Tuesday, 3 May 2011

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

The combination of our main product (film) and the ancillary texts such as the poster and the radio trailer for our film were very important. The poster and radio trailer will help to promote our film to our target audience, and so both needed to be very effective in the way it attracted our target audiences.

We used various media languages such as camera angles/ movements and sounds effects to communicate with our audience. In one of our scenes, we thought it will be interesting to add a montage in order to make the scene of our actor getting prepared for school look exciting and not dragging on. We merged clips of our main actor getting dressed and working out to create a montage. We used close-up shots and not long shots to make the clips more interesting and to allow our audience to guess what he is doing. This will creates suspense as the audience would want to find out what is happening, and they will carry on watching it until they find out. We also added a very energetic and dramatic sound clip in our montage to enhance excitement to the scene.

In our film we used binary opposition. We have students vs. a teacher. We challenged the stereotypes of characters as we perceived the children as the ‘bad guys’ and the teacher as the ‘good guys’ the children are usually presented as being innocent and the teacher is fearless and uptight. Not only would it be useful to help establish the relationship between the two, but it also make our film very appealing to our audience, as it may be something they feel they can relate to.

Our target audience are quite young, so it is important for us to make our film clearer to this particular group. In our film we added a lot of things such as objects, signs and symbols to denotate that our actor is an ex-soldier. Using our creativity, we looked for objects as well as gestures we could use to give an impression to our audience that our actor is an ex-soldier who returned from the military. It is important that audience understands that our protagonist is an ex-soldier because he is also a teacher. So, to not create confusion between the two roles we made it things clear by using objects, clothing and the different gestures he uses to bring out his character.

Poster:- 

To make our poster appealing to our audience we decided to use strong, dark, striking and dramatic colors to draw our audience’s attention to our film. We decided to add images of our protagonist, images of the school building and also images of explosives in the background to enhance the idea that his from the military. The images of explosions in the background will also make our poster visually eye-catching to our target audience.

In our poster we are going to include a tagline ‘One man must stand alone to face his fears’ this will make our poster stand out from the rest with the addition of our unique tagline. The tagline is going to be in bold and it’s going to have to stand out from the poster in order for our audience to read it. Our tagline creates a sense of fear and suspense and makes our film look really interesting.

Radio Trailer:- 

Our radio trailer is also really important for the promotion of our film. From the radio trailer our audience will be able to get a glimpse of what our film is about. The layers of different sounds help to create a particular mood for our film and make our film sound exhilarating and exciting. We used sound clips of a soldier chanting, children screaming, explosions and fast-pace music and heart beats to create a dramatic sequence of sounds. The sequence of dramatic sounds will have a great impact on our audience as it will lure our audience to watch the film.

Our trailer creates suspense immediately as we hear continuous heart beats, a soldier chanting and children screaming. A voice over then says ‘teach them a lesson’. After a few seconds of silence we hear sounds of explosions with fast-pace and energetic music playing, slowly building tension. We then hear another voice over ‘one man must stand alone to face his fears’, this creates fear and unease for the audience as they will be wondering what is going on. The sound track becomes really dramatic going at a fast pace and we hear more explosions. We hear another voice over ‘will this be his last battle’ this causes the audience to worry and creates a lot of suspense. The voice over then continues to say ‘starring Olu Oseiende’, ‘Numero Uno presents A Man One War’, ‘Coming to cinemas near you’, ‘rated PG’ and then the trailer finishes with a loud crash of explosion. I personally feel that this trailer will have a great impact on our audience and on our film as it will make our film very appealing and ‘watch-worthy’ after listening to the trailer.  



Monday, 2 May 2011

What have you learnt from your audience feed back?

The survey we produced before creating our film was very significant in terms of informing us of what our target audience wanted, what they looked for in a drama, what kind of endings they preferred and how they wanted the film structured out. The feedback was a great help as it helped us to improve on the little things that will have a great impact on our film. The whole point of a feed back is to find out what would satisfy our audiences and, all in all help us produce a successful film.

We used survey monkey to create and publish our survey to our target audience. We used web 2.0 to get access to facebook and other sites in order to reach our target audience and get the responses. These were the responses we received:-


Post-production; This is the feed back we received after the film was made.

Student;

Good points:

§         They understood the plot of the story, it was clear
§         It was easy to understand what was going on
§         They were anxious at first of what was going on – whole point of our film
§         They identified the teacher/solider

Bad Points:

§         Some clips were too long
§         Needs to be more clearer
§         More clear emphasis on military themes
§         More sound tracks

Person 2;

Good points:

§         Good use of camera angles
§         Story line is clear

Bad Points:

§         More emphasis needed on the actor as a solider
§         Need more military themes
§         Montage needs to be shorter

Feed back from our target audience is significant because our main aim of our film is to make I appealing for our target audience. So in order to satisfy our audience we needed to make sure where we were going wrong with our film and what needed to be improved. All the feed back we got was very crucial for our film as it helped tells us what needed to be fixed and where we were going wrong. We acted upon all our audience feed backs and made sure that we acted upon all the areas that needed to be fixed.