How effective is the combination of your main products and ancillary texts? on Prezi

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

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

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

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

final media project;

This is our final video.

This is our poster.

This is our magazine cover styled on the little white lies magazine.

Musical Compositions

Originally we decided to compose our own music due to the restrictions from the exam board , as you can see in previous posts we used garage band.

 We found that this wasn't very effective for our trailer as most romance films use well known top hits in their trailers.
We did some research and found that we are allowed to use music as long as it isn't signed so we spent time after school looking up unsigned bands on the internet. We found a website (www.unsingedbandweb.com) which allowed us to look through loads of songs by unsigned bands and download them. This website was particularly useful as it listed songs by genre , as our movie is an independent production we decided to look at the 'alternative' genre.
While browsing we found a song which we fell in love with;

This song was absolutely perfect from the lyrics to the composition and timing , the song is all about trying for someones love which is exactly what chase and cindy end up doing with each other . the music timing was also perfect (after a small edit) which ment that the tempo sped up right at the moment of the montage which was very effective.
unfortunately this song didn't go well with our clause in the trailer as we needed something sad and desperate. so we decided to use two songs, after some more researching we found this song;

We thought the lyrics and composition worked very well with our trailer with the first line being "don't you hid your true feelings , dont lie to my face" which is exactly what chase is doing when cindy over hears talking about her , although she thinks he genuinely feels that way. We mixed these two together but there were some difficulties with voice levels .

at one point you can't hear what chase is saying , when he says 'great' sarcastically' , to get around this we decided to have antar do a voice over but unfortunately it was the last day of the project and he was at the hospital. We decided to try out Mr southworth imitating antars voice , we found that this actually worked perfectly and you couldnt tell the difference.             

Magazine cover research

As a group we researched in to the different types of film review magazines on the market. We found that magazines such as 'Empire' and 'Sight and sound' were not appropriate for the type of magazine we were looking to create. Reasons for this were that Empire realistically wouldn't have our genre of film on the front of their magazine as they usually focus on blockbusters, rather than an independent romantic comedy.

One of the magazines we considered doing our cover in the style of was 'Studio' (a female based magazine) which is aimed at women through the use of the articles and focus upon female actresses. Their website informs us that all articles are written by women, for women. Along with content being inspired by fashion & beauty which are stereotypically appealing to the female market. We found that each of the covers for Studio magazine focused upon the beauty of the actresses with the use of posed shots of women both in character and out of character. Due to the dominance of women throughout the magazine we would be forced in to using 'Cindy' on the cover. In this case our target audience would be for the female market, ruling out men reading the magazine unless they were female enthusiasts. 

The other magazine we considered using was 'Little white lies'. Little white lies focuses upon the creative design of each issue which is followed throughout the content of the magazine. From the cover examples of the magazine we can see that the predominant focus is of the leading role within the independent films it displays in the magazine. The actor/actress on the cover of the magazine is usually edited in order to be perceived as comical and appear more graphical than other film magazines. The individuality of the style of Little white lies appealed to us as a group as it does not follow the usual conventions of other magazines. We decided that following the style of the magazine would be a good idea. But, we decided to change the form of the front cover as we would like the focus to be on both 'Cindy' and 'Chase', but the style would be kept the same. 

Characters Natural on screen chemistry

The character on screen chemistry was actually a natural chemistry as we filmed our actors while they were just sitting at times as their natural self. We found this was when our characters acted at their best so we decided to use some scenes from this throughout our trailer.so Our actors off screen chemistry allowed their onscreen chemistry to be clear and realistic for our audiences.

Design of titles for trailer

We decided to use titles throughout our trailer to break up the scenes, we had to come up with short catchy lines and a design to use throughout.
Because our film idea is based on a video diary , we found a font linked to that theme which sketches out he words like they are being written. We thought this coincided with out diary theme well.

