Evaluation Question 4

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

Media technologies have played a huge role within our A2 coursework and has been constant throughout all four stages and has been needed for us to progress and ultimately produce our three products. Technologies such as Photoshop, cameras, voice recorders, internet, Finalcut Pro and so on

Nadine

Within planning and research their were numerous of ways in which media technologies were used to ensure our project was carefully thought out and used a wide range of media platforms.

The blogging site blogger.com was a huge part of our research and planning. This media technology allowed us to display the planning and research we had done electronically to make it easier for members of our group, teachers and the examiners to see what progress has been made and keeping all pieces of work together. Blogger also enabled the support of other forms of media technologies such as youtube and being able to insert website links which helped displaying our planning and research to be visual with the use of different technologies.

For our audience research we used the smartphone Blackberry to have general chat with our target audience to get their opinions on what they would prefer to see in a horror teaser trailer as ultimately our aim is to please them and give the audience what they want as they are the ones who will be consuming the product. Through the use of Blackberry we were able to use BBM (Blackberry Messenger) which helped us to get instant responses which enabled us to ask as many questions as we liked as response was quick because of the instant messaging device.
Blackberry Messenger also enabled us to communicate with one another as we only had group meetings 2 times a week. The use of BBM helped us to express any ideas or concerns we had when we were outside of class and very useful to remind each other of what work needed to be done and when deadlines were. This technology was especially useful in the planning of our filming. As we filmed off site it was essential we used BBM to inform where we would be filming, meeting and times and what was essential for each person to bring on filming day. For example  I was in charge of bringing make-up costume and filming equipment whilst Ashley was in charge of bringing camera and fake hair as one of our props.

The use of social networking sites such as facebook and twitter were other ways in which we gained audience feedback. This pull technology enabled us to create "chats" with people, one of facebooks functions, to also receive quick responses on peoples views on what they would prefer for a horror teaser trailer. The facebook chat responses have a more relaxed approach and appeal so people feel more comfortable giving opinions as its in the context of a general conversation.

Through the use of the Internet, the widest form of media technology we used, further audience research was gathered through the use of survey monkey.

Follow this link showing how research was done using this site http://laneteasertrailer.blogspot.com/2011/11/further-audience-research.html

Surveymonkey allowed us to gather feedback quickly as the site was able to produce graphs and analyse our feedback for us saving lots of time. The use of this site shows our development as a group from AS as we now know how to gather qualitative data through the use of technologies. Surveymonkey was a site that worked well with other social networking sites like facebook. It allowed us to create a link on our facebook's to this questionnaire to try to gain mass responses.

The Internet was one of the biggest uses for our research it equipped us to access a wide range of tools. With the use of google a popular search engine we were able to examine closely other horror products such as horror posters and magazines. Looking at other peoples products through the Internet helped us to learn the conventions of posters and magazines and also gather ideas to use in planning our own products.

For example when creating the film magazine I saw these two empire magazines.

 

it helped me to decide to use either a medium close up or a close-up for my image on our own magazine instead of the usual long shots I was seeing. However it was important for us to not just copy from any Internet sources we research as this would be copy right infringement and the Internet was solely a form to help us inspire our creativity as well as using certain conventional element.

Ashley further gathered research through web 2 in using various websites and wikepeidia to do research on obsessions and dreams, two elements our trailer is focused around. This research was vital as some people misinterpret what an obsession is as their are various types. The research gathered enabled us to portray obsessions in the right way. I personally feel we could have used the Internet more to our advantage to do more specific research into the slasher horror genre as this could have perhaps furthered our ideas into what to put into our storyboard and to create a trailer to be distinctively categorised as a slasher.

The Internet also provided the use of well known site youtube, below is an audio description on my personal views in how youtube helped us and what great use this media technology had.

Our everyday use of TV was a technology that also helped with research for our coursework. TV allowed me to watch the show crimewatch which showed the Danilo Restivo case. Follow the link to the research I found http://laneteasertrailer.blogspot.com/2011/10/research-into-danilio-restivo.html
Watching crimewatch helped me come up with the idea of hair being the obsession our killer would have as it is close to a real life story and give our audience more of scary chill.

Even within the creation of our storyboard media technologies were used. As a group none of us felt we were confident in sketching shots for our storyboard. So instead we took still photographs of what shots we would be using and placed these in our storyboard instead. Taking pictures for our storyboard was very beneficial as it caused oir storyboard to be very clear in what our shots would look like. The samsung camera we used also caused our pictures to have that sketched look effect which we thought was cool.

