Evaluation (4) - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The use of multiple and inter-operative platforms and technologies was essential to all aspects of our work.

Blogger was crucial to the development of our tasks from start to finish.

It allowed us to publish our work publicly for evaluation from the rest of the group, and indeed class.

It proved invaluable for a collaborative work tool.

Google is a very powerful search engine and proved inessential to our research.

Using it, we were able to find appropriate research resources for the genre and look at existing texts.

It also enabled us to find images, sounds, videos, and other ideas for use or inspiration when constructing our piece.

YouTube is a social networking platform driven by user-generated content.

It hosted many of the trailers and existing A-level texts that we used for research.

I uploaded our trailer there and this opened up opportunities for feedback.

Crucial to our poster and magazine cover designs were Adobe's Photoshop and InDesign. Photoshop allowed us to manipulate images to suit our products, while InDesign allowed us to block elements and create the actual product layouts.

We used Dafont.com to find creative typefaces for use in our tasks.

The fonts there tend to be licensed under Creative Commons, and as such are free to use in our situation.

They tend to also be much more specialised than the fonts one would typically find in Microsoft Windows or when using Adobe's Creative Suite.

We used Serif MoviePlus v5 for editing our trailer. Though not very feature-rich and not as flexible as industry standard software such as Sony Vegas, it proved sufficient for most of our needs. We created the elevator CCTV effect using this software, and all the transitions as well as sound effects were applied with it. We used it to reduce ambient sound and apply gunshot sounds.

Also crucial to our tasks, were the obvious video camera and digital camera. We had reliable hardware that meant we could film all our shots several times as well as take pictures for our ancillary tasks and document our progress using our digital camera.

Facebook was also a very helpful platform. It proved invaluable for receiving audience feedback and promoting our work. It also allowed the members of our group to collaborate and communicate using a variety of mediums, including text, sound, and video.

Evaluation (3) - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our primary medium for obtaining feedback was the social networking platform, Facebook. It allowed for much more interactive participation and allowed different people to collaborate on constructive criticism for our tasks.

The above screenshot shows comments on our poster. It is clear that we need to work on composition, positioning, and clarity of lettering.

From the above comments on the trailer, the feedback is encouraging. Viewers seemed to enjoy more stylised shots such as the elevator shots (hued blue and made grainy, as if from CCTV), close up shots of the father, and the dumping of a body into a body of water. Music seemed to also be a strong factor (We used Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang" and The Prodigy's "Breathe").

We do apparently need to work on pace and suspense. Levels of audio could also have been tweaked.

I uploaded the video to YouTube and received one interesting comment. The author was probably another A-level student having been searching for content like ours.

"I like the parody aspect of this!" -- interesting given that our intention was not to parody other texts. It might be worth initiating conversation with this commenter for elaboration.

From Audience Feedback Questionnaires, we learned that the trailer held suspense well, and the props, settings, and action were powerful. However, some found the story line unclear -- perhaps if we were to do this again we would make the "romance--perceived betrayal--failed assassination--revenge" more explicit.

Evaluation (2) - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Any successful feature film is accompanied with appropriate and carefully planned promotion. In our combination of trailer, poster, and magazine cover, our most prominent goal was to vary the content, but to have sufficient links and devices so that a potential audience would associate our tasks with eachother.

This cohesion is essential to successful promotion.

Both our main task and ancillary tasks bear similarities and share devices that create an effective 'brand'.

Our magazine front cover took inspiration from established magazines such as EMPIRE:

The concept of having a background image, with auxiliary elements such as titles, subheadings, pictures, captions, barcodes, and other promotions intertwined, is the most common format, and as such we decided to use it.

Our poster, as seen above, follows a similar format. It features the protagonist with a gun against a red brick wall. She sustains a direct mode of address and the auxiliary elements form a ring around her. The darkness, and strong colours, combined with her address and possession of a weapon are striking but not threatening to the viewer. I think we could have added more content, and tidied up the colour scheme to go with the background image.

The poster, designed mainly by Tristam, carries similar themes. The films' logo remains the same, as does the colour red. Red plays to nature's instinctive warnings -- it indicates that there is some form of danger here. The reviews and informational text at the bottom add professionalism and act as a point of authority for the viewer. It becomes attractive and reliably endorsed.

The stormy sky was rendered in Adobe Photoshop, and the red-hued and wind-battered cityscape was a photo taken by Tristam and subsequently modified in Photoshop. It suggests the setting of the film (London) but is tainted by blood. In fact, in earlier drafts of the poster, we used blood as a vivid feature, but we decided against it.

There is, however, no direct mode of address, and the image is not very provocative. This is something I think we would change, were we to do this again. There is also a very visible division between the black background and the centre image, which looks visually odd.

Having said this, these elements are tied integrally to the equivalents in the magazine front cover, creating cohesion and uniformity.

Using conventional elements such as guns, and representative shots such as running, shooting, and authoritative speech shots in the trailer, we made it clear that we were working in the gangster genre. In all three of the tasks, we use the same outfit for the main character to objectify and isolate her from the rest of the tasks.

Evaluation (1) - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In choosing the Gangster genre we were subscribing to a very iconic and powerful series of conventions, archetypes and devices. This was encouraging for us, not because we necessarily had a basic template ready to use, but because in creating our trailer we would be able to conform to, stretch, and outright break them.

Because the genre focuses on several fundamentals, such as group psychology, relationships, sacrifice and hierarchy, it is a very interesting genre to play with. Renowned directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese were of much inspiration to us because of the footprint their films have left on Gangster films produced since.

We produced a short theatrical trailer, a magazine front cover, and a promotional poster. We researched and annotated several crime and gangster trailers, posters, and magazine covers.

We quickly gathered that gangster films are anchored heavily to the alpha-male characteristics of competition and violence. This phallocentricity is something we found very interesting. When we look back at one of the earliest 'gangster' texts, Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet", both the main characters have equal parts to play in the war between their families. Since our plot had similar themes to R&J, we wanted to take this a step further and thus we chose to have a woman as our protagonist.

Whilst not resisting theinevitabe primarily male audience, we hoped to attract more women by the main character being faster, stronger willed, and more intelligent than the male gangsters.

Many gangster films are of Italian-American focus. While we were keen to have a British setting (being better known to us and more achievable), the strong Italian views on 'family' were something we wanted to draw on from other films. An example of this can be found in the Godfather, a famous '70's Italian-American gangster film:

As is convention, we filmed in urban areas. This is visible in the skyline on our poster and the trailer itself. Guns are also a powerful symbol or 'action code' in films of this genre, so they featured in all our tasks.

We cast my father as the father, who in Italian-American (IA) gang films tends to be the leader. We used him for his age and build, similarly to what we had seen numerous times in our research.

The genre tends to be characterised by large male casts, special effects, and specific props and sets. Since little of this was available to us, we had to improvise a bit but tried to keep it as true as possible to the genre.

In our characterisation of the assassin, we decided that although he was a conventional and ruthless hitman, he would have compassion and treat the protagonist with a certain amount of respect. This was not particularly visible in the trailer, but would have been present had we produced a feature-length film, and would have challenged convention.

Evaluation - Prep

Trailer on YouTube

Embedded below is our final trailer, hosted on YouTube.

Audience feedback questionnaire

1. Would you say the film trailer was exciting?


2. Did it entice/ make you want to watch the film?


3. Was the genre clear?


4. Was the props/ mise-en-scene relevant?


5. Was there anything unclear?


6. Was the poster effective?


7. Was the magazine front cover eye catching?