WELCOME TO DYSPHORIA

We as a group are fascinated by the relationship between the media and the government, particularly due to the recent phone hacking scandal. We want to create a thriller film campaign which presents a near future world where media has been disbanded and rebels fight for freedom of speech.

• View Our Final Trailer
• View Our Poster
• View Our Website
• View Our Facebook Group
• View Our Twitter Feed
• View our YouTube Account
• View our Draft Trailer

Evaluation Question One

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

Teaser Trailer:
Form: - Our teaser trailer is 1 minute 14 seconds which fits the teaser trailer convention of around 1 minute.
- Our trailer begins with the production companies and
- ends by informing the viewer of the title, the date of release and the webpage where they can discover more about the film.
All of these are conventions used to structure and define a teaser as apposed to a theatrical trailer which would be longer and focus more on the narrative hooks and actors.
- To view our storyboard, click here.

Inspirations and Research:
- Media in the News
- 1984
- Blade Runner
- Equilibrium
- Franklyn
- Gattaca
- I, Robot
- The Matrix
- V for Vendetta
- Genre
- Media Theory
- Symbols

Poster:
The layout and form of the poster fulfills Poster conventions:
- it has the names of the actors,
-the tagline,
-the title,
-the date and
-down the bottom the cast and crew list with the production companies.

Content:
- the idea of two opposing characters,
- representative of two sides of a conflict,
- inspired by the CD cover of U2 and Green day's single 'The Saints are Coming', where the leader singers heads are back to back highlighting an opposition of forces.

This consept also appears in the poster for 'The Ides of March' from which we took the idea of cutting the faces in half. We felt that this:
-  Created greater character enigma and
-  A mirroring quality between the characters, an effect which can be seen in 'Equilibrium'.
- Allows eye contact: the pictures stare out of the poster, at the viewer,
- an emotional connection is made and
-invites the consumer into the world of the film.
This can be seen in the posters for 'Gattaca' and 'Blade Runner'.

The static across the political figure:
- implies the technological aspects
- shadows his image, aligning him with darkness.
There is a link between this and the '1984' film poster which includes the iconic image of Big Brother on a screen ribbed with static. We have chosen to leave out the screen to imply that the threat in our film is far more physical, part of the reality of the world.

General ideas we got from the media texts we looked at were:
- stoic expressions,
- shadowed faces,
- characters dressed in black, and
- gritty ambiance to imply dark plot elements.
This we feel we have conveyed and the urban, grungy background reinforces the film's identity as a dystopia and the strange high angle perspective draws viewers in to look closer. We feel that the symbolic spiral staircase conveys imagery of an endless conflict.

The triple colours - black, white and red are conventions of our chosen genre: Soft Scifi Thriller.

The Anchorage:
- SteelTong anchorage (used on the website and in the teaser trailer and inspired by the same sleek red font of 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy')
- stands out against the dark background.
- red title: draws the eye most due to the brightness of the colour and because it is the only colour
- red: symbolic of danger, violence and blood.
This can be seen also in the 'Blade Runner' and '1984' posters where red is the only bright colour, used for the title.

Title at the bottom:
- highlights the significance of the characters (who are in the foreground further illustrating this) and
- the narrative above the film's label, this is used in the 'Gattaca', 'Matrix' and 'Equilibrium' posters.
- aids the compisition, the viewer's eyes travel down the poster.
Date at the very bottom is a poster convention.

Stylised Black and White:
- can be seen in the 'Equilibrium' poster
- connotes to mystery.
- Darkness is also important for our narrative, something which our product has in common with many of the media texts we deconstructed eg.  'Minority Report' and 'Franklyn' supporting the presentation of the Thriller genre.

Covering the Mouths:
- inspired by news reports where faces or eyes are blacked out for anonimity and where indecent language is covered.
- symbolism: implies that in our dystopia freedom of speech is oppressed and treated like foul language.

Websites:

 - unique to make them interesting to a consumer but also
- add to the world of your narrative.

Webpage  conventions we have conformed to:
 - title at the top and the link to the home page and
- the appearance of the trailer.

Synchronosity between products (trailer, poster, webpage):
-the colour scheme (black, white and red),
- images eg. spiral staircase and
- static
- further emphasises the ambiance of our product/film.

