




kk..............................................
As part of the marketing campaign, we had to include a movie poster and Empire magazine cover. These two ancillary texts were very effective in reflecting the chosen genre of my media text and also able to gain a sense of the eeriness of the entire media text I had created. One way that I was able to reflect our film was by having the killer’s face o
n the movie poster covered by the darkness of his hooded jacket. This was used not only to create the enigma of who is this character but also it’s the same technique I employed for the trailer, as we never fully see the killer’s face nor do we ever see anybody’s face who has authority. Furthermore, this is an indexical reference to the fear that a youth wearing a hooded top creates within our society. Moreover, to create the theme of my chosen genre, I also included the faces of the main characters to be the subordinate image both in ghostly whitey blue effect on the movie poster.
This technique was incorporated because it is very commonly used on posters of this genre it is used on posters like I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Sorority Row (2009).
It will also easily help our audience identify which genre my media text is associated with.
jjj.........






.......
To secure the right target audience for the our media text, I did some research to see what the typical



In order to know if we had successfully appealed to our target audience, we asked a group of experienced media practitioners around the ages of 16-18 to view our trailer. They all correctly guessed that the trailers genre was horror, claiming that conventions such as: characters screaming, “shaky camera scenes,” and the use of a red screen to symbolise blood made them assume this. They also said that the flashing inverted images came across as scary. Moreover, the audience also correctly guess that the main premise of our trailer to be about a killer, who was following the plot of book and murdering students at a school. They were also able to establish that the main characters were Mary-Alice and Robin, although they did not know their names. They also said that Kevin looked like he would be the killer. Although, by the end of the trailer they did claim to be surprised when they heard the female voice over say “I wrote the book, I choose the endings,” leading them to question who they thought the killer was; this is what we were aiming to achieve. When asked if they would see the film upon its release, the whole audience agreed, they felt that our trailer left them with a lot of questions that they want to find an answer to. Such as: “who’s Kevin?” “What was the book really about?” “What did the head teacher have to say?” (Although this audience member then immediately said “that maybe this meant the head teacher was in on the murders?”- this was very interesting, as it was not something that I had interpreted before, it’s a very clever twist which if we had thought about earlier, could have added to the mystery of our feature film.) Some of the audience who were not fans of the horror genre said they would still see the film upon its release because of the underlying “funny” element. This was the scene where Kevin was laid on the floor and said “my name’s not Kevin.” Based on this feedback, it shows that we were successful in creating a trailer of the horror. Although as some of the audience members found some elements of the trailer amusing I believe that if we had the chance to re-edit our trailer, I would consider either re-shooting this scene to make it more dramatic and avoid some classing the trailer to be within the spoof genre. I would also re-shoot the radio scene, to make it more obliviously that it was a radio report that the audience were listening to and not a narration. Overall, the main reason that our target audience would see our feature film was that they were intrigued and wanted to find out who the real killer was.
After the production process of our trailer we moved into the post-production section. In Hollywood most films companies use the software: Apple: Final Cut Pro; to edit my media product I used the editing software: Adobe Premiere Elements. Although it includes very basic editing software, it actually helped me quite a bit in achieving a smooth flowing trailer that looked professional and included all the typical editing conventions other horror trailers use. With the layout being easy to understand, I was able to change the pitch and bass on the heartbeat and boom sound effects, creating a more dramatic and frightening sound.Moreover, it was easy to invert sections of film that helped me to incorporate the convention of quick invert image flash; it also made some continuous shots that I changed to invert shots in order to make them appear more ghostly and unnatural. As I became attuned to how the software works, I was able to overlay scenes which gave the app
earance that they were quickly flashing on and off the screen. Also, I was able to create many matches on actions between the music and changing scenes on the screen. Overall, the editing software made a huge impact on the way our film turned out, in the pre-production stage I had planned to only have a couple of inverted shot as I thought they would be hard to achieve under the limited time we had. However, it turned out the process was very easy and, as a result, I included many which I think gave my product the finishing touches that overall made the trailer more recognisable as the horror genre...
......
Over the process of moving from our AS media text to A2 media text, I believe that I have gained a lot of experience and information about how much time and effort it takes to produce and develop a movie. It has made me more aware of how important the pre-production element of the task is if something does not work in this stage it is highly likely that this problem will still not work when you come to shooting the film. Overall, the progression from AS to A2 has made me realise how important it is to have a co-operative group of people who are willing to work collaboratively to help you create the finished product that is at a professional standard.