Evaluation Question- 4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout my project I used a wide range of different technologies in creating my magazine front cover, the poster and the trailer. This ranged from online questionnaires to Microsoft software, Photoshop, Movie making programmes etc.

The first part of my research required me to create a questionnaire asking a variety of questions about what the participants liked in horror films in general, what interested them the most about horror film as well as how old they are and what their gender is. To gain a wide range of answers, I created the questionnaire on a popular website called Questionpro. It was not only quite easy to make the questionnaire but it was also easy from there to distribute it on Facebook and Twitter where people could click on the link to it and
automatically be directed to my questionnaire. The website then calculated the results so it was easy for me to get them together and create graphs of the results on Microsoft Excel. From the graphs I could then determine what I could add to my film like the choice of weapon or the kind of killer, what my age rating would be, how it would be distributed etc. After creating the graphs I put them all together on another  programme; Publisher. This allowed me to view all the gained information, in graph form on one piece of document. So before even starting the creation of any templates and the film trailer itself, three different media technologies were used.

However, the research part of the project wasn’t over as I also had to analyse existing texts of horror trailers, magazine covers and posters to see what has already been done and to get familiar with the codes and conventions of such product. For this it was only appropriate to use popular websites like YouTube to get familiar with existing film trailers which I could watch time and time again to make sure my analysis of them was thorough and detailed and Google to look for existing posters and magazines which I could

then, again, analyse in terms of their codes and conventions. These websites made the research easy as I was always one click away from finding more pictures of the posters and could watch the trailers I was analysing multiple times without any limits.

These websites also proved successful when researching for my narrative and genre essays as they provided me with helpful and deep information on the theorists that I needed to include in the essays.

For the creation of my templates for the magazine and poster I used Publisher as it was a programme I was already familiar with and it is pretty straight forward to use. Therefore all my templates were created on it and then I transferred them to PowerPoint when presenting the audience feedback I received for them.

As well as using publisher to demonstrate my audience feedback and what I learned from my samples comments, I also used it for presentations such as the one I created for the common codes and conventions of horror film which included slides on the final girl, the benefactor, the first girl to die etc. as well as that I also included slides on German expressionism and Film Noir to look at the historical background of cinema. I gained all of this information from Google as well as from notes taken from our lessons.

 

Microsoft was also an integral software that I used throughout my project. I used them when I was writing my trailers analysis and when I was creating the call sheets which informed the cast and crew of the dates of the shoots, the destinations, the cast phone numbers etc. This was given out to the people involved in making our trailer so they knew when and where to show up for out shoot. We also made a Facebook group to make sure that if the call sheet got lost or misplaced, people could still find out where to go. A lot of people nowadays use social media so this proved much more effective than giving out the call sheets. It also proved important when negotiating the timing of the shoots as there were times where not everyone could make it to shoots due to their private commitments so we could discuss the changes or add more days to our shoots to make sure everyone could be there. It was also a much easier way of communicating with the whole group.

 

For the creation of the images for both the magazine front cover and the poster, I used the software PhotoShop as I could play around with the pictures and change them to make them appropriate for the genre I was trying to convey. For example, I made the eyes on Eve red to emphasise the fact that she is the evil character in the film and in both images I darkened the background, I did this again to emphasise that this is a horror film and that it is ark and eerie. The overall pages were however, put together in Publisher with the edited pictures imported from Photoshop.

 

We shot the whole of our trailer using a camera provided by the media department. Because the camera we used was quite old and used many times, it still let us gain better images than we would have gotten if we used a cheaper home camera. However, the quality of the film was often not very good which came up quite a lot in the feedback we go from our sample when they watched our trailer. It wasn’t something we could invest in though so we just made the best use out of it we could which I think we did in the end.

The main part of our project, which is of course the trailer, was put together and edited in a non-linear digital software Serif Movie Plus. It is a pretty simple to use software that allowed us to import and edit all of our footage from the shoots. It was very easy to use the crop tools to make the footage an appropriate length and we could play around with the shots and move them around to see where they looked best in terms of the form of our trailer. The shot filters were also helpful like fading the shots in and out or making them darker or lighter were appropriate. There was however one disadvantage to our editing.  We did most of the editing on the school computers which are used over and over again everyday so they were often slow to respond to the editing of our footage. This made things difficult when speeding up shots as we could never be quite sure whether we were making them the right speed and length and not making them too fast or slow. There were days however, when the software worked fine and was up to speed with our editing and we could clearly see if we had to make any changes.

Making changes to the trailer was also quite easy as it was just a question of highlighting some shots and moving them around and it didn’t mess with the rest of the shots which were in the right place.

 

One that was done and the editing of our trailer was finished, we worked alongside a sound engineer to create a soundtrack for our trailer. We also used the schools recording studio to create a voiceover and recreate the dialogue for our shots. For the soundtrack, we used a programme called Cubase to create our score. We imported different sound and had a real opportunity to play around with a lot of things until we were happy with the final product and how it all worked together.