Research - Focus Groups

I have chosen focus groups as its a direct means of contact with my target audience. This way I can interact with my target audience face to face, and receive constructive criticism to amend my media pieces to an excellent standard for my audience. Below was the members of my focus group. I chose not to include anyone in my media products to eliminate bias and thus made a group consisting both of friends and friends of friends.

A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging. Questions are asked in an interactive group setting where participants are free to talk with other group members. The first focus groups were created at the Bureau of Applied Social Research in the USA, by associate director, sociologist Robert K. Merton. The term itself was coined by psychologist and marketing expert Ernest Dichter.

I will be using mini focus groups, which are groups composed of four or five members rather than 6 to 12, as i don't have access to the normal group of around 25-50. With this research I will alter my final pieces to suit my target audience better and generally listen to any majority feedback I receive from the focus groups.

Planning - Animatic

BRIEF

• A promotion package for a new film, to include a teaser trailer, together with two of the following three options:
• A website homepage for the film;
• A film magazine front cover, featuring the film;
• A poster for the film.

EVALUATION

• In the evaluation the following questions must be answered:
• In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
• How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
• What have you learned from your audience feedback?
• How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Research - Magazine Research

The Z-Pattern is a pattern which is in the shape of a Z across the page of a website or a magazine. It is the way a person reads and scans the page when they first see it and are not being distracted with the adverts around it. The pattern is below, and as you can see, western civilization, read from left to right, so they go from top left, to top right scan across reading, or looking at images on the way to bottom left which then finishes bottom right. This is normally done very quickly in a matter of moments. This pattern is generally used by children to younger adults though, the rule used for adults and is just breaking through at the moment, is the "F"-Rule. A picture below shows this.

Z-Pattern.

F Pattern.

Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds is another guideline just like the "F" and "Z" pattern techniques, which enables the picture to look more flush and not so 'out of place'. The technique is when you have a canvas or image chopped up into 9 quadrants. These are done by 4 lines, two horizontal lines and 2 vertical lines, they are equal distance apart from each other on the same gradient, and the edges. The technique states that a focus should be at the intersection of lines or on lines to make the image more flush and not so out of place. An example is below in the form of a picture.

As you can see here in this wildlife close up image of a bee, its head is on the intersection of two lines, putting a focus here, and drawing viewers to this point of the image. The flowers themselves are also on the horizontal lines which keeps the picture in touch with the focus.

After looking into this technique, i will definetly incorporate my magazine with this rule to some extent, as my project is based on a magazine and not entirely on a photo or an image. I think this will help to make my image on my front cover stand out.

Research - Target Audience

My target audience for my teaser trailer would be the younger generation. As its a psychological horror, the conventional target audience would be from the ages of 15 - 35 years old. The socio economic background of my target audience would be 3A. This group consists of the working class who aren't in any financial difficulty or extremely wealthy. The group is for the mainstream public of the age category specified.

As I researched my genre of my trailer I noticed that not many people over the age of 35 were interested in watching such films, obviously this was the majority, and some did, but the mainstream feedback I got was that mainly 15-35 year olds would be interested in such a film.

Evaluation and Feedback - Final Poster

This was my final poster pre-feedback through the focus groups. The focus group I used was my target audience of 15-35 year olds and asked them the following questions to provoke a constructive response.

1) What type of film do you think of when you first see this poster?

2) Do you think this film poster looks professional enough for a billboard advertisement?

3) What would you change if you had the chance?

Here are the responses I got from the questions:

1) Replies - "Horror" "Religious horror" "Horror spoof" "psychological horror"

The majority of the focus groups said they found it to portray a horror or a psychological horror and when asked why they replied with "the double face and the font plus the title give it this impression" and "The colour scheme and general gothic element to the poster hint towards this type of genre". This was a good response and mainly the response I was looking for and due to the majority giving me this response I think i've achieved the genre I was trying to portray to my audience.

2) Replies - "Yes, it gives the impression that it is professionally made" "The stock image and the editing to the picture is of a high standard, although the title could be improved and the image colour could be better, its seems a bit too light and not enough colour."

