Evaluation..

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

Trailer

• The fonts we decided to use on our film trailer we have kept consistent with our film poster. We decided to have block letters for the film title so it was easily read by our audience. We also only show the title screen for a matter of seconds and we did not want the audience to not be able to read it. This was, we do not have to show it for a long period of time to be able to work out what it says. We chose to out our tag line in a more romantic font, by choosing swirly italic writing. This kept the romantic element of our movie in this shot which suggested it would be a ROM-com, if it wasn’t already established from our footage.
• We decided not to use a specific release sate on our trailer as teasers don’t often display specific dates of release and just show the month or season that it is due. We researched into the release dates of other romantic comedy films and found that most of them are released during spring and summer. We chose to use ‘Summer 2011’ as our release date as the holiday breaks and hotter months seem to peak for romance.
• After editing most of our film, we noticed the some of the shots at the beginning of the boys were off centre, we chose not to re-film these shots as it would be inconvenient, instead we chose to adjust the shots on Pinnacle by zooming in on specific shots and choosing which parts to be shown during our trailer.
• The quick shots of the boys at the beginning of the film are supposed to represent the ‘imperfect’ guys that our female character doesn’t want. Although we do not make this obvious in our trailer it teases the audience into asking questions like “what is there relevance to the movie?” this would make them want to go to see the movie when it is released so their questions can be answered.
• Typically, ROM-coms have a scene set in a coffee shop.  In this shot we have filmed in our school canteen to make it look like they’re in a coffee shop. Originally we didn’t include this shot in our trailer, but after analysing the shot we used before, we decided it would benefit us to change it to this shot for consistency reasons. Considering that it is an inside shot, we should have placed the male character in something more suitable than a coat, as people tend to take their coats off whilst inside.
• Luckily the actors were wearing several layers of clothing and were able to swap and change between shots to give the effect that the scenes were filmed on different days of their relationship.
• We chose to use a variety of shots including; long, short and media shots. The long shot was filmed when the male character runs after the girl and unexpectedly picks her up. Looking back we should have included a quick close up of her face when he startled her to make us feel pleasant about their relationship.
• In our trailer we don’t explain why Mr Imperfect is imperfect, the footage we have used seems to portray their relationship as perfect, this raises enigma between the audiences as they wonder “why isn’t he as perfect as he seems to be?” this would entrance the audience into going to see our film.
• Our voice over is very important to our film as he explains our story line without giving too much away to the audience. This also persuades the audience to see our movie so they understand the full story.

Magazine

First we chose to display only our female character on the front as you tend to only see the main character on film magazines. We chose to portray her as a pretty young girl with a plain background to make her stand out. After getting feedback from our peers, we realised that this particular layout is mostly seen on the front of fashion and teen magazines. We therefore decided to take some more photos where we focused on choosing a specific background. Also, the red and black colour scheme didn't sit comfortably with the consistency of our teaser trailer and poster as we have used pink and orange on them. We decided to take another picture of our main character in a more relaxed environment and use a real background instead of a block colour to make it seem like more of a film magazine front cover. We also used more compatible colours on our texts to keep consistency with our other promotion products. After doing some more research on film magazine covers, we noticed that there wasn't always just one font used on the page, so we decided to try out different fonts on our magazine cover, this made it more realistic. We also added more story lines on our front page to add to the real magazine effect. We encountered problems when the image seemed to be stretched, we decided to add a grey advertisement block at the top and bottom of the magazine cover, and this improved the quality of the image as we didn't have to stretch it. We included the obvious elements of a magazine like the date, bar code and issue number, this gave it more authenticity.

Poster

This is our romantic comedy poster. Typically we have kept the main characters centre of the poster, we choose to keep our actress on the left and actor on the right like the Rom-COM posters we researched earlier. We dressed our actors in pink and white to match our colour scheme for the poster to keep our theme consistent. We also kept the names at the top of the poster above the actor's heads; we made the last names bigger and a different colour to stand out and to balance out the colours used overall. We centred our film title and tag line for maximum effect on the eye grabbing of the audience. We also decided to change the full stop to a heart to make the poster seem more romantic, putting this in a different colour divides up the title's colour so it is less of a block impact on the eye. We chose not to challenge the convention of the billing block and decided to keep it at the bottom of the poster, as it is seen as unimportant and did not want to distract our audience from the main features. We also decided to make the release date unspecific and stuck with the traditional romantic season for advertisement. We noticed that all films create a website to advertise their film; although we did not do this we included a website address on our poster to keep it looking professional.

2) How effective is the combination of your media product and ancillary texts?

