Film Review- Draft No. 2

Here is the 2nd draft of my second ancillary task, the film review. I produced and edited the film review using Photoshop CS5.

From my second draft, I have added all of the text, a secondary picture in the bottom right, the cast and film information on the right hand side, and the plot of the short film at the top right. These conventions are all things I have learned from my research into film reviews. The formatting is all up to speed in my opinion, and the picture and title 'Intrusion' is large and bold to attract the audiences attention. The film review would be for a double sided, A3 magazine page, which also a lot of my researched film reviews had the same structure.

Even though it is only draft 2 of my film review, I'm happy with it and don't think it'll need any more significant improvements or adjustments!

Feedback and Reviews from Peers and Teacher- Poster Draft 1

Recently our media class has undergone some feedback sessions for our ancillary tasks. I presented my first poster draft to the class and was relatively happy with the feedback and their responses to it. Some of the common strengths with my poster were:

- The choice of font, style and colour was effective to a fair extent. I am happy that my classmates and teacher thought this way, as I carefully selected and stylised the font to achieve a sinister, psychological-thriller effect to my poster, in which they also had similar feelings. They also liked the red, striking typography as it captured their attention and interest to the poster and the film. 

- They also liked the name for the short film itself, 'Intrusion'. They found it to be an appropriate, and effective word that represents the film and grabs the viewers attention and curiosity, despite the fact it's only 1 word.

- Another thing they picked out was the actual image from the poster, of my 2 main protagonists sinisterly standing outside of the house. They thought how it reinforced the title was good, and thought it was a good choice of primary imaging on the poster.

- Lastly, a few people thought how the primary colours used in the poster of red and black were successful in representing the moods and tones of the film, such as danger and crime which is what people deciphered from the colours used in the poster, which I'm pleased about as this is what I wanted.

Moving on, I also got given some disadvantages for my first draft of poster. These were things that people didn't like so much about the poster or things they saw as unnecessary or needed changing. Some of these disadvantages include:

- It needs to be portrait, not landscape. This is an essential adjustment I need to do for my poster as the main convention for posters is that they are done in portrait rather than landscape. This is something I will be changing as a result.

- Another thing they commented on was that my poster needed additional credits at the bottom, like how most conventional film posters do so including the production companies, directors, actors, camera and crew cast and so on.

- One person thought the poster would be better if the image was in black and white, as opposed to being in colour.  This is something I'm not fully sure I agree with, however I understand that if the image is in black and white, it may make the poster even more bleaker and explicit in the tone it's trying to create.

- Another person thought the depth and colour of the image on the poster could be improved, and will result in a better quality image. This is something I will do in order to get a better looking poster aesthetically.

These are all things I will be considering in order to improve my drafts of my poster.

Film Review - Draft No.1

This is the first draft of the film review for Intrusion. It is just the basic format and includes a picture and the logo of the magazine in the top left.

The picture is of a still from the film, which is used as a device to give the audience an insight into the film. Even though the image is very vague, the audience can draw some kind of interpretation based on the image, such as because they are hooded they can be considered as villanous or antagonists. And they are also both looking the same way, at the same thing, which can assume they are working together, but not for the best intentions.

I also used a 'Total Film' logo in the top left, this means that the film review I'm using would belong in a Total Film magazine if it were real. This is also used to remind the audience what magazine they are reading when they read the film review.

As an overall mockup and draft 1 of my film review I am happy with it so far and think when I add the text and additional images and titles to it it will look like a good film review, and a conventional film review.

Audience Theory

There are various different audience theories that we need to be addressing and thinking about when it comes to the coursework. These are theories that put across certain statements and understandings about what audiences do with, and what they gain from certain media products and texts. It also establishes how easily, or in what way they come to an agreement with the media and how susceptible they are to believing it, or being 'controlled' by it.

Hypodermic Needle theory: This is a theory that dictates audiences are passive in nature. Ideologies and opinions are passed on to, or injected into the audience through the many different mediums of the media. This 'injection' then shapes and alters the audiences state of mind; essentially controlling their thoughts and beliefs just through showing them things on the media explicitly.

The Agenda Setting theory: The Agenda Setting theory, or model represents a very powerful influence of the media. This theory suggests the media has the power to tell us what is and what isn't important. It can be justified in 2 main points. 1- The press and the media do not reflect reality; they filter and shape it. 2- Media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important than others. 

Two Step flow theory: This theory proposes that the key information from the media movies in two distinct stages. It can be described by a diagram, the Two Step Flow Model, developed by Katz & Lazarsfeld in 1955. It basically says that the 'opinion leaders', individuals that pay close attention to the media and the information presented, and then they pass it on to many people around them, or as the model describes 'individual in social contact with the opinion leader.' This is how this model suggests information and opinions presented from the media gets around. 

