Evaluation Question 4

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

Throughout the production of my media texts I’ve used technology to create and demonstrate them. Technology is the most important thing in my project, without it, it would be almost impossible to finish my media texts, gain audience feedback and research. Me and my group we used our own camera to film, as we were more familiar in how to work it, we used a Nikon D5000 Digital SLR camera to film the trailer, it had a 720p high definition video option, it made the trailer look more professional and impressive. The camera’s lenses allowed us to film extreme long shots, wide establishing shots and zoom shots like extreme close up shots. We also used a camera holder, to keep the camera steady when filming; it was a success because it allowed us to film looking down at the screen rather than looking straight into the camera. We used a tripod to hold the camera still and to create panning shots.

Before I started to produce my media texts, I had to research trailers and their codes and conventions and get an idea of what they look like, what they use to create them and how they come about in presenting it. I used ‘Google’ and ‘Youtube’ to research movie trailers and analyse them. ‘Youtube’ was very helpful as it gave me the advantage to search any movie trailer and to search low budget trailers and link them more to ours. We used the trailer of ‘The Blair Witch Project’ to link to our trailer. The comments people leave underneath every video on ‘Youtube’ kind of helped me, as they were talking about the codes and conventions the trailer was using. 

I watched many horror trailers and I picked up many codes and conventions and get an idea of what my trailer would look like. The trailers tend to start slow, to build up the tension and half way through the music starts to get louder and quicker, the transition between every scene starts getting faster, makes the audience to get more into it and more eye catching. When we finished filming our trailer we uploaded it on ‘Youtube’ to get some audience feedback and for people to see what we’ve done and what we have achieved. 

When we started editing our trailer we used this programme called Adobe Premier Pro. This software is a professional editing programme, it allowed us to do many things, the programme was very helpful and it wasn’t that complicated to use. The programme contained free music, like dark and horror sounds. This was very helpful as we used some sounds for the background music and background noise. 

To display the final trailer to the class we used an interactive whiteboard to show it on a big on a big screen. The high definition really stood out and the music was quite loud, making it more interesting to watch. We used the whiteboard to show our presentation to the class as well, so everyone could see what we wanted to achieve by the end of the project.

 To create my poster and magazine cover, we had to research some examples first on the internet, I used ‘Google’ to research images of film posters and magazine covers, I researched their codes and conventions as well, to know more about them and have an idea of how my media texts will look like.

The programme I used to create my film poster and magazine cover was ‘CorelDraw X3’, its really easy to use and you get a lot of options of how you want your writing to look, and you can put them anywhere you want.

I used Photoshop to edit the pictures I used for my film poster and magazine cover, I wanted to picture to look darker and more horror looking, I did this by adding some contrast and changing the levels of shadows and reducing the amount brightness present in the picture.

I used this free web programme called ‘Blogger’ to show and illustrate all my work I’ve done throughout the year, it’s really easy to use and you can choose what background you want, what font you want, anything. You can separate your work by labelling them; this is a useful way to find what piece of work you want to see from my blog.