Headings:
Inspired by the most common ones on the sites we deconstructed, for example:
- photos,
- videos,
- cast and crew, and
- book tickets.
However, like on the 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' webpage we changed the names we gave these headings to play more with the themes of our narrative eg. 'Surveillance' instead of 'Videos'.
These headings also differ between the two pages which link off of the Home page to continue the concept of conflict between two opposing sides.

Like the 'Gattaca' webpage we have emphasised the 3 characters introduced in the trailer through images on various pages.
The 'Blade Runner' webpage uses scenes from the film as backgrounds to each page and the consumer becomes an active user as they search for items to click on and discover more.

- engages the audience
- creating a more memorable experience
- also mirrors the detective, mystery narrative of the film.

This interactive aspect is something we particularly liked and also found on the 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' Webpage - the consumer must enter the date as the entrance code and can then go through different levels of the 'circus' visiting places from the film.

Our date appears at the bottom of the home page with out '/' or full stops like a code and we ask our consumers to click on an image or 'Choose your Allegiance' after watching the trailer.
- continues the theme of sides and conflict from our narrative
- each picture takes you to a different page.
- on these 2 pages - one for rebels and one for the government there are video backgrounds with clips from the trailer/film which adds to the identity of each side.

Evaluation Question Two

Question Two:

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

Politicians David Cameron and Nick Clegg, and our politician, the antagonist

We subverted the conventions of our genre by using a young politician as our antagonist. We felt that this was effective as it provides a link between our antagonist and our protagonist, who is also young. Having our protagonist and antagonist as the same age meant that the characters were much more easily comparable. This helped to develop the narrative and opens up room for interpretation of our trailer.

Our protagonist, the 'rebel' leader



Our final poster

Our poster continued the theme of opposition between our protagonist and antagonist from our trailer. We continued this through positioning the two characters on either side of the poster, with the title and tagline between them. The tagline of the poster is also featured in the trailer, maintaining continuity between our main product and our ancillary texts. The use of bold writing and dull/dark colours in our poster gives it an industrial feel and continues from the feel of our trailer, which is conforming to the genre of soft sci-fi. We also wanted to show the elements of the thriller genre from our trailer on our poster, so we looked at thriller posters such as that from "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy". We also wanted to continue the political elements within the narrative, taking inspiration from the poster for "The Ides of March" and the artwork from the cover for the U2/Greenday single "The Saints Are Coming". Our initial ideas, however, focused too much on the political elements of the narrative and could have been misconstrued as presenting the narrative as a political drama due to the inclusion of the Union Jack. We resolved this issue by placing our characters on either side of the poster and using the spiral staircase in the background rather than a flag.

Our website's homepage

Our Rebel homepage



Our Government homepage

Our website was key in continuing the theme of opposition between our trailer's protagonist and antagonist. The Government homepage features a copy of the speech that is heard in the trailer and the Rebel homepage features an invitation to join "the resistance". This develops the narrative by continuing the development of the two opposing groups in our trailer. We wanted to give the resistance an identity as the underdog resistance against an oppressive, totalitarian, government such as that in Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Maintaining the feel of the narrative through the poster and the website combines with the style of the trailer successfully.

The combination of our main product and our ancillary texts is very effective as we were able to maintain continuity in the style of our trailer, poster and website. By keeping the feel of our soft sci-fi thriller narrative, the main product and our ancillary texts conform to the style of our chosen genre.

Evaluation Question Three

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

What have we learnt from audience feedback concerning our trailer development?

We deconstructed the trailers of Franklyn, Minority Report, Nineteen Eighty Four, iRobot, Blade Runner, Gattaca, V for Vendetta, Equilibration and The Matrix. Our overall trailer convention list can be found here.

The most vital feedback we received was on our trailer. We uploaded the trailer to YouTube, promoting it through our personal Facebook accounts and through Twitter by linking it to trending ‘hashtags’. Our draft trailer had the following audience demographic: We found that most of our audience lived in the UK, most likely our friends through Facebook. However a small amount of people from the USA and Canada have watched the trailer also. We found that it is most popular with females between the ages of 13 and 24 and males between the ages of 25-34. One of the issues with the YouTube statistics feature is that anonymity allows for misinformation.

