Sunday 8 May 2011

Dead Mans Love -The Film

Magazine Review

Dead Mans Love Poster

Question 4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

EVALUATION 3 What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout the process of creating our ancillary tasks we often asked for audience feedback in order to improve our designs. The people we asked were not part of our target audience and were friends that worked in our media studies group. This was always a risk because we could receive biased feedback which may have leaded to our ancillary tasks being poor quality. Thankfully the feedback we received was honest and benefited us rather than hinder us.

First we started to think about where we would expect our film to be reviewed. We thought about the popular film magazine ‘Empire’. We started to design a template for the basis of our review.

The feedback we received from our audience was encouraging through the stages of designing our magazine review. Near the end of finishing our review we asked for lots of feedback to help finish a quality piece of work that would reflect the quality of our film.

The feedback we received for this draft was positive however changes were suggested by some
People whom would not necessarily be in our target audience

Sally Paskins said 'I like it. It looks professional however I feel the white writing is lost in the back ground'
Jack Arnold Suggested ‘I think you should change the amount of stars you have given the film. 5 seems too much and is giving the intention your film is brilliant and amazing. Ask yourself if your film is truly that good and if you were reviewing it where would you place it’

This feedback was useful because it made us look at our film in detail and then give an honest view of our film. We also edited the content of the review as well. When this was finished and after some other drafts we had a final draft we showed to some people who would most likely be our target audience.

This final draft of the poster was shown to people in our target audience. Dylan Mason said 'He liked the red font. Although in places it was still illegible it gave the connotation of rage and death and the obvious blood', some themes that ran through our film.

Our poster was a very tricky task to try and perfect. Our original idea was to have our character ‘Luke’ as the focal point of the poster. Where half of him was normal the other half was ‘zombiefied’. The first draft we came up with was good however it was suggested that maybe the face was a bit too dark and the eye didn’t look right. We brightened up the face and changed the eye however we decided the eye didn’t look realistic enough. Justin tried to change this to make it realistic however because we couldn’t perfect this we decided to speak to a photography student who helped us design a new poster. We concentrated on a new idea and when we finished we posted the poster on Facebook. We received lots of positive feedback. Sam Tyler said ‘The colour suggests possibly dark themes, its ambiguous nature connotes mystery and leaves you wanting more, yet font suggests a comedic element – as it is in bold and the red liquid (assume its blood) reinforces the zombie genre’ this feedback was rewarding and encouraging however our teacher pointed out that this was familiar to the poster of ‘Dead man’s shoes’ and even similar to its DVD cover. This was purely coincidental as we didn’t use ‘Dead man’s shoes’ to influence our production work. We then received the feedback on how to improve our poster so not to make it too similar to ‘Dead man’s shoes’ ‘Change the font, maybe don't have red and black as your colours (you could try using the blue you have used in your titles) Perhaps think of a more comedic tagline’ We worked on these point to produce this poster. My friend Andy who would be in my target audience said ‘I like this poster however maybe there is too much blue. Make the silhouette black’ by changing this we have produced a quality poster that reflects our target audience which is what we intended.

During the process of our film we always asked for feedback in a bid to make sure we could produce a slick, upto date film. Jack Arnold said to me that he didn't like the long shot between 'Luke' waking up walking to the bathroom and the shots of him getting changed. I then looked at shortening it. I produced a scene where sam walks into the bathroom, then walks out fully clothed. This was an effective jump cut that showed the passing of time but also saved a big duration of the film.

EVALUATION 2. How Effective is the Combination of Your Main Product and Ancillary Texts?