Lara - Finished Trailer

Click here to watch our trailer

Lara

Directors: Max Tonkin & Natalie Coombes

Stars: Abbey Cooper, Josh Daniel, Dan Coombes and Ollie Miller

Writers: Max Tonkin and Natalie Coombes

Edited: Max Tonkin

Original music score: Natalie Coombes

Film Poster

Finished Magazine Cover

Evaluation Question 1: 'In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?'

Donnie Darko- This is the shot which is going through a "wormhole" It is a very fast paced shot where the camera moves forward very quickly. We wanted to have this sort of shot which did not involve a character.

Lara- We matched this shot by using the Pentax to capture the amount of detail and then in post production combined it with a fast and slow shots. This is a great shot because we wanted to show the location we were shooting in. We added this shot when we got to the location because we felt it would be perfect to really show the location of the film. It was covered with horrible dust and old farming machinery, a perfect location for a horror film.

The Woman in Black – Here we can see a scary ghost like character become visible over the shoulder of the main protagonist Daniel Radclyffe. In the clip the shot moves closer to the character as the ghost moves closer and closer towards the character. It then cuts to another title sequence.

Lara- We choose to mirror this scene in a two shot. The camera is held up from the floor as though It had been dropped. Then it is put into a position in which we see our main character on the right and our ghost on the left in the corner. This shot is shown for about 2 seconds when there is a reaction shot from all the characters before the camera is dropped again in it slide onto another sequence.

The Blair Witch Project- This is a famous shot in where the main protagonist is declaring a message to her family because she thinks she is about to die. Here we see a extreme close up with a handheld camera.

Lara- We thought that this shot would be a good way to show are main character. It is also using a handheld camera and shows our main character in full view. We wanted to show our whole character and not an extreme close-up.

The Strangers - In this shot the main protagonist is stood in her kitchen when the evil character walks into shot without the character noticing. This is an unusual shot in the sense that it shows the murderer but he is not giving in action, just simply starring at the main character.

Lara- This shot shows two of our characters. It originally started as a two shot but we can see Lara in the background. It pans slightly to get both Lara and the two characters in shot. The characters turn and react to the fact that Lara is just starting at them.

The Grudge- Here we see a shot of the main evil character. It shows such things as what she is wearing aswell is her face and her make up. This gives the audience a chance to see what they need to look out for in future and also what the movie itself has been about.

Lara- Here is a close up of Lara. This shot is a handheld shot where the character is holding the camera and he moves from side to side as if trying to look both ways. In the 3rd turn we see a quick shot of Lara before the camera is dropped. The shot of Lara is about 1 second long.

Saw- Dr. Godon one of the main characters of the Saw film has just cut of his foot in order for himself to be able to escape. We can see the blood running from his legs as the shot pans from bottom to top. This shot would most likely be a dolly shot on a tram as it moves forward as Dr. Godon crawls.

Lara- We decided to have a long wide shot of the character (dan) crawling from one side of the frame to the other. The shot is faded in slowly and Dan is already mid-crawl.

Saw- This is almost the same shot as the other but so is the shot we chose. It is a different angle than the previous shot. In this one we see a reaction shot from Dr. Gordon as he has just cut of his leg. Here we can see how bruised and unhealthy he looks.

Lara- This is a closer shot of Dan crawling. It is a handheld shot but with the Pentax - k7. Our more sophisticated camera. It picks up more detail and we used this with shots that could not possible be handheld. The cinematography in this shot is beautiful as it highlights lots of shadows which gives a overall grimy feel to the film.

Signs- This is one of the most recognised shots in the film. We see the alien in a different location on the planet to where the film is set. This shows how the aliens are everywhere and not just in the main location of the film, giving a sense of perspective. The alien walks from one side of the frame to the other. This gives us a small glimpse of alien.

Lara- This is a shot that follows the previous one. Dan has just crawled across this frame and now we see Lara following him. She is walking and not running, taking her time and clearly not in any rush. We felt that the shot needed a little something. So we zoomed in and out while the shot was being filmed; then during post production we manipulated that zoom buy skipping little bits of the shot giving it a sort of jagged feel.

The Shining- This is clearly a reaction shot. The main character is huddled in a corner and screaming out of fear. She looks as "Johnny" breaks through the door. This is an excellent wide shot and possible one of the most famous shots of all time.

Lara- We chose to put our character in the corner aswell but decided that there should not be any purpose, such as he should not be being attacked in anyway. So this is a basic shot just showing a scared character.