We made the following changes to the trailer because of feedback we have received:         

• We removed the shot of our heroine being dragged along the floor. This is because of the genre issues we had, our feedback led us to believe it may have made the trailer look like a slasher. We also wanted to decrease the importance of the romantic sub story within the trailer because one viewer told us it detracted from the thrill.
• We made the news montage shorter. This was for two reasons, firstly that our trailer was too long already and didn’t meet convention in this way. Secondly that some viewer commented that the pace of the beginning could be faster.
• Some viewers believed that the narrative should be clearer. However our research into teaser trailers as opposed to theatrical trailers told us that the amount of narrative we revealed was appropriate. Our teaser trailer research can be found here. 

• In terms of the sound element of our trailer, the audience noticed two errors we had not picked up on. Firstly, between the beginning montage and the political speech shot, we wanted silence to emphasise the sound of the tv static and coloured bars so as to illustrate a definite change. However the backing track continued between these few shots. Secondly, during the speech, the sound changes according to the setting in which it is being played. Between the hall and the pub, the sound continues in one way then the pitch changes halfway through the shot. We rectified both these issues thanks to our audience feedback.
• Lastly while playing our trailer in the controlled feedback session, we noticed that the sound was being compressed on the larger speakers which created level issues and unwanted noise. We found that on smaller speakers that this was not a problem.

Draft trailer:

Final Trailer:

What have we learnt from audience feedback concerning our poster design?

Our initial poster research included research into set out, archetypal poster designs and appealing to different audiences. We deconstructed the posters of Franklyn, Minority Report, 1984, Blade Runner, Gattaca, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, iRobot, V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, and The Matrix and then summarised what we believed were the conventions of posters within the thriller genre. We then took images we would like to emulate, turning these into poster ideas.

After initially designed our posters, we asked a small demographic of majorly teenage male and females to vote on their favourite design. These poster designs can be found here. We found that the most popular tag line was ‘A Society Fed on Lies is About to Get a Taste of the Truth’ and that the image of the Prime Minister, with it’s bright colours and contrasting text and background, appealed to this niche audience. When researching audience theory, we came to believe that our audience are between the ages of 18-30, are male, interested in thriller books and movies, are middle class, and are educated to a higher level.

(Although the audience we asked were not this targeted audience, it did allow us to get vital feedback.) From this point we developed our poster further using the feedback we got from our audience and from our Media Studies teachers. The main issue we approached was that of genre: we believed people were becoming misled as to which genre our film was. The use of the flag background suggested the social realism genre and the juxtaposition of the rebel symbol and the union jack suggested a political drama. In order to make the genre clear, we had to change the design to create a sense of a world alien to our own. We did this through the mirroring of the two images, black rectangles which censored the character’s mouths, a monochrome colour scheme with contrasting coloured anchorage and the static effect over the Prime Minister’s image. For our entire justification of our final design, click here. Due to the genre issues we have already explained, we believed that the second tag line was linking our trailer too extensively to a political drama and to some extent to conflicts like those involving the IRA. Moreover, we wanted our audience to be on the side of the rebel group, not have the choice between the two. Therefore we decided to use the first tag line; it aligns the audience to the rebel side of the conflict.

What have we learnt from audience feedback concerning our website design?

We began our website research by deconstructing the webpages of The Matrix, Gattaca, Blade Runner and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, then made a list of overall conventions. 

Our website received less constructive feedback, perhaps due to a less complicated design process and more easily met codes and conventions. To see our development post click here. The set out of our website, with central home page and two other pages, one for each opposing side, meant that it was easy to create. We created a sense of the contrast using different videos for the backgrounds of each. The feedback we received was limited to a need for a ‘back’ button to take the user back to the central home page. For all of our website research including website development, click here. Alongside the trailer and poster, the title font changed as we attempted to achieve conventions of the thriller genre. The overall final webpage design justification can be found here.

In conclusion, audience feedback allowed us to modify our trailer to improve its continuity, to polish up the editing and to fully achieve the conventions of our genre. It was vital to the development of our trailer and ancillary tasks.The full achievement of the conventions of the soft sci-fi thriller genre can be seen in our final audience questionnaire:

Evaluation Question Four

HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH, PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

In the process of planning, creating and evaluating our film trailer, poster and website, we used many different media technologies. 

