How did you use media technologies in the construction , research and planning and evaluation stages?

RESEARCH

During the research stages of our coursework we decided to use ‘survey monkey’ to gain secondary information. It was important for us to understand what our target audience wanted. We created an online questionnaire which was sent to our audience, this was also posted on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to which we could reach a wider audience. We asked questions like ‘what are your general thoughts on horror films’ and ‘what scares you the most when watching a horror film’, asking open questions likes these allows the audience to go into detail which would later assist us in the planning of our film. Once we received the results from the questionnaire we used Microsoft Office to create pie charts of these results which we could then summarize.

Search engines were also very helpful during the research stages of our coursework, such as Google and YouTube. YouTube was used to look at existing film trailers, horror trailers in particular as horror was our chosen genre. Using YouTube allowed us to gather basic conventions of film trailers, such as the titling. Also the key conventions of horror trailers like the eerie soundtracks, jump cuts to create jump scares and importantly how to create a narrative enigma. Google helped us find images associated with horror to create mood boards. We also found key historical information of the development of horror films which we later made into a timeline.

We also used ‘time glider’ which was used to create a timeline of horror films created from past to present. Time glider had features that allowed us to insert images and annotations about each film in which we could compare film by film. It also helped us understand that certain horror films were made based on the happening of that year. For example during the time of the nuclear bomb horror films were created that involved mutated humans. We wanted to do the same with our future film trailer.

PLANNING

During the planning stages of our coursework we used ‘Prezi’ which helped to creatively put our idea’s together. Using Prezi is a unique way of presenting work which we wanted to present our initial idea’s creatively. We used Prezi as opposed to Microsoft PowerPoint as Prezi is more interactive allows us to embed this into our blogs.

We also used our mobile devices to communicate our ideas between each other while we were not together. We could plan out schedules and arranges times to film scenes from our trailer. We also used our mobile phones to take recce images which would help us with our animated story board.

We also used Magix movie Edit Pro ti create the animated story board in which this would help us visualise what our actual horror trailer would look like. Also helped us get used to the tools that Magix had.

CONSTRUCTION- Film Trailer

For the construction of our film trailer we used the ‘Sony NEX-5 dSLR’ camera so that the film quality was of a high standard, as we were creating horror film we wanted to ensure that the quality of the film was good. It was important that we practised how to angle the camera and how to film specific shots, such as a low angle, high angle, mid shot, wide shot etc. The camera tripod helped us keep the camera still.

Again we used Magix to create the film trailer in which we had to use YouTube to find tutorials on how to use the basic tools and effects as Magix was a new technologies to us. We learnt how to create jump cuts and jump scares by making specific cuts and using specific sound effects. This technology allowed us to produce professional looking work as the effects and lighting could cover up any mistakes made during filming. We also discovered tools that we did not know was at our disposal to which we used several times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpyVJkPKwvY

We also used Aftereffects to creates the titles for our film, which we were also unfamiliar with, again we turned to YouTube tutorials. Aftereffects allows you to produce almost every effect, it allowed us to manipulate basic typography and make it become something completely different.

CONSTRUCTION- Film Poster & Magazine

We used Photoshop for the construction of both our film poster and film magazine as we were also familiar with the programme from AS. Photoshop allowed us to thoroughly manipulate the images we took using the dSLR in which the original images appeared to be very bright. We darkened the image using a vignette and further darkened this by changing the brightness and darkness levels of the actual image. Photoshop made it easy for us to create a realistic film poster which would hopefully catch our target audiences eye.

Again YouTube assisted me in creating the ‘cracks’ for the poster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bnv1dxwjkJ8

EVALUATION

We used several technologies such as ‘Slide Share’ and Prezi to present our evaluation. As our evaluation was mainly coming from audience feedback, we used our mobile devices to record feedback and comments from our target audience to which we could apply these comments to update our work, again we posted our work onto social networking sites to get the wider audience feedback, sites such as Instagram and Twitter would show how many ‘likes’ and ‘favourites’ people have given us.

Having media technology available to us allowed us to create professional and realistic pieces of work to which we could progress into finding a job in media areas. The technology that we used was very similar to what professionals or production companies use which was at our advantage so by this I believe media consumers do become media producers. And also amateur producers like us can produce work at a high level.

Throughout the whole process of our coursework we used blogger to upload all our work and idea’s to present our work our way. It was easy to manage all are posts and pages. As it is a public page we could receive feedback from people who took a look at our blog in which we could easily fix mistakes and create work which was missing