Evaluation

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

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

3. What have you learnt from the audience feedback?

This is for ALL productions, trailer, poster, and magazine

 Link to the entry on the blog where we have audience feedback

http://zainaba2media.blogspot.com/2011/09/target-audience-research.html

How has your audience impacted on your production process?

Our audience impacted greatly on our production process through the audience research and audience feedback we created. We conducted interviews which we filmed, which helped us improve our drafts, we sent out questionnaires and then analysed our results to help us understand what our target audience wanted out of our products and what they expected and we also gathered focus groups to show our drafts and final products to and allow to suggest further amendments.

What changes did you make because of the audience feedback?

We made the shots shorter in our trailer to achieve suspense more effectively, we minimalized our poster to follow the genre conventions more, and we changed the format of our magazine cover to make it more a more typical film magazine. 

Discuss how you gained continuous audience feedback and this helped you develop your productions as you went along therefore resulting in better quality

They’re continuous feedback helped us to understand and tailor out productions to our target audience. Before production we created questionnaires which were handed out to a males and females of various ages and occupations, after which we analysed them which solidified our target audience which were 17-24 yr olds as they were they group which preferred thrillers, could be reached by various marketing and the most regular cinema goers. They also helped us understand what our target audience expected and liked most about thrillers. The next research we conducted was mid-production, we showed two males and two females from our target audience our trailer and asked them a series of set questions designed to help us identify what we needed to change or add to the trailer and what we had done well , we taped this on video for reference and accorded our production accordingly. We also showed a group of or target audience our poster and magazine cover and after their feedback made amendments. Finally we did the same for our finished products for any last minuet amendments. 

How did audience feedback help you meet audience expectations? 

Our questionnaires helped us first of all understand what our audience expected from our products, through continuous audience feedback such as interviews and focus groups we were then able to modify our products accordingly. Our questionnaire’s told us that our audience expected tension above all else in a thriller, after knowing this we then strived to make that a main feature in our trailer, we finally achieved this through various editing techniques such as jump cuts and sound effects such as stings and non-diegetic eerie music. Our interviews identified that we had done this effectively. Our focus groups then helped us identify what was expected from our poster and magazine, we found that we had over complicated the poster and not correctly followed the typical layout of a magazine, which both made our products less effective. Overall our audience feedback helped us understand which points of our products did not meet audience expectations and how we could improve on them. 

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

Throughout the whole process of creating our final package of teaser trailer, magazine and poster for our A2 media coursework: we used a variety of media technologies to simplify and help on our on-going path into the research, production and evaluation stages of our work. Technologies play an important part in our everyday lives and it is vital to creating any media related products because without it we cannot use media to our fullest abilities. 

RESEARCH AND PLANNING:      

Blogger: is what we used to place all our information and data and final pieces for our A2 coursework blogger was out concrete staring platform to our coursework piece. Blogger was useful to us as it helped us keep our work organised and keep a record of all our work for our future referencing to our final pieces. Being able to name and organise our blog with titles made my whole media coursework a much easier layout.

Google was our main provider into the internet to finding all our research and data needed. It was the easiest to use and lead us to all the information, images and data we needed to get the best out of our media coursework. Google was the key to our whole research and planning.

Youtube was our source into analysing trailers and watching examples to help develop our visual ideas to what we wanted our trailer to look like for the certain types of genres. We were able to pause and analysis our trailers we chose detailed and this helped our long on-going process of our teaser trailer coursework.

IMDB had a variety of trailers in HD that YouTube had poor quality for so this was a helpful website used on the internet to research the trailers for our analysis.

Wikipedia was our internet source into finding more information about our influencers, Media companies, the film classification and my insight into our chosen genre. Wiki gave us a long detailed analysis of everything we needed to know so we were able to improve and develop our planning and research as much as we could.

FREESOUNDS.ORG is where we found our free copyright-free sounds for our atmosphere to our trailer this had a very wide list of different sounds so we were able to find various sounds that fitted perfectly with our trailer as if we wanted those exact sounds all along.

PRODUCTION:

CAMERA HD was our key to our whole teaser trailer with its face recognition my close ups and long shots all kept in definition and clear. We also filmed our interviews for our audience feedback on this camera.

FINAL CUT PRO was our editing suite. This is where we edited our entire teaser trailer on.

MAC COMPUTER is where we did our entire teaser trailer and I did most of my research on apart from when I was at college and researching on that computer.

IMOVIE is where we placed our interviews for our audience feedback we then transferred them onto YouTube and uploaded them to our blog.

MEMORYSTICK is where we kept the film footage and photos for our magazine and posters.

PHOTO CAMERA was to take photos of my model for our magazine and poster.