CREATION

• Wix - We used Wix, a free website creation site, to make our website homepages. It allowed us to make a dual-homepage system to continue our theme of the two sides of the freedom of speech. When technical problems arose with the site, we considered using Microsoft Publisher instead, but found that the professional quality of the Wix sites were worth the hassle of working around issues. 
• Photoshop - We used Adobe Photoshop to manipulate our photos and create our poster designs.
• iMovie - We used iMovie to edit and arrange our footage for our trailer and the background videos for our website. A prime example of this being combined with other media technologies was when we decided, following audience feedback, to change our montage to give it more of a sci-fi feel, by putting blue filters over the news footage and cropping it in more 'artistic' ways.

• Camera and Tripod - We used both of these to capture our original footage and create exciting and individual shots.
• DVDs and TVs - To give the sense of the political speech being shown nationwide, we burnt it to a DVD and filmed it being played on several different TVs and screens.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

• Facebook - We created a Facebook group for our team to post links, organise meetings and for general discussion of ideas. We also created a fan group for the film which the public can like and follow for up-to-date news. Later, we used Facebook to create a poll on which of our initial poster designs were best, and shared our intial trailer draft there to get feedback from our target audience.
• YouTube - We found all of our news footage on YouTube, as well as our non-diegetic music. We created our own channel, where we posted our trailer drafts and the background videos for our website. 
• Twitter - We set up a Twitter newsfeed, with the tweets being directly shared to our Facebook group and blog.
• Tumblr - We shared our poster designs and initial trailer draft to Tumblr to create interest and promote our blog. 
• Blogger - We used Blogger to organise and collate all of our research into a managable system, using tags for easy access. 

 

OTHER MEDIA

• YouTube Converters - We used several converters to get news footage and music from YouTube, for our trailer.
• DaFont - We downloaded our poster and blog fonts, Dink and SteelTongs from this site.
• SurveyMonkey - We created several surveys on this site to get audience feedback.
• Photobucket and Flickr - We set up several accounts on both sites to create a photostream to our blog, however, technical difficulties prevented them from working.

Montage Editing

Click here to view our Initial Trailer Montage

This opening News Montage was inspired by the opening of the 'Gattaca' trailer .
Uses:
- a collection of fast edited images and
- overlapping voiceover
- creates a social context for the film's focus debate.

Although we were very proud of this version it was pointed out that the clips felt too documentary similar to programmes/sequences created by Adam Curtis. (Here is an example of his documentary style)

This decision was made in response to audience feedback.

After this we edited our montage:
- increasing the pace,
- overlapping and merging the over-voice more and
- only emphasising key phrases.

We cropped our first image of the BBC presenter to her mouth down to shoulders. The reduced amount of her face that can be seen establishes her as a vehicle to present our themes rather than an important character. Some shots were removed altogether to increase the fluidity of the message and the build of pace.

We looked again at the Gattaca trailer and conventions of our soft-scifi and dystopian genre. A bluy-grey colour scheme is frequently used to mirror the oppression of authority and we used this throughout our montage, deviating only to create dramatic contrast with shots containing fire which we added the 'Heat wave' effect to.

We also experimented with brightness, saturation and contrast to create the right ambiance of a fractured futuristic society.

Not only is the montage now shorter, with faster editing which creates drama, it has a more filmic quality.

Webpage Finalisation

We edited our webpage and added our finalised teaser trailer to the first page. We used HTML to create a pop-up video that can be made full-screen and is linked back to YouTube.

Find the final webpage here. 

Going Viral!

Visit our Facebook group, our Twitter feed, our Trailer or YouTube Account, final poster design or website.

Locations

Social stage theory dictates that if we are setting our film in an opressed city then the "look" of the locations should be urban and to draw parallels with the corruption of the society; it should be "grungy" and dilapidated, hence why we chose the carpark. The grey cement walls, low key lighting and enclosed feel allowed us to explore the "jungle" metaphor of the city.

 

We filmed our shot of the rebel headquarters in an old warehouse used to store farm machinery; the open-plan setup of the barn is juxtaposed with our other locations, reflecting the liberty the rebels are trying to attain. Having the old workbench and machinery around, along with the smashed window and dusty filing cabinets gives the idea that the rebels find safety in the remnants of the 'old world'. We also used differents lights to try and create the yellow light that was in the carpark stairwell, which threw strong, striking shadows and gave an interesting shot when we filmed from high angles.

We wanted to explore how the corruption of the government has invaded every aspect of the lives of the public; this is why we chose to have shots of the speech being shown in the pub and the school hall. The school especially highlights the loss of privacy and the corruption of knowledge, as schools are generally perceived to be safe and secure places.