AS Coursework Reflection

•          Digital Technology

We used a variety of media technologies in the various stages of my AS coursework. The first media technology we used was in our research stage were we relied of Youtube  to look at the different types of film trailers of the various genres to compare the different conventional styles present in the opening 3 minute. When we has decided on our genre, in my case horror, we used sited like IMDb and Wikipedia to research directors and horror films in general and to find out what production company is mostly affiliated with the horror genre.

When moving on to the second stage of our AS course work, planning, we moved away from technology and had drew our story bored to allow as more freedom and we were able of get our idea down quickly, when we were happy with the story line and the shot used we turned our story bored in to an animatic. We created the animatic by taking a picture of our hand drawn story bored and loading them on to Adobe Premiere Elements and added annotations

Reaching the construction stages of the course work required the use of a digital camcorder to record the footage; we then used Adobe Premiere Elements to edit the footage together and also add the opening titles and music when relevant. We also created an opening 20 second sequence of edited red, black and negative pictures to set the mood stereotypical of a horror genre opening 3 minutes. The change in the pictures was created by Adobe Photoshop giving us a lot more freedom to manipulate the various pictured to suit our needs. 

In the last stage of our AS course work, evaluation, we used youtube to present the final cut of our opening 3 minutes. By using Youtube a wildly used media presentation format it made it easier for everyone to access our coursework as it would be in a format everyone was happy using. When we were doing our final tasks to complete our course work which involved presenting our opening 3 minutes to the class and also giving a short presentation of how we found all stages of our course work we used Microsoft PowerPoint to aid in this.

Throughout all stages my work was documented in Blogger.

•          Creativity
when we were planning our coursework we looked at alot of horror films and with this genera it was important to find something original as no one would find something they have already watched scary or a copy of one and so to ensure we came up with something new we mixed together sub genres and to find something that was as close to new and original was we could of hoped for.

•          Research and planning
I feel that looking back i could of analysed more opening 2 mins to fully see the options available for us but i think we combined our main product with our ancillary texts quite well and tried to document every aspect of the creation of our opening 2 mins  

•          Post-production
from the audience feed back i have learned that music plays a bigger part in the over all atmosphere of the footage than i originality thought, whereas know from my audience feed back i can clearly see that the music and footage are on the same level of importance and i will try allot more to find the perfect fit for my trailer 

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looper`s trailer analysis

 this film would appeal to men around the ages of 16-25. the fact that it would appeal to men is that it is a hybrid of scfiy and action, both genera separably would stereotypical appeal to men because of the fight scene and explosions which again stereo-typically attract men whereas women would be more stereo-typically drawn to a Romcom.

the music to this trailer is designed to attract the target audience by starting with the  sound of a ticking clock to represent the countdown to trailer and also to draw the target audiences in with a  sound they can associate with, the diegetic sound  ticking clock might also have connotations of time running out. the opening statement from the main character "time travel has not yet been invented, but 30 years from now it will have been" works to establish the movie for scfy fans by pointing out that this film dose have an element of syfi and also action

shortly after the extreme close up of the pocket watch, the tralior cuts to a long shot of a man standing at the edge of a corn field; the connotations of a corn field is both rooted in the horror genera where it is scene as a thing to be scared of and something symbolic of rural america were back in the 1920's corn and cotton were a major factor in the economic development of the country. The juxtaposition between the location and the event taking place can act to shock the viewer and also show that this is no normal action film. 

the net noticeable sequence of shots is a short montage of the elements of his life; travel, friends, killing, money and his "looper" identity. the short montage is also accompanied by a monologue of the main character explaining his job, the monologue carries on thought out the tailor with him being the only source of information with the one exception being said by an scruffy man who hasn't been noted in the previous clips who says "this time travel crap just fries your brain like an egg" this suggests that the story line is not so simple and there will be a twist at the end, but to find out the twist you need to watch the film and so in doing this it creates interest in the film.

from the trailor it is unclear if the the character you are following is the hero or the villain a line that is stereotypical drawn very early in the film so the viewer has more time to learn about him and decide that they want him to save the day. with "Looper" the focus of the film is a murder and so blurs the lines and confuses the audience and they do not know if they want this killer to be okay or not. The tralior follows the younger of the two actors played by Joseph Gordon-Levit a actor who has recently stared in the The Dark Night Rises a very high budget action film, this suggests that it is trying to appeal to the younger generation with the tailor and relying on the fact that Bruce Willis is in an action film to make a slightly older generation of people want to watch the film. the names of the actors are a key selling point to the film as the music comes to dramatic peaks with there names the only thing showing on the screen this reiterates the fact that they have big names involved with the film and so gives the viewer an element of trust that it inst going to be a bad film.

romance film poster

This romance film poster has a key theam of green which connotes luck and the setting of the film which is in Ireland has a strong global association with this colour, the main femal charecter is also wearing a green dress which also ties in with the common theme of green shown thoughout the poster; the fact she is dressed in green and placed infront of the male suggests that she is the lead in the film which is a common  sterotype for a romance gerne as the target audence is female.

The text at the left and right of the screen "anne planned to propose to her boyfriend on February 29th" "this is not her boyfriend"  this technique is very uncommon in any type of film poster as they leave it up to the film trailer to explain the plot of the film, the fact that they are using the poster to explain the plot suggest that it is a low budget film which cant afford a  more traditional marketing campain.
The font is very typical of a romance film poster as it contains bold and smaller font to attract the audeiences eyeline to the important informatin such as the release date at the bottom of the text and also creats diversaity between the the two words in the title and the actors names

The juxaposituion between the the man and the woman is also shown my the costume they are being presented, she is in a very smart almost city like dress whereas he is dress scruffely in jeans and a jumper, which could suggest that his charecter is more relaxed and from a less urban area.