Evaluation for ‘Room
112’
Overall I think
our transmedia marketing campaign turned out to be very successful. By using a
variety of different elements we managed to create a believable world that our
characters lived in that the audience were able to access and begin to follow.
The main
strengths of our project I think came from the authenticity that our
investigator’s blog created where the use of designing old style newspapers
that he could analyse for research and the use of videos being sent to him using
established twitter accounts seemed to make a large backstory to the room and
the investigator wanting to find out about it.
The whole
investigator, Tony Crawley and British Paranormal Investigators side to the
project with the social media, blogs and videos were the strong point in making
the company and hotel very realistic however the side that I think lacked the
most was that of making the hotel seem real.
For the hotel
we designed a website and a twitter account for the manager to make the hotel
seem like you were able to book into however they seem quite separate from the
rest of the project in my opinion. While all the B.P.I. organistation media
connects together by either direct links or writing the website is very
separate and can only be found through searching for it on Google or the
website address if someone was given it. The manager’s account receives tweets
from Tony Crawley asking about Room 112 but except for that there is no
acknowledgement of what is going on within the room. Although this is good
because we wanted the manager, Harold Jones, to not be directly talking about
it as it would give the hotel a bad name it does again make the hotel’s realism
come secondary in the making of the project.
The entirety of
the project was exactly what we aimed for in making the hotel and mainly the
room seem real to the audience before we would announce that it was in fact a
film. The only section that I felt didn’t go to plan was the other elements
that we wanted to create to further back up the realism of the Lucy Winch case
was to make a TV news report talking about the case. The report would have been
set in 1985 and would have followed the case as it had just happened making the
murders and deaths in Room 112 seem a lot more realistic.
For the project
we divided up the different elements to make sure that everything we wanted to
create was completed in time. The list went as followed.
All:
·
YouTube
videos
·
Soundscape
Tyrese:
·
Website
for the hotel
·
Hotel
manager’s twitter account
·
Room
112 wiki
Tyler:
·
Film
Poster
·
Teaser
trailer
·
BPI
Facebook
·
Investigator’s
twitter
·
BPI
website
Louise:
·
Modern
day newspaper
·
Old
newspapers
·
Investigator’s
blog
The main focus
of my section was to make the investigator’s blog seem very realistic to the
audience that he was researching into the room. I had to do this by creating
articles that seemed to describe realistic deaths that had happened in the
language that was used for each separate time period, layout, text and the
introduction of pictures. This was finalized by making the paper seem old and
worn which was done by staining them with tea and then baking the paper in the
oven to give it an old, crisp look.
The modern day
newspaper was made to be a rabbit hole into the project. The paper was created
in the image of the Manchester Evening News, the local Manchester newspaper, so
that when we handed it out in Manchester psychologically the audience
recognized the paper and took one. The two articles in the paper talk about the
reopening of the hotel and Tony Crawley and B.P.I. solving a case at
Brannigan’s night club from here links were provided to the social media and
website linked to the B.P.I. that hopefully people would go on and try to find
out more about the cases they were involved in.
We all took
part in the producing of the YouTube videos and the soundscape of the hotel
room.
Soundscaping
the room took place in a seminar where Matt had bought in instruments he had
created that make distorted sounds. From here we made our voices seem ghostly
and distant for the young ghost girl being scared and also just made weird
moaning noises that could just be attributed to regular ghost activity. Finally
we wanted to create the stereotypical knocking that is supposed to occur in
haunted rooms that are regularly talked about in Most Haunted and other ghost
hunter programmes. We did this through Tyrese asking for some communication
where Tyler and I responded through quieter and louder knockings.
The first video we created was of a couple vlogging there time at the hotel
on holiday to show their friends and families after. It follows them entering
the room where the male is showing the camera around the room while the female
goes into the bathroom to get ready for the night. Once inside the bathroom she
can’t find what she is looking for so calls in her boyfriend who places the
camera down on the desk.
Following this, a lamp falling from the bedside table seen by the camera
even though there isn't anyone present in the room. The lamp falling off the
table was created by pulling a string that was attached to it so it seemed to
fall on its own accord. The only problem that occurred was that on first
placing the camera on the table the string was visible to conquer this problem
we added static throughout the vlog to make it seem like the camera was being
effected by the disturbances in the room.
The second video is of an amateur ghost hunter, the one who captured the
soundscape, who leaves a camera rolling on him throughout the night to capture
any ghostly activity. Things occur throughout the night in the form of lights
switching on and off, things being thrown, light anomalies and the duvet being
pulled off him.
We created all these by either turning the lights on and off ourselves,
throwing objects from behind the camera and pulling the duvet off of Tyrese.
The main
learning curve I felt for us was learning how to create a realistic setting and
background to a hotel and company that an audience would believe. The process
to make this happening was quite complex involving multiple social media
accounts and other websites that would build a big enough online portfolio that
any audience would believe.
Another step
that I think we learnt from was the soundscape exercise where we needed to
create sounds that could sound as if they had come straight from a haunted
hotel room rather than something we had created. I think this was partly
successful as some sections of the piece seem quite obscure and paranormal but
at times I think we could have tried harder to make them not seem faked.
However we had never used any of the equipment before making the whole
soundscape a large learning experience with trying to work out how to use the
instruments, make them sound like distorted voices and edit them together
successfully.
Each aspect to
our project had a different influence that led to us creating them in a
specific style.
For our
newspaper that we are handing out in Manchester as our rabbit hole we wanted to
use the same idea that the Why so
serious? campaign did of creating a Gotham Times newspaper that they handed
out around the city of Chicago. We wanted to create the same feeling that this
campaign did on the run up to the film that the audience were very much
involved in all of it that they were in the same reality.
Our YouTube
videos took influence straight from the series Most Haunted where they use handheld cameras and night vision to
show what is happening in haunted locations around the UK. In our case we used
a handheld camera for the couple that were on holiday at the hotel to make it
seem like the footage was just captured accidently while they were there. It
also creates unsteady movement so that without pausing the footage you are
unable to get a full view constantly of how the effects are created. For this
video we also took some ideas from the film The
Blair Witch Project that was all filmed using handheld cameras by the
actors to create a feeling that the whole film really happened. This was the
same feeling we wanted to create to our audience that we would carry on through
the actual film.
The vlog of
Tyrese trying to capture the ghostly goings on in the room we used a green
effect on the camera to create the night vision effect that was commonly used
throughout the Most Haunted series as
they were all filmed in the pitch black except for the lights of the cameras.
We also took some of the paranormal phenomenon that takes place in the episodes
and recreated them such as the throwing of objects and the turning on of
lights.
When Alton
Towers released the teaser advert for their new ride “Thirteen” they created a
suspenseful atmosphere using a blue, grey and black colour scheme, showing
hardly any images and the whisper of the number 13. We wanted to create similar
feeling for our teaser trailer so that anticipation was caused for the audience
wanting to see the full trailer. We made a six second trailer that showed just
images of the hotel door in black and white, static as if the TV was going
wrong and the whispered number “112” which is the room number. We wanted the
trailer to pop up randomly through advert breaks on TV to make people become
interested in what the advert was resulting in them looking it up on the
internet and creating hype this way.
All the other aspects
of the project like the social media and the blogs weren’t directly influenced
by anything specific because our main aim for them was to create formats that
would seem real to all that were viewing them.