PHOTOSHOP is where we edited our magazine and posters to make our pictures look exactly how we wanted them to look.

FIREWORKS another editing process to help complete our magazine and posters to get our final drafts.

PICNIK we used this website before we used Photoshop as this just added a couple of adjustments and edited our photos to make them look the certain way we wanted them first before we edited them properly on Photoshop

INDESIGN is what we used to layout our magazine and edit it to our best ability.

FINDYOURTRIBE this site was useful for our audience research as we could see what people are put in what groups this added to our final findings.

EVALUATION:

GOOGLE was use throughout the whole process of our coursework It was especially helpful in evaluation finding images and information we needed to complete our questions.

MICROSOFT WORD to write it out all first before adapting it to new media approaches.

FILM CAMERA in one of our questions we used the approach of a news report and used it to improve our evaluations look.

FINALCUTPRO was used once again to edit together the videos we did for our final evaluation.

I feel by using all this various technologies my researching approach has improved dramatically than my first year coursework as I felt that more media related visual presentations looked much better to read and by including more videos pictures your blog becomes a lot clearer. By having so many different media uses our creativity has improved from just writing out our coursework to having various different layouts giving our blog its own creative look and a clearer understanding of using a variety of media’s.

The impact of using all this technology approaches is that our blogs look so much more advanced and it shows we have spent time on developing and designing the perfect lay out of our blogs to make it interesting for our teachers and moderators to mark. Also the fact I know how to use photo shop and final cut pro and various other sites a lot better than I could when I first started my coursework.

Media is changing and developing every single day with new technologies being brought to light so by us using the new technologies we are becoming familiar with the changes and uses of having more uses of technologies rather than knowing a small limited use of technology.

To round up this question and our media coursework I feel that I use as much technology as I could throughout the whole process to give us a more professional look. We tried to adapt a slow pattern and list going through our long process and how we got to our final poster, magazine and teaser trailer. This was so it was clear and organised so we could keep adding and adapting our process rather than leave it in one big muddle. I am pleased with our final outcome and I am much more confident using media related products in the future.

allocation of roles

For my A2 course work I was in a group with Sophie Killoran

For The teaser trailer filming she took front stage and became the director and camera person, we made the story boarded together and I was the visual and producer making sure the actors were organised for our busy filming day as well as ensuring that the shots were coming out right. Sophie mainly edited the teaser trailer we used final cut pro 7.0.

For the editing and making of both the magazine and film poster I took front role for these, putting my photoshop skills to the test to edit the images we both supplied for the magazine I did the editing processing of the magazine and film poster.

With all the research and planning it was shared and we both did as much as we could to make our coursework have enough work including drafts and interviews and research into companies/classification/genres etc to gain the highest grade we could achieve.

reflection on learning

Teaser Trailer:
In my reflection of learning for our teaser trailer process and final trailer. I realised that any good trailer needs that soundtrack to build suspense for the audience, without it the audience dont feel the apreciation of the tension your trying to create. When making a 'thriller' like ours its a good idea to have your images darkerned to create that gloomy mysterious look. Teaser trailer's need to just grab the audiences attention, so for a thriller like ours the atmosphere and darkened gloomy shoots we used used the conventions of the usual typical thriller trailer.

Poster and Magazine cover:

Whilst making the poster I found that less was more, in my orgional drafts I had filled my posters with unnecessary extras which did not add, but instead took away from the poster and the strong image I already had. I needed to entice and intrigue the audience through my poster, I learned (through research and audience feedback) that I could do this through using minimal text and a striking, high quality ambiguous image. Evidently it was vital that I used the correct image, all of the original images which I had taken I found not to be strong enough to stand alone as a poster. I then realized that our strongest images where within our trailer, this lead me to take still shots from our trailer and use those instead. However I came across a problem when editing the photos, when they're size was increased, they're quality was dramatically decreased. Nevertheless I used Google and Youtube to solve this problem. When editing the images for my magazine cover I encountered the same problem, but instead of carrying out the whole process of converting the images, I instead took new images. However I encountered another problem, my audience feedback showed that my magazine cover was not effective enough and did not meet audience expectations. I found this due to the layout which was not typical of a film magazine, after researching popular examples I amended the layout accordingly and organised a focus group that in turn, confirmed the effectiveness of my magazine cover. 

Overall I have learnt many things, I have gained skills which I did not have before, such as improving the quality of images. I have also gained valuable experience, for instance in the future I will take high quality stills whilst filming which I can later use in other productions. Due to the wide variety of media and editing technologies we used I am now also more capable and experienced on many programs such as Adobe In Design and Photoshop. There were set backs in the creation of my products but through continuous audience feedback and initiative I believe We have successfully created 3 excellent media products that satisfy our audience and entice them perfectly.