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

1. Evaluation –Tasmin Bailey- Delusions Question four- How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

2. The variety of tools we used span from, hardware, and software, handwritten and viral tools: here is a list of the tools we used: Adobe Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator Scanner, photography Word Facebook Xanga Prezzi Youtube Imovie Garageband Logic Video cameras Stills slideshare

3. The internet was probably one of the most important tools we used and crucial for our initial research, we first looked at the questions of what a trailer is; Wikipedia was one of the sites we used for this, although because of Wikipedia’s credibility other sites were also used. File sharing websites such as YouTube allowed us to access existing film trailers and we used these to analyze and deconstruct in order to get a clear view of what we thought was effective or not in terms of trailers. YouTube was also the site we used to host our trailer and drafts. IMDB was where we got most of our poster images from to deconstruct and film reviews to see what audiences liked and disliked about popular horror films. Xanga the blogging site we used, I chose this site rather than blogger because I have used it before and it enabled us to edit html which was very useful to present our material and research in the form of imbedding codes, I also used my skill of html and css to create the theme for all of our blog sites.

4. Initial we used a range of hardware was used to acquire the film footage and photography. Emma had a professional photography camera so we chose to use that one when taking pictures a hd film camera was used to capture footage for most of our trailer , we transferred these to an apple Mac where we edited the visual aspects on programs such as imovie and Photoshop, when using text based programs such as word or internet browsers I used a windows pc because the word processers work faster and internet browsers such as chrome and Firefox enabled me to extract and edit html easier than safari or Camino on a Mac.

5. For me personally the use of Photoshop is probably the joint most important tool I used; the use of Photoshop was crucial to developing out final products (particularly the poster and magazine cover) to a profession looking standard. As a graphic design student also I was used to using Photoshop and similar programs, so I was allocated in charge of design and visual effects, whereas Emma was mainly in charge of filming and Jasmin was mostly in charge of editing and evaluating as we worked. The effects I used the most in creating imagery was adding layer styles and overlays to create grungy distorted imagery, I did this by creating a texture (such as crinkled paper) and overlaying it over the photo. Changing the hue and saturation enabled me to change the colour to suit our colour theme and unsaturated the image a little to create a feeling of darkness. Because of the difficulties of taking pictures at night some of the pictures I used where taken in the daytime, I had to use the replace colour tool to remove the daylight and add darkness to add the effect of nighttime. Photoshop enabled me to create many effects and experiment with ideas; some of these are on the blog. We also used illustrator to smooth out pixilation in low resolution images by using live trace.

6. In design was the tool I used to create the magazine cover, similar to windows publisher it made it possible to create a professional looking magazine cover that followed the spacing and conventions of a real magazine cover, by creating rulers and lines follow I managed to place images precisely into indesign and create a quality magazine cover for our hypothetical magazine “mad about film” I did this with the help of Emma and jasmine giving me feedback

7. Imovie was the primary program used to create the final trailer, we used raw footage we had filmed and were able to edit and compress this footage into our minute long trailer, and we were able to cut from one shot to another smoothly making it look more professional. Imovie was very limited however in editing the trailer with little range of special effects for both video and audio, however this was the only program we had access to, and we had very little knowledge on video editing software so imovie was useful because it is relatively easy to use. Because of the limited effects we could add to audio I ripped the audio from the voiceover and the music and edited them both in garageband to create a eerie effect on the sound, garageband was also very limited however with some difficulty I manage to create some acceptable sound effects there were several useful things we did on imovie such as speeding up or slowing down certain scene sequences to give emphasis on a particular mood or message; the fade to black tool enabled us to fade our trailer out and present the credits and release information at the end of the trailer smoothly, and removing background noise from the original footage was also needed as well as inserting sounds and music, these were all basic things needed in a trailer but essential for creating one.

8. During the evaluative stage, online presentation tools such as ‘slideshare’ have been extremely useful uploading the evaluation in the form of a presentation. Facebook was useful to gather feedback and essential for any production company and movie team to have because it is the biggest social networking site.