Draft Evaluation Question Three

Evaluation Question 3:

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

Media technologies have been a vital part in the execution of my main task and ancillary products. Many different platforms of media have allowed me to progress my work ability and enhance my production of each task. I understood that by using a myriad of advanced technology would allow me to present my work in detail with accuracy and better presentation.

Before we could start any of our main products we had to make sure we were knowledgeable on the themes and conventions of the horror genre. Research became a very important process for our workload; we needed to make sure that we understood not only about horror but also about different auteurs and theories. DVD players became vital for allowing us to watch and analyze a variety of different horror films, alongside educational DVD’s about the production and development of horror itself. The class projector was also used on numerous occasions so that we could talk and discuss as a class about our thoughts and opinions on key horror films. We were able to view films such a Psycho, and Dawn of the Dead that are both vital for our knowledge that needed to be known in the exam and the coursework and therefor this helped significantly to allow us all to watch the films together and talk about the horror conventions within them.

Microsoft programs allowed us to focus our attention on generic horror conventions. Microsoft Word helped us type up our research and to plan for future events. Microsoft Word became extremely important within the planning stage of our main task, as we needed it to write essays on particular films. An example of this is when I made a spider diagram on Microsoft Word with different tangents of what could occur in individual scenes. Word has also been very important for our evaluation stage, it has enabled me to express my views and ideas about each question, and allowed me to type it up before putting it onto Microsoft PowerPoint.

YouTube has been the key search engine for looking up and analyzing horror films. YouTube is filled with very influential and inspirational trailers that uphold a variety of different techniques. Not only have we used YouTube to look into other trailers, we have also uploaded our various cuts onto YouTube (Rough, Evaluation, Final) so we could see the progress of our editing.

IMBD.com was another vital tool. It allowed me to research with detail about different horror films. This site allowed me to have accuracy that is vital when researching into particular people such as cast members or the backstage crew from particular horror films. IMBD was one of the easiest sites to use and made my information more precise. Again this helped me understand the work of Hitchcock more and also about his film ‘Psycho’.

Throughout all the stages from the planning all the way through to the evaluation stage Blogger has had a massive input onto my work. Blogger is used to represent all of my work, and to upload all of the relevant work that I have produced. Blogger allowed me to organize y work into each section of progress. Blogger also allowed other people to view my work and leave feedback, alongside making the communication between my teacher and myself easier. (He could access my blog at any time to see if I was on the right track.)

Throughout the planning stages I really needed to organize myself so that my work was easy to read and was in a very structured way. I used Microsoft Publisher to structure my shot list and then uploaded it to Blogger so it could always be referred to by The Demented filming group.

Throughout the construction stage of the production of my main task I was very hands on with using digital media such as a hand held digital camera or a video camera both needing SD cards to then transfer information over to the computers. Without these forms of technology then the actual trailer and photos could not have been produced and therefore are an important part of how things were executed. We also had to take the photos in the college’s media studio with three different light sources that could be manipulated to create the correct low-key or back lighting required to create a horror atmosphere. Using these lights I was able to adjust the shine onto a particular part in the scene (either the demented girls face, or a key object) you can see this in my own work (poster) as the doll has a tad more lighting on it compared to other objects in the scene. The construction of my magazine and poster would not have looked so professional without the lighting and camera facilities that were available to us.

For the construction of my ancillary tasks I needed to use Photoshop to edit and manipulate the photos to show how I wanted them to be presented. Photoshop was used heavily throughout as I wanted my work to be edited in a professional way. Photoshop allowed me to do things that other media technologies could not such as darken my images, add writing to symbolize different meanings and to also make the photos exactly how I wanted them to look like. I darkened the images by playing with the brightness and contrast, meaning I was able to manipulate the work to the level in which I believed worked better to create a more conventional horror feel.

DaFont.com provided the next key stage. This website allowed me to find a font under the ‘horror’ section that was different and suited my main product better than the normal fonts on Photoshop. Photoshop allowed me to add multiple layers and therefore I could edit my work many times until I was happy with the final product. Photoshop had a myriad of tools that helped to edit my particular work e.g., different blending options, drop shadows, stroke, glow, gradient effects, contrast, brightness, image adjustments, color balance, vibrancy, filler effects. All of the above factors contribute to the professional depiction of my ancillary products.

Adobe Premiere was used consistently throughout the construction stage of my main product. It allowed me opportunities to import all of my shots and edit them onto the timeline. The use of the cut tool on Adobe Premiere allowed us to determine the length of each shot, alongside cut things out from the clip that we did not feel necessary to be included in. We decided to use this when figuring out where to place particular parts in our trailer. In our first attempt at creating our trailer this tool was used on many occasions. We used it on the part where Frankie was being dragged backwards as the shot was too long and didn’t have the same affect as a shorter clip. Premiere allowed us to have multiple sound tracks, meaning we could emerge multiple tracks together to create a sequence of music that was appropriate for our style. We used music being emerged together throughout our entire trailer to get different sounds mixed together. This was a good way for use to build tension throughout as we could also decide on what particular music was the most dominant part and adjust the levels for speech and different variations of music. We were also able to put footage over other footage that worked perfectly for our horror genre, as we were able to blend the footage and make it creepy and give it a very ghostly unnerving feeling. Premiere also allowed me to add effects onto my existing video. We could make it darker and give it a low-key lighting feeling by playing around with the brightness and contrast (found under “color correction”). This can be seen when the ‘demented girl’ is on the swing because we had to edit the moving image to create a more darkened and mysterious scene.

Overall, Premiere offered us many key aspects that helped with the success of our trailer. The pen tool allowed us to do different transitions, such as dip to black and fades. Audio affects were very important for making our trailer seem more professional. “Denoiser” helped to remove unneeded crackling sounds and adjust the volume of each soundtrack that we have. We used this in our jump scare scene as we had an unneeded crackling noise. Clearly, Adobe Premiere was vital for the development of our main task, it allowed us to use industry standard equipment and arrange our clips to create our official trailer.

When it came to the evaluation stage, Flickr allowed us to annotate our work in a more professional and “new media” way than Microsoft Word. It allows us to hover over particular photos and a caption/summary to appear of what our reasons were for adding this particular horror convention. I used this to evaluate my own work to a higher level, especially when analyzing my main tasks and ancillary products. Flickr was also interesting when researching into other people’s work as it made it easier for us to read the relevant parts. Flickr was helpful at picking out the ‘quality’ rather than the ‘quantity’ aspect of our work. In my own work I was able to see that key words were more important to categorize things than long and complex sentences.

To finally present our media evaluations we had to use Microsoft PowerPoint. PowerPoint allowed us to present our work more visually and helped to separate each task into sections with detailed examples. I used PowerPoint in my evaluation to separate paragraphs and add in photos.