Question 4

how did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluating stages?

planning and research:

In terms of planning and research my group knew what genre we wanted to do straight away (horror) but we wasn’t sure what sub genre of horror we wanted to do e.g. zombie, slasher, super natural, etc. So for our research we looked at many different film trailers on youtube. 

 super natural:

Zombie:

We also used Wikipedia to find out key information or the synopsis of the story, I think this really helped us determine what sub genre we wanted to do because we got to see a wide range of horror films and we then decided what one we wanted to do the most, and in the end we chose to do a super natural horror because this was the sub genre that we wanted to do mos,t because it looked really interesting to make, and we could really use our imagination to decide who and what the killer could be and i think that made us determined to be more creative with our product.

 I was in charge of the editing of our main product (the film trailer)  I decided to pay close attention to how some of these film trailers changed scenes and built up suspense and other key things I would have to know, I noticed that a lot of these film trailers used fast 2 second shots with a creepy soundtrack, this I think is a very effective method to build up tension. I then discovered that the key thing to remember with a teaser trailer is to not give too much away to the viewer. I took all this into consideration and started doing textual analysis of different film trailers. (as you can see on my blog).

Once my group had decided on what sub genre of horror to do, we then made a synopsis of our film and posted it on our blog. We also had to create a power point on our idea for our product, and pitch our idea to the rest of the media class, I think that this was really helpful because we got feedback on our idea straight away. We mainly got back positive comments but some people seemed to think our idea was confusing, so we took that on board and edited our idea to make the plot clearer to the audience. I think this really helped because we got it straight away we knew what we could improve straight away. 

We then started to draw up our story board we decided to draw up the key scenes from our trailer because they are the most important scenes, as you know a teaser trailer has to be short and simple it can’t be to long and it cant give too much away! We the made our camera shot list which I think really helped with filming because we had a plan on what we would have to do at what time; it was like a more detailed version of our story board. We discovered to work efficiently and get the best possible outcome you must be organized, so having our shot list and story board done really helped us.

 

Filming and editing:

When it came to filming we had hardly any problems because we knew what were doing, because we were organized and made the shot list with dialogue so we knew what everyone was supposed to being doing and saying and what type of shots we were going to be using, we didn’t stick completely to the shot lists because we experimented with different shots and found that certain shots for a certain scene looked better a different way to what we had planed, but this want really a problem because we were just seeing how we could improve our footage. One problem that we did have was that we could only have the church that we were filming in for a certain amount of time this then restricted the amount of filming time we could have. For our filming we used a HD camera which was easy to use got good quality footage it also recorded sound so that saved us time editing because then we wouldn't have to put in voice overs. 

When it came to editing we did have a few problems trying to cut down some of the unnecessary footage because at the start our trailer was nearly five minutes long and a teaser trailer is only supposed to be 1 minute 25 seconds long, we wasn’t sure what footage to cut out and what footage not to cut out because we didn’t want to lose a good scene and ruin the whole trailer. This did take quite a while to cut down, because we came across another problem while editing. We had to be really careful if we were deleting a scene not to mess up the audio that goes over the top of the clip. This did prove difficult but we got used to eventually and finally cut down our trailer to 1 minute 20 which is the ideal time for a teaser trailer. After editing and deleting all the unnecessary footage we added a soundtrack over the top of the trailer which worked really effectively at building up tension. We then added in text like “coming soon” in red font to represent blood, we also added crashing noises when the text would appear to make the text seem more intense. Other than at the start of editing our video we didn’t come into anymore problems. We edited our video with final cut pro.

Marketing campaign:

I created the marketing campaign in Photoshop both the film poster and the magazine cover. The only difficulties I came across with Photoshop was that it deleted my first copy of my magazine front cover, so I had to start again from scratch. But with both of these products we had to do a photo shoot of the main character of our film. We used a back light so that the character was emphasised from the black background we had up, also this lighting made her features come up more detailed in the pictures, this emphasised her eyes and her lips which we then edited to make look evil. 

I found the film poster easiest to edit and create in Photoshop because I didn’t have much text to add on other than the title of the film, etc. With the central image of the film poster I edited it to make it look more intense and to make it stand out from the red font and the black background. By getting the image to look like that I played around with the brightness and the saturation of the image. I also smudged round the edges of the photo to make her blend into the background more and to make her look as if she was glowing I didn’t really have any problems when it came to editing the film poster it took the least amount of time. 

Where as when it came too creating and editing the magazine cover for the second time I did struggle a bit because Photoshop kept freezing and not letting me select different layers and then it deleted all my layers so I could not move anything. But before that happend I was able to use the smudging tool to blend the central image with the wood background, this made her look as if she fit in more. I also struggled with this because I didn’t really know what to else to type to be featured in the magazine even though I did look at other magazines like empire for inspiration. But other than that Photoshop really helped be make my marketing campaign look as reaslistic as possible.