For example I’ve looked at the teaser trailers of “Bourne Identity”, “Taken” and “The Dark Knight”. Both “Bourne Identity” and “Taken” are very similar thriller movies with almost identical fast-paced themes, whereas “The Dark Knight” is a little bit darker, more futuristic thriller. 

• The names of the main actors positioned at the top of the website. In my opinion this acts as one of the main elements which grab attention of the visitors, because once the person visits the website and if he or she sees the name of the actor that she/he likes – the visitors will more likely stay on the website and watch the trailer, which will possibly make him interested to buy the ticket and see the whole movie.
• The actual teaser trailer is positioned right in the middle or on the right side of the website. This is the main element of these promotional websites and in my opinion companies who create these websites at the end of the day want the visitor to see the trailer and become interested to see the whole movie. This is why so much valuable space is given to the teaser trailer.
• Either at the bottom or top of the website there are no more than five to ten links which lead to various articles, pictures and other information about the movie. I’ve noticed that a lot of the promotional websites that were created to promote films that were created to promote big movie releases tend to have very little links on them, because I think this is done because the creators of these websites that there more links there will be – the more attention they’ll distract.
• Also very often there’s an image on the background which is related to the theme of the movie. Sometimes there are no images, sometimes the image is of the main character, sometimes the image is completely unrelated to the events that will happen in the film.

These are the main conventions that can be found in promotional websites of popular movies, so when I was working on my own websites I’ve tried to use all of these main elements to make my media products easy to read and understand for my target audience. 

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

In my opinion the combination of my main product and the acillary texts is very effective, because all of them are congruent with each other and there person who obsverves these products can see a clear main theme of these products that is carried out throuh all of them.

My main goal was to create something that professional media production companies do and I think that I’ve achieved this goal successfully. I’ve been following the traditional codes and conventions throughout the whole production process and none of these three media products that I’ve created challenge the traditional codes and conventions.

Here’s a rough version of how the final design of the poster will look like.

As you can see I didn’t want to challenge the traditional codes and conventions, but instead I’ve decided to use them so I could make my poster and my movie more appealing to my target audience.

I’ve decided to make my main character as the main focus of the trailer. My research has shown that a lot of production companies use this same technique and after some testing I’ve realized that the final result doesn’t look bad at all.

As you can see the main colours of the poster are red and white. I’ve decided to use these colours, because there’s a good contrast between them and dark red background makes the white text stand out more, which at the end of the day cathes the eyes attention.

Red colour indicates violence and blood in the movie, whereas the white colour is used simply to catch audiences attention.

As you can see I’ve used very large font for the title of the movie, because the two main elements of this poster are the main character and the title. I wanted to put as much focus as I could on these elements and this is why I’ve chosen to use this colour combination and these large fonts.

On the top left corner there’s some typography. The words used in that corner are related to the main theme of the movie. They say: deception, mislead, distortion and etc.

I’ve made them hard to to read on purpose, because I wanted to slightly brake the pattern of what do you usually see in a movie poster and in a way I wanted to catch my audiences attention with this element.

What would you do if your life fell appart? is another really important piece of information. It allows the audience to see into the future and expect what could potentially in the movie. Because there’s a lonely male character standing in an empty corridor, the audience can expect that his life will fall apart and to see the reason why this had happened – they’ll need to see the movie.

One of the best ways to visualize on how your ideas could look on the screen is to grab a piece of paper and a pen, and draw up a storyboard.

Storyboards are graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence, including website interactivity.

Above you can see my old storyboard which I’ve found not so long ago.

There’s a slight possibility that some shots will go in a different order in the final piece, yet roughly this is the order of shots that I will use in my final production.

Today I’ve made an edit decision list (EDL), which will allow someone to understand what my trailer will look like without even watching it.

The first thirty seconds of my trailer will introduce the story and there won’t be a lot of different shots. The soundtrack will be getting more intensive and at the culmination I will start to show the different scenes from the movie in the same order as in edit decision list.

I am adding some final touches to my trailer and now I need to think about how my promotional website and the poster will look like.

Over the past few days I’ve did some research and I’ve realized that most of the movie promotional websites follow the same generic codes and conventions.

It looks like the main goal of these websites is to promote the main trailer of the movie. Almost every movie website that I’ve looked at had its main trailer on it’s homepage. In my opinion the people who create these websites know that it’s not the website that makes the person see the movie, but the actual trailer.

