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

The media products I created was a movie trailer which was a romantic comedy we challenged conventions with scene like reality/fantasy and used scenes like the woman trying to change for the man. We developed scenes that showed what people expect in a romantic comedy but held things back to show that we wanted scenes to be a surprise.

We had scenes that showed the form of a romantic comedy by showing Sinead running and trying to get fit, becoming out of breathe stopping but keep on working and starting to run again to show how committed she was to change. This was to show that Sinead’s character worked hard to get a relationship and would work hard to keep the relationship going.

The reality/fantasy scene we created after I saw it work well in 500 days of summer, this challenged the convention that has been created by romantic comedies because it challenges the form of film making and is  a very unique idea to do and very hard for it to work well.

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

When creating the trailer we were thinking about the ancillary tasks and how scenes in the trailer could be connected to the poster and possibly be discussed in the trailer. When we found out we were just making a front cover I figured a photo shoot would work just as well and used a nice picture outside with the star of the film and the main character in the trailer. The poster worked well because I could link the lockers that were in the trailer, and which can be linked back to the school, with the poster so the trailer and the poster anchor each other. The poster had a puff on it that said it could be the best romantic comedy of the decade which was quoted by Exposure magazine, the magazine that I used as my other ancillary text anchoring them together as well.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

The audience feedback we received after our first viewing with initial clips and a different take we had on the romantic comedy genre went down well but wasn’t liked by all. So we changed the way it was narrated with the main character had scenes where the main character was the centre of attention throughout the trailer and received a better public opinion.

After our first screening we realised that doing something different that could still be done well was working. However realised that some scenes weren’t working people understood it was a coming of age story based in a school but didn’t understand who was the love interest if the friends were good or bad and what was going to happen through out the film.

We decided to change the narration from the friends telling the flaws around the girl and her say it herself, this showed it was the girl who thought she was imperfect and trying to win the guy by changing and meeting what she thinks his expectations are. We also changed shots that showed her being awkward in public places for humour to her changing her ways and being in funny situations, this brings humour to the audience because of her feeling the need to change her ways and appear in these funny scenarios. We also created a reality and fantasy scene which we had trouble with but the audience thought would be a good idea and backed me up which worked well even if it was the hardest bit of the whole trailer.

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

For research I used my own knowledge that I gathered through watching Television and seeing the types of trailers that were produced and seeing the type of shots and quality that makes a good trailer while also looking through the internet, mostly YouTube, and looking at trailers that related to the romantic-comedy, coming of age storyline we wanted to portray. While watching television commercials you are able to see advertising of a movie out currently through the smaller trailers, from the ones that are shown at cinemas, this gets great publicity for the product especially when it is the middle of well viewed television shows, like soaps or reality shows, so I realised that we needed to create a trailer which could be shortened and still look enticing to the audience. While watching YouTube, I was able to see a pattern with in romantic comedy trailers that shows the main character, their love interest, the background to their lives and then possibly family or friends with funny situations which shows the main character in a awkward or ridiculous situation. I knew if we were going to do a romantic comedy trailer we needed a basis of a storyline to work on for shots we needed to do.

During Planning I looked again at YouTube and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) to see what common romantic comedies were out there so we could follow a trend but put our own stance on it. I found out that a lot of romantic movies were showing a man trying to get a woman, Remember Me, Beastly, etc. so I decided we should go the other way seeing as this was a romantic comedy, if some of the audience were going to watch guys be serious in love why not offer them women acting ridiculous? We went out with the camera and took shots of initial ideas we had, like our main character walked into a room and everybody stared at her because she was out of place, when she thought she fitted in and was being idolised, this got us onto the idea that I had planned.  I wanted scenes in this trailer to look like a scene I liked from 500 Days of Summer where a persons fantasy and reality were on at the same time, we used Adobe Premier Elements 8.0 to do this and after some initial setbacks it worked really well.

We used the Sony Handycam DCR SX45 Camcorder to record our shots and used the features provided to successfully upload our shots onto the school computer.  When we began the construction of the trailer we used Adobe Premier Elements 8.0 to put our scenes together however we suffered a lot with the schools instalment of this programme and at times were unable to save a hard, full days work of editing at times. We were able to move on from that and we found a way to work around it. Thanks to adobe’s simple editing system we were able to find media and bring it into our trailer quickly and with out a lot of problems.

Poster final piece

Magazine final piece