Evaluation Question 2: 'How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?'

This is the voice over where me and Max discuss how we filmed and edited our trailer. We also talk about our ancillary tasks; our poster and our magazine cover.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxcMGf5-jag&feature=youtu.be

Commentated by Nat and Max

Evaluation Question 3: 'What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Results for Questionnaire for audience feedback

Gender

16 Females

13 Males

Age

7 15 year olds

4 16 year olds

6 17 year olds

11 18 year olds

1 35 year old

Do you study media studies?

22 Yes

6 No

Genre of films you enjoy the most?

14 Horror

15 Comedy

8 Romantic

1 Sci-fi

3 Drama

5 Other

Do you really think the soundtrack matched the genre well?

27 Yes

1 No

Did you enjoy the trailer?

27 Yes

1 No - too scary

Do you think this trailer shows typical conventions of a horror genre?

27 Yes

1 No - too much of Lara

Does the trailer remind you of any other film?

7 Paranormal activity

7 Blair witch project - use of handheld camera

1 grudge

1 Friday the 13th

5 The ring

1 The ward

8 No

3 The Woman in black

What did you feel was the most effective shot in the film?

7 Beginning walking down the stairs

3 Lara walking across the shot after dan

12 Lara behind josh - fast editing

2 Ollie rocking back and forth

1 Josh speaking

1 When the camera is dropped

2 Crawling

Does the storyline interest you?

25 Yes

3 No

Do the characters feel like they are a stereotype to the genre?

25 Yes

2 No

1 Not sure

How effective is the combination of our trailer and ancillary texts (poster and magazine cover)

Would look better in black and white

Confusing

Music too obvious

Color poster, black and white film

Shows a lot of the story line

Font hard to read/understand

Good editing on film and poster

A picture of Lara may work.

Evaluation of Audience feedback

We set a series of questions, some with simple answers and others which would be very beneficial to us. We had a fairly evenly sexed group, 13 males and 16 females; along with this we had a great difference in age, ranging from 15-18; however we had a lot more 18 year old’s watching us.

We also had an audience that had media experience with most of the audience (79%) having studied the subject before. We then started to ask more questions that we felt would benefit us more, we asked “What is your favorite genre of film that you enjoy the most?” We were hoping that we would have a mostly horror favored audience as we wanted the audience that were watching our trailer to understand horror and enjoy it; this would mean that they would give us a great feedback for our trailer. The results are as followed:

Unfortunately you can see here that Comedy was the most favored choice of genre among our audience. However horror is not far behind, losing by only 3%.

So far we know about our (typical) audience is that they are female, 18, study media and enjoy comedy and horror films. We felt that this was the evidence we needed to provide us with a solid foundation on which to gather evidence about our trailer. We started to ask more serious questions about our trailer.

The next three questions results will be shown in charts and then I will summarize the evidence.

Do you really think the soundtrack matched the genre well?

Did you enjoy the trailer?

Do you think this trailer shows typical conventions of a horror genre?

This was an outstanding showing of how well our trailer had done, in each question there was only 1 no response, those audience members did actually say why they said no. When asked did you enjoy the trailer, one person said no because they felt that it was “too scary” which to us sounds more like a win. Another audience member was asked “do you think this trailer shows typical conventions of a horror genre?” and responded no because they felt that there was “too much of Lara” we felt that showing Lara would be a bit of a curve ball because in many horror films the main evil character is not shown. However in the latest film “Insidious” horror characters are in fact show in the trailer, this scared us both so we felt that it was a new way in which we could try and scare our audience, which is what a horror film is meant to do.

We felt that knowing if the trailer reminded any audience member of another film then this could be interesting, we felt this because we tried to make some shots look like one’s out of other horror films. The results were as followed.

There were three people that mentioned; The Grudge, Friday the 13th and The Ward once respectively but I felt that they did not have as much of an effect as the other responses.

Most people (27%) thought that the trailer did not remind them of any other film but “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity” both had 23% which is great because this was the sort of look that we wanted, they said that the trailer reminded them of that film the most because of the use of handheld cameras, which was one of the camera techniques we used. The Ring was also picked, we put this down to the way Lara was dressed and the way her hair was styled, as we did take “Samara” from The Ring as inspiration for the way we styled Lara. The Woman in Black was also picked, we thought this was because of one type of shot that we decided to use. This is great because that specific shot was one that we chose to try and match a specific shot in The Woman in Black.