Uses and gratifications theory: This theory is the opposite to the Hypodermic Needle theory and it suggests that audiences are active. It is all about what people do with media rather than what the media does to people. People use the media and all of its products for individual needs and requirements. This can be for social needs, cognitive needs, affective needs and social integrative needs. 

Addressing the Evaluation Questions

The following are the 4 evaluations questions we need to address: 

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

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

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stage?


1- My media product I am currently developing and working on production is my thriller short film, where I aim to bring in conventions of dark, psychological thrillers. One way my product uses forms and conventions of real psychological thriller films is through my use of dark, low-key lighting and darker colour pallets, and through the use of slowly built up and escalating camera shots and editing. Such as, modern darker thriller films can often build up tension and suspense that intrigue the audience, through the use of slow camera shots and pacing, that have an end goal of revealing something made to shock the audience. This slow build up is what gets the audience involved with the thriller film and is what creates the thrill value of the product. They also, often use very low-key lit scenes with dark colour pallets, that are suggestive of bleaker and more sinister moods that the audience can decipher, just based on the colours used in the shots. Additionally, one way my media product currently develops real forms and conventions of thriller films is by the way I have got a slow building, ambient piece of soundtrack over my video. In certain types of thriller films, fast, attention-grabbing pieces of non-diegetic audio will be used. This is different to the type of non-diegetic audio I have used in my short film. The reason for this is the different purposes the types of audio create, where my slow building, atmospheric non-diegetic music slowly draws in the audience to my films diegesis and premise, fast, action-based non-diegetic audio aims to get the audience attracted to the action on screen as quickly as possible. This is why I used a slow and more subtle piece of non-diegetic soundtrack as opposed to fast, uptempo thriller bases soundtracks; I was aiming to lure in the audience slowly rather than try and attract them in as quickly as possible, doing so creating a more tense short film.

2. I personally believe that my combination of main text, and both ancillary tasks is fairly effective. I am particularly happy with my poster and how it visually turned out; it replicates the dangerous, dark themes of my main text considerably well. This can be seen through the use of my black and white colour scheme, along with a contrasting, striking red font throughout my poster. This created themes of danger, since the colour red is a convention used in typography and posters that indicate danger or some kind of trouble. The black and white colour scheme also helped to explicitly add to my theme of crime and bleakness. So on the whole, I believe to a fair extent that my poster is a thorough, and effective visual representation of my short film text, and it hints at what the film will be like considerably well, through the uses of conventions and features I've explained. For my film review draft 1, I am happy with the way it turned out and think it represents my short film text to a fair extent, once again. Despite it's a film review, I tried to stick to the same colour scheme as my poster of blacks and reds, which is why my background colour in my film review is black and text colour is often red. I did this to try and replicate themes of Intrusion in my poster as well as film review, so the 3 products share synergy and an overall theme.

3. I think that my audience feedback survey served as an informative, anchoring piece of evidence that helped me establish features and conventions to use in my main text. Despite the fact that my audience survey was based off another short film idea I once had, both of them still incorporate thoroughly similar themes and visions so I still currently find my audience feedback survey useful. One useful thing I have currently learned from my audience survey is that the most common types of thriller sub genres people like to see are action and psychological. This is something beneficial for me as it is good to know that audiences like to see psychological-thriller films, and that I'm not making a product that people technically would be less willing to see. Additionally, I have learned from my results that thriller films can be made better through more effective uses of sound, lighting, direction and cinematography. These are the answers numerous people said when I asked them what they thought made thriller films better. As a result of this, some of these are elements I prioritized and paid additional attention too when it came to filming, story-boarding and post-production. Additionally, another key thing I learned from my audience feedback survey was that 90% of my interviewees thought that the gender of the lead character in a thriller film doesn't matter. This is definitely something that helped me out because once I received all of the data, I then was confident to cast a male in my short film due to the fact that the audience said they don't mind what gender is in the leading role.

4. One form of new technologies that has helped me with my construction and research stage of my project is through the likes of YouTube, Survey Monkey and Adobe After Effects. YouTube was a fundamental aspect of my research stage, I watched many previous short films from students and professionally made, that really gave me an insight on what was to come and how I can draw any ideas and inspirations from these past examples. Survey Monkey is a new technology in the form of a website, that allows anybody to create questionnaires and have them filled in by users on the internet. It was a great service and very much helped me create my survey, which in turn gave me the results that very much so helped my research. In terms of Adobe After Effects, it is a fantastic piece of video editing software developed by Adobe. It is fairly modern as well. This was the main piece of software I used to cut, select and edit footage together used to make my rough cuts. Without it I would of had to choose another editing software which I was more reluctant to do as I like the interface for After Effects and have used it in the past.