Evalution Activity 4

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

On the computer we used a variety of programmes to help complete our advanced portfolio. These programmes were used in research and planning, filming and editing as well as the evaluation.

To film our teaser trailer, we used a digital HD DVI video camera made by GE. This camera allowed us to pick up a lot of detail in our shot and give us a very clear image, which made our final piece look very professional. Comparing this with our Year 12 foundation portfolio, it looks much better because the picture quality allows for more clarity and when we added effects in and changed the contrast of the picture, it was still clear and not pixelated.
To give the shots more professionalism, we used a tripod to steady the shots. We used this for each shot as it kept it steady because we are not using the hand-held camera effect. It allowed the pan to be steady and flow more so it wasn't jumpy and with the tilt and high angle shot it didn't shake, which will not put the audience off of what is actually in the frame. Using the tripod was a progression from last year because, although we were trying for the hand-held effect for the audience to feel they were in the stalkers position, there were some shots which looked very amateur without a tripod; so this year watching it felt like much improvement had been made.

The high definition camera allowed our shots to be much clearer.

Using the tripod allowed our shots to look more professional and
allowed us to experiment with different camera shots and angles.



There were a vast amount of other media technologies which we used in our research and planning stages and creation of our film poster and magazine front cover. To edit our film we used Adobe Premiere Elements (4). We learnt more about the porgramme this year because we experimented more with effects and transitions. For example, last year we simpl inserted a black screen, which, although effective, looked a bit jumpy. So this year we used a fade-to-black effect which broke the trailer up and kept suspence for the viewer becuase they didnt know what was happening next.

We had to learn to use Adobe Illustrator (3) and Adobe Photoshop (2) from scratch. By doing this, we were able to develop our skills in making the image look professional because we experimented with layers and colours. We used internet search engine Google (9) to search for images to edit into photoshop. For instance, we searched for the logo of popular Empire magazine and then cleared the background to place onto our own cover. The Empire magazine website (7) also helped us create our magazine front cover. This website helped us by allowing us to go through the arcive of previous front covers, which helped us create as close to a real magazine front cover as possible by taking not of what covers included, such as bar codes, prices, issue numbers and types of images etc.

In the first research and planning stage, we had to gather statistics which would help us decide on the genre. Film institiutions are concerned with revenue and so are interested in the audience they could be targeting the film at. For a horror, we found that males, aged between 16 and 24 which made us look into the conventions of the horrors. We used YouTube (1) to look into horror teaser trailers and analysed them to see what was repeated within the genre.
Throughout, we have used Blogger (5), an online blogging site, as a diary to note down all our research, plans and to keep track of our progress with filming and editing etc. By doing this, we stayed on top of our projects by keeping up to date and alos keep a checklist of what we needed to do. To help Blogger look neat and organised, we used Paint (8) to organise photos and images in order to make the images easily viewed.

 

The vast aray of media technologies we used in the various stages whilst creating our Advanced Portfolio.

During the creation of our magazine front cover and the edting of our footage for our teaser trailer, we learnt a lot more about the program and our abilities became much stronger.