Who are your audience & what have you learned from your audience feedback?

Our target audience are both sexes, ranging from eighteen to thirty years of age. We believe our decision to focus upon two characters within our film; one male one female, will appeal to both sexes as their characters are portrayed as equals, going through the same situations but handling them very differently in the film.

We also believe that our film will appeal to a more educated group of people, as rather than ‘spoon feeding’ the audience, our film encourages people to think, and relate fragments of it to wider society, as is reflects the raw brutality and harsh truth that lies with drug addiction and living a life of poverty.

We collected quantitative feedback from an audience of forty people, who scored the storyline, originality, editing and music quality of our trailer out of 10 as shown in the table. From this we learnt that the editing was the most favoured part of the trailer, and the storyline was the least favoured. This was an inevitable conclusion as we decided to use a mixture of fast and slow paced shots shown in a variety of locations and times within the film to leave the audience feeling both distorted and slightly disturbed, rather than giving too much of the narrative away, spoiling the ending and leaving no room for temptation to go and see it at the cinema.

Another method we used to collect feedback from audience members was more qualitative, as we asked them straight out what their thoughts and feelings were of the trailer, if they would in fact go and see it and if there was any constructive criticism they could give us. This proved to be a highly successful method as we encountered a lot of honest opinions rather than just numerical feedback which isn’t as precise.

Overall, the majority of comments were positive such as “the music sets the tone really well”, “the production logo is impressive” and “the voiceover is so sincere, it made me empathise with Eve’s character”. Although, there was some constructive criticism, for example, “drug addiction is a very common theme” and “the voiceover was quite faint”, both of which could not be helped given the recording equipment we used for our low budget film and the fact we were recording in a school. Also, we knew that drug addiction was a common theme through our extensive research of film trailers, but decided to portray it in a far more truthful light, rather than glamorise and ‘sugar-coat’ it as most big Hollywood blockbuster films do. We also decided to use a drug that was not as well known as those used in larger budget films such as cocaine, cannabis and heroin.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

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

Panasonic HD Video CameraThis was used to film all of our footage for the trailer. The main tools used on it were the zoom, adjusting the focus, and altering the white balance for the shots in the tunnel to create a cold ambience. An advantage to using this camera was that, compared to the camera we used last year, the quality was much better, providing a clear and smooth imagery. Additionally, it was much easier to use as it saved the footage onto an SD card rather than a tape, eradicating the risk of overwriting. One of the major flaws we had with this piece of equipment that due to the camera being HD, the file type was not recognised by our editing software. We solved this issue by putting the footage onto a program which did recognise HD footage and then saving it as an AVI and transferring it back to the college computers.

TripodUsing a tripod improved our camera work as the shots were steady in each scene, and it allowed us to easily adjust the height, angle, and enable smooth panning. This was especially useful when filming in Burnley, as to achieve the effect of the public speeding up whilst we were stayed in the same position on the bench, the camera needed to stay in the same place and stay perfectly still, which the tripod allowed us to do easily. It was also helpful when filming in the tunnels, as it allowed us to adjust the angle of the camera when the terrain was slanted. There was no issues with this piece of equipment as it was easy to use and was of great help to us.
Digital Camera
We used this digital camera in order to take pictures for characters' costumes, the props we intended to use, and for the film poster. The pros of this is that it provided us with the perfect photograph which we wanted for the poster. The only downside to this camera is that compared to other items on the market today, it is not as high quality, and the photo was slightly grainy. However, I overcame this problem through tweeking the picture in Photoshop.

Pinnacle Studio 10+
This was the editing program which we used to compose our trailer. The advantages to this program was that it was straightfoward to understand and used, and had the essential editing tools which we needed. However, there were many cons to Pinnacle. The first being that on multiple occasions, when we tried to add certain effects, such as adjusting the speed, it would corrupt the footage, and we therefore has to do them as seperate AVI files and put them back together later. Also, we had issues with using our selected songs in Pinnacle, as it would not recognise our WAV files. We overcame this by converting them in Audacity and we were then able to use the music.

Photoshop CS5
Photoshop was used to create our production logo, film poster and title plates for the production. The pros of using this program was that as I am so familiar with the program, I found it easy to make a realistic and professional looking logo and film poster in a short period of time. Additionally, I was able to create the title plates with the appropriate logos, but edit them so they matched the colour scheme of black and white. The only negative was that Pinnacle didn't recognise the usual file types which they were saved as, and so they had to be converted.
Vimeo
Originally, the trailer was uploaded to Youtube, however, the quality was much worse than it was on Vimeo, so this is the main platform we decided to showcase it on. The pros to this website was that it enabled many people to view the trailer and give feedback, and we could simply post the video link onto social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter in order to get more exposure. Vimeo is also free, and easy to navigate. However, a disadvantage was waiting for a long time for the video to upload and convert.