Evaluation Question 2

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

Roland Barthes (Enigma Code)

The Enigma Code is a theory by theorist Roland Barthes which suggests that a text (whether that be television, film, a poster etc) has a mystery which helps to attract the audience and make them more intrigued in the piece. It makes them ask questions regarding the text. For example in Thriller films or mysteries the question the audience may be wanting to know the answer to could be 'who committed the crime'.
Our trailer has elements of Barthes enigma theory as it is never revealed to the audience whether or not our main protagonist fulfills her dreams of art or stays at home with her abusive father.
This factor makes our trailer have an aspect of mystery which can lead to the audience becoming more intrigued in our product.

Publicity

To make sure that our trailer was seen by a wide variety of audiences we made sure we created accounts on the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.
We also have a Youtube account so people interested in our trailer can track our progress and view various videos we have made during the process.
We made use of the website Survey Monkey, this was to create a survey for our audience so they could give feedback to our ideas.
It is important that we made our trailer widespread, as it allows our audience to give an opinion on our trailer and so we can receive feedback which can help us to further improve our trailer.
We placed links to these sites on our website and blog so the audience can easily access information.

The Kuleshov Effect applied to our Trailer

The Kuleshov Effect is a film editing montage effect demonstrated by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. It is the process of taking a single shot of one thing (e.g. a man's face) and placing a variety of shots after it. Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing.
Below is a video of the Kuleshov Effect in action.

The Kuleshov effect can be applied to our teaser trailer as there are certain instances where we have used editing to create a certain idea without actually showing it literally. For example, when the main female is sitting on the bed with the male and he says "have you not done this before" we instantly assume that he is talking about sex, despite actually seeing any sexual references. Purely because it is a male and a female sitting on a bed the audience think it is about sex. Additionally, when we see the medium shot of the father walking towards the screen with the belt in his hand, we automatically assume he is going to use it in a violent way on his daughter. This effect is useful as we can inform the audience of what  is happening without actually having to show it visually.

Feedback from Screening

We were given the opportunity to present our trailer to the year 12 media classes in our school. This was a fantastic opportunity to get feedback on whether they felt we matched the conventions of our genre and whether they would be inclined to go and see the film.

We handed out a questionnaire to each person containing a variety of questions from "Would you watch this film?" to "What are the three main themes?". As you can see from a few of the responses above, everyone generally had the same answers. All of the participants noticed that it was a social realism, as well as being aimed at females and for the 16-21 year old age group. We also received an overwhelming amount of compliments on the adventurous story line as the participants thought it was quite challenging. The majority of the responses noted that the main themes were abuse, relationships and having a dream.

From the feedback, we can feel confident that through our use of shots and work in post production we have created an effective and appealing social realist teaser trailer.

Reflection

The overall experience of making a teaser trailer has been challenging, however extremely rewarding. As a team we have worked together to create a high quality trailer, website, poster and blog. We gelled well as a group as we could each bring something different to the final product. Bronwen is skilled when it comes to using iMovie software, the Wix website and most of the technical aspects. She was also the director during the filming of our trailer. Joe participated as an actor and spent a lot of time researching before we produced our product, which was essential as we needed to fit the brief and match our genre. I spent a lot of time in pre-production designing the storyboard and researching different theorists. I was also selected to be the main actress in the trailer. Acting was not something I had done much of before however the task was fun and successful. Over the past year, each of us have enjoyed working together and we believe we have become experienced, well rounded individuals in the media department. 

Audience Profile

This was our audience profile so that we could clearly direct our trailer at our specific target audience. Having a specific character in mind helped us to make our decisions and include aspects such as the Sex scene, the bad boyfriend and the pregnancy test into our trailer because we knew that our character 'Gemma' would be attracted to it.

Click on the picture to see the 'ideal' viewer