The Kid Official Trailer

EVALUATION OF TRAILER: DIRECTORS COMMENTARY

Director’s commentary notes.

At the beginning of my trailer I have used a green screen rating card image as this is a convention that appears on almost every trailer that I have researched and I feel it gives it a professional look. Straight after this there is the establishing panning shot of the protagonist on holiday enjoying herself. You may notice that this footage appears to be blurry however I decided to add an effect overlay to make it appear like old footage due to the colour and blurriness. I feel this works well as a convention of thrillers is to start with a happy equilibrium, which I feel this shot achieves, especially with the summer music that I have added. This quickly changes with the voiceover of the protagonist speaking and the disruption of abrupt spooky music with the blurry fuzzy shot. I feel this instantly hooks in the audience as the enigma of what has happened to this girl. I then added my own production company shot to show that I had created this myself with the ‘black asylum productions’, which also follows with the lionsgate production company introduction, I decided to use both of these as lions gate is well known and it promotes both the film and my company with them being on the trailer.

Both of the soundtracks that I chose for the trailer are now put together to make the intensity of the trailer much higher. I have also used a range of quick cut editing and montage editing here to show a quick amount of shots from a number of locations. I start the trailer with a shot of rocking swings with low key lighting and then this goes to the shots in the house with natural lighting when the story starts to be explained. I feel these contrasts of locations really meet the conventions of the thriller genre and also show the break in the equilibrium. I used the voiceover of the protagonist as she is a child and this is also represented through the innocence of her voice, which makes the scenes more chilling as they do not expect a little girl of such innocent to become so sinister.

The sound tracks I used were the Dead silence theme tune along with 'scary' iMovie sound track, I originally liked the iMovie soundtrack but knew this was to generic. After researching different potential scary/chilling setting soundtracks on youtube and from a number of trailers I used a few sounds over the top of the trailer to find out what sounded the best and in after trying 3 tracks I decided the best to use would be the dead silence theme tune with the scary iMovie track. This helped with genre conventions as the dead silence theme tune was consistent throughout and the scary theme tune varies throughout causing enigma and suspense which meets the genre conventions.

The close up images on the photos I felt would help with the audiences understanding of what was going on and the voice over again guides this for the audiences to walk into the narrative themselves. The use of props I decided upon here are limited however effective. The over the shoulder shot of the victim shows a balance of good vs evil as the victim is lying down whereas the villain is above her looking down on her with a knife which signifies power. As the protagonist is much smaller than the victim I felt this shot needed emphasis as it is obvious from here on in that the kid is in control of the situation. This is one of my longer shots as I decided to use an effect on the shot after two seconds as it goes from low-key lighting to a dreamy effect overlay, which is ironic as the victim is asleep. I also feel this shot allows the audience to grow closer to the villain as they get to clearly see her face, size and body language which becomes threatening and very serious leaving the audience gripped to see what happens next.

The mise-en-scence then changes to the woods, which has connotations for being a place of danger anyway. I decided here to go against typical conventions of a thriller and use natural lighting as I feel that the narrative is chilling enough without the whole trailer being dark. I have timed the voice over so that when the protagonist says ‘its all because of her’ the victim turns around.’ I feel this is effective as it shows exactly who the protagonist is talking about and enables the audience to start making sense of who she is, I then kept the diegetic sound of her screaming as I felt this was hugely effective and causes the audience to become tense with fear as to what is going to happen as this is a real scream not a fake one.  Similarly in the next shot when the villain is sharpening her knife I have left the diegetic sound to this obvious to make it realistic to the audience that these events are happening, The idea of this birds eye view shot was to get strauss theory of binary opposite’s of the young girls innocence into the scene via the mise-en-scene of her room and also the psyche side of her with the sharpening of a deadly weapon. Innocence vs evil.

I decided to add in a title with a quote from a magazine. This was me going against genre conventions as these are not often found in thriller trailers, normally just title pages. However due to the voice over I felt that title pages would make the storyline to obvious and boring with no enigma to it. This quote however, helps with the added enigma, as the audience will want to know why SBS thriller has said this.

