responding to what I was writing...

When I researched the Butterfly Effect for example, I got things such as :

I also received little encouraging remarks along the way, simply affirming that what I was doing was going down well.

The above image shows how audience feedback sort of inspired me partly to keep going with the face paint idea and incorporate it into my final trailer. Similarly, audience feedback was useful when I abandoned ideas such as 'Breakfast'...

The text at the top of the image shows some feedback I received on YouTube on this video as well. You can see from this that although people seemed to like the idea I had, no one could actually see the direction it was going in. I couldn't either.

My first rough edit got a lot of feedback, which you can see below.

Comments here can be related to my finished teaser trailer. I abandoned a lot of the footage from my first edit and put much faster cuts in the final product, reflecting feedback here that showed people found speed to be effective.
Similarly, I got a lot of feedback as I was developing my ideas for the posters, which can be seen below.

When I put my final teaser trailer on YouTube it was also nice to be found by students from other schools who commented on my work. In response, I went and left them comments and had a brief exchange about each others work. Although it came too late for them to suggest any criticisms, they were helpful in just being reassuring that someone I didn't know liked my trailer...

Additionally, when I put my trailer on Facebook to show Dan a few minutes after I'd first finished editing it, I recieved a good response:

The thing with Facebook was interesting, because I was able to reach a wider audience than I was intially with the blog. Most young people today can navigate Facebook with ease, whilst blogger is less used and understood. I think commenting on Facebook requires less effort on their part, and it also feels even less formal than blogger does.

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

I think the combination of my three products is quite effective because there appears to be consistency throughout.
For example, I used the same typeface throughout called 'Capture it', which I actually downloaded from dafont.com a few years ago to use in my GCSE art project.

'Capture it' then goes on to appear in the films title and text used in the trailer, just with the colour inverted.

I then carried it over onto the poster...

And the poster matches up with the magazine cover, acting as the other half of the photo (keeping with the theme of being Split, geddit?)...

I realise that neither the poster nor the magazine cover actually says the films name 'Split' explicitly, but I think what I've done thus far would all appear right at the beginning of an ad campaign, when the audience are being genuinely 'teased' as such. It would be, at this stage, up to them to make the connection. Of course, the article in the magazine would give the connection away assumingly, but not everyone would read it.

I think this implicity would be more likely to get people talking than an in-your-face campaign... That or it would completely fail, maybe. Although, I think both the poster and the magazine front are fairly unconventional and would attract attention if they were displayed amongst your average blockbuster and mainstream film posters and magazine covers. Of course though, many Vertigo front covers are quite quirky and original, so in terms of the history of the magazine it might not stick out amazingly to the normal readership, but to others it may do. Or, it might even encourage people to collect both, once the film was around more... I think (not blowing my own trumpet) that the combination of film poster and a magazine cover is quite an interesting idea. Although, in terms of the real world I don't how successful it would be - supposedly it would mean the film could only be advertised that way with one magazine, and would suggest some kind of loyalty to it. However, on the independent circuit I might be able to get away with it because we would be less restrained by what would definitely sell and make money...

Also, obviously I used Dan throughout and he appears in each piece. This also helps consistency and makes the audience more likely to recognise that there's a connection between the pieces. However, I guess it's not explicitly shown that it's Dan, but I do think that his hair might be pretty recognisable, and also the use of the same typeface should help.

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

(/work in progress)
I think my media product both uses conventions for a thriller teaser trailer and challenges them equally.

For example, in relation to the Requiem for a Dream trailer my teaser trailer appears fairly conventional. I adopted in a sense the use of 'hip-hop' montages that director Aronosky uses in both the trailer and the actual film, where lots of short consecutive shots are combined to get across a feeling of chaos or energy.

In my trailer, I think this comes across as fear, or panic perhaps, as the 'fight' between the two alter ego's are reflected onscreen with quick flicks between each representation, whether it be Dan in the woods or the suited Dan smirking.

However, this style of editing is quite atypical. Many of the other trailers I looked at, such a Fight Club and The Butterfly Effect, follow more mainstream formulas for trailers such as having a voice over to narrate the events onscreen. I think to have a voice over in my own trailer might have distracted from the feel I was trying to convey of being lost and detached.
A film like Fight Club is from a single characters perspective, and so the narration is directed in such a way to feel more personal to the viewer.

 You can see this in the use of the main character as the narrator, not only in the trailer but in the film as well (reflective of the book, which is told in the first person). To create an objective and detached narrative, such as Aronofsky did with Requiem, it's better to have no voice over because then you do not get a singular perspective on the plot. Whilst Aronofsky did use a mixture of dialogue from the film written information (such as "Adapted from the novel..." etc), I chose only to have text.
I did this because I think to achieve a good quality of sound would have been hard, and it would have been difficult to follow the quick shots and listen to what someone was saying at the same time, and let alone the effort it would have been to narrate it in the first place at such a speed.
So, in this way, I was conventional in that I took a convention used by Aronofsky and did something similar, but was also unconventional in relation to more mainstream ideals like those used by Fight Club (despite it now being considered a cult film).

Other conventions I kept to were obvious thriller trailer ones, like the ones I mentioned in this post a while ago:
http://amyloulynch.blogspot.com/2009/10/teaser-trailers.html
I mostly kept to all of them, such as the time limit, the surrealist plotline and little footage from what would be in the actual film. Ones I missed were perhaps the ones about CGI, which was limited by budget and equipment (and skill, aha), and footage that was obviously sped up.

Similarly, I don't actually know any major stars that could have appeared in my trailer, so in a way I sort of broke that convention. The Butterfly Effect has Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart, Fight Club has Edward Norton, Helena Bonham Carter and Brad Pitt, Requiem for a Dream has Jared Leto and Ellen Burstyn...

So in my trailer I made use of my friend Dan, and made as if my film would be pushed on the independent circuit. Few big blockbusters now have a completely unknown cast or director anyway, because Western audiences have become accustomed to going to see a film based around who is in it or who directed it.

Evaluation: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? (...Part 2)

(/work in progress)
Whilst the last post was mostly about the 'new technologies' I used in my construction work, this post will deal more with those used in the planning and research and the evaluation.
Whilst obviously the blog was a huge factor in everything I did, I also had to use the Internet in other ways. For example, YouTube I used for finding the original teaser trailers I looked at in the beginning. To host the videos on this blog I had to take the embed code and paste it here. Similarly, I uploaded my own videos to YouTube to put on here (creating an account under the name MindyLynch), such as my initial ideas like 'Breakfast' and my original edit of Dan walking through the woods. So YouTube cropped up in both my research and construction, and also in my planning I guess - in the form of me being able to put my first ideas out there for feedback.

 Research-wise, I also used Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database (IMBD) to read up on films, their directors and producers and studios they were distributed by. I was able to also read about the methodology of the editing, for example the 'hip-hop' editing style of the Requiem for a Dream trailer that I later sort of adopted for my own and tried to mimic. Additionally, I was able to research genre.

On top of that, I used the website freeplaymusic.com to download an uncopyrighted mp3 to use on my trailer.

Planning wise, I used simple old pen and paper to sketch out my original ideas, and then scanned them into my laptop to put on here. If I had the means, and the know-how, I would have liked to have spent more time on them, like reconstructing them in PhotoShop so they were more clear, or drawing them out better using a graphic tablet or something...