This response was mixed, some of the members of the focus group said it was professional looking but could be better in terms of image quality. With this feedback I decided to go back to photoshop and try to fix the picture to agree with my focus group comments. I changed the text to suit the picture more and brightened the image up and saturated the colours more using the layer properties option brightness/saturation/hue. This was the end result.

Old:

New:

3) Replies " I think the poster is very good, i might blend the effect of the two face image into each other, but other than that i wouldn't change much!" "The titles are very good, but maybe could be made a bit bigger, especially the "satan spawn"

If I had more time I would try these comments out on my poster to see if they made a impact on my target audience, as not many of the focus group members said they would change much.

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

My main product and ancillary texts are all linked through images and references to one another. The 3 media products all have images of the actresses in my teaser trailer, and the poster and magazine I have used two different actresses. Below is the teaser trailer and you can see clearly the two actresses I used at '0.24' and '1.09'

0.24:

1.09:

Research - Monochromatic Colours

A monochromatic scheme consists of different values (tints and shades) of one single color. These color schemes are easy to get right and can be very effective and soothing. They do, however, lack the diversity of hues found in other color schemes and are less vibrant.


Magazines tend to use these to make it smoother on the readers eyes, and more eyecatchy. People say don't judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to magazines everyone normally does. So if a magazine has a monochromatic colour scheme, the colours blend into one another. The colours are of the same "primary colour" but are different shades and tints, presented next to each other they are very synthetic to the eye.


and example of it in reality:



As you can see in this picture the colours are very close in the hue and saturation scale of colours. Their is no clashes of colour and everything seems to 'blend' into one another.

Production - Final Magazine Cover

This is my final magazine cover. I used an image of one of my actresses in the final film by putting her against a white background and cutting her out using the magic wand tool on photoshop. In my magazine research I found the rule of thirds and the z and f pattern. The z pattern being the more conventional pattern used in western magazines and media. I applied these to my magazine as best as possible to keep the conventional themes for my audience, but I did try to challenge conventions.

I started with a plain background and then moulded the colour scheme round my image - mainly the dark red colour of the models hair. I then used my research of film magazines to include aspects that are already in conventional film magazines today. These included the bumper sticker you can see on the magazine, the main image slightly covering the title to give it that emphasise of importance, yet the title is still eligible due to its branding.

Production - Final Poster

The first step of making my main poster was to brainstorm ideas. We struggled to find an idea at first but then the idea of two faces split between one came as an idea, as the film narrative has got the religious possession element to it. The idea also was influenced by the character 'two face' from the Batman franchise. An image of the character is shown below from the recent movie 'The Dark Knight'.

We used the idea and adapted this into our own, because obviously we didn't want the burnt effect, but more of a demonic and gothic effect. We took a close up picture of one of our actresses and then started to create the given effect.

I started off by splitting the face completely in half. I then made a base layer which was the original image, then two layer copies - one of the left side and the right. I then put effects, gradients, different layer properties and effects to generate the desired effect below. I also used my knowledge of photoshop to enhance the light side of the face with more of a "tanned" look and made the colour of the given models eye and lipstick more feminine to give that connotation of vulnerability.

After we had the base image done I needed to add the text. I chose a font which was quite straight and had calligraphy properties to it, but not so much it made it look to old fashioned. I decided to keep the symmetry to the image to make it more aesthetically pleasing to audiences who were gonna see the poster. We researched current film posters and noticed that the whole text at the bottom of the posters regarding the information to the film, including its actors, actresses and crew were all in capitals. The only difference was that the names were a bigger font than the titles. We adopted this in our own poster due to this, to follow conventions and give our poster that authentic look we are trying to achieve.

This is the finished product, our font for "Satan Spawn" was a custom font made which was called horristical. We felt that it blended well into the gothic element and dark connotations our poster was portraying. Again you can see we used the symmetry to make it aesthetically pleasing and divided the "Winter 2011" with the colours according to the main title "Satan Spawn". We played around with various editions of the poster and felt that it worked best with the symmetry implemented, and thus used this version.

