Evaluation 4

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

Since I started this project I have used a variety of different media technologies to display my work in unique and interesting ways to improve the overall quality of the entire project.

Construction

Dafont website and searched font

The construction phase of our project was the most important part as it was when we created all of our media products so we used lots of media technologies to make our products look professional. The first of these was using the website DaFont which allows people to upload their own custom fonts which people can then use. We used Dafont to get the fonts that we used for all of our media products with the main fonts being for our film and magazine name.

Next, we used Photoshop as this allowed us to create all of our media texts including our film trailer as if we would of been unable to make our production logo and film title and without them our trailer would look very unprofessional. However, Photoshop was the most useful when creating our poster and magazine cover as it allowed us to create interesting effects such as the red filter on the poster and the blur on the magazine. In addition, if we didn't have Photoshop we would of have to re-shoot the poster photos as I would have been unable to crop the photo and move the villain in to the centre of the road.

Production

The most important piece of media technology that we used was Final Cut Pro which is the editing software that I used to create our film with. Final Cut allowed me to use a variety of different effects to make my trailer look more professional such as the glitch effect that I use throughout the trailer. Firstly here is a picture of the trailers complete timeline that I made in Final Cut Pro

As you can see there is a lot to discuss so I shall start of with the main techniques I have used throughout production.

The first of these is the glitch that occurs whenever the villain appears on screen. This was created by me using the Bad TV effects tool as what this does is changes the quality of the footage to make it appear like it was coming of an old television. However, I was not done here as I then edited the effect to increase the waviness of the screen and increased the amount of static that would appear this was to make it harder to see the actual footage on hide any of the clips that I had cut together. Next I used the colour sync tool to distort the colours of the footage so that they looked saturated which made it look like the footage had been corrupted. 

I started using this technique back when we first created the prelim for our trailer only then instead of using the bad TV effect I used the noise effect which added loads of static to the screen. I discovered the bad TV effect when trying to change the footage quality for CCTV cameras as I assumed it would just make the footage look older however I was happily mistaken.

An example of what the glitch
effect looks like on the
trailer timeline

Going back to the CCTV cameras another technique that I used was by adding a timer into the footage to show that the CCTV cameras where on as on real life CCTV cameras the time is recorded alongside the footage for security purposes. I decided to then merge these two techniques by making the time change on the CCTV camera when the screen glitched to show that the footage is corrupt. In addition to this I also added subliminal message as when the footage is glitched the CCTV camera timer will display sinister words such as FEAR and HURRY NOW to make the trailer more scary.

The audio technique I've been using

The next technique that I used was a way to increase the audio in parts of the trailer that were to quiet or got drowned out by the music. What I did here was copy the clips audio and then overlay the duplicate on top of the original audio. What this did was amplify the audio to make it even louder and if I still couldn't hear it I would over lay another copy audio on top of that and so on so forth. This was very useful for the editing process as at first I was worried I would of have to export the audio and then edit it using audacity, which is not installed on macs so I would have needed to log off and log on to another computer with audacity installed, edit the clip, put it back onto the mac and important to check if I made it loud enough so to be able to do this process entirely in Final Cut Pro saved so much valuable time.

The blue filter

Next I'll be talking about some of the setbacks that I faced during the editing but first I would like to mention one of the setbacks that I used to my advantage to make a scene more unique. So my group and I were on the last week of film and we intended on filming all of the clips we still needed. So we get back after filming and I'm looking through all of the clips and its here that I noticed that several clips had this strong blue filter applied over them. We had no idea how this happened and were fortunate that it was only a few scenes that got affected and we were running out of time and didn't want to rush back out to finish filming so i put the clips into final cut and its here I realised that i could use them to make it look like we filmed early in the morning as the blue filter made the sky look darker as if the sun hadn't come up completely.

Onto the set backs in the trailer. Going back to the glitch effect there was another reason that I used it so much aside from the villain being on screen and that was to hide errors that appear throughout the trailer. The first major one of these is the scene where the villain pulls the guard to the ground and the camera cuts to a close-up shot of the guard being dragged away. Originally the glitch effect was a lot shorter and would keep flashing back to the normal showing the guard getting dragged to the ground. However, when I reviewed the footage I noticed that there was a student walking home in the background which breaks all of the immersion in the film. At first i tried to keep the flashing back and forth glitch effect but the student could still be seen easily so I decided to hide the entire scene using the glitch effect throughout it to make the tension strong and hide the student completely.

The bag that appears in the chase
scene

The next time this happened in the film was during the P.O.V chase scene as if you look closely between each of the glitch effects you may notice a black bag on the floor. This is the camera bag and like with the student I only noticed this when we got back from filming and what was a bigger problem was that the location we shot this in was located further away than the other locations we used so going back there would prove to be difficult especially considering how little time we left to film. So to hide this whenever the bag appeared on screen I used the glitch effect but to make it more interesting every time the bag was on screen I made the glitch effect even more intense as this was a chase scene so it made it look more intense.

The next setback I discover was that in the scene were the character is on the phone 2:28 - 2:42 the characters voice becomes difficult to hear especially when he says' I don't need them here in 10 minutes I need them here now' as it gets quieter while there is a lot of background sound that couldn't be removed during the editing process. The best I could do when editing this clip was to use the audio technique I mentioned earlier to make the parts where he is talking louder but I would have liked to redone this scene if we had time.

