HORROR TRAILERS

BY ALEX DALTON

EVALUATION ANALYSIS PART 3

HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES WITH THE CONSTUCTION, RESEARCH, PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

Section A:The first examples of new media I used for my research and planning are the websites YouTube and imbd. When using YouTube I was able to search for other horror trailers to gain ideas and influences for when I made my own trailer. Examples of trailers I viewed and found useful were where ‘Mama’

This particular trailer influenced my main product as I tried to remake the psychological style of it, the trailer builds up tension effectively and the narrative is put across in a slowly building, teasing manner. I found the use of young children a clever aspect as they usually represent innocence; however when placed into a horror trailer, this goes against the stereotypical representation and makes us feel uneasy.

Another trailer which I drew ideas from was ‘Silent Hill’. In this trailer, I was drawn to the image used for the young girl, with her jet black hair and pale white face. This use of mise-en-scene created a washed out, unearthly feeling. The use of flickering lights as the man and woman are standing in the house was also a clever technique as it creates panic and uncertainty as to what is happening. I consciously replicated this into my own trailer as I thought it was an effective technique.

Imdb was useful for other reasons. Firstly, it gave me information in order to make sure both my research and planning was accurate. It allowed me to search via the horror genre, as well as making the plot lines clearer and being able to see the directors and auteurs who were involved in making them. This helped me explore certain directors, such as Christophe Gans, who made Silent Hill but also Brotherhood of the Wolf. On the internet I searched and looked at many horror poster’s and magazines to understand how to make the products, and I also found typical horror images to add into my horror mood board to try and get across the style and my ideas for the horror trailer I was making.

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Section B:The media technologies I used for the construction of my products consisted of Photoshop, Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects Pro C56. Photoshop was used for the creation of my ancillary products. This software enabled me to use many editing tools such as cropping, merging, manipulating images with eraser and blur tools, and adding in layers to create certain desired effects. With the crop tool I could take text from dafont and add it into both my poster and magazine.

is used to make the text pop out more on the page and to give it an added shining effect.

Within the magazine, layering allowed me to place a subtle skull image behind the director’s face and also layer the text so that it placed behind theimage of the director. My final ancillary products had over ten layers of effects, images and text.

The eraser was useful in cutting out the main signifying images making it quick and easy and not taking up too much time. Within the poster I used the blur tool for the ‘coming soon’ text. It has two layers and in the back one a blur effect

With Adobe Premiere the main focus was the construction of the horror trailer. Within the software I could cut pieces of footage to certain sizes, manipulate the colours of shots using contrast and brightness, reverse shots for supernatural moments and also including music.

Some of the footage was quite lengthy so we cut shots down to the majority of 1-3 seconds, the lighting was not always consistent throughout so we altered this through the contrast and brightness tools to give a regular look. Shots such as the hair movement and Joe being dragged up the stairs were all done by reverse shots (using the speed/duration button

and then typing -100) and then manipulating the speed. I was able to add in copyright and royalty free music found on YouTube on this software and alter it in a ways such as speeding it up and slowing it down. We also reversed some of the music in the jump scare at the end to add a distorted sound.

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Section C:At the final stage of my trailer, I also used media technologies to help me in the evaluation of my products. The most vital one was Blogger which allowed me to save information in the “cloud” online and also made it visible to other people. This led into other social networkingwebsites such as Facebook and putting the rough cut of the trailer onto YouTube. I had to set up blogger account and once I had done this I was able to post my work onto a blog. Each post was labelled under a section depending on what area of the work it was.

As you are able to see in this print screen the orange text is the labels and the blue text is the title of the blog post.

Facebook was helpful in gaining feedback from friends, and they gave insight into what they liked and also what I could do to improve my products. Once I had shown the rough cut of my trailer to the class, it was then uploaded onto YouTube. Here people were able to view my trailer and offer their opinions about it. We also had an evaluation screening where people would contribute their opinions about the trailer once they had watched it in class. This was filmed so we were able to look back at the evaluation, again providing a digital record of an actual event that we could refer back to whenever we wanted.