EVALUATION:How effective was your audience feedback?

Our audience feedback allowed us to build a greater understanding and reckoning of how effective the production pieces for *Playtime* were. As the feedback was mainly positive, this gave us a sense of confidence to know that our planning and effort had been succesful.

However, as most of our feedback came from friends, it was undeniable that there would be a sense of bias when they were critiquing our work. This was true and we faced hardly any criticism.

What would happen when we showed our trailer to other Media Students who have never met us before and so have no guilt in criticising? Our media teacher made this possible by communicating with another teacher from another college and negotiating with them to grade our work using the markscheme as comments from the trailer uploaded on Youtube.

"It seems like the girl has had an isolated existence so even though its difficult inside a house, some long shots would make her loneliness clearer because at the moment we see close-ups and mid range shots, but the zoom to the boy is a very effective shot."
We enjoyed this point as the fact that we were given ideas on how we could have improved our trailer and made our aim more effective was very helpful. The audience feedback allowed us to know that 3rd Party advice although sometimes shunned, can sometimes be a great help.

"Editing: The rapid sequence of words and pictures of the boy makes it clear what the background of the characters and themes of the film would be, but it would be a lot more effective if this was done as camera shots of her past for example, instead of words that could have just been added quickly and easily"

This comment shows that our audience did not know anything about our influences. Perhaps if they had seen that we wanted titles to be a significant aspect to our trailer then they would have understood why we used titles instead of just images. Titles give our future audience brief descriptions to our film, using shots from her past would take away the suspense we wanted to build.

"but the slow motion shots of the girl slow it back down and it loses its pace, so the audience get less excited by the action"

The whole point of the slowing down of our character's movement was infact to build tension. The fact that these audiences thought that this effect actualy removed excitement is arguable. Obviously the pace is slowed down but this was in order for our audience to relax and then be startled by the quick, fast paced shots that soon followed it. The fact that this audience did not get this technique makes us question the effectiveness of this idea.


So, we can see that audience feedback differs from strangers and colleagues. In a sense the feedback from those that we didn't know was more effective as if in actual fact our trailer did go on screens, the viewers too would be strangers and so these comments helped us to argue our thoughts. It is not compulsory for our audience to understand all of our ideas in the way that we deemed them to be understood and it is all based on their interpretation and for this reason, audience feedback was interesting and gave us a real chance to stand up for our trailer.

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

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

EVALUATION:How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

How Effective Is The Combination Of Your Main Products And Ancillary Texts? on Prezi

Final Magazine cover of Playtime

Final Poster of Playtime

Final Teaser Trailer of Playtime

Magazine influences

We researched many different film magazines to use as an influence for our magazine cover. We looked at the different formats,unique selling points,logos use of text an colour, font size/style, and relevance to genre etc. It was difficult to find one that embodied what we needed in terms of genre.
We looked at Total film which is one of the largest film magazines in the world which features a range of different types of film. We looked at the features of the magazine and how we would incorporate things like the title,barcode and price.


Salt being on of our main influences encouraged us to use the total film logo as a base structure for our magazine cover. We found it very difficult to find a logo which had a good quality pixel so we decided to come up with our own. we used magazines like Empire and Little White lies as inspiration. We used concepts like using the title and the picture to create a 3D effect. We tried to market the film using genre and we did it in a way that makes the audience want to know more by not giving away to much of the themes and ideas of the film.

Magazine Influences

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magazine cover and theory.

The magazine cover conflicts the theory of british film theorist, Laura Mulvey who talks about the male and female gaze. viewers are encourage to identify with the protagonist of the film which tends to be a man. Playtime has a female protagonist which is portrayed on the magazine cover which doesn't portray her as desirable which is the 'norm'.
The male gaze is a well established phenomenon in film,advertising and other types of media. The concept of it is the tendency of media to view its subjects of heterosexual men which is aimed primarily at females. In the case of Playtime it conceptualises the idea of the female gaze.
People watch movies like playtime give people a sense of enjoyment and thrill. Male viewers may be attracted to it because it gives them visual pleasure as the protagonist has a dominant role and is shown to be a sexy criminal. Women may her position as empowering and as Mulvey talks about the beginning of annihilating patriarchal Hollywood.
An example of the Male gaze is this scene in the movie Heart- Magic man-The virgin suicides.




Cropping pictures is a tool used to put an emphasise on different element of the body correlating to the male and female gaze theory, so instead of this....


you might get this....

Possible Magazine titles

Premiére
Cannot use this as it is already an established film magazine

Cinematic
Sounded A Bit Too Amateur

Disturbia
Matches our film as it is a disturbing concept but doesn’t sound good as a magazine title

Scream
Would suit a magazine for films that are much more horror based

Film Central
Perfect. As There are no adjectives relating to a specific genre in the title, it is a title that can advertise any genre of film and for this reason, perfect for Playtime.

Photoshop Practice

Before we could really start up and create our poster, we needed to brush up on our skills on photoshop. During a Media Studies Lesson, we took a few quick flicks of images similar to ones that will be on our actual poster and began to edit and mesh them together to see if our idea would infact work.

The main idea for our Poster is to have an extreme close up shot of our protagonist, Ursula, wearing her trademark midnight shades. In the reflection of the shades will be an image of the boy in the trailer as a way to create synergy for our audience and create an association between the child and our main character.

This idea will require us taking two images. With the image of the boy, we will have to use the 'Select' pencil on Photoshop to carefully draw around the boy and then press 'Cut'. If this is done successfully, we should be left with the required image of the boy cut out of the picture, leaving only a stencil behind with the rest of the image that too is unwanted.

We Tried This Out On Photoshop And Here's What We Ended Up With...