We wanted to find out which specific shot’s worked well aswell:

The most popular shot was when Lara was hiding behind Josh (44%) , when the other characters notice her and they spin round. We felt that this was the most likely shot to be in a horror trailer. This is because it raises tension and surprises the audience. This is the shot that we matched to The Woman in Black. Walking down the stairs (26%) was a shot that we used with our Pentax K-7 camera, our camera that we used to create cinematic styled shots, we are happy that this shot was the 2nd most popular shot because it shows that our mix of handheld camera’s and cameras that capture the most detail, confirming our distinct style of filming as a success. Lara walking across the frame was also using our Pentax K-7, this is a fairly artistic shot that we did a lot of editing on. While filming we zoomed in slowly and then out again slowly. In editing, we cut little seconds of the shot so it looks like the camera skips back and fourth quickly, while zooming in and out, this shows how Lara may be able to skip through time, it also shows a dramatic styled shot. Other shots were popular, but the chosen three really showed how well our ideas paid off.

Aswell as the use of our editing techniques and music we wanted to know if the narrative worked well. We asked simply; does the storyline interest you?

We can see here that the storyline looked interesting, which meant that the trailer was well put together, including being able to show the storyline well. Being able to sell the audience is one of the main intensions of a trailer and I think we can say that it worked well.

We wanted to know what the audience felt about the characters in the trailer, we were not expecting much because the actors we used were our friends, not amazing a-list actors.

However the characters did manage to look like they were acting in a horror film. We think that Abbey who played Lara did really well and looked like a proper evil horror character. Some people said no or did not want to respond, this may because they did no understand the question. However the people did not think the characters acted like they were in a horror film, which we can’t please everyone if we don’t have proper actors.

After the questionnaire we asked about our poster and our magazine cover, we also wanted just general questions.

Some people found the ancillary texts confusing as they felt it did not work well along with the trailer, aswell as this we learnt something that originally did not cross our mind, the trailer and poster did not match because the trailer was in black and white and the poster was in hard, edited color, we thought about if we should change this at all but decided against it because we felt both were strong as a separate and not as a whole, if we put one in color or one in black in white it would have made the trailer or ancillary text not look aswell as it could. Some people found the texts hard to read and others felt there was good editing on both the trailer and poster.

The most common response was that the combination of the trailer and ancillary texts was very effective, which we look at as a success.

Overall we learnt a lot about our trailer, but most of our predictions were right we felt that the music would be popular. We also thought that The Ring, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and The Woman in Black would be mentioned by the audience. We did think however more people would be reminded by our trailer of another film.

We are very happy with the response and think that our audience response and a success.

Evaluation Question 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?''

Here are some screen grabs of the media technologies that we used in the evaluation stages. These include, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger and Facebook. Both Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were all used in trying to gain recognition for our film trailer. We uploaded our trailer onto YouTube first, and then we pasted the link onto both Facebook and Twitter, explaining what the link was. The aim in this was to try and get the views on our trailer to increase, which we thought would be a high possibility if we posted the link onto Facebook specifically. We suspected that we’d get more views after sharing the link on Facebook because between the two of us we have around 1000 friends on facebook, resulting in a higher chance of getting people to see the trailer. We also decided to ‘tag’ everybody that was involved in the trailer (the actors) so that the link would also appear on their Facebook pages, meaning again, the link would be accessible to more people. Blogger has been used throughout the production of our trailer, mostly being used to publish posts with research, analysis and progression of our trailer.

These are a few screen grabs of media technologies that we used in the construction and research stages. YouTube, IMDB and Google Images were all used for research, helping us to get inspiration and looking at similar conventions of trailers with the same genre as ours. YouTube and IMDB were both used for viewing trailers from the genre ‘horror, assisting us on deciding which conventions we were going to use in our trailer. Google Images was mainly used to find examples of movie magazine covers and film posters, resulting in us analysing them for typical conventions, and then putting these into practice when creating our own magazine cover and film poster. iMovie was used in actually creating and constructing our trailer together, resulting in us being able to choose from a range of effects and editing techniques to develop the final product. iMovie made it possible for us to incorporate the grainy, high contrast effect to our trailer, which we felt really added to the horror genre by creating an eerie atmosphere. To create the soundtrack for our trailer, I used a programme called Garageband. This allowed me to design my own sound, and really match it to the mood of the trailer. I knew that I didn’t want a piece of music, I wanted to create something that used sound effects, so Garageband was perfect in this sense. I used Microsoft Word in creating the magazine cover. It had all the facilities that I needed in making the cover, and was very easy to use. I used a website called www.dafont.com to download the font for the title of the magazine cover, which was perfect for allowing me to choose an ideal font from the vast amount that they had. We used both the Flip Camera and the Pentax K-7 to film our trailer. The Flip Camera was used for the handheld shots to give a sense of realism to our trailer. We were inspired by this affect which was used in The Blair Witch Project therefore we decided to incorporate it into our trailer. We used the Pentax K-7 which is a normal SLR digital camera, however it also has a video recording device. This helped us to create shots that were better quality than the flip camera.

