Evaluation

Question One: In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media?
· Codes are visual or audio elements that the audience can see or hear.
· Conventions are stereotypes that the audience expects from characters in a particular genre; in our case this is Arthouse.
· Form is a basic structure of media text includes, camera, sound, editing, mise en scene; and our structure is a teaser trailer, magazine cover and a poster.

Our teaser trailer used these different elements from other Arthouse films:

Visual Elements
· Birds eye view shot and the spilt screen from Requiem of a Dream; which shows contrast between the characters. Also, the extreme close up of the eye changing pupil size is also from Requiem of a Dream.
· The canted angle from Donnie Darko
· Graffiti as a background from Volver.
· Sepia tones from Amelie and Delicatessen
· The Brighton beach long shot was used to show the location and connection between the characters.

Audio Elements
· From our sound research we discovered that most Arthouse films use string instruments as the soundtrack. Therefore our soundtrack was a guitar which emphasised the warm feeling. The rhythm builds up to create enigma and then fades out.
· We used the Spanish language as an inspiration from Pedro Almodovar films.

Conventions
· Our storyline contains untouchable taboo like events in childhood for example rape. We got the idea from Pedro Almodovar’s films.
· Strong contrast between and within the characters, which applies to most Arthouse films.
· Romance and drama

Forms
· Split screen, canted angle
· Sepia tones, luminance and channel map (overlay between shots)
· Backgrounds, costume, make up and prop

Developed and Challenged
Visual and Audio
· Subtitles in different places on screen
· Jump cut
· Reverse shot
· Jaw harp
· Typography in titles – got from dafont.com

Conventions
· Superstition; mirror smash, black cat instead of normal cat
· Bubbles – childhood memoir

Question Two: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
· The cat logo was used on our poster and the cat was mentioned in the trailer and appeared on screen too.
· Colour – sepia tones are featured in our magazine cover, poster and trailer.
· Two shots – suggesting the main characters of the storyline.
· Lighting – used in all of our products.
· Setting – warm feel. Graffiti was used in the trailer and magazine cover background.
· Typography – unique font in our products link together.
· Costume – complimentary colours.

Question Three: What have you learned from your audience feedback?
· From the audience feedback, we improved the storyline as we changed the order of shot, to create enigma.
· We received comments about the level of background noise which we were unable to change.
· Addition of the black cat at the end of our trailer to create quirkiness and to connect to superstition.
· Changed the font in the trailer to suit our genre of Arthouse.
· We cropped the edge of our production company animation to make it less jumpy.
· We developed our magazine cover, we changed the background, and the typography to suit the magazine we chose Little White Lies.
· Pearl and Dean – looked at the comparable profiles for Amelie and Donnie Darko to have an idea of the structure of the audience.
· We are aware that our audience is an older generation.