As a group we thought it was a good idea to plan a test teaser trailer so that we would know how easy or hard it would be when creating the real deal. Here is a link to our practice teaser trailer.

http://laneteasertrailer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/practise-teaser-trailer.html
As you can see the quality of  practice trailer was not good at all but it helped us to realise how much hard work, effort and research was going to be needed to produce a well thought out teaser trailer. It showed us how research into final cut pro was needed and also lighting. We posted this video on our groups youtube page so that viewers can perhaps see our transition from this trailer to our official teaser trailer.

Elis

Technology has helped us a lot in making our teaser trailer, whilst producing and filming. We had to start of by practicing some shots because we couldn’t be too sure if the quality would be great on certain shots. We found out that when we practiced on how to take certain shots we could manipulate some shots by using different angles. We decided to film some test shots just to see if it would look good and kept looking back at them to see how we could actually improve our teaser trailer shots. Test shots are very good when filming anything because they give you an example of what the final outcome will look like. The improvement in technology allowed us to do this because we could view our shots on the camera as soon as we filmed the shot making the filming process more efficient. We also faced difficulties whilsy taking test shots b ecause we were gettin used to a lot of the equipment. Tasks such as focusing the camera and using the lighting were difficult at times and setting up the equipment took quite a while however we managed to achieve our tasks in the end. We did notice that as we took our time and started to try lots of different shots we started to get pressed for time which made us think quickly because we had to decide what type of shots we would be outside the box and try it as soon as possible.

 Here is a link to our practice shots: http://maskedproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/practice-shot-3.html

Before we started filming we had to familiarise ourselves with the equipment so that we would be able to get on with filming quickly. As well as that getting used to the equipment meant we could manipulate the equipment such as the tripod to help as make a better quality trailer. The hardest things to set up were some of the modes on the camera such as the lighting on the camera because there were certain settings we had to put it on to get the best quality out.

 If anything held us back it would have probably been the lack of locations, we didn’t need sophisticated locations however there wasn’t too much options. This didn’t hinder the quality of the teaser trailer because we still found the locations needed. We made sure our locations fitted our story line perfectly and due to technology we can use final cut to edit some features such as lighting.

As a group we learned how to use different functions on the cameras, one of the most important things we learned was how to set the white balance on the video camera because as we found out this instantly improves the quality of the video and makes things easier to see. We already knew how to focus a camera and it was just about adjusting to different video cameras. Before we started filming another important technique we learned was the rule of thirds this made it a bit difficult at times because it always had to be at the back of your mind before shooting.

Technology we take for granted such as mobile phones and the internet were very useful especially blackberry messenger where it made it easy for the group to communicate, it helped as organise meeting times and the allocation of work. It made changing plans easy but also to update each other on where we reached in our work. If we had to use another source to communicate from it would either just be texting or using facebook and whatsapp. Facebook was very important because it also allowed us to see what we would need to consider before we made our actual teaser trailer.

As you can see blackberry messenger is being shown which was an important source of communication. The speed of communication helped us make changes to our work. this helped us meet up as usually we woul dhave about 2 meetings or more a week but even on bbm(black berry messenger) we could have a private meeting and discuss a lot of issues we were going through. More than anything technology on phones can help just from the simple things such as alarms to reminders that were useful.

Facebook helped us get our ideas out there for people to give us feedback on some conventions. Doing work in college meant we couldn't go on sites such as facebook and twitter which made it difficult because we couldn't plan together some of the stuff we would like people to see or things we wanted to ask them. This meant we had to tell each other what we wanted to do in college and do it at home individually we still overcame this and managed to gather relevant information we needed before the filming date.

Lekan Akanni

Movie poster & Movie magazine front cover (print production/advertising)

The image manipulation software our group used when designing the magazine and poster was Adobe Photoshop. We used Photoshop for many reasons such as Photoshop is a good way to manipulate images also a good software when it comes to editing and adjusting images and lastly this software is effective when help editing and adjusting font for example adding a drop shadow on a piece of text. We used for both our magazine and poster. 

Here are some of the ways we manipulated pictures

                                  

This image is the main focus of the poster I created. The picture on the left is the picture we took with the Cannon Eos as you can see the lighting is not the best and is lacking quality. However as I was creating the poster I used Photoshop to help adjust the lighting of the picture to create an effective poster.  (Below is how I carried out the process)

To adjust the lighting of the picture I clicked image then adjustments then clicked levels, then I increased the input levels and decreased the output levels.