So even though I was analysing websites I’ve realized how important it is for the production company to make a trailer that will catch audiences attention and make them want to see the movie.

Below you can see how the promotional website looks like for the movie called “The Men Who Stare at Goats”

Even though the genre this new movie is not related to my movie it think that the website below represents the generic codes and conventions of promotional websites very well.

There’s not a lot of content and when a new person visits the website the first thing he or she sees is the trailer and the names of the popular and well known actors.

In my opinion this promotional website puts so much attention on the trailer and the names of the actors, because this what makes people want to see the movie.

There are some links at the top right, but in reality these links don’t mean a lot and while analysing some of the movie websites I’ve realized that I’ll need to focus on the trailer and the names of the actors to make my wesbite appealing to my target audience.

In order to fully complete this production I will aso need to create a movie poster and a website. Today, during our media lesson I’ve started to do some research and analyse popular movie teaser posters.

My research has shown that majority of the movie posters haven’t got all of objects in them. Mainly they have an iconic image of someone that the audience can easily recognize and if the movie is completely new to the audience then the teaser posters most of the time have something that catches audiences attention – a catchy phrase or a mysterious image.

On the 2nd of October I’ve decided to do some tests with Sony Video Vegas video editing software. The last time when I have used this software was more than 3 years ago, so I thought that before I’ll start to edit my actual raw video footage that I’ve taken on Thursday I should remind myself on how to use this software.

My main goal during this simple test was to figure out which video codec I should use when I’ll render my movie to get the best quality possible.

I’ve worked with WMV9 (Windows Media Video 9) codec before and I pretty much knew the codec settings on how to get average video quality, yet I have never tried to render and HD movie.

After a couple of test I’ve figured out how to render the HD movie and I think that I’ll use these video setting when I’ll be rendering the actual teaser trailer.

Today I was looking for more movies which have a similar theme to my plot and I’ve remember that the whole “Bourne” series is very similar to everything to what I want to do.

Above you can see the teaser trailer of the final movie and in my opinion it is a very conventional trailer.

The story is introduced very well. The first shot shows the audience a lonely man who stands on an empty dark street during a cold winter night. We don’t know who he is yet, but after a couple of seconds this shot fades to black and we see a caption saying “His identity was stolen”. People who have seen the previous movie can straight away tell that the man who was standing on the street was Jason Bourne.

In the second shot we see a man floating in a river or sea. This shot is from the first movie and it reminds the audience of what had happened in the past. So far the pace of this teaser trailer is quite slow.

After this shot we see another caption saying “His loved ones were murdered” and after this we go back to the second part of this movie and the audience is reminded of how his girlfriend was killed.

Finally we see a caption saying “His past was destroyed” and after this we see a super quick overview of the major action scenes that had happened in the first and the second movies.

For people who have seen the previous movies the first 0:33 seconds of this trailer were used to remind them of what had happened in the previous movie, whereas people who are new to this series have been introduced to the whole story.

In my opinion this trailer contains a lot of action scenes, because the creators wanted the audience to see that this movie will fit in perfectly with the previous Bourne movies.

Another interesting thing that I’ve noticed is that there weren’t any narrators. We’ve only heard the main characters speaking and the sound was digetic. It is interesting, because the previous trailer that I’ve analysed, Taken, had very similar sound. We’ve only heard Liam Neeson speaking and no narrator like in some other movie trailer.

During today’s Media lesson the students who have decided to do the teaser trailer for their coursework have been told that the length of the trailer should not exceed 1 minute.

Straight away I’ve decided that I’ll need to change my storyboard and increase the pace of it.

In the beginning I thought that my trailer should somewhere between 2 and 3 minutes long, but now the teaser trailer will have to be up to 1 minute long.

This means that during those sixty seconds I’ll have to introduce the bits of the story to my target audience and make it interesting and appealing to them.

Because my movie will be fast paced similar to “Bourne” series or “Taken” – I’ve decided that I’ll use very dramatic, fast paced and catchy soundtrack that will capture my audiences attention.

I did some research and I’ve found that the movie producers listed below produce music for popular movies:

Immediate Music
X-Ray Dog
Two Steps From Hell
E.S. Posthomus

Over the next few days I will be listening to their music and I’ll try to find the track that will fit into my movie theme perfectly.