Looking at previous romance trailers such as "Friends with Benefits" we found that the titles were quite simple , as you can see from the snapshot to the right it is a short phrase with three simple colours. there are also not a lot of effects with the title coming in from the left hand side.
We liked the simplicity of this and decided to use something similar for our trailer.
We already had the font that we wanted to use and all we had to think about was the colour scheme and what it would say. As the beginning of our trailer starts with a short clip of 'chase' and then a short clip of 'cindy' we decided to use the phrases "one boy.." and "... one girl" before each clip. Because our film is a romance we decided to use the colour white and burgundy , originally we chose red but found that the colour was too bright and not kind to the eyes.
Our first idea looked like this ;

We then decided we needed a line to bring out the story line to the audience , after a lot of thinking we decided to go with "do opposites really attract?" which links with the theme of opposites throughout the trailer. As we are using the same colour theme with all of our titles , it also has a burgundy backgroundand white writing with the same font. 

After playing around for a while we found that the titles looked better with a white background and burgundy writing as it was more simple and effective. 

For the title "do opposites really attract?" we decided to add emphasis on the word opposites by leaving it as the last word on the screen.

We decided that having the rest of the words disappear straight away was to harsh and broken for a romance so added an effect where they fall away. We found this was very effective. 

We decided to place this title right before our shot of chase and cindy together when they don't like each other as it adds to the story line and gives a hint to them becoming friends in the future. 

We decided we needed another title towards the end of the trailer to make it more symmetrical as all of our titles were at the beginning. We decided to go with the title "how will it end ?" to leave the audience in anticipation and questioning to find out what happens. 

We originally placed this title after the last scene, but then found that when watching the trailer , it felt as if you had seen the whole movie in the trailer except the ending , so we decided to place this title right before there is the disruption of equilibrium making the audience feel like they haven't seen everything.

The use of the new imovie

We decided to use the new iMovie unlike our class mates because we liked the precision editor and the way it seemed easier to use images and cutting tools. The new imovie also allowed us to cut scenes to a 0.1 second gap so we could have exact timings.


Also we had the idea to use a green screen. This was a new piece of technology for the group and the school in general, so we used this green screen to add the recording outline to the image. This was a piece of visual post production. 


Furthermore, we extracted audio from images to play through clips that didn't have the exact audio that we needed underneath it. This was helpful especially when voices on video were not projected enough, so a voice over was needed.

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

This is asking us as a group to think about synergy between our trailer the poster and the magazine front cover for example in what ways does it feel like it is promoting the  same text and in what ways could this be improved.


We will do this with a voiceover and possibly some green screens at certain points. But we will be aiming to show where there is synergy and what we have kept similar throughout our film, poster and magazine. We will look at fonts, colours and characters. The fonts were similar on each of our products, the colours were kept the same and the characters 'Chase' & 'Cindy' were included on all three showing consistency and what we wanted to keep centre of attention. 

The Completion of the Hats and logo;

We decided to use a plain hat and draw our design onto it with marker pens as this would give us more freedom to be creative with it, we purchased to plain hats in black and white online. While we waited for them to be delivered we came up with the design we wanted to use on the hats , we searched different fonts on www.dafont.com and decided that the graffiti fonts worked well , we then downloaded the font and used photo shop to get the size and outline of what we wanted on the hats and then printed it off.
Our logo is our initials put together (ANC - Antar , Nikita and Chloe) , we all decided to choose a colour each for our initials , which was blue for Antar , pink for Nikita and green for myself. 
After printing of the graffiti outline of our initials , I cut them out and drew them onto the top of the hat. I then coloured in each letter in the chosen colour and to add definition went round it in a bold black. Finally we chose a darker shade of each colour and shaded round the outside of each letter and merged the colours together where the shading joined.
As the hat suited Antar's appearance the most we chose him to be the person wearing the hat in our logo. We then had to decided how we were going to take the shot. We decided that a plain picture wasn't very creative and found that having the word 'productions' written on his hand made it harder to see what it said. We decided to have Antar holding a plan piece of paper and would then use live type to write the word "production" on it and add effect onto it. 
When filming we decided to start with a close-up of the antar wearing that with it his head tilted downwards so that you can see the logo, then as he tilts his head upwards , the camera zooms out and tilts downwards to focus solely on the white piece of card in between his hands. 
We had to shoot this a few times as it was difficult to zoom out smoothly while tilting the camera smoothly but we found if we shot it in revers then it was easier because we could get the framing of the card perfect. 
We then uploaded it onto the computer and reversed it. We then changed the contrast , brightness and colours on it to make it more abstract as our "company" is an independent company. 
To add in the writing on the paper , we had to take a still frame from the end of the shot and transfer it to livetype. We decided to use a blue coloured font to go with the contrasting of the hat and then added an effect when it comes on to make it slide onto the screen at the end of the shot as we felt this looked effective. 
We had a few technical problems as we found that when the edited frame on livetype was added to the original shot it changed the size of the shot lightly making the shot inconsistent. We solved this by cropping the original shot closer to the size of the edited frame and also changing the colour of the edited frame so you don't notice the small jump in size between the two frames. We had to edit it in small amounts to get it as close as possibly but finally managed to make it perfect.

