David Perkins Evaluation

Introduction
My project is a promotional package for a British horror/thriller film. The film is called 'The Sight' and the project includes the film teaser trailer, the film's teaser poster and a magazine cover. I worked in a pair with Beth Eddleston. We both contributed to all aspects of the project however most of the filming and photography was done by me with Beth doing a lot of the poster and magazine cover. We both did equal amounts of the editing. We settled on our target audience to be males aged 16-25. We decided that the mainstreamers would be the best group to aim at taking into account psychographics.

What is unique about our product is that we have changed a few of the normal conventions of the horror and thriller genres to try and draw people in.

Genre

Our film genre is horror.

Codes and Conventions of Horror & Teaser Trailers

Some conventions of the horror teaser trailer include:

• tense and/or eerie music
• low key lighting
• extreme moments in the film (however the actual shots are not always in the finished film)
• POV shots (to create tension)
• creepy mise en scene e.g. blood, deformities etc. (our mise en scene included the contact lenses)
• it has to be long enough to catch the audience's eye without giving too much away about the story
• make the audience want to see more

Does our teaser trailer do what it is supposed to?

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Looking at all these things I would say yes it does.

Differences

We have kept very much to the codes and conventions of the genre. It is important for the audience to understand what is happening as they may reject something if it is too challenging.

'story makers depend on this recognition for instant communication with the audience'

G.Burton

 However, we have made little changes to these as we wanted to offer the audience something fresh and exiting without straying too far from the norm.

'the same but different'

N.Lacey

We have changed aspects of the genre by making the protagonist an outcast of society who is wanted by the police. We have also added coloured filters to the film which isn't typical of the horror genre and we have used an experimental sound track.

Where the differences effective?

I belive that the differences in the trailer where effective. Looking at the questionaire our audience stated

• the coloured filters did well in creating the atmosphere we intended
• we were told our use of soundtrack was interesting and effective
• we were told the music was different but it did its job well and created an uneasy atmosphere

Branding & Brand Image


Everything that is successful has a brand image. A brand image is something that the brand is trying to promote. For example, the brand image for Mac Donald's is that it is family friendly food and that it brings the family together. Their slogan to help promote this is 'we're loving it'.

The Brand image that we are trying to push is that everyone is a hero. We do this as in the trailer, magazine cover and poster they all focus on our protagonist being a loner or the fact that he is different. Also the image tries to seem scary, realistic and unique. The colours we use to create the brand image are red and black as together these colours give a freaky feel.

The Brand image is carried through in the poster.

The brand image is also in the Magazine Cover. The magazine cover gives us a freaky feel and it also shows us the fact that our protagonist is an outcast from society.

We can see that films such as The Dark Knight also have a very distinctive brand image and these show in the poster and magazine covers.

Audience

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Listening to the audience feedback and looking at the questionnaires I think that we did a very good job in making the target audience enjoy it and they seemed to give a lot of positive and supportive feedback.


Target Audience

• Our target audience is 16-25 year old Caucasian males in the working class. This is because they are the majority of the cinema audience. (this is good as groups of young men are the most likely to go out and see a horror film)
• According to demographic profiling on a socio-economic scale is D (semi-skilled e.g. assembly line workers, cleaners).(This is good as these are one of the groups of people who usually go and see films at the cinema)
• Looking at psychographic profiling I think that this film should be aimed at the mainstreamers. This is because we are aiming at the largest area of the population and that we are using a well known British brand: DNA Films.

Our secondary target audience is most likely to be:

• Females of the same age and ethnicity as our primary target audience as they are likely to go with groups of males, females or may go on a date.
• I think the secondary demographic audience would be E as these people have more time and they are more likely to go to watch a film for escapism. This is also the category that our protagonist fits into (unemployed), therefore people in this group may be able to relate to our protagonist.
• The secondary psychographic profiling group would be the aspirers. This is because they like smart and high tech things, our film may appeal to these due to the smart and unique editing.

It is important to have a secondary audience as if you don't have enough people from your primary audience going to the film to make a profit then the secondary group will have to make up the numbers, hopefully getting the profit needed.

The group mainly consisted of our primary or secondary target audience. This is good as it means the audience we asked questions to are the people that have given us the feedback. This has helped us as their negative and complementary criticisms have helped us understand what we would do to improve our project.

The audience we tested

Looking at these graphs on the audience we showed our product to, the majority of them fall within our target audience.

Reflecting on the feedback I think that if anything was going to be changed I would try and film the trailer in more locations and more interesting places than the streets and houses. I would have been round and looked for a few places that could be better to create more of an eerie mood. Also to do with the ancillary tasks I would have made the poster stand out a bit more. I would have put more eye catching things on it to draw the audience in a bit more and maybe had a little bit more information about the film.

Use of creative technology

Through the duration of my project I used many different pieces of technology. Some of these included:

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I think now I understand how to use all the technologies I have used in detail, even the ones I had no experiance in using before.

Conclusion

I think the product as a whole has been a success as it does everything that we intended it to do. The trailer helps draw in the audience and also creates enough enigmas to get the people who have seen the trailer to want to see the film. I think it was well edited and that it flows really well. The music is very successful in creating the atmosphere intended. However I think that if it had been shot in more locations it would have been more successful. The poster and magazine cover catch the eye and are both very successful in the way they draw people in to see more of the film products. The pre-production planning was all very successfully carried out and helped the production of the products come along well. The post production and audience feedback was also very useful in helping me to understand what changes I would make to the products if I was to re-create any of them. The products have all been successful, according to the audience, in doing their job and they have all received more positive comments than criticisms.
I think that I have made many improvements and I feel I have made my mark well in the contribution to this project. I feel I have organised well with the rest of my group and that I will be able to do everything again. I think my camera and photography skills have improved along with all other aspects of the work. This project has helped me to understand more about how to create a successful trailer. The next step will be to create a short film along with a poster to go with it.