Another website which was used a lot in the creation of the poster and magazine was www.dafont.com. For both magazine and poster we used the font ‘DCC-SHARP DISTRESS BLACK’. We used this font as it is very strong which sends a clear message about our trailer which is going to be tough and dangerous especially as our font colour for the film title was red on the poster and magazine which connotes blood and terror something horror films are based on putting fright into our audience.

Poster Title

                                                            Magazine Title

The process of getting the font was we went on www.dafont.com researched the font we wanted then when we found the font we wanted to clicked download then saved it in our files. Then before opening Photoshop we opened the downloaded font folder then opened Photoshop and the font was there ready to use.

When designing the poster; through research we noticed the font of the credits differs to the rest of the font on the poster. The most popular font used in real media products for credits is Steeltongs or SteelfishRg-bold for our poster we used the font SteelfishRG-Bold from www.dafont.com .

 

As you can see a print screen of our credits we decided to use the colour white as it is a dull colour not really important exactly what credits are in horror posters. Credits are normally blended into the background and not really noticed by the audience.

Technologies

Here are some of the ways we manipulated photos:

Canon EOS 7d:

The Canon E0S 7d was the camera we used to take our magazine and poster pictures with and also we used this camera to film half of our teaser trailer. This piece of technology was difficult to use, some of the struggles we faced when taking the pictures for our magazine and poster was getting our pictures into focus. However after practising with it for a couple days and getting use to it as group we were able to produce some quality pictures which looked in focus and looked very effective. Use technologies such as the Canon EOS 7d helped us follow many of the magazine and poster conventions as we were able to produce pictures which looked appealing, scary and intriguing.

This was one of the pictures i took with the Canon EOS 7d which was not if focus.

Samsung t10bp:

The Samsung t10bp is a very small video recorder this piece of technology was what we filme the other half of our teaser trailer with. The advantages we had of using the Samsung t10bp was that fact that it was small it made it very easy to get in position to do unique shots and was very effective when we wanted to shoot from different angles which made life very easy and useful to us. The Samsung t10bp was very easy to use compare to the Canon EOS 7d.

LED light:

When taking the pictures for our magazine and poster images lighting was very important. We used the led lights to assist us in getting quality pictures, when positioning the lighting we positioned it approximately 5 steps away from the main shot. We did this as the led lights are relatively strong if we brought it closer it would have an effect on our model/actors eyes. The led lights were relatively hot which could have been a safety hazard so as a group we had to be care when moving the lights around and also the led lights were heavy so we had to take precautions when getting out the lights and putting the led lights back into the boxes.

Ashley

In our Post Production stage we used a variety of software to put together our teaser trailer. In order to help us produce a professional teaser trailer, we used Apple Mac Computers. We felt privileged to be able to use the great range of software that come along with the Mac computers to construct our final product as we thought that they would enable us to create a high quality teaser trailer.

The main software we used to edit our teaser trailer was Final Cut Pro (Version 7). This is a professional editing software. Using Final Cut Pro was difficult for all of us at first as we were all not familiar with how to use it, however with the help of our teachers, practising and mainly sites such as YouTube and Google we finally got the hang of it. Follow this link to view a Blog post showing some of the tutorials the group took a look at and used to help edit the teaser trailer
http://laneteasertrailer.blogspot.com/2012/02/reasearch-on-editing-techniques.html

Final Cut Pro was mainly used to complete all the basic editing such as cutting in and out of the footage and putting in fades and transitions. We used Final cut pro to import our footage as to enable us to put it into a sequence order and edit it. At first we found it difficult to import of footage, however after being told how to do so, it became second nature to us. The image below shows us we did this:

As final cut pro allows you to view a footage on one of the window panels, we decided to open up our shots in here and In and Out the selected footage. This process was quite long because it meant we had to go through each and every shot that were were going to use in our teaser trailer so that we could In and out them. Having used this video technique was good because it meant that our shots looked good and did not have any mistakes.  Also because it allowed us to choose the exact part/s of that footage we wanted to include in our sequence meaning we could cut out bad parts of a recorded footage which are usually at the start or ending of the raw footage. Below is a image to show how one of our shots has this 'In' and 'Out' technique.

The screen shot below shows us going through transitions in the effects window on the left hand side and then dragging onto the timeline.

This is a close up shot of the timeline with the transitions/fades inserted onto some of our shots. 

