Media Lesson

In a previous Media lesson we got told what we had to do for our Preliminary task, we had to film some of the school but Miss Martin left the genre and length down to us. She said that it should be less than a minute long though. So we decided to make this a horror / thriller task, which is completley different to what we had to do last year, although we had some aspects of something eerie going on in our previous one with the door shutting on it's own. In today's Media lesson we filmed our scenes for the Teaser Trailer. We used a Camcorder & a Tripod, although most of this was hand held work. We got our friend Suzi to help us out as today she wore a creepy contact lens to school. The basic plot for our Teaser Trailer is that Therfield School is haunted by a mysterious figure, and they go round writing disturbing things on peoples whiteboards and throwing paper around to make people think that there is a 'ghost'.

Super 8 Teaser Trailer

Here is the teaser trailer for Super 8. The trailer doesn't show anyone being cast in the movie, nor does it have anyone names in the credits within the clip, all it shows it a truck skipping the crossing of a train and then driving towards the train causing it to crash. All the clip gives away is that it is in area 51, an area renound for aliens and supernatural incidents. I think that this movie will be good because the teaser trailer is quick and fast paced, the music goes with it aswell, it builds suspense to when the truck crashes into the front of the train. As tease trailers go, tis one is quite long, with it being 1 minute and 30 seconds long, however it doesnt have lots of detail within it, so I think this really shows us, as media students what kind of length & detail we can go into when we are producing our teaser trailers. When we do come produce our teaser trailers we will have to have a think about what kind of shots we can use in the clip, as we will play around with them as much as we can. In this teaser trailer there is a total of 23 different shots, all showing us the action of the scene. this gives us a good idea on how many we can include in our teaser trailer. The shots, on average are about 3 seconds long each, which shows us that we can have over 10 shots in our teaser trailer for it to still be good, we dont need to have time lengthly shots for our trailer to be good. The trailer plays around with the angles of the shots and it jumps around quite a bit, from the shots to showing us who directed the film. At 34-35 seconds the shots jumps from the truck & the train colliding with one another to the shot of who directs the film. I think this is effective because it cuts into the middle of the action and you are left to read who directed it. Steven Spielberg, has directed lots of films and we know from them that one is going to action packed and will probably have cost a lot of money which should, in theory make it a must-see!

Investigating film releases

For Homework tonight we were asked to look at recent or up and coming film trailers. Using 4 of the features from the previous post we studied what the main features of the film were.
I chose 5 films which are coming out soon at the cinema.

Buried
Genre - Horror / Thriller
Unique Selling Point - Man in coffin draws you in, because you are intrigued on what is going to happen to him. This keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Target Audience (Gender, Age etc) - Men, in their early 20s. Young Couples.
UK release date - 1st October 2010

Vampires Suck
Genre - Comedy
Unique Selling Point - a parody of Twilight
Target Audience (Gender, Age etc) - Teenagers, people who like/hate/love Twilight.
UK Release Date - 15th October 2010

Life as we know it
Genre - Comedy
Unique Selling Point - 'aah' factor.
Target Audience (Gender, Age etc) - Teenage girls, Girls in General
UK release date - 8th October 2010

Takers
Genre - Action
Unique Selling Point - Cars, Hot women, Gangsters etc
Target Audience (Gender, Age etc) - Men, early 20s
UK release date - 1st October 2010

Devil
Genre - Thriller
Unique Selling Point - Chilling, Keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Target Audience (Gender, Age etc) - Men/Woman/Couples. 15+
UK release date - 17th October 2010

Analysing a Trailer.

Today in our first media lesson we looked at how to analyse a trailer; we looked at the features of a trailer, we used the following headings for the features:
Genre, Narrative, Unique Selling Point, Target Audience, Music, Shot Types/Camera Angles, Pace, Dialogue, Voice over, Special Effects & Credits and Inter titles.

We decided to analyse the 2012 Trailer, here is what I wrote for the following categories:
Genre: Adventure, Action & Sci-fi.
Narrative: End of World, Fight for your life.
Unique Selling Point: The amount of special effects.
Target Audience: People who enjoy Sci-Fi films, people who liked War of the Worlds, Independence Day & The Day after Tomorrow.
Music: Inquisitive at the beginning, dramatic, Rock. Makes it seem Epic.
Shot types/Camera angles: Long shots, Birds eye view, Canted angles
Pace: Quick paced, action. Slow at the beginning of the trailer. There is a 'Surge of Action' and then a 'Release'
Dialogue: There isn't much Dialogue. There is a comedy bit where a Dad says to his Daughter 'What are the Odds?' The only dialogue there is, is when it is necessary. The news reader repeats 'this year' a few times, it homes in on how close it is to the end of the world.
Voiceover: Man reading the news over a few shots.
Special Effects: There are lots of special effects, they obviously havn't cut corners on teh amount of them. There are waves destroying everything, Buildings crashing & CGI.
Credits and Intertitles: The intertitles give brief details about when the film is released and how the end is only the beginning. Appocalyptic films.

Conventions of a Teaser Trailer

Here are the conventions of a teaser trailer which we compiled as a class:

-Not much information is given away in a teaser trailer
-Name of the Film
-Sense of its Genre
-Release Date
-Generally is less than a minute long
-Target audience, usually from the teaser trailer you can tell what the target audience is.
-Non sequential, it takes things out of order.

AS Coursework Reflection

I was asked to reflect on my AS coursework. I used the following Titles to write down what I used last year and what I used them for.

Digital Media:
- Computer Based Media
Adobe Photoshop, was used for editing the photo of our Queen B's
Adobe Premier Elements, was used for editing and making the final changes to our opening 2 minutes of a film.
Freeplay Music, was used for finding music to fit with our film.
Blogger, was used to blog what we did every day for our media course
Youtube, was used to look at clips from films with a similar genre
Media Convertor, was used to covnert a clip of working titles logo so we could add it onto our movie.
- Components used for actually filming our film.
Camcorder, used to capture the film
Microphone, used to capture sound that the camcorder didn't pick up
Tripod, used to stabalise the camera so it wouldn't move around and be shaky during a shot
Digital Camera, used for the photo of our Queen Bees and used in the evaluation tasks

Creativity
We followed the stereotype for our chick-flick, however to make it different we used still images at the end to show the transformation.

Research and Planning
To plan our film we watched lots of chick-flick trailers on youtube and used storyboards to plan what we were going to include in our film. We redrafted the final storyboard to make sure it fitted in with our film.
For our ancillary task we used the 360 rule and the over the shoulder shot.

Post Production
We recieved good feedback for our film, we didn't recieve any bad feedback.

Evaluation
We used Youtube, for us to upload our video and people to comment on it, of what they thought about it and what we could've improved on.
We got a list of 7 evaluation tasks to complete and we used shots from both our preliminary task and our main tasks to compare them to see what we had learned.
We used Google to find pictures of other similar characters in the Chick-Flick genre to compare our characters to.
We used a digital camera to take pictures of us standing by the equipment that we used to say what we've learned from it and how it helped us to finalise the clip.