Production - Logo

This is my production logo for my teaser trailer. The whole image was made in photoshop CS3 and is mainly comprised of using the pen tool, making of custom shapes and some effects such as bevel and embossing, and gradients. I chose to make our logo look different but at the same time not so unique it wouldn't fit into the film genre we are really making for the teaser trailer (Horror/Thriller).

It is made up of 18 layers, and i really tried to emphasise the aesthetic look to the logo, and in trying to do so made the logo symmetrical as possible. I thought the font of the logo also went very well with the shapes of the custom shapes made, for example below you can see the aesthetics to the image is quite flush and pleasing.

I also tried to make the logo look "classy" and professionally made as possible, and by doing this added effects as you can see in the above image, the gold 'spades' have a dark gold gradient though them from bottom to top, to give it that again more aesthetically pleasing look to them. They also are bigger as most symmetrical logos have a big to small pattern to them, examples are down below:

Although this isnt always the case i do think that the large to small from outside the logo to the inside is more aesthetically pleasing.

Research - Moral Panic

A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order.

An example of this was the moral panic over the role playing game of Dungeons and Dragons. In this game you played a person who became a witch, and then revolted and turned to christianity to revert from the afterlife of hell. This brought great controversy with the issues of Satanism, witchcraft, sorcery, pornography and violence. Characters could tie and torture people, whilst also using spells to inflict pain and "damage" to creatures in the mythical world.

In game screenshot of one of many of the demonised creatures within the game.

Religious groups were in uproar about this, and claimed it was "demonising" the social order of people who were immensely influenced by the role playing game. This negative media led TSR the makers of the game to remove all references to demons and satanism in which they replaced characters with names other than "Lucifer" and "Mephistopheles"

My teaser trailer contains religious connotations of a demon or devil which is present in one of my characters in the movie. To not upset too many people, I will not challenge any ethical or religious views in my film or begin a 'Moral Panic' with the intensity of the teaser trailer. The trailer will not contain any mythical creatures, and we only intend to have one scene were you can clearly see the demon or devil is present. The scene begins at 0.50 and ends at 0.53

Example with still image:

The scene can be seen from 0.50 - 0.53 here:

Research - Media Theories

Media analysts have developed theories and explanations of how humans take in the media texts and how it may influence or our behaviour in everyday life.

The Hypodermic Needle or Hypodermic Syringe

Dating from the 1920's, this theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media. It is a crude model, as it implies that audiences receive media texts through a forceful means of injection of the mind, hence 'hypodermic needle' without any challenge or attempt at processing the data. The most famous incident of this model being in use, was the wide spread panic of the American public from the film "War of the Worlds" in which a number of people were so influenced by the film, they believed and thought the film as becoming a reality around them.

Paul Lazersfeld and Herta Herzog challenged this and based a lot of their research from this incident, and found it was in fact quite a small majority of viewers of the film that were in panic, and Hadley Cantril showed that it diverse in reaction, and were largely determined by situational and attitudinal attributes of the viewer.

Uses and Gratification

During the 1960's, as the first generation to grow up with television became grown ups, it became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals in society:

• Surveillance
• Correlation
• Entertainment
• Cultural Transmission

The Peoples Choice

Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters decision making processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The Peoples Choice. Their findings suggested that the information unmediated but its filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they influence.

The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm.

Reception Theory

Extending the concept of an active audience still further, in the 1980s and 1990s a lot of work has been done on the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their individual circumstances (Gender, class, age, ethnicity) affected their reading. This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience - the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major difference between two different readings of the same code.

Production, Evaluation and Research - Magazine Front Cover Mock Up

My task here was to create a magazine front cover involving the theme of film. I chose the title 'MovieShot' because i felt it was simple, but gave the movie a straight forward but still quite 'classic' name. I used a conventional font, which didn't stick out to, but gave the title a finesse to it whilst still getting the message across - The magazine was about cinema and film.

