What have you learned from your audience feedback ?
After showing the film trailer to members of the audience, along with the poster and magazine cover, they had given me some feedback on what they thought worked and what didn’t. By making a horror film trailer it was crucial that my target audience could immediately identify the genre of the trailer. Every member of the audience was able to pick up on this right away because of the music and the scenes featured in the trailer. Using dreary, dark lighting also helped to reinforce the genre of the trailer. By using a fast paced song towards the end of the trailer, the audience stayed interested the whole way through the trailer, which would help attract a wider audience in the real world. By using the music to help build suspense my target audience had told me that this was very well done as it did give them a slight clue that something was about to happen. From asking my target audience for their views I was able to clearly identify which features worked well and which didn’t.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts ?
The combination of our products was very effective. We made sure that there was a strong theme throughout the project so our film would be very recognisable therefore helping it to sell to the target audience. We had the same colour scheme and lighting through out all of our products and this created a strong link between them. We were hoping that the audience would be able to recognise any of our products without having to look at them or think about them for very long. The title was also something we wanted to keep runing in all our products, we have the same title in our film poster and magazine cover but not in the film trailer but this is only because we did not have enough time to put it in.

Evaluation
In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products ?
There are usually quite strict conventions you have to follow in film to enable your audience to fully understand the situation. Through our research we found that all though horror films may be different at first glance if we thought about the conventions with things like props, types of shots and sound we found that they were all quite similar. For our trailer we tried to follow most conventions so that the audience understood it. We found that in most horror film trailers we watched there was not many shots in daylight or bright light so we said that most of our shots would be filmed at night or in low light and i think this went well in the trailer because if most of our shots had been in the light then it would be difficult for it to be scary. Although we wanted our shots to be dark it was very hard to get the lighting right as it had to be light enough in order to see what was happening but not too light that it looked unnatural. Another big convention we noticed about film trailers was to do with captions and voice overs. At first we wanted to add a voice over to our trailer because we thought this would go well with what we wanted our trailer to feel like but as we researched into other trailers we realised that voice overs were mainly used for comedy films and most horror films used captions for their trailers , so because of this we decided to use captions instead and it worked well because we made the captions fit in with the theme of the whole promotional package. Other conventions we followed was that the editing at the start is quite slow and the music starts off with a piano solo that is a little bit scary and builds the tension for the turning point of the trailer which is about the middle where the music changes and a fast drum beat kicks in and then the editing goes from shot to shot a lot more rapidly creating a fast pace feel to the trailer. We did not have enough time to finish the trailer but if we did then we would of liked to of slowed the editing down a bit at the end and to make some of the shots fit more with the music. We did not really challenge many conventions because we though that we didn't really have the equipment or knowledge to make it understandable to the audience, we though that if we challenged the conventions too much it would make the trailer look of less quality so we though we would get a better looking product by sticking to most conventions.

Our film poster also follows quite a few of the conventions. First off in a film poster you have to let the audience know what the name is, when it comes out and who's in it. Our poster does all of these. i am pleased with our film poster overall because i think it promotes the film well. We knew the picture we wanted for our film poster, the silhouette of the main actor (murderer/killer) in a door way. We though this would be good because it does not give too much away about the film and creates a mysterious film but lets you know enough that it makes you want to see it. With though it was a good representation of our film because you cannot see any detail of the person which makes you question who he is and he is also standing in a doorway which you can clearly see he is not really supposed to be there which means he is intruding. We also followed conventions with the colour scheme of the whole poster. Blue is the main colour used through out our whole promotional package, we felt that the blue colour created and eary and mysterious feel that added to it all being scary.

The theme was also carried on to our magazine cover. We followed conventions quite strictly with the magazine cover because people have strict views on what they want from a magazine cover. Our original idea was a picture of his business card covered in blood because we though this was a good representation of the main characters professional side and also his psychotic side, but we then decided against it because it not look right, most magazine we researched had the main character as the picture on the magazine cover and not an object or prop.

