Evaluation Question 1 - Danielle

Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

• Our media product conforms to many aspects of the psychological genre. Prior to producing our 60 second teaser trailer we carried out our research thoroughly by deconstructing films which explore a similar narrative such as The Soloist and The Butterfly Effect Through this we were able to establish the conventions of the psychological thriller genre such as low-level lighting, use of canted framing shots, use of tight framing and dull grey and black colours. We were also able to recognise the distinct approaches of how to illustrate a mental illness. The Soloist illustrates the journey of the protagonist in a documentary way, whereas The Butterfly Effect delves into the enigma. After completing trailer deconstructions and rooting sources of inspiration to aid the development of our narrative we decided to produce a media product, which focuses solely on the discrimination of a teenage girl Schizophrenia.
  
  

Teaser Trailer

• Typically, a psychological thriller trailer follows an anachronic modular narrative, which involves the use of flashbacks, and flash-forwards, which is one of the listed conventions. In this respect our 60-second teaser trailer conforms to this convention; our loft scene is an explicit example of a flash-forward as there’s acceleration in the narrative established through the use of our montage scene, which builds the downwards spiral of the protagonist.
•  In combination with our use of non diegetic  eerie, discomforting and discordant sounds we develop our trailer to conform to the conventions of a psychological trailer as our use of non-diegetic sound also achieves a sense of perspective for the audience. An explicit example of this would be the ear ringing sound that we used in relation with oblique shots as our protagonist experiences a schizophrenic episode, which is shown on the right.
• Furthermore we conform to the conventions of the psychological genre as it builds tension and provokes a scare factor among the audience. In combination with the sound, the use rapid cross cutting and fast paced jump cuts evoke the enigma and builds tension for the penultimate montage scene. However, we also challenge the conventions of a psychological thriller through our choice in cast. A convention of a psychological thriller is that the protagonist is a male, yet we challenge and subvert this convention by having both the protagonist and antagonist as females. Another way that we challenge and subvert the psychological thriller genre is by using little to no gore, and focusing solely on the actions that the protagonist performs due to her schizophrenic mind.
• Sound was a large part of our trailer as the production took a while and had to fit with the ambience of the trailer.
• I started by aligning the new non diegetic sound up with the production company clip, in order to have the sound begin as the production company is shown on screen, this was it eases the audience into the narrative of the trailer with no sudden changes in the sound too early on in the trailer. However, I did encounter an issue when inputting the non diegetic sound of the piano melody into the trailer.
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  Although I had made sure that the sound matched up to the exact timings of the trailer as I produced it, I did not trim the track of the "ear ringing noise" therefore it went on further than needed. To resolve this issue, I had to delete that individual track from the Logic Pro project, bounce the file and import it into our footage. From then, I had to import the "ear ringing noise" file into iMovie separately and adjust it by changing its fading options in accordance to the piano melody.
  
• At this stage of inputting the sound into our trailer,  I decided that the other non diegetic sounds that we had recorded prior to making the piano melody such as the whispers would extremely well with our piano melody. I dragged the whispers into place and then had to make sure that they did not dominate the sound entirely. We also thought it would be effective to add the sound of an old TV as it would help build suspense and add to the relevance  of the bad TV effect on our  green screen footage. 
• Overall, adding the sound to our trailer has definitely heightened the effect of it. The sound for our trailer becomes the climax in terms of sound. We made sure we were able to build tension threough using sound effects such as 'swishing' noises and sinister sounding crashes. We applied each track carefully making sure that nothing overlapped the other causing extreme discomfort in the sound all together.
• We also had to make sure that the volumes of each track were fairly similar and worked well together, so we had to manually apply a fade out or fade in to certain tracks so the audio sounded together and not random and detached.
   

Poster

• Furthermore, our poster challenges conventions by steering away from the conventional red, white and black colours that are traditionally seen within a horror film packages in film posters such as the Final Destination.
• Prior to designing our own poster, we deconstructed psychological thriller posters as a means to gain inspiration. We started by deconstructing posters such as Jacob's Ladders' film poster. We noted that:
• From the name, ‘fatal attraction’ we can understand that the director, Adrian Lyne has a reputation for directing horror films.•At first glance our eyes meet the blurred image of a face that remains centred but slightly to the right as if being pulled by something else, connoting possible disequilibrium in the movie.
  •The choice of a black background depicts that it isn’t necessarily a happy, light hearted comedy but quite the opposite as black connotes death. The black also mirrors the hidden depth of the story line that is revealed as the story itself is unravelled.
  • Similarly, the three colours used are black, white and red the traditional colours for a horror/ thriller movie. 
•  During the process of deconstructing many film trailers we decided to challenge the conventions of psychological thriller film posters and utilize psychedelic colours within our poster. We used this as our initial idea after gaining inspiration after deconstructing the Butterfly Effect  film poster; which utilizes psychedelic colours within its main image.
  

• The main image as you can see on the right is the silhouette of the protagonist casted against the clinical blue colour of butterfly wings presenting the psychological genre of the film as well as the concept of the film too.
•  With this in mind, we decided to adjust the contrast, saturation and sharpness of the image through using Photoshop; we were able to pay closer attention to detail to the shadow casted behind our protagonists’ imaginary friend as we were able to stretch the shadow as much as we wanted to, allowing our poster image to come across with more of a professional and creative edge. 
•  We also increased the saturation of the poster image to achieve the vibrancy that we now have present on our poster, in this respect we majorly subvert psychological thriller film posters as we do not use any of the conventional colours red, white or black. 

Website

• After thorough research of other psychological thriller film websites we decided to edit the photos that we had taken during our photo-shoot to an extent that it challenged conventions. After deconstructing the Butterfly Effect we took on board the use of using fluorescent colours within our package. 
• During the post production point after the photo-shoot we decided to adjust the saturation levels and utilize the Focal tool that allowed us to bring the image of the protagonist nearest to the camera into focus more whereas, it allowed us to blur out her imaginary friend. 
• Developing this further we also used Photoshop to make a GIF. file of the image of the protagonist allowing us to achieve the disappearing effect of the image to reiterate the instability of the protagonist. Similarly, to our poster image we also edited the main image in terms of its saturation levels which also made the image appear at much more of a professional standard. It also added a vibrancy to the colours of the website, allowing the colours on the protagonist’s jumper, hair and features stand out a lot more than they did prior to the editing of the image.