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

For this project I have used a wide range of media technologies, throughout my research, planning construction and evaluation stages- the presence of technology in every stage was crucial as it played a massive part in the finalisation of the project.

We had to create a new questionnaire on QuestionPro, as one of the first things in the research stage. This was done in order to obtain a wider knowledge of the target audience and gain information  such as the age and gender of the target audience, as well as their expectations of a slasher film e.g. their favourite murderer or the weapon they found most suitable. By doing we were able to achieve and insight into the expectations of the audience.  QuestionPro was a useful website as we were able to achieve a large sample in a short amount of time, through essentially ‘promoting’ our survey by sharing on social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook.   QuestionPro saved us a lot of time by calculating the figures for us, and from this data I turned them intographs and charts using Microsoft Execel.  The date I have obtained was then turned into a Microsoft PowerPoint, which was useful, as I was able to analyse the data and understand it more clearly. Furthermore, as well as obtaining primary research, some secondary research was also necessary regarding cinema and the horror genre. I have done this through looking up websites such as the BBFC website, or newspaper reviews online. The data I gathered was again presented onto a PowerPoint slide.  Microsoft PowerPoint was also useful when I had to put together a presentations about the codes and conventions of slasher films, such as typical characters and the locations. It then included the slides about the roots of the slasher genre from German Expressionism, to Film Noir. By using Google I was able to develop a deeper understanding of these cinematic techniques, as Google offered me a wide range of sources to learn from.

As part of my research I also had to analyse existing media texts such as trailers, magazines and posters. This had to be done in order for me to gain a further understanding of the codes and

conventions of those texts. I viewed that trailer on YouTube, as I could watch them for as many times as I needed, to make sure I have understood and analysed the important aspect of the trailer, codes and conventions wise.  The easiest way to obtain magazines covers and posters was of course Google, which offered me a large variety to choose from. Without the benefit of the internet, this process would have been very difficult, as I would have had to buy copies for the magazines, and tapes for the trailer, and this would have been time consuming. Greater efficiency has been achieved due to the internet, because I had an huge range of choice to use for my research in a relatively short amount of time.

During the planning stages, using our finished story boards we constructed a filmed edit, by scanning out original paper copy in a computer, which we then turned into a video by using Serif.  This helped us form an idea about the pace of our trailer and about how it would build up through the way in which the shots worked or did not work together.  This helped us think of ways to improve our final trailer and it served as a template. To construct templates for my magazine and poster, I used Photoshop, as I thought that working with it would help me develop my skills for when I will have to construct my final pieces of work.

By researching I have managed to find out the specific size of Little White Lies, which then I managed to apply to the magazine. Firstly I had to use the magic wand in order to remove the plain background and replace it with a picture of a dark alley I have found on Google images. As the front covers of Little White Lies tend to look like a cartoon, I had to used the filter gallery to achieve this. I was able to chose from a range of filters for my own picture as well as the picture of the alleyway I have found. Even with the filters, the pictures did not convey the genre or looked scary in the slightest, so therefore I decided to experiment with the colour balance and the hue of the picture until I managed to turn them into a red colour. Based on the fact that my audience seemed to liked the arched typography I used the ‘shell lower’ wrap text to turn the name of the film into a knife reminiscing style. 

When taking the picture I was going to use for the poster I failed to notice the object which flawed the picture as it was cutting it in half, and there was also a comb in the picture. At first I tired to crop the picture enough to get rid of the barrel and comb but then the size of the image did not seem to allow me to include the other elements of the poster such as the title or the cast and crew. But then by using the clone stamp tool I had managed to mask the barrel and the comb, but not enough to make

them not visible, so then by using the smudge tool I masked the whole bottom area of the picture. Because the background was too white, I decided to use the gradient tool to darken different parts of the area. Through using this tool I made the darkened area look like knife cuts, and the setting of this specific tool allowed me to also make some parts of the poster fuzzy, reminiscing of TV screens complying with the narrative.   Then I had to got onto ‘My Fonts’ and find the ‘Orbital’ font and add it to the poster, by through ‘copy paste.’

We chose the website MyFonts, in order to choose a typography suited for our film title. The reason why we chose a website, was because we believed that Publisher did not have any typography which would look professional, in term of the way it fits in with out film. We looked typed in key words such ‘cyber’ ‘horror’ ‘action’ ‘sharp’ ‘blood,’ and we looked through hundreds of them until we found the one we thought it was the most suitable, due to the fact the it had sharp edges which could covey the knife and the murders, and the ‘O’ written in such a way that it looked like a focusing point. After this was done I has to include the cast and crew, and go onto Google images and find specific logos of the productions companies such as Film4. And I also had to add the age restriction. Photoshop also helped with the construction of our company logo and the logo of ‘Slasher inc.’

During the construction of the main task, battery operated lights were used to create an effective shot when the location we were filming in was too dark.  We used to different cameras for filming. One was a Canon 500D, which was used for the filming of the trailer overall (set in sports mode) and the other was a Nikon D3200 for the shots which were filmed by the killers, because we had to emphasize that these are different shots and we had to keep them on separate to avoid mixing them up. This provided us with a decent image quality, in order to make our trailer look as professional as possible. The footage we filmed had to then be downloaded onto a hard drive.  After that we used a non-linear digital video editing, in the form of Serif Movie Plus.  This program allowed us to watch the clips multiple times, and cut them where we thought it was necessary.  Next, we had to put all the clips together to form our trailer, and the software helped us manipulate the shots.  After we used all the footage we filmed, we were able to highlight some mistakes, and noted them down so we could film them,  or introduce some more shots as the trailer conveyed little of a slasher film. After we added some more footage we decided to change the contrast and put some effect of the shot- such as making some shots looked poorly filmed on purpose by adding the words ‘REC’ and ‘NIGHT VISION’ into the shot by using the text tool. This was done in order to make the trailer fit in with our narrative.  We were able to slow down clips, cut them, or speed them up where we though was necessary such as the part where the paces increases. We were also able to manipulate the contrast, by making it lower. For example when Charlie walked past the church the sunlight was too bright and so we had to darken it lightly. However, although a good standard would have been hard to achieve without using digital editing software, we encountered a problem as the editing process was very slow due to the fact that the program continuously buffered, which made our work very time consuming.

After our trailer was finished in terms of putting the edited shots together, we then had to create a soundtrack with the help of a sound engineer.  We school’s sound software to edit the soundtrack. We  had to record non diegetic sounds and the music and diegetic sounds, such as the dialogue which was used as a sound bridge or background noise. We had to record the voice over used at the start of the trailer and at the end. We also had to use this software to merge the voiceover of the teacher with that of th killer. as well as non- diegetic sounds, such as music.  We had to include diegetic sounds which such as hard breathing, doors cracking, video recording noises, sound of children playing at school, sounds of steps and other sounds which we could not obtain just through filming.

Nevertheless, social networks such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter was crucial for during the evaluation stage to gain feedback on the finished trailer. I used those platforms to share the trailer with the audience and gain their feedback.

Finally all my coursework had to the be uploaded and presented on a blog. Overall, this project would have been impossible without the use of technology.