A2 Media Evaluation - Elliott

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

Me and my group have created 'HIGH STAKES' a 5 minute (and then some) short film, in which we have used, abused and subverted the conventions, forms and preconceptions of the film-going audience and real media products.

I will use this 9-panel format to analyse our short. (introduced by Art of the Title)

I've put up a larger version of this file, which you can download in full 4K resolution, here

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

Video link in case embedding goes nuts - https://www.youtube.com/v/dqJDvoPmTso
Watchmen title sequence 240p - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVyLG4MY1h4
High quality film poster - http://advancedportfolio201365.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/final-film-poster-elliott.html 

Transcript of my video analysis:

I believe that overall my portfolio would work very well in a real commercial context. I have tried to tie my products together through the use of synchronicity between the different media platforms, in what I hope is a very similar way to how large film companies do.

One way I have done this is by trying to build a brand or in-house style between my poster and short film products.

Doing this helps to make the products more recognizable to an audience and to make the product stand out in their minds, by associating a visual style to the film. This means that whenever a consumer sees a similar style – be it font or otherwise, they have a chance of remembering the film and therefore being more likely to see it.

One good example of this purposeful correlation is the film Watchmen which uses a bold, yellow font in both its poster and title sequence (as well as lots of promotional material.) This gives a huge impact to the posters, that also give the audience context clues about the movie, such as using the blue-green gradiented colour style that has become synonymous with the thriller genre. I will link to Watchmen’s excellent title sequence but it can be found in much better quality on the more illegal side of the internet.

Through my research on big budget film titles I have noticed that action films and thrillers tended to use large bold fonts to reflect their, mostly male, target audience. As that is the same audience that my short hopes to target I have followed this convention in picking the very impactful font that combines our film and poster.

Through all of our poster ideas we chose to pick the one that represents all three characters as we wanted the poster to give a vague idea of what the plot could be. I also liked the symmetry of the protagonist flanked on either side by the film’s antagonists. Following the common sense and film conventions, ‘Franklin’ is centered, enlarged and physically in front of the two backing characters. This is to show that he is more prominent and features as the focal point of the story.

My group decided that screen-shotting scenes from the movie would deduct from the professional look of the poster, and so to get higher-quality images we took dedicated photos specifically for the poster, this meant I could tailor the images to convey the exact messages I wanted, such as giving Matt’s character an aggressive pose to show he is the more brash of the two antagonists.

To further enhance the correlation between our poster and film brand (and partly to justify the hours I spent editing them) I decided to use the same photos in the credit sequence for the film. Another touch I was particularly keen on is the website I put on the poster; most short films use their website as the prime means of advertisement and yet most A level posters feature a made up website address. The website I made for the poster links directly to the group blog where people can watch the whole film or read the review.

I felt that using a red spade in the stylised title helped subtly link the poster to the gambling theme of the movie, as well as causing enigma among members of the audience who recognise the contrapuntal nature of the sign. Both film and poster also feature the same logo for Zeppelin production group (the moniker my group adopted.)

It was difficult to link the review into our brand because of the differing audience of Little White Lies. Whereas an audience member for our film is most likely to be an under 25, working class male, the average reader of the review magazine is a typically wealthy older male. In this case it was important to aim at the typical reader demographic because that is the in-house style of Little White Lies, however doing so probably would fail to attract our target audience because of the differing writing styles that appeal to the two. To make up for this necessary discrepancy we decided to include references to the Zeppelin production group in the review, which makes sure the reader knows the review is a part of the film’s branding. This was the best way to correlate the ancillary tasks while maintaining the formal language that is commonplace in a review of this nature.

I think that, on the whole, the ancillary tasks succeed in supporting the film because of the many factors we have spread across all three platforms, and because each medium gives the audiences just enough of an insight into the film that they may just be interested enough to give it a watch. The poster certainly helped in attracting attention when we were looking for audience feedback.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Facebook

After researching the average age demographic of Facebook members using publicly available sources, I found that the genders are a roughly 50/50 split and that the 18-25 demographic makes up the biggest portion of their users. As our target audience consists of 15-25 year old males this means a significant number of our target audience is represented and Facebook is (in theory) brilliant for obtaining audience feedback. This turned out to not be the case. 

Twitter

Youtube

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

This Prezi slideshow showcases the technologies which were essential to the development of High Stakes, there was also some technology that I used to make the whole progress easier, such as buying my own tripod to allow me to film without the college equipment, and the way I tried to stop my work from being distributed, shown below.

The Prezi slideshow can also be found here in case the embedding goes wonky again, as it likely will.