Both me and Max communicated via facebook chat throughout the process of getting our Trailer to be seen by the public.

1) Stats before sharing on social networking sites.

You can see that we only had 7 Lifetime views on the video. This may have been through links in our other work, such as teachers having a look for the first time. 2)We shared a link to YouTube on Facebook. Max tagged Me, Josh, Ollie, Dan and Abbey to the link because it will then be posted onto their Facebook pages, so more people will see it, this will give is a “big bang” launch.

So these were the results after the link was publicised onto Facebook. On the far right is the image of what the link looked like on the "News Feed" of facebook. On the far left is my Facebook profile with the link and in the middle is my Facebook page with the link.

The link was posted onto face book at 20:12 PM, Max and myself decided to refresh everything including the link on YouTube as well as activity on Facebook every 10 mins and record the activity.

At 20:20pm there was a comment on Facebook on the link.

3) 20:22 Pm 108 people are now on Facebook and the YouTube has had 22 views in total, 15 since it was posted.

You can see that there has been a very small increase, but this is because of the amount of people that are online. A lot of people are sharing links and status's, which means that it is just too hard to get as much publicity we would like.

At 20:29pm there was a comment on Youtube on the video itself.

At 20:31pm Following Anneka's comment on Facebook, three other people have "Liked" the link, which would spread onto their Facebook pages, getting more publicity for the link.

20:32pm: 100 views, 29 views. Despite all the further publicity the YouTube video has only increased by 7 views.

At 20:36pm because of Anneka's earlier her comment, following all the other activity it has now be automatically "re-shared" without me being able to do anything about it. This is called "trending" which is where people purposely automatically spread a link, picture or comment throughout the internet, this can be on a small scale such as ours or the famous Kony video, where the video reached 70 million views in 5 days.

At 20:40 We took advantage of the amount of people online by "re-posting" the link, this will hit a wave of people who have just come online. On Facebook, it is important to remain at the top of the "Newsfeed" when sharing something.

20:42pm 108 people online 31 views. We can see that there has been a small rise in people viewing the video. We decided to leave the video alone for 10 mins, not sharing anything, just letting the buzz speak for itself.

20:52 100 people online and 31 views. There has been no views which means that Facebook is starting to dry up, which would be a great time to post to Twitter. It may also be because YouTube cannot keep up with the amount of "Traffic" that it is getting, meaning it is not getting enough time to process the views into the statistics.

At 20:53 We posted the link onto Max's Twitter.

This should show the link to more people and getting more views. We also used my twitter by tagging me in the link, this will then show on my Twitter page.

At 20:56pm We received a comment on Facebook. This shows that the link is still getting publicity from Facebook. Sorry for the swearing!

21:02pm there has been no changes in the amount of views, which is impossible seeing as we have had a comment from James, this means that YouTube is not keeping up with the statistics. We decided to leave everything for 20 mins. This will give YouTube the time to catch up.

21:22Pm 80 people online. 34 views. There has been a small change, which may be the possible end result for the amount of views it may get as the number of people online on Facebook is starting to reduce as the time goes on. This is a good sign to leave it for tonight and check the final, totalled statistics tomorrow after all the "buzz" and "traffic" has died.

At 21:38 pm We received a comment on the link from Facebook.

At this point Max logged off  Facebook and Twitter and will now look at all the links and all the statistics.

22:21pm (The next day, over 24 hours has passed)

Facebook. More comments have been added to the link.

YouTube Statistics -

We can see that the lifetime views up to this point is 73 views. This makes me think that we received most of these views yesterday and not overnight, this is because we think that YouTube could not keep up with the sudden traffic it received from the link, only after can we see the whole effects of the publicity from the video.

We can see that more females saw the link than males. As well as this we had more people looking at the video, from outside of YouTube, basically from our links.

One thing that is interesting in this process is that I have only posted the link on my Facebook twice and only on Twitter once, yet we have managed to increase the views from 7 to 73.

It is the input from other people with comments and sharing that got it to that level.