Question4typedup2
- 1. There were many technologies that I used for different parts of this whole project. In the research stage, DVDs, and the internet were particularly useful, as we could research existing trailers in a lot of depth. Plus, using the blogs for planning was helpful so that I could lay out all of my thoughts in chronological order, so I could refer back to them. When actually constructing, the trailer, poster, and magazine front cover, many other technologies were used, This included the camcorders, iMacs, and therefore the editing program ‘iMovie’, as well as ‘Paint’, ‘Paint.NET’, and ‘Photoshop’ to help give our products look as professional as we could make them, although some of these things did have limitations. Using websites such as traileraddict.com, I was able to do as much research as possible into as many different trailer genres and styles, so that as a team we were able to get a wide range of ideas for our own trailer, and also to check on common conventions to make sure we were heading in the right direction. Without the internet, individually we may not have been able to do as much research and therefore not many good influences as it is hard to find trailers anywhere else. When researching trailers online, I would choose a different genre each time, to find out conventions that are included in all types of trailer. I found out that these were things such as billing blocks, the date of release as well as having main characters, setting and plot introduced. From doing this we were able to check that we had done all of these things in our own trailer as we went along, as missing something out would not make it as trailer-like. Further on into research, I would then only focus on horror trailers as this was our chosen style. These included films such as ‘Devil’ where we wrote down the order in which things happened, to find out how much they revealed or not. This helped us create a storyboard and suitable sequence of shots for our film. We noticed common things when looking at horror trailers, such as a slow beginning but then it gets faster paced as the tension mounts, as well as plain black screens for titles to appear so that they stand out. We did look at a DVD of trailers in class as a group together on the big screen, which was useful as we got to discuss ideas together rather than individually. It was good for us to analyse each trailer as many times as we wanted, focusing on a different thing each time for example, focusing on voiceover one viewing, and then titles the next. This helped us construct our
- 2. own production, as we asked questions such as: “Why did they use this shot in this place?” when watching the others, which we would then ask of our own production to try and see it from the audience’s perspective. Making the blogs were very god for planning and research as it helped us put all our ideas together in order, so we could look back at initial thoughts. It was also good for evaluating our work, as the drafts and final pieces were all in the same place to compare and contrast. I enjoyed doing the blogs as it was fun to present ideas in different ways, as well as it being a part of self evaluation where I could go back and change and improve parts. Improving the blogs helped improve practical work too, as I had to think about what the audience would see, not just what the creator sees. For me, filming the trailer was the best part, as it was fun to film and experiment with the shots we had planned on our storyboard, even if some shots had to be done several times. This included things like zooming and tilting the camera when filming Amy witnessing h murder scene in our trailer. This was hard to do, and took many takes to perfect as it was hard to get the timing and flow right all in one take. But, in the end, once uploaded onto iMovie, we noticed that this camera movement was not necessary anyway, as it looked better as a still shot with no movement, as it was cut up in between the words of the tag line. We tried to use a variety of shots when filming, but our main focus was to make sure that we got slow shots for the trailer opening, and faster shots as it goes on, which is typical of most horror trailers. I think we did this well, as the point of view, low angle shots when Amy was being chased helped to speed up the tempo, and it also expressed her emotions well. When filming the beginning shots of the circus acts, we had to focus a lot on lighting to create a circus and horror atmosphere at the same time, but it did come out well on the camera. You could say that lighting was a technology that we used in our production also, as we had to hold it up above the circus acts so the light would act as a spotlight. To add to the horror genre, we wanted to add in a shot of the clown with his knife in the trailer, to link it to the magazine and poster more, as well as the fact that knifes are generally associated with horror films. However, when uploading these shots onto iMovie, we noticed that the background mise-en- scene was not suitable, as it didn’t match with the rest of the trailers’ mise-en-scene, such as the colour of the wall. Using the hand-held camera technique, we were able to add drama to the trailer when Amy was being chased, another technique used in horror trailers. Another lighting issue we had was when Amy was hiding in the cupboard. We experimented with the night vision setting on the digital camcorder, as the cupboard was dark, to see how effective it was, but like the knife scenes, the