As you can see, this is very similar to what we described above. Unfortunately, the shoe has been left behind in the image and this has taught us to be very careful when selecting and to ensure that we check that all aspects of the image that we want to select is actually selected.

Once we had this image, We pasted this onto our image of Nicky of LNC impersonating our main character. This worked well and appeared somewhat realistic once the edges had been softened and smudged out. We had previously played around with the editing of Nicky and had used all sorts of effects to give us a basic idea of how we wanted our final production to look.

Either way, here's how our 'Trial Poster' turned out :

You can quite clearly see that we have put the image that we previously cut onto the main character's glasses. This works quite well although with the real image, the framing of the glasses will be more residing and so will provide a better outline for our character to sit in than the scarf used in this.

On our actual poster, our character will be wearing her signature bracelet of which is colourful, The dark editing that will be used on our poster will allow the beads of the bracelet to really stand out along with the editing on her lips that will be made a bold red.

In terms of writing, we wanted as little as possible. We want the image to be the main focus of our poster and so simply used text for the title and tagline. We will make these bright and colourful to further emphasise the childhood theme but use a smudged paint font that although appears quite innocent on the surface, still has a sinister tone to it.

The importance of Taglines on a film poster

Posters are essential to building up a voice and following for a future releasing of a film. In order for a film to be mentioned in conversations by future audiences, there must be a certain aspect of the poster that stands out substantially from other films soon to be released. Features such as a Tagline on the poster are essential to building up a following. If effective, they will be easily remembered and unintentionally fixed into the minds of the audience when the name of a film, in our case ‘Playtime’ is brought up. A successful Tagline will constantly be associated with the film and stay in the minds of future audiences.

LNC have decided that “Are You Ready To Play” will be the most effective tagline for our film. It is short and straight to the point and easily associated with the title of our film (Playtime). The tagline does not give away too much about our film but simply gives a vague idea of the playful theme. This is definitely the most effective Tagline to associate with our film

Influence for Playtime Poster

Sin city was also one of our influence as it is a crime thriller just like Playtime. The film's unique colour processing renders the film mostly in black and white but retained some bits in colour was the kind of theme we was going. Initially we wanted Playtime to be in black and white but we decided not to do this because we felt it would not appeal to our target audience so instead we used this concept in our poster. We were also attracted to the way the camera used angles to emphasise the importance of the characters. We tried to use a range of different angles from low angles to aerial shots but e then decided it would be more effective to do a close up shot of the protagonists' face.


The Movie Salt starring Anglina Jolie is one of or main influences for our poster. It has a similar genre and it also features a female protagonist which isn't very common and predictable. We were attracted to the way the main focus in the picture was her face and we thought we could develop that idea and incorporate the childlike theme we had. The eye catching feature on the salt poster is the prominence of the characters eyes and the contrast between light and dark. we tried to incorporate this by using a black background and the use of colour. We decided to make her lips bright red so they stand out and is the main focal point alongside the use of colour in the title and the young boy shown in the reflection of the glasses. The use of colour in the title depicts the relation how young children can be attracted by colour.
The simplicity of the structure of the Salt poster reminded us that clear and basic texts,fonts and boldness can elaborate the meaning and significance of how the film
can be portrayed in an exciting way without making it to busy.

Poster : Initial Ideas

Intial Teaser Trailer-Playtime

Just from 2 shooting sessions, LNC can already smell the progress from their previous opening sequence. The shots are of a higher standard and the simplicity that is our trailer in some ways enhances the quality of our production.

By sticking to our storyboard, we have been able to get our sessions done efficiently and this work has been produced. It all goes hand in hand and once adding the shots from our final shooting session, our teaser trailer should really start piecing together.

Although this is a bit long, the shots here are prolonged and will be cut down dramatically to create the pace that we want our trailer to be. The shots with Ursula as a child may be deleted as we are not sure if this will tie in the way we want it to in our trailer. All major decisions like this will be made once we've edited everything together.

XOXO
LNC

Titles

Filming Schedule

Casting shots and location shots

Dami(Ursula) touching up on her evil villain costume

Lydia applying Dami (Ursula's) trademark

lipstick for the first few shots

Having a look at the work filmed so far

Me working the camera,(what I do best ;)...our main shots of the villain were taking by the front door of our main setting.

Creative Risks

When producing a "Teaser Trailer' there are many risks involved and I am not only talking about practical factors such as health and safety but the technical and social factors such as offending people.
In Playtime some of these factors may be incorporated in the images. Some viewers may find this disturbing as they may not agree with the concept of the storyline which is why age rating is needed in order for people underage to not to watch it.
The cost of this is losing some potential viewers of other age ranges and viewers who may find the concept inappropriate.
Benefits of this maybe it builds up suspense for viewers.

Another potential benefit maybe the stereotypical barriers we've broken of a villain, which tends to either be different sex eg. a man or someone of an older age. This may cost us some viewers if they take offence to the concept being based on child cruelty or even see it as setting a bad example, as the villain uses children toys to attack their victims.

Audience Profiling By LNC

User Ratings For "The Crazies"
Above, We have a graph showing the audience that attended the opening week screening and rated (/10) of "The Crazies". From looking at the data, we can see a variety of different members of the audience. Immediately, we can confirm that Males U18 Aare definitely members that dominate the audience. Females were also a main attender of the movie with 7% being under 18 and 7.2% being 45+. This is a surprise for females to be so interested in a thriller movie and we at LNC definitely believe that females will dominate the audience of Playtime as our protagonist is a vindicting, menacing woman seeking revenge.

Women like to see other women in higher positions especially those that are usually posed by males. Ursula Montgomerry will intrigue many viewers and hopefully males also will be interested in viewing what a female killer is capable of.

U18's dominated the audience overall, so we must ensure that our film is rated at an acceptable rating of 15 as some of the content is not suitable for a 12 year old.