Our production companies logo

These were the main setbacks that I got during the editing the film so I'll finish this post off with some things that I needed to create to finish off the editing. The first thing was I had to create our film companies production logo and add into our film trailer to help us create brand identity for our film. We decided on the name Netherverse productions due to how ominous it sounds. The production logo was created entirely in Photoshop and was later inserted into the trailer.



The other two things that I needed to create are the is the films title and the coming soon text that appears at the end of the trailer. Luckily these were both already done in Photoshop so I place them both over a black background. I then used the glitch effect to make the cut in between them look more professional. I then added social media links to the coming soon text so that audiences who see the trailer will want to follow the films production and be more invested in it.

Research

The red filter I tried to replicate

This is the phase where using technology started to become very important as there was lots of information that needed to be presented. The first types of media technology that I started of using was images to help emphasis important points in my research by giving a visual image of what I'm talking about. For example, going back to my institutional research whenever I mentioned a film or scene I would try to include images to go along with them such as me showing a picture of the nightmare factory when I talk about nightmare on elm street as while I can tell you how a red filter makes a scene more effective its much better if I show you an image alongside my research so that it is much easier to understand. 

The ring GIF that I originally used

I later improved my use of adding photos into my research by also using GIF's as it allowed me to show brief scenes from films which allowed me to further analyse them to make the whole analysis much more detailed. I started to use this technique in my genre research post as I wanted to talk about several shots that I saw in the trailer I was analysing and I didn't want to have dozens of pictures showing really brief shots of the The Ring trailer so I ended up creating GIF's from the trailer which allowed me to explain everything that was happening in the GIF while whoever is viewing my blog could look at the GIF so that they understand what I'm talking about.

The next type of media technology that I used developed from inserting GIF's to embedding videos into my blog. I did this as it allowed me to analyse full clips of films and their trailers in detail while the viewers can watch the video that I'm talking about on my blog which will be convenient for them. I started doing this in my genre research as I inserted the trailer for The Ring so that I could take screen shots of it and talk about them in my blog post. I later started adding time stops in my blog posts so that I can talk about specific sections of the videos that I'm talking about. I started to do this in my use of sounds within horror films as I used them to talk about specific sections of the music that I had been analysing.

A Prezi

One of the more professional forms of media technology that I used was Prezi presentations to display my research in an interactive, entertaining way. Prezi's allow me to write lots of information in an creative way. Prezi also allows me to insert photos and videos that appear alongside the information as it will be more informative for the viewers. I first started using Prezi when I created my to convention of the genres posts as I wanted to lay out the information in a unique way. When I created the conventions of the action horror genre post I made a Prezi using the island design to make it more conventional to the action genre as many action films are set on island as they are more adventurous and exciting so the viewer will be thrilled more. In addition, the island could be seen as conventional to the horror genre as an island could also connote to themes of isolation and abandonment which will make the viewer feel scared.

Planning

During the planning phase I used many of the same types of media technology that I already used as I I felt comfortable using them as I knew how to insert them into my blog posts in a way that makes my blog look more professional. During the planning phrase I started to use more photos than GIF's and videos as at this point I was no longer analysing film trailers as I had finished all of my research so I started talking screen shots of my work so that I could talk about them and how I was going to develop it to improve the quality of y work.

At first I started taking photos of storyboards and drafts for our trailer and poster as it allowed me to explain the development process in more detail. The use of photos were the most useful when I was creating the location recce as I needed to get as many photos as possible of all the potential filming locations so that my group could decide what location would be the best location to shoot our film trailer at. I used this to my advantage as I am also photography student so I could easily take dozens of photos from interesting angles that I had learned in media to make sure the photos that I inserted into my blog were very high quality and looked professionally made. 

Prezi's were also very important for the planning phase of my work as I used them to display the feedback of the questionnaire results that I had received as if I had displayed the results as a gigantic wall of text it would be very dull and boring to read through the entire things so I could use a prezi to display the questionnaire results in unique ways which I did by creating pie charts which showed off all of the results that I got and then analysing the results that I got.

Evaluation

When I started the evaluation process for the film trailer I needed to make sure that I used as many different forms of media technologies as possible so that I had a good variety of them in my evaluation questions. For the first question I used a Prezi as the as the question was about how I challenged/developed the conventions for my chosen genre so I decided to use a Prezi as I could lay it out so that I could talk about one section for my trailer (costume, mise-en-scene, etc.) and then move onto the next section until I had talked about all of them in good detail.

Powtoon presentation

For the second evaluation question I used a a Powtoon video to display information on how my ancillary texts and media product were effective when I combined them. I used Powtoon as it allowed me to create an entire presentation as the form of an animated video and it came with many features which allowed me to change how the information was displayed by allowing me to change the font, size, colour and style and include effects for how they appear on the screen. Powtoon also allows music to be added into the presentation which will make it more entertaining to watch instead of having nothing but text being shown.

A Slide share presentation

The final type of media technology that I used in my evaluation is a slide share presentation which allows me to create presentation similar to the ones in Microsoft PowerPoint however slide share allows you to embed these presentations into blogs so I wanted to use this to give myself a new way of displaying information. I used slide share the same way I would use PowerPoint so I had a paragraph of text discussing my media product while showing images of the product next to it so that people viewing my blog have a visual idea of what I'm talking about.