RCMedia: Evaluation Question 4

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

In the researching and planning stages of production, YouTube and Google allowed us to easily explore and research any existing films that fell into the Supernatural Horror Genre when we were looking for sources of inspiration. We also used Blogger, which allowed us to show specific examples of previous trailers that we had analysed, as well as test editing styles that could possibly used within our trailer.

Editing

We have progressed strongly within terms of technology as when we began editing our Preliminary Task at the beginning of year 12, we were originally using iMovie however the programme was highly limited to what techniques could be used, it was an extremely slow programme to used ad it was highly temperamental therefore we decided to explore other possibilities, leading us to use Final Cut Pro.

Effects available on Final Cut Pro enabled us to make some of our scenes more convincing. For example, in our Preliminary Task, we wanted to include a hand held scene but due to the lack of effects available on iMovie, we were unable to do this convincingly. However, when we changed to Final Cut Pro, “Bad TV” enabled us to create this effect.
Final Cut Pro also gives us more freedom in our creativity, as we are able to manipulate effects and settings more in the inspector and change the colours and saturation of the clips, which iMovie wasn't able to provide us with, as iMovie's focus is to be user friendly whilst Final Cut Pro is meant for more advanced users and is used in the professional film industry.

Typography

Having access to the internet and Google, meant that we were able to research and find specific examples of typography previously used within supernatural found footage films.

Photoshop was a large help when creating our Typography for our trailer as well as our Poster and Website design. We used a very basic font for the foundations of our Typography that we would later manipulate. We eventually chose a font called Adobe Garamond Pro, as it was very simplistic and basic for us to manipulate.

This font then went onto Photoshop were we added effects such as “Dust and Scratches” as well as “Wind” in order to give the typography an older effect, making it look worn and battered. We simply watched a tutorial on YouTube about how to make text look old and then followed these stages in order to create the effect that we have achieved on all 3 parts of our Promotional Package. After creating this final typography, we had to transfer it onto a black background, meaning that the background would not show up on either the trailer, poster or website. This meant that our typography looked professional and very fitting to the overall genre and sub genre of our piece.

When we decided to do our tag line, we used the same font as our title, however we didn’t manipulate it as much through Photoshop. This is because, we believe that the tag line does not need to stand out as much as the title itself, therefore it should not be as eye catching – we still used Adobe Garamond Pro, however, it was not manipulated in any way.

This meant that our title and tag line were completed. In terms of manipulation, the typography fits extremely well with our genre and sub genre – instantly letting the audience know what type of film they will be watching.

Sound

At first we researched the non-diegetic sounds that are usually used in horror films, and we found that the pace at the beginning of the trailer is usually quite slow and calm, but slowly it would pick up the pace, adding to the suspense with a lot of high pitched sounds and low bass drops.

We tried to make our own music, through the use of Logic Pro 9, adding in sequenced instruments and automating the sounds, however, we felt that the finished product did not seem professional enough, so we decided to search for a seperate non-diegetic sound which was not copyrighted. We managed to find one, through the use of Soundcloud, which is a free music distributing website.

In our trailer, we have small snippets of diegetic narrative, which we pre-recorded in our music studio, using condenser microphones e.g. the radio overlay. We then took this recorded sound and manipulated it on Logic Pro 9, where we cut the higher and lower frequencies to give that radio effect.

We also overdubbed the scream at the jump scene, as the camera didn't capture the right scream that we wanted, so we also re-recorded this in the studio, and we added a slight echo to it as the title comes up, which adds to the suspense of the film and conforms to the conventions of a horror teaser trailer.

Poster

We also used Photoshop to produce our Poster. We went out of a photo-shoot in order to collect the necessary images for our trailer – this resulted in 30 or so images we had to choose from, for our poster. Once we had selected our final image, we began editing it.

The main thing that jumps our to our audience, about our trailer, is the vibrancy of the colours; therefore we decided to transfer this to our Poster. We increased the saturation and brightness dramatically in order to increase the colour intensity.

We took an image from a scene within our trailer to be 100% sure that the poster links with the trailer itself. In addition to this, added a Vignette effect in order to darken the edges of the image. This creates even more of a contrast between the bright colours and the black edges, making our poster even more eye catching.

We made sure to stick very closely to conventions – making our poster portrait as well as having very few main features on the poster in order to avoid over crowding and allowing our audience to only gain a slight bit of knowledge about the film through the poster.

Website

In order to create our website, we used www.wix.com to help us edit and produce a website for our trailer. We did encounter a problem being that none of our images taken from the same shoot as the poster, were suitable for our website. Therefore, we decided to take a still from our trailer and increase the resolution of it on Photoshop.

This meant that we had the correct dimensions on our image in order to fit correctly to the website background. In addition to this, it became easier to edit our reviews onto the website itself. The typography overlaid simply as well as blending in perfectly with the background. Finally we adjusted the Hue and Saturation of the image on Photoshop in order to increase the vibrancy of the image, allowing it to fit in better with our trailer and poster.