Using transitions/fades in our teaser trailer was a good idea as it meant that most of our shots flowed when played due to the fact that they were blended together. We also found it helped our teaser trailer convey a tone or mood that suggests separate parts of the story or the passage of time. We however found it time consuming when dragging each transition/fade onto the shot we wanted, rendering and then playing it back and deciding whether it blends the two shots smoothly.

Along with Final Cut Pro, we also used another Apple software called Motion to create our title sequences. We used this software mainly because it enabled us to choose and customise the fonts we wanted to use for our captions as well as create more interesting yet professional title sequences using the special effects that come along with it.

Below is a screen shot showing a caption that was in the process of being created using Motion.

SoundTrack Pro is another software that we used in our post production stage. We used this software to create and put together the sound effects and background soundtrack we wanted to use in our teaser trailer. As this software allowed us to create professional sound for our teaser trailer, we were able to have high quality sound in our teaser trailer.


SoundTrack Pro was a very useful software because it provided us with many sounds (see image in the left hand side) to choose from to help put together some sound for our teaser trailer. As it had almost any sound we could have wanted to use already recorded, we did not have to go through the stress of going out to record sound effects ourselves


The only thing we went out to record was the sound of hair clippers. This is because we thought that it would be much more effective if we went out to record this sound ourselves. This is because we wanted to give our teaser trailer a more realistic feel in terms of this specific sound. We used a Zoom H2 hand recorder to record this sound. This process was not difficult as we just had to look for a quiet room and then start recording.

To Market our teaser trailer, we used quite a few media technologies. The main one being YouTube, which is a globally recognised broadcasting website. This was a good site to market our teaser trailer on because it meant that we had a greater chance of many people around the world viewing our teaser trailer and giving us feedback. It also gave us the opportunity to keep track of the numbers of viewers we had as it writes the number of people that have viewed a video clip, this helped us see if we had distributed our teaser trailer well enough depending on how many views our teaser trailer had received. The image below shows our teaser trailer on the Youtube website:




We also decided to use the two most popular social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter to market our teaser trailer.

This was the twitter post I made to promote our teaser trailer.This was the facebook post I made to promote our teaser trailer.


Using these two networking sites was good because it gave our teaser trailer a chance of being seen by many of our Facebook and Twitter friends. It also meant that people could share our teaser trailer with their friends, therefore helping us as it increased the chances of receiving a high number of viewers and feedback. 

Evaluation Question 3

After spending 4-5months working on our teaser trailer, we finally finished producing it and put it on a range of websites in order to get feedback from our audience. We posted our teaser trailer on two different social networking sites Facebook and Twitter as well as the world's largest video-sharing website Youtube. Doing so was good as our teaser trailer was exposed to a wide range of people (including friends, family and others) not just in the UK but across the world. This allowed us to get enough feedback for our teaser trailer.

Ashley

As a group we discussed the possibility that some of the comments we may get from our audience may be to put us down and not be constructive criticism. We identified people that do this as 'Trolls', this is because they will pick the smallest and silliest things to negatively comment on. We therefore discussed how we should not take any negative comments made by people to bring us down to heart, but instead just use the feedback to draw conclusions on how effective our work has been as well as what we could do to improve on it if we had the chance to do it again.

From the two networking sites that we used to promote our teaser trailer, facebook was the one website that actually promoted our film very well. As most of our friends and families are also part of this social network, it was not as difficult to gather feedback for our teaser trailer. Especially keeping in mind that we were targeting an audience from ages 16 and over, this was good as our facebook accounts already had people around the ages we were already targeting.

After posting the teaser trailer onto facebook, our teaser trailer managed to get 9 likes and 3 shares. This is good as it shows our audience enjoyed our trailer and a few to an extent were they went ahead and shared it with their facebook friends, helping us to market the teaser trailer to even more people.

Most of the feedback we recieved from facebook was generally positive feedback.  As good as this was for our group we found it quite difficult to then know some of the other things we could have done better in order to improve our teaser trailer. Many people commented saying 'this is really good'. The screen shot below shows some of these comments. As most of these comments came from our friends, we particularly found it difficult to judge whether the positive comments made were genuinly true or bias. 

The one constructive criticism we got back from 2 of our viewers was about the 40-43 seconds of our teaser trailer. These viewers felt as if we could have improved the last shot by having made our actor look more distressed or scared by frowning a bit more and not just stare at the camera. One also thought that we could have had her scratch her face or pull her hair instead of staring at the camera. After thinking about this feedback we came to realise that if we were given a chance to improve our teaser trailer we would have definelty made the actress do something unusual or striking as to get the audience to have a shocked reaction.

