Evaluation- How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Media technologies were a big part in producing our media products such as our trailer, poster and magazine front cover. We used media throughout our planning, research and creating our media products.
For our research we used YouTube which is a video sharing site, to research some of the trailers. We researched trailers such as Dead snow, Zombie land and Shaun of the Dead on YouTube. We also used Google to research different magazine covers and different posters so we had an idea of what we were going to use on our ancillary tasks. We researched a watchmen magazine which we used the same layout as for our magazine on Google which helped us a lot.
To construct our media product we recorded the footage on video cameras and edited it on power director 9. Power director 9 is a program where you can edit the footage and the music within each clips. For our magazine front cover and our poster we used Photoshop which is a program where you can edit pictures and add titles to it. We also used a program called Audacity which is a program where you can record sounds with a Mic. We used Audacity when recording our voice over within our trailer.
We didn’t use many media technologies for our planning as most of it was hand-written. We used a scanner to scan all of our work into our hard drive, so that we could enter our planning into our blog.
Again for our evaluation we didn’t really use much media technologies but the media we did use did come in handy. We used YouTube again for our evaluation as we put our trailer on YouTube and allowed people to leave comments about it.

Evaluation- What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We collected many peoples feedback on our film trailer and decided to change a few things. We learnt that by using the same colour scheme throughout the media production, we can attract a bigger audience as they recognise the style and what film were advertising. We also learnt about what fits what in the trailer for example the types of music to use and where to put the music when needed. The feedback also helped when considering what they would like to see in a trailer, because if they wanted to see a certain main character in the trailer then it would help us decide whether we should put that person in. The audience feedback also showed us that we should have used more cuts, so we decided to add more to the trailer which worked out great. We also used audience feedback for our poster and our magazine front cover. We showed them both of our ancillary tasks and asked them whether it makes sense and whether the colour scheme was recognisable to our trailer. The audience feedback was mainly positive but some did comment about the colour scheme as we did have a different, darker approach to it; we then changed it to more primary colours to highlight the comedic aspect of the poster.

Evaluation- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

The combination between the main product and our ancillary task which are our poster and magazine cover are very effective. They are effective because they all link together as they are advertising the same media production which is How to train a zombie film. We have used the main characters to advertise the film in all of our media products from our poster, magazine cover and our trailer. We used the same main characters in the magazine cover and the poster as we wanted to attract our audience through these characters as they are the main icons of the film. We have used the same style of writing and font for the title of the poster and the title of the magazine front cover. This showed continuity and would show our audience what theme the film is about as the style of writing is set in zombie font. We’ve used the same colour scheme throughout which is green, yellow and red. We have used the green and yellow as our background to our magazine and used the titles in our trailer as green and yellow. We used this so that when our audience saw these types of colours they would recognise the theme and it would help them see what genre of film we are advertising.

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

Our trailer challenges these forms because it starts off in a state of disequilibrium because everything in the film is wrong, for example in our media product the world have trained zombies like pets. We haven’t used the same form of a trailer we have challenged it by using more of an infomercial approach by giving information about the film through the head teacher. The genre of the film is very rare when researching horror comedy films so we challenged real media forms by having zombies trained and kept as pets. We also challenged real media forms simply by adding comedy to a zombie horror film. By taming the zombies and taking them to school shows that we are challenging real media products as schools are supposed to be for children not zombies. We have also challenged the expectations of the film as people would think that they are going to watch a horror film because it contains blood thirsty zombies, but in fact in the film the zombies are trained which adds humour to the trailer. We used the Shaun of the Dead trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfDUv3ZjH2k) as an example because that is a zomcom and that shows a zombie outbreak but we challenge that as we are taming the zombies and using them as pets.

How To Train Your Zombie Magazine Front Cover

This is our finished magazine front cover which is promoting our film 'How To Train Your Zombie'. We decided to go with a colour scheme that suited both the horror aspect and the comedy aspect. The red and black suits more the horror aspect and the yellow and green is the comedy aspect. We have based this layout on the Watchmen magaznie cover which features the three main characters in the middle and the Title going across. In the magazine cover we have chosen different captions to attract the readers to read on. We have also used different fonts to attract the audience; We have used a zombie font which we used off dafont.com.

How To Train Your Zombie film poster

This is our finished poster for our trailer, How To Train Your Zombie. We used the Dawn of the Dead film poster as a guide to construct our own film poster. We used the same layout as the Dawn of the Dead poster by putting the main character at the front as the iconic feature. We used Alan as our iconic feature as he is the main character and is portrayed through all of our media products from our magazine cover to our film trailer. We used a zombie text to show off the genre of film it is. We used the slogan 'Dead Funny' as it is a pun which our audience we are trying to attract will find funny.