- 3. mise-en-scene of this shot did not match with the rest of the trailer’s shots so we had to film it again. To make the actual title of our trailer more interesting, we initially filmed some confetti falling infront of a large black piece of paper. It was difficult for us to focus the camera so that that the confetti was clear, but we thing the overall effect turned out well in the iMovie program. This shot of the title may not look horror like but we do think the confetti falling is effective as it links the two things together, and it is also on a typical black horror background. We used the hand-held effect once again, when having a quick shot of the clown chasing Amy at the end, to add an element of surprise. This is similar to the teen horror ‘The Blair Witch Project’ as it is a shot that is meant to make people ‘jump out of their seats’. We were pleased that we were able to do this effect with the camcorder and that it worked well because we think the overall shot worked well with eh plot and theme of the trailer. Overall, as a group I think we used these camcorders to our advantage very well, as we were able to create many different styles of shots that were effective for us to make our almost-one-minute-long trailer. Using the iMovie program on the iMac computer was great fro editing, as we were able to add things like taglines, titles, and effects and transitions that we wouldn’t be able to do on other programs. We could also add in our institutions to make our trailer look a bit more professional. We could fade many shots in and out to reveal titles, which most trailers do, as well as fading the circus acts in and out so that they flowed better and moved the plot a long a lot quicker too. This editing software allowed us to cut out errors we had initially mad in filming which was useful, such as the tilting and zooming attempts when Amy witnesses the murder, to turn it into a one second still shot. Without iMovie, we would not have been able to time all the shots together along with other elements, for example timing the voiceover’s introduction of ‘Confetti the clown’ top the precise moment when the clown peeks around the corner of the wall. iMovie also helped us add in helpful sound effects, such as the heartbeat Sound effect of Amy breathing in the cupboard to add suspense, along with the creepy child’s singing and the sinister music. Photoshop was the main program we used for creating the drafts of the magazine and poster, however, individually; I had more experience with the program Paint.NET, which is a similar program. I think Paint.NET had a lot more useful tools which I could use also, which Photoshop didn’t have, such as a straight- line tool, useful for outlining the clown image. We used a digital camera for the still photos. These programs were useful for changing the background colours of our products, such as for my final magazine, removing the clown’s green background, and adding in the purple one. In our poster draft, we were also
- 4. able to add the ‘note paper’ effect for our clown’s silhouette to make it look like a ‘Wanted’ poster. As we used these Photoshop and Paint.NET programs more, we learnt more about what they could do. The magazine took longer to actually make on the computer, but the poster did take longer to come up with an idea for. The magazine took longer as you had to change the background, add the title, and each cover line in a separate layer, as well as making sure the layout, font, and colour balance was all right. These two programs helped us make our drafts and final pieces a lot more professional, as other programs may have had more limits such as the normal ‘Paint’ program, where its main use was just for cutting and pasting images. For the poster drafts on Photoshop, we could change thins very freely. Audience feedback for our draft implied that the key image of the clown holding his knife had to be a lot clearer, so we were able to fix this problem with Photoshop. There was a limitation when doing this however, as we could not make the clown’s actual face clearer. It was not possible to change this, as the program would not allow us, so we had to leave the draft as it was. Overall we used many technologies when doing this project, using them as much as we possibly could to get the results that we wanted. There were some things that we were unable to do, but the main thing they helped us do was to change and improve the drafts we had already made, and get rid of big mistakes, to get one step closer to finishing our products. Above our some print screens of the program Paint.NET to show that it was useful for a variety of different tasks.
- 5. Re-rendering Testing the clown’s layering two glove to layer photos in the on top of the poster drafts silhouette poster draft Changing the A draft of our clown’s title for the backdrop poster Trying to make my new Testing the magazine draft ‘Clapperboard’ more male- masthead orientated These are some print screens of the Photoshop program which was useful for when constructing the poster drafts and magazine drafts.