Evaluation Question 1

This question relates to how we used codes and conventions of our genre: social realism. We chose to present our evaluation questions through visual methods, combined with a audio layered over the top. This would enable the audience to view an example and a comment in context.  

"In what way does your media product USE, DEVELOP or CHALLENGE forms and conventions of real media products in association with our trailer?"

Evaluation Question 1 Script

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products in association with our trailer?

Mania is a social realist film, therefore should follow the conventions of this particular genre and also the conventions of a teaser trailer. There are certain characteristics that you expect to see that we should include in our product to demonstrate how we have understood, and reproduced a social realist trailer. 

Our storyline is similar to that of Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank" which consisted of a teenage girl having a talent and wanting to per-sue it, however obstacles such as family and love intervene. We used the bad boyfriend and disruptive family life themes of fish tank and applied them to our own trailer. The storyline matches the conventions of a social realism as it is hard hitting and emotional. We captured elements of her struggle through shots such as the medium shot of the dad walking towards the screen with the belt.

As you can see we have included a main protagonist which is commonly seen in our genre. We chose to cast a female as the main character to make it easier to feel sympathy towards her and to emphasise the vulnerability of the character. 
The actress is an unknown female which confirms the genre. Unknown actors or actresses are usually seen in social realist films as the idea of the film is that it is meant to be a realist perception of life and the struggles people face. For example, in this is england, Thomas Aiden Turgoose plays a lead male role, however before this he was not well known, similarly with fish tank's Katie Jarvis playing mia. 

Another convention of social realist film is that they are based in a working class environment. We have depicted this lifestyle through the continuous use of tracking shots of the housing estate. The idea that the main character comes from a less fortunate background is a  convention of social realist films. We challenged this convention slightly as we did not want to focus predominatly on her socio-economic background, but more on the relationships she has within her life that, inturn prevent her from following her dream. 

One of our themes was sex which is a common convention of our genre. We showed sex through the medium shots of the girl putting her top back on in the boy's bed, suggesting she has just had sexual relations with him.
We challenge the stereotypes of the genre by narrowing the themes we exclude the use of  drugs, alcohol and antisocial behaviour, so we can focus mainly on the struggle between her father, her intimate relationships and her dream.

Social Realist films normally use mostly diegetic sound which we developed through use of dialogue as well as a sound track layered over the top.

Our trailer matches the conventions of Freytag's dramatic structure. Initially there is exposition, following a rising action created through the slow motion medium shot of the father walking towards the screen with a belt in his hand implying violence. Additionally, there is a climax at the end of the trailer when there is a rewind of her recent events which builds up tension and curiosity as to what will become of the character. As for the last two stages of Freytags theory, these are not appropriate for a trailer as having a falling action and resolution would reveal the whole story, which is not a convention of a teaser trailer. 

Final Trailer

This is our final trailer.

Final Website

This is our final website design, we used the website Wix.com as we felt this would be best and has the relevant tools we can use to create our website.

http://bronwenhannahjoe.wix.com/maniafilm2013

Final Poster

Final Website Design

We decided to do some further development on our website and changed a few things as well as worked on what we already had.

HOMEPAGE

For our homepage we chose to use an image, similar to the one we used on our poster so that continuity would occur. We used the Sepia colour filter as well as we did use this type of colour filter on the poster, and compliments the pink date to make it stand out. The colours of pink used, highlight that our target audience would be more female, however, it also helps the key iconic parts of the film such as the date of release stand out. We changed a few elements to help improve our homepage:

1) We changed the Font on the top left hand side to our iconic font that we are using in our poster and our trailer, to create more continuity.

2) We also added our trailer (which will be the finished one) onto the home page and selected an option so that it started automatically when the website came up, increasing our chances and views by people, as they are almost forced to watch it, because the music will start playing and catch them by surprise.

3) We changed the date heading from 'July 2013' to the date that shows on the poster and at the end of the trailer as well, just to create continuity again as they will recognise the numbers rather than the month we felt.

ABOUT

We did not need to change anything on the 'about' section, however if we were to develop the website further, then we would include more quotes and more information on there about the film itself.

GALLERY

We felt that a gallery would help our publicity and show some photos of the characters, which aren't used in our actual trailer. This makes the viewer feel more familiar and maybe more interested to watch it so they can find out about the character and her journey.

CAST

This last tab we felt would be good as it would give a small insight into the characters if someone was further curious after watching our trailer. It will help the viewers relate to characters as well before the film and may encourage people to watch the film more so they find out answers to some cliff-hanger questions that are given away in the bio's of the actors and characters.

Improvements

Our feedback consisted of helpful changes we could make to our trailer to make it better. Our teacher's advised us to add an additional scene of the girl in a art gallery, instead of the shots of the girl looking at art colleges on her laptop. Also, we added a scene where the girl is slapping the boy from the trailer to increase tension and sense of 'mania'. Currently we are trying to get some footage of the main girl holding a pregnancy test to broaden the potential stories inside the trailer, therefore making it more appealing and entertaining. Furthermore, we are tidying up clips by stabilizing them on i-movie, making the voice overs fade in more smoothly and editing the colour filters on different clips.

Feedback from our First Cut

Feedback is essential when creating a media product as if the public do not understand or appeal to it, then it will not be effective. We used our social networking accounts to publish the first cut of our trailer in order to see people's reactions to it. We received a wide variety of comments as you can see below. Most of them are constructive and contain tips such as "work on audio" and "don't concentrate on the relationship part so much". We will use these comments to finalise our trailer to make it as attractive and effective as possible.