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.