As we also posted our Ancillary texts onto facebook we also managed to get some feedback. We did not really get as many comments about our Movie Magazine compared to The Poster. Our Movie Magazine maganed to get 2 likes, which was good for us as it showed that there were some people that liked it. The Poster however recieved 15 likes, this could however be because these 2 products were on my facebook, therefore as people know me they more likely to pay attention to the text i am in. Most of the comments we recieved commented on how much the viewers thought the poster looked good. As one of my friends was also once a media student, she actaully pointed out some of the conventions we used and wrote what they symbolised.

 Getting such feedback from one of our audiences that is familiar with media and how symbolism is used in films etc was good because it shows that just by her watching our teaser trailer and then picking our specific conventions, she understoiod that this was a teaser trailer for a horror film genre. This feedback also made us quite confident about our teaser trailer as it makes us feel as if we chose to feature the right conventions in our teaser trailer, eg the colour red and the caution sign.

Videos By Lekan Ashley & Nadine

We felt we needed more feedback on two of our products so decided to film people from our media class on their opinions of our poster and magazine cover. Retaining feedback from people in our class was  useful as they were about to use  terminology  relating to our products and give in depth feedback as they themselves have gone throught the process of creating these products.

Nadine


To promote our teaser trailer I decided to use BBM and sent the link of our trailer to all my contacts on my blackberry. I thought this was a good way of promoting our trailer as most of my friends are in the age range of our target audience so feedback from them would be more helpful. Sending through BBM also showed me that our trailer was easily accessible to view on smart phone and that it was a good idea that we chose youtube to host our video.

Most of the feedback I received was generally positive. This has shown me that our trailer met our target audiences expectations and that as a team we produced a good product that was well liked, proving our hard work had paid off.

Other feedback I received however was more useful, many people commented on the editing and the sound showing us that this is very important within the trailer and a key element to making a trailer a success. As a group we at first felt that our camera shots were not shot very well, but adding the soundtrack we saw a huge improvement in our trailer which is emphasised in our feedback.

However we did recieve some criticisms which was very helpful and what we needed. Some of our audience felt the ending of the trailer was not attention grabbing and didnt fulfill the suspense and tension we had created throughout the trailer. As a group we decided if improvements were to be made this was one of them. We also pointed out that we should have perhaps used an alternative piece of footage that we had orginally filmed for our ending which was a close up of our protagonist screaming. We decided to not use this footage as it didnt seem realistic and very typical/sterotypical to have at the end of a teaser trailer. However from the feedback ahown below we have learnt that sometimes it is best to go with our instincts and that doing the "sterotypical" thing is not always a negative as we have found it is what the audience like and our familiar with. We were very grateful for the alternative suggestions our audience gave.

Youtube.com is one of the widest used video hosting websites used today. Its popularity is so useful to film companies in this day and age as it is a quick easy and also free to promote their products. Promoting our product on youtube was a huge success we managed to receieve 450 views in total and views are continuously going up. Youtube is accessed worldwide, so our video was availiable to anyone anywhere, our video being accessed worldwide was abit daunting and scary as it meant anyone could comment and be free to make any comments they liked good or bad. All in all we had a positive experience using youtube we managed to receieve 11 likes and 1 dislike showing that generally people liked the video. We also managed to receieve 1 comment from a stranger which was positive shown below



The images at the side illustrate the demographics of our trailer. Our trailer seemed to attract more females than males which we found a little bit surprising. However this could be because we have a female protagonist and our trailer centres around hair which is important to females, making the trailer more relateable to them. Our video has also shown to grab the most attention from 13-24 year olds, a young audience which we intended to have. This has shown us that we have a storyline that is appealing to a younger audience, however the demographics have shown that older people have also found our video appealing creating our trailer to be one that is appealing to all which is a good factor for a movie to have as it could ensure high revenue.

The picture below us has taught us the hardwork of being an independent film company as its not always easy to promote a film to a global audience. The youtube statistics have shown that our film would be one that would appeal to a UK audience only with only few other mainly European countries viewing our trailer. Perhaps with more promotion we would be able to reach a European aswell as a UK audience. 

Traffic source is the various ways in which our viewers found our video. This has taught us that their our loads of ways in which audiences can get a hold of our product and that media convergence is an important factor when trying to reach out to audiences as shown through the statistics.