Evaluation 2- How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Within media technology is essential; it is used in all corners of the industry through the entire media production process, from production companies to audiences. We used technology throughout the process of making a trailer, from construction to planning and research but also through these evaluation stages. I plan to evaluate these technologies and their contribution to our final production.

To conduct our planning and research we had to use several different technologies. The first being blogger, an online platform to express my ideas for the production, a way of communicating plans for it and a way of evaluating throughout. Blogger is convenient as everything is stored online therefore we are less at risk of loosing valuable coursework and planning than we would if we had to keep it in a folder. Blogger is also accessible on any device which means you are able to constantly update your blog. However this means we are solely reliable on the internet and if we are unable to access it, we can't update our blog.

Using PowerPoint I analysed the film trailer ‘Black Swan’ in order to gain an insight into trailer conventions and how to effectively use them. I find PowerPoint makes my blog visually more interesting for readers. I believe with PowerPoint you are able to make more clear and concise points without having huge pieces of information to read through. You are also able to visually communicate your ideas and embed photos; a way of thoroughly conveying your ideas to readers through all types of mediums.

Taken from my trailer analysis PowerPoint

When making my PowerPoint I had to conduct research through several related websites. The first being YouTube in which I found my initial trailer to analyse. YouTube has several features that aided my choice of trailer; the first being the like and dislike button which ultimately gives you an indication of how the public see a piece of media.  I could see from this feature alone that Black Swan was hugely successful and therefore a worthy piece to analyse as we could then take inspiration from the dark themes embedded and apply them to our trailer.

Black Swan YouTube summary

Other technologies we used pre-production included websites such as Facebook and twitter which play a huge role in the advertisement of new films, I wanted to see how this was done and how social media platforms essentially advertise and promote a film to the networking world. Production companies flock to these outlets as a means of advertising but often you find, particularly with films, fans freely promote the products themselves. Things such as hash tags and official production accounts allow fans to engage themselves in the advertising process and become engrossed in the buzz of it all by following these accounts and relaying the information the production companies provide which subsequently promotes the film to their followers and so on. The Hunger Games is an example of a film made successful through these networking platforms. Bearing this in mind we decided that considering our target audience (15-25) are prime users of twitter, we should take to twitter as means of advertising. We made a page for our film and using the hash-tag #somniumfilm gained an insight into people’s opinions of the trailer. I believe this was the perfect platform to advertise on as our target audience particularly engage in twitter frequently and therefore are more likely to see the film as we are trying to access audiences that perhaps don’t go to the cinema often. 

Word was used throughout the production stage for a number of things including permission letters and questionnaires. I find word particularly easy to use as it is familiar and using word can help with the professionalism of our production. For example handing out letters that we have hand written lack formalism, whereas using word allows for structure and those we are seeking permission from know that our company is legitimate and therefore will engage in the production. 

This year instead of using word for the script we used ‘Celtx’ which unlike word provided us with a proper structure and allowed us to produce a professional looking script with an automatic format, it also provides us with the script font that professional production companies would use it is a professional version on industry standard script writing software such as final draft. We used Scribd which allows us to upload and embed word documents to our blogs in order to keep the format, again allowing for a more varied and professional appearance. Similarly sliedshare is used to do the same but with PowerPoint presentations 

We used excel to produce our call sheets again it is a more professional and creates a layout using the grid system which is more understandable for cast and crew which then enables us to be more efficient when filming, as it contains information as to where everyone should be and at what time. 

IMDB (an online database especially related to films) played a huge role in our research. It allowed us to sieve through the successful and unsuccessful films and draw inspiration from them as to what genre we should go for. We could see, through IMDB, that horror was a widely popular genre with a lot of its films generating high ratings for audiences. We also looked to IMDB to see if our target audiences were alike to those that favoured horror genre this information we found proved they were and thus allowed us to market our film in similar ways in order to generate a similar interest.

For our titles we were largely reliant on dafont.com, as I personally found they had a huge range of fonts suitable for all genres from sci-fi to horror. We used horror in particular for our fonts and the fonts we decided on looked rather scratchy and distressed which is just as I hoped.

For editing and construction we relied mainly on Pinnacle Studios 10. Which allowed us to edit our film in a way that made it more appealing for viewers such as fast paced editing and special effects such as slow motion. However the editing process had us facing various problems particularly when changing the speed of shots. Ideally we would have used Avid software however I was thoroughly pleased with the standard of editing and although pinnacle bared issues they were easily overcome. Pinnacle had many transitions that added to the overall appeal of the trailer such as fade to blacks which had a mysterious and menacing feel which was extremely suitable for our trailer. 

Using the software Audacity we were able to alter Evelyn’s voice when she screamed 'get the girl' which originally sounded rather high pitched and girly which is simply not appropriate to our genre. As we had this line as a focal point to the trailer it needed to sound menacing and threatening. Experimenting with different pitches and tones we were able to lower Evelyn’s tone to achieve the perfect voice in order to shock audiences and also to tie in with horror conventions.

When filming we used a Panasonic full HD SD camera, the shots were filmed mainly hand held which allowed freedom of movement for example the end shot when Rosie runs down the alleyway we thought that a handheld shot would be suitable here as we wanted the shot to appear panicked and distressed much like Rosie. This was extremely easy to achieve and the camera was small, compact and light, so we could be rather creative when it came to the handheld shots. However the majority of filming was done using a tripod which allowed for more steady and professional shots. Some useful adjustable features of the tripod were that the camera was able to spin around on the tripod; this allowed us to film panning shots. Also, the tripod could be adjusted to allow the camera to tilt.

Post-production we used Adobe Photoshop to create a poster and magazine cover. I thoroughly enjoyed using this software as it allowed me to be creative with tones and fonts etc. I enjoyed altering the colours and blurring images in order to fit in with the horror genre, for example altering the font and background to give a more menacing and gory feel overall and also linked in with our main production to create a sense of continuity. 

Vimeo has been of great use to us throughout our production. Vimeo is extremely convenient as it is so easily accessible at both school thus making it an appealing option as it allows us to be more time efficient. In terms of uploading our production I preferred to use Vimeo as I find it has a cleaner aesthetic than YouTube, as there is less information surrounding the video thus allowing the readers primary focus to be on the video rather than what’s surrounding it.


However I have had some issues with vimeo for example there is a weekly limit as to how much you are able to upload this meant that for some of my videos I had to use fellow group members vimeos account to upload certain clips, like my final edit. Unlike YouTube where you can upload as many videos you like.