The promotional package we wanted to try and create was for a mainstream audience on 16-24 year olds. From our research this is the main age group which would see a romantic comedy film and go to the cinema in general. We did not want to aim our film specifically at a female audience because we wanted as many people to want to see it as possible. We did this by not making each product overly girly, keeping the pink to suggest the ROM-com genre but evening it out with the orange. The three promotional products work well together as we have kept our colour scheme consistent throughout each product. We have kept the film title and tag line exactly the same on the film poster and teaser trailer so the audience will be able to recognise that the two items are advertising the same film. We decided to change the font of our film title on the magazine and not to include our tag line; this allowed us to put the film title in a more romantic font and to be able to use our colour scheme with the text around the edge of the image.

Product	Strengths	Weaknesses
Poster	-The simplicity of our poster highlights all the key details, eg. title, release date, actors. -The image corresponds with our colour scheme with what the actor’s are wearing.	- We couldn’t put the title where we wanted, originally next to the couple on the bench. -We had trouble with the font and size of the billing block.
Teaser Trailer	-The music is acoustic which immediately gives off a happy, romantic vibe. -Our continuity is a lot better than last year. -Creates enigma like a teaser trailer should.	-Our camera shots are very shaky. -We have a lack of shot .variation (long, medium, short) -We had to film our distribution company ourselves.
Magazine	-Our image is relaxed and can relate to our audience. -We have a variety of font, like a real magazine cover. -Our cover lines are based around popular films, for example Harry Potter, to draw in a wider audience.	-In the distance there is a bright green bin in the background. -We should have placed our actress on a bench instead of a railing, this would have related our magazine with our poster.

 Difficulties we have overcome include:-

•  The boys at the beginning of our film were off centre, this was easily resolved using a tool on Pinnacle which let us choose which part of our shot to show.
• We also had trouble finding a male character as people kept letting us down and being unreliable. After begging Sam to play our male character we had trouble arranging a time when we both could film. The wait was worth it as the two characters worked very well and weren’t afraid of being in front of the camera.
•  We had to change one of the shots in our montage as it looked like our female character was talking as the male went to kiss her. Although we knew that she just casually opened her mouth to smile, our audience wouldn’t have known this and would have seen it as inconsistency. 
• We had problems with our music, as we were relying on someone else to make it for us. What he made was too slow and boring, which didn’t fit with the theme of our trailer. We then had a rush to find suitable un-copyrighted music; luckily we found some happy, acoustic music which fitted in very well with our trailer.
• We had to do several takes with our voiceover. Originally a boy in our year did it for us, unfortunately he sounded too serious for the role so we used one of our teachers instead. After 3 or 4 takes we finally received a very good voiceover which fitted very well with our trailer timing.

3) What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Before we began producing our promotional package we created a questionnaire to understand what our target audience would want from a ROM-com promotional package. The most important things we found out was that they look at the image before anything else on a film poster, this allowed us to focus on that aspect of the poster than anything else to make it the best it could be. Also that ROM-com was the most popular film genre among our target audience of 16-24 year olds. This worked to our advantage as it would mean that our film would appeal to our audience like we would have wanted. We also found out that the Teaser Trailer was the most popular way to advertise a film, we therefore decided to spend a couple of weeks making our poster and magazine and used the rest of our time creating our trailer to make it the best it could be.

We uploaded our teaser trailer to the popular social networking site – Facebook. This allowed us to gain feedback from our peers, more important our target audience.

We decided not to change the shaky camera as we felt this made it look like a home video which adds a sense of reality to our film. This is also seen in Ellie Goulding’s video for Your Song, although this is a music video, it is made from home videos which creates a more romantic feel to the video. This is what we wanted to perceive in our trailer. We decided to keep a more serious voice over as we didn’t want to distract the audience from the romantic elements from our teaser trailer. We decided to expand the length that our film title was displayed at the end of the film to give the audience more time to read it and familiarise their selves with the film.

We also handed out a questionnaire to our class after showing them our finished products, from this we found out that our promotional package does serve it’s purpose and that they preferred the teaser trailer out of the three products. The felt that we needed a wider range of shots and that there should have been more emphasis on the prejudice against our main male character, of which makes him imperfect. We discussed whether or not to put more emphasis on this subject but came to the conclusion that this would give too much away, thus not teasing our audience.

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

Having a younger target audience gave us the opportunity of using lots of new media facilities, including Facebook. We learnt from our research that this was a quick an effective way to reach our audience. We did this by uploading our finished product onto the social networking site to gain audience feedback. We used Pinnacle to edit our film this year as this program holds a lot of useful tools and elements to help us make our film the best it could be. We also used this programme last year so we were all familiar with the software. We used an Edirol and Flip Video Camera to record our voice over and animatic. We found these easy to use as they are simple, portable and easy to transfer our files on to the computer. We also used PhotoShop this year to create our magazine and poster image, we hadn’t used this before and had to figure out how to, which was very time consuming.