My first draft is below and was submitted to a focus group of potential audience members. The focus group evaluated the magazine giving me feedback on what they found good and bad, what drew attention and what needed altering. The following was said:

Positive Points:

• Colour scheme was good
• Picture and background well blended (two separate layers)
• Good use of the Z-Pattern
• Good use of the rule of thirds
• Good innovated idea of brightening the eyes and chest.

Negatives Points:

• Colour scheme is a bit to saturated in colour in certain parts, mainly "Iron Man"
• Background is blended in, but maybe introduce a little more colour by playing with the levels, saturations, hue and colour scheme.
• It was also suggested that the background was too sharp, so adding a texture to it would break the shapes up, and not draw too much attention to the background rather than the main image of "iron man'.
• Enlarge the 'Iron Man' title.

I used these focus group comments and with them set about to improve my magazine cover. I tried to pinpoint all the negative comments and change them to improve my magazine and satisfy the focus group.

Below is the finished preliminary magazine. I tried to implement all the points given to me by the focus group, but I found some didn't work with other points that were given. I increased the saturation of the poster and the title and seen a massive improvement to the monochromatic colour scheme which gives the poster its eye catching visage to audiences.

I also broke down the background image quite a bit by using the mosaic effect on it. It made it less 'square' and made the iron man image stand out much more off the background. The Iron Man logo was enlarged to make it stand out even more, and the colours more vibrant through playing around with the brightness/hue/saturation settings of the text layer which i rasterized to play around with the layer properties. The title was also given a drop shadow effect to make it stand out even more as it is the title of the magazine. Some members of the focus group said that the title didn't stand out as much as the 'Iron Man' logo which wasn't conventional. So this is why I changed this.

I am happy with the final product and think that the feedback from the focus groups were very helpful. Due to the majority thinking the same, it is in my interest to listen to them, as they would be the ones who would be buying my magazine. For my final product I will also use a focus group, to improve my final magazine.

Research - Propps 7 Character Roles

Propp believed that there are seven roles which any character may assume in the story:

1. Villian - Struggles with hero
2. Donor - Prepares and/or provides hero with magical agent
3. Helper - Assists, rescues, solves and/or transfigures the hero
4. Princess - A sought for person (and/or her father) who exists as goal and often recognises and marries hero and/or punishes villain.
5. Dispatcher - Sends hero off
6. Hero - Departs on a epic search (seeker-hero), reacts to donor and weds at the end.
7. False Hero - Claims to be the hero, often seeking and reacting like a real hero.

Putting this into the context of a trilogy of my favourite films (The Matrix Films) certain characters fall into these roles quite neatly. Keanu Reeves who plays the character "Neo" can be clearly defined as the hero, but his only difference is that he dies at the end of the series as well as his "Princess" dying in the finale to the last film Matrix Revolutions. "The False Hero" can be seen as the commander of the sci fi city "Zion" as he tries to save the city through the use of brute force, but is overwhelmed by the opposition - the machines. "The Helper" can be seen as captain Morpheus in the trilogy as he helps Neo through his journey into saving "Zion" from ultimate destruction. The character Captain Naomi can be seen as the "Helper", as in the last film she gives Neo her most prized possession in terms of the narrative - her ship to travel the machine city to fight the "villain" the character Agent Smith, who is a program investing the matrix, which in the narrative is the world we are currently in but, not the real world but an illusion. The "Dispatcher" can also be seen as Captain Morpheus as he sends Neo on his way through the Oracle and deciphering Neo's dreams.

Propps 7 Narrative roles show a clear pattern even in modern films in contemporary times. Characters fall into the roles describes quite identically, some with slight differences but the general narrative roles are filled showing that Propps 7 Narrative theory is quite accurate. Even though only one trilogy has been analysed it shows that Propps 7 Narrative roles show some meaning to them and coincide with modern narratives as well as old.

I will try to incorporate these roles into my media product, with a slight twist, as many modern theorists say Propps character roles are outdated, but still show some definition into modern films and the characters in the film.