Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your Main Product and your Ancillary Tasks?

Final Poster Design

After deconstructing existing posters, designing our own posters and developing our draft, this is our final design of our poster.

We have changed various aspects of our draft in order to develop and finalize our poster design: 

- We have changed the tagline, 'Innocence is no excuse', to Italics. This represents and reflects the characters' movement and action 

- We have lowered the title 'Arcane', as we could not find any existing action thriller posters that did this 

- Audience feedback suggested that the target was too faint, and so we increased the intensity and thickness of the line

- We also enclosed the target more so it appears more focused on the main character i.e the protagonist

- We altered the tagline font, and made it to plain white Arial in capitals 

First Draft Trailer Feedback

Upon finishing the first draft of our trailer, we decided to publish it on YouTube.  This would act as a useful service for receiving constructive criticism from the public, allowing us to improve our product further.  We have also shown our trailer to our media teachers for the same reasons.

After receiving audience feedback and reviewing the draft ourselves, we have created a list of the trailer's strengths and weaknesses to work from.

Strengths

• Sticks to the conventions of a teaser trailer:  1 minute and 24 seconds in length, begins with showing the film’s production companies,  has been created intentionally for marketing/to build anticipation for the film’s release, ‘teases’ the audience with short snippets from the film (establishing the concept and genre of the film but without revealing too much of the plot), ends conventionally by informing the audience of the film’s title and stating that it is 'coming soon' rather than providing a specific date.

• Sticks to the conventions of the 'Action-Thriller' genre: has the concept of a male protagonist fighting for survive, a government body act as an adversary, use of enigmas, striking establishing shots, multiple chase scenes which use tracking/panning shots, urban setting, effective use of both high key and low key lighting, fast paced editing, variety of transitions (mainly jump cuts), dramatic climaxing music, use of a tag line, edgy typography.

Weaknesses 

• The trailer does not contain any reviews or awards it has received, a missing feature which would generate more interest in our impressionable target audience.

• The trailer does not include a 'billing block' of film credits at the end, with only the words 'coming soon' being shown.  This is unconventional for any teaser trailer, as it is often considered an essential feature.   

• The footage used forms too much of a coherent whole, potentially spoiling the film's plot by being too chronological.

Storyboard: Version 1

Below is an image of our completed storyboard (first version), a clear guide as to how we should go about shooting our desired trailer.

Codes and Conventions of a Thriller

After looking at Codes and Conventions of a Teaser Trailer and deciding upon a Genre, we found the need to research the codes and conventions within this. We used both the internet and watched some of the thrillers ourselves to find some patterns and made a poster (below) to show what we found out.

Codes and Conventions of the Thriller Genre

SoundCloud

We are currently considering using a soundtrack to overlay our teaser trailer, as this seems to be a common trend in current film marketing.  After researching music sharing sites such as ‘MySpace’, ‘Last.fm’ and ‘8tracks’, we have recently discovered the website ‘SoundCloud’. 

As mentioned in our ‘Problems and Solutions’ post, SoundCloud is an online audio distribution platform which allows the ‘collaboration promotion and distribution of audio recordings by users’.  It was founded in 2007 by sound designer Alex Ljung and artist Eric Wahlforss, and has since accumulated over 20 million users (growing by 1.5 million every month).  On SoundCloud we have found a number of potentially useable soundtracks available for free download, with permission from the creator to adapt and publish them.  This tool may save considerable time during our project, as our group does not have the ability to compose and create our own professional sounding music. 

Problems and Solutions

Whilst planning the construction of our film trailer, we discovered several problems which we may encounter in the future.  To ensure these issues were eliminated as quickly as possible, we organised a brainstorming session to create potential solutions.  Overall we were able to produce a practical solution for every problem that may occur in future creative processes, and below is a photograph of said list.