Final Poster and Magazine Cover

This is our final poster for our movie we wanted to incorporate everything we had in the film into the image we wanted our two main characters in the film in the image as they are key to the film and vital to the selling of the film and making the film appeal to the audience the love hearts on the image show that the film will definitely have some romance throughout the film. The quote at the top of the image allows us to have something short and very easy to remember for the audience the use of the film strip creates the effect that this will be the sequence of events. The use of the colour red also lends to the fact of it being a valentines theme and a romantic film.

This is our final magazine cover we chose the magazine little white lies as we found it favourable as a group and we liked the effect of the cartoon kind of theme. We did though find that the effect on photoshop was rather basic so after a period of messing around with different tools on photoshop we found a way to add colours that would allow us to make the image a cartoon. We kept the same font throughout the magazine cover although we did change the colour as we had a problem with the legibility of the font with the colour. We kept our two main characters on our cover as this is what has been on all the work we have done has always had our two main characters.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We will be examining our feedback given by our chosen candidates. This will give us the possibility to gain valid criticism from various reliable sources.Praise and criticism from people who have not previously seen are film will give us the opportunity to discuss how we could of done things differently. 


To present this we will be creating a video which will switch between the critic and us which will show the criticism/praise and our evaluation on the ideas pointed out. 

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

We will need to consider the role of computers in the process of making our various pieces  of practical work. We will need to think about how many different technologies that would have been needed ten years ago to create our film trailer. We shall discuss how convergence can be applied to our media product and how as a group we were frustrated and guided by technology during our project. We will be presenting our evaluation of this question through a PREZI.On this we can include short clips of the software we used and a wordle. 


Things we will include and consider in a Prezi are our use of live type, garageband, and photoshop. We can also say how we used a video of the process used in photoshop to create the magazine cover which we videoed on the computer itself. Furthermore,there will be discussion of how last year we used a video camera which filmed on tape, whereas this year we used a media card which in turn shows how technology has improved. 


Another example displaying how technology has improved is through accessibilty to computers in modern day society, this has only taken place in the last ten years. This opportunity has allowed students work to be developed in ways which would not have been possible previously which shows how the development of technology is useful. This would be expanded on the Prezi.


The frustration we faced from using photoshop will be included in our prezi as we found we had to constantly work out how to do certain things eg magazine cover. Adding to this we show how technology didn't enable us to do everything we hoped to which showed how technology guided us. We will also point out how we had difficulties in finding the font for our poster as we wanted it to stick with our theme whilst being original and creative.

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

This is asking us to think about our influence and what we borrowed from them and in what ways did we as a group try to differ from these. The discussion will include terminology and technical details.


We will video our response to this question whilst also comparing our two influence films and our film we will select various parts of the films that we used as influences and this will then allow us to compare the three films, separately from this we will have a voiceover with pictures and compare our influences and what we used from them.


Friends with benefits
Mean Girls
One Day


These 3 films the group used as major influences as we believe these films would have a similar target audience to ours and also deal with relationships and issues similar to ours.