This is the final version of our poster, as you can see the image is slightly different from the one before, obviously one the of the first things we did was to add a title to the picture, we wanted the title to just simply display the name of the film. At first we wrote the title just plain, all in one line and the same size and we just scrolled through fonts trying to decide the best one that suited the poster and our genre the most, we did eventually agree on a title that looked good but i though it wasn't good enough and looked to boring so i played around with things like positioning sizing until i was happy with the title. As the picture shows the title is quite different from a regular line of text, the number 7 is a lot larger than the other text, this makes it stand out and emphasises it, i also added some other effects like gaussian blur to make the font appear to be glowing, to add the fading lines to the number 7 i just added motion blur in different directions. I think the finished title looked very appropriate for our poster and our film genre. But because the title was a bold white colour it was very bright, this made the image behind it look very dull and dim so i had to adjust the brightness and contrast levels further, the white and blue shades were not bright enough and did not contrast enough to the darker areas. So i made the brighter areas brighter to get a wider range of tones and so the brighter areas matched to brightness of the title more so they went together nicely. We also was not sure on the best place to put the title, whether it should be at the top or bottom ? or to one side ? or in a corner ?, we experimented by moving the title around and thought that our research shows that most posters have the title centralised in the bottom half and we thought it looked best there on our poster.

This is the edited version of the original photo we took, as you can see we have made some drastic changes. The first change i made was to place a blue filter over the image, what this did was to turn all the lighting and objects that were mainly yellow and brown colours into blue, white and black shades, this made it so the image fit more in with our film genre, horror. We had looked at some other film posters of the same genre and we felt that most of the ones we saw contained mainly the colour blue or red, so we though that this style for our poster would be appropriate. Another change i made was to the contrast and brightness levels, i had the play around with the levels until i had it so it became a complete siholoutee, i made the darker parts darker and the lighter parts lighter, i am still not happy with the photo as it is now as i feel it is too dim and the blues and whites should be a little lighter to contrast more with the black, but overall i think that we have changed the picture very well in order for it to fir out genre and also look good. The original shot was a good one, but it was not one we could just put straight onto the poster, i think we have created a good feel of mystery and horror, also we wanted it to look intrusive, like the killer is intruding into the home, like he shouldnt be there. i am happy with how the poster is coming along but will add more adjustments until it looks more professional.

This was the original photo we took for our poster, we used the doorway to the house we were using for filming, we wanted the shot to be from a low angle to make the figure look dominating, this shot we actually used was one that we just took quickly and was a bit of a tester for all the lighting and everything else in the shot, the person who is in this photo is actually tom Edwards (the victim) when it is supposed to me (the killer) but we figured that you wouldn't be able to tell after we adjusted it in photoshop. The picture we had in mind was a silhouette of someone standing in a doorway to a house so for the lighting we tried to make it as light as possible behind the figure but as dark as possible in front. We used headlights from my car to light up the background and also turned on the light behind the head of the figure, in this photo you can see the face and some detail of the person standing, we didn't want this to show but we thought that we would be able to photoshop it into a complete silhouette. To make the figure appear more scary we tried to show that he was holding an axe and also wanted and outline of the the hood rather than his head as this would hide the identity further and add to the mysterious effect.

we also experimented with different blood patterns and different lighting, above are a couple of photos to show this. The first photo is taken from when we changed the lighting so it shone from different angles, in this particular image the lighting is directly in level with the card and is shining from the side, this has given all the raised areas exaggerated shadows and makes the blobls of blood on the card look very fake and like they have been put in by photoshop, we though this effect looked good but it was not what we wanted as we wanted the photo to like realistic and more older that computer generated. The second photo is a picture of one of our ideas for the blood pattern, as well as spraying the blood onto the card and paper we also thought that a hand print might be just as scary and have the same effect but when we did a test run with it we decided that spraying the blood and flicking it onto the paper looked better than the hand print as the hand print looked too purposly done.