After this the mise-en-scene is back in the child room but from a different low angle and a medium shot. This is when the music starts to get more intense and there is no voiceover needed at this moment of the trailer as it becomes obvious to the audience how disturbed this child is and the Maslows Hierarchy of needs start to come in with the need for safety and physiological needs of the audience and the character as they start to not only fear the protagonist but emphasize with her situation.

I decided to use a child as my main character as this is untypical of thriller conventions, however is often typical in horror conventions. The Orphanage is an example of a child horror film and i feel the use of a child makes it more gripping and intense as it is not expected that children are in control or dominant. 

The low angle shot of the victim in the car appears that someone is watching her adding to the atmosphere.

Diegetic sound of scream running through woods adds to all the non-diegetic sounds.

I faded out one of the tracks so that there was not to much not diegetic sounds, I decided to use a real life news voice over about a missing girl as I felt this made the impact of the storyline more realistic.

Close up of the protagonist shows clearly the victims face and this is the first time she is properly revealed. Her clothing and age shows innocence but her actions and body language show evil, strauss theory good v evil.

Close up of props – allows the audience to identify the realism of it.

Long shot of protagonist in a church yard with the quick cut editing to the close up of victim crying shows contrast of good vs evil again.

Use a range of montage shots leading up to the end and then put on a dreamy effect,

Used low key lighting to show contrast throughout the trailer.

Mostly close ups to leave enigma for the audience, used slow motion effect on the protagonist walking away.

Followed conventions by adding in the film title and when it is being released

EVALUATION OF TRAILER

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

Media technolgieas from GEeegi

Evaluation: What have you learnt from audience feedback?

LISTEN TO MY FEEDBACK HERE 

What have you learnt from audience feedback?

Helped me create a professional realistic product, which would appeal to my target demographic. Needed to make sure of this so that it could fit into the uses and gratification theory.

And meet Maslow’s hierchy of needs in ensuring that the specific needs of my target audience were met. 

I am confident that my products, poster, website and trailer all meet the needs of my target demographic due to the amount of audience feedback I have received and the changes and add on I have made regarding my feedback making my final product the best it could be.

I have received feedback in a variety of manors, using multimedia platforms, such as online questionnaire sites such as survey monkey and messaging my friends with improvements they may be able to suggest, which I found the least helpful out of all my feedback as the closed questions made it hard to understand what was needed for my website, however the information I did get helped with aspects such as the colour scheme and layouts.

Focus groups were used for coming up with ideas for my trailer and then sitting down and getting constructive critic of what needed changing, improving or what was great and should definitely stay the same. This helped me focus on the trailer as a whole and that I needed to go an take more shots so that there was variety and that there was different mise-en-scene, and also allowed me to focus on what I had already filmed and suggestions of how I could edit it better. And look at it in more detail.

I used social networking sites for my feedback as well and I felt this was very successful as people could comment on what they liked and improvements that could be made. And a lot of people participated in this, which greatly helped with what I could add, take away and change.  Therefore this was very effective as it quickly reached a larger scale of people than the previous focus group and surveys.

I also gained a lot of verbal feedback from my fellow peers in class and free periods as well as my teachers, and I found that this was the most helpful as it was more hands on and they could point out exactly what they meant which changes and what to add on. This was the easiest and most effective method as it was very quick and allowed me to gain feedback from people who were doing similar things to me as well as others who did not have any media experience, so this was all very helpful.

An example of where audience feedback helped me massively was the decision of what music to use on my trailer as I had two potential tracks which I could use and the one that I was swaying more towards actually ended up being the less popular one, and I took this into consideration as the audiences opinion is crucial in making the trailer a success.

 As well as this, from my verbal feedback I was given the suggestion to add to the top of my poster a sell line from a similar thriller film that is popular, following this comment I decided to add “from the creators of gone girl”.

The feedback overall helped me learn a conclusive round up of what my audience did or did not like and this was essential as I now feel that my final product meets the needs of my target demographic and also includes Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which is more appealing to a wider range of audiences. Therefore this feedback is highly valued as it has helped me build on my trailer, website and poster to make sure that they are the best they can be and also ensuring that they look professional as possible.

EVALUATION: In what ways does your media ancillary products use, develop or challenge the conventions of real media products?

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