EVALUATION

Our trailer uses various conventions of teaser trailers by effectively establishing main characters as well as the overall mood within a brief amount of time. Sticking to the more traditional teaser trailer length, our teaser fell between 30 and 60 seconds long, giving us a short but sweet trailer, just enough time to lay out basic information and generate intrigue and interest by use of enigma. The often overlooked elements of trailers are also featured in our piece, including the production company ident, the title, and "Coming Soon" title card, a trailer element used to give audiences something tangible to follow; to look forward to. Horror film conventions are also well represented, use of which is shown in a tried-and-tested horror code used in our film: a predominantly woods-based setting. This helps the audience to quickly familiarise themselves with the genre. Character close-ups are also used in our film, to show expression and emotion, a key element in horror films.

We have used montage editing to suggest a meaning for the short clips we have included, and demonstrated the use of enigma to make the audience wonder what happens next in the film. Another convention of horror we found particularly useful was the use of sound and music. By creating an eery sound effect soundtrack it created a tense atmosphere and was a reason for the suspense. When we combined the soundtrack with the fast shot changes we felt that it added to the thriller genre. However, our teaser trailer also challenges the conventions of horror films by using upbeat music at the start as opposed to an atmospheric sound, and colour effects at the start to represent the effects of drugs and hallucinations.

A recognisable brand identity is a key element in the film industry, especially in getting your audience to identify your film. We have successfully created a brand identity for our film by sharing noticeable features from our film across all three of our media texts created. Our trailer alone generates recognition and buzz around our film, but the addition of our closely related ancillary texts helps to strengthen this and begin to form a solid brand identity for our film. Ouy film's main character is featured in all three of our texts; the trailer itself, the magazine cover, and the official film poster, and this creates the strongest and most obvious link between the three. The same typography is applied to both our trailer and our poster, creating a recognisable visual style, in a similar way to the Matrix franchise. The Lionsgate production company logo is featured across these two texts, both to provide a consistent bond and to give the audience some basic information about the film, such as its genre.

The use of Adobe PhotoShop in the creation of the poster and magazine cover created an overall darker visual style, making it both more visually appealing, and assisting the audience in genre identification. By creating a clear brand identity, it will make it easier for the audience to recognise the film. We created a recogniseable picture of a stilled image from the main teaser trailer. It is a clip of the main characters face and we have decided to use it as the main focus for the poster and the magazine cover. However the picture is darkened and distorted differently in all three of our projects to give a different effect but still outlines the film.

We screened the rough cut of our film to a small audience and requested they fill out a brief questionnaire in order to allow us to see how it fared against an audience, and to help guide us into some improvements of the trailer. We took such advice as increasing the shot duration on some title cards so that they could be read easily. When shortening the title cards we also decided to add a different effect to each one. This created a shaky and unstable image to co-incide the theme of confusion in the film. The soundtrack was altered and re-synchronised to reflect the footage better by changing rapidly to input to the suspense and atmosphere, this was done by choosing sounds that were under the title of violins and piano. This gave a classic and recogniseable horror sound.

We also increased the film's pace by cutting some clips down and adding more into our montage sequence, and we filmed a few more shots for the trailer's end to make sure it had an effective cliffhanger. When we cut the shots down we also decided to re-arrange the order of the shots to create a confussed state-of-mind for the audience and which reflects the characters. However there was many positive comments for the rough cut in particular the beginning was favouritised by alot of the other groups. We felt this was because we had put most of our work into it and had almost perfected the combination of the editting shots and soundtrack for the first montage. Overall the positive comments were on the use of the editting effects with the use of colour corrector, we were told that they helped understand the 'drug-use' theme.

We used a variety of new media technologies for the construction, research, planning, and evaluation stages of our final product. The use of current technologies aided us in creating our final products more effectively and efficiently. To do our research prior to the creation of our film, we used Microsoft Word, web 2.0, and blogger.com, to write up and post information gathered to aid us in the planning and development of our film. This helped us log and recap on our progress and we ccould visually see in the parts of the project that were lacking for example we had done less research on magazines than poster and by realising this we noticed that it could effect the final outcome. For the physical construction of our film, we used a Canon 500D DSLR camera we chose this camera over the ordinary ones to gain a closer capture and greater final outcome, a tripod, iMacs, and a card reader, the latter two of which were used to obtain our footage prior to editing and sequencing.

When editing our trailer, we used an iMac, and the software Final Cut Express to edit the images of the film, Soundtrack to create the music for the film, and LiveType which created the titles for the film. In the production of our ancillary texts, we used Adobe PhotoShop when creating the poster and Illustrator for the magazine cover, giving us a wide variety of tools to create the exact poster and magazine cover we wanted. However by using photoshop for the poster it restricted us when printing the final poster as it only allowed limited size. We had never used adobe illustrator before and found it beniffited our magazine cover as it was easy to use and gave a professional look with the tools. We had used final cut express before so we found this easy to use and was able to gain a greater knowledge when using this for example i learnt how to use the 'colour corrector' which was an important part of film for setting the theme and genre.