Question 4How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Research and planning

During my research and planning I used google to search the world wide web for information. I used the search engine to find information on how storyboards are made, to find out who the audience of horror movie is and what they like and I used to find the conventions of each aspect of horror movies including the mise en scene, the editing and the sounds used. Google is an extremely useful tool to sue to find information on any topic however I could have used Bing and Yahoo in addition to google to get a variety of search results instead of just the ones google puts on the first page of the results. I also used Google Chrome as a web browser the majority of the time as it is much faster than internet explorer, it is also less likely to crash than internet explorer so I used to get my information faster and find out what I need to know in a reasonable time. Google Images was used in order to collect and use images in my blog uploads for example in my post about production, audience and purpose I used images to provide examples of when filmmakers haves used certain equipment or techniques such the storyboard from Disney’s Aladdin.

YouTube was used firstly for research as I needed to view and analyse examples of short horror films and the best way to do that is to use YouTube as YouTube is an extremely popular site were people especially aspiring film creators will upload their content for everyone to see as they are more likely to be viewed on YouTube than any other site. I found three short horror films that were uploaded into YouTube and embedded them onto the blog post so the video I analysed would be next to the actual written analysis which far more convenient than having the html link being placed there.

Prezi is a site where you can create presentation using a variety of professional looking templates that are also animated for you. I used Prezi to present my findings on the mise en scene of horror films. Prezi was used so I could present y work and my research through medium that already makes the layout and structure of the presentation look professional also I could embed the Prezi presentation thereby allowing me to place it on my blog so I can easily refer back to my finding when working on the film or editing it. An issue I ran into with Prezi was the slides you put the text in were always round which lead to some of the text going outside the lines of the circle which looked very awkward however I was able to resolve this problem by reducing the size of the font for the text but I found Prezi to be restrictive on how much text I could put in one slide because of the round shape of the slides. The zoom in feature was very helpful with Prezi especially since I needed to make the text smaller than the default text.

Bubble Us was used to present the conventions of horror films that I found. I found using Bubble US very effective for this because the bubbles could be organised into a mind-map and I could organise each convention and put them under a sub heading for example the sub heading “setting” is a bubble that is linked to all the common places horror movies are shot and the subheading “editing” shows all the editing techniques used to create horror films. The organised structure that I could create with Bubble Us was very easy to read and follow so I could very easily look over the conventions of all the different aspects of horror films with ease. I can also zoom in and out with bubbles us in case I want to zoom in on a particular group of bubbles.

Survey Monkey was used to create the questionnaires to find out what people like about horror movies; it was also used later on to create the questionnaire for the premiere night. Survey Monkey

is extremely easy to use in fact it was much easier to create a questionnaire in Survey Monkey than in Word as the tick boxes are already set to be where they need to be and don’t alter the texts position and it was very quick to get the right layout. Survey Monkey also has pre-set questions that I could use so popular questions such as “what gender are you?” would appear instantly if I wanted them in the questionnaire thereby reducing the amount of time I spend writing out the questions. The main issue I faced with Survey Monkey was finding a way to embed the questionnaire onto my blog, for a while I only had the URL pasted onto my blog but the way to embed it is to publish the Survey Monkey file first and then go into the settings to find the embed code.

PowerPoint was used for any poster or double page spread reviews that I needed to do. For example, the poster analysis was all done of power point using text boxes and arrow shapes to point to what was being talked about. PowerPoint is effect for annotation because you have freedom to move text boxes wherever you want and use shapes like the arrow to clearly show what I am discussing. PowerPoint also gave me as much space as I needed to write a detailed analysis of each and every poster. The problem with PowerPoint is that there isn’t way to save it a jpeg image, which needs to be done in order to place the analysis onto my blog. In order to do this, I had to screenshot each slide with the print screen button on the keyboard, paste it into Photoshop, crop it with he crop tool and then save the as a JPEG so I can insert it onto the blog.

Excel was used in order to create graphs and charts for the questionnaire results. The reason excel was used is because it has better data management tools than word or PowerPoint so all I had to do was type the results out, highlight them and select the graph wanted excel created a graph with all the results in place. Excel was the easiest way to create the pie charts and graphs I needed to represent the results of the questionnaire.

Construction

The camera used to record the film were Panasonic HC-V700. These cameras were used to film each and every shot in the film and they were very effective to use as they are good quality camera’s that pick up a surprisingly small amount of background noise thereby making the editing process a little bit easier. The cameras were also very easy to use as we could record and stop recording at the press of a button and the SD was extremely easy to remove and then place into he computer so we could back up all of our files and place all of our footage in premiere pro were we could begin to edit the movie. The problem with these camera is that the battery does not last very long and they don’t have a lot of memory, so sometimes we would have to stop filming and go get another camera with full battery or find a new SD card or delete old footage from the SD card and put I back into the camera so we could start again so while these cameras were of good quality they were very inconvenient at times especially since there was not a lot of them to around the three groups that were filming at this time.

Premiere Pro was used to edit the film and do sound editing. Premiere Pro was one of the best programs to use for editing films as one you understand the basics editing becomes very easy to do in addition to this there a plenty of tutorial to find if I got stuck. Premiere pro has a great tool for getting rid of certain bits of a video which are the mark in and mark out tools which basically set where the footage will start and end so if a scene was recorded and it has a couple of seconds of the actor waiting to be told to start then I would use the mark in tool to get rid of that section and start when the actual scene starts and end it at an appropriate spot. The whole document is laid like a time line so video and clips can be moved around by just dragging and dropping it wherever you

want and there are tools for removing background noise. The razor tool would also split video and music clip in case I wanted to quickly chop of part of a clip or part of the music. The problem with using premiere pro is that in order to view the edited movie I had to render it and rendering can take a very long time especially when film has more elements in it than before such as the music and because rendering takes up a lot of the computer memory and processing power the computer runs very slowly when trying to do anything else.

YouTube was used again so I could have all the drafts of the film on a site where I can also embed the videos to the blog. YouTube allows me to easily access all of the drafts for the film and it also lets other people see them so during the premiere night we could show he film through YouTube instead of relying on of us to bring in and use a USB with the film on it. YouTube walls also helpful because we could all look for tutorials on how to create or edit different aspects of the film, poster or double page spread.

Photoshop was used to create the poster. Photoshop was very comfortable for me to use as I have used it several times before to create logos and posters. Photoshop can be used to make very interesting effects such as the as the cloud effect which was made by using a combination of the cloud filter and the masking tool. In Photoshop you can create and edit text easily by suing the text tool and going on to blending options which I used to create the gradient on the title of the poster. Professional effects that would only be normally seen on really movie poster can be done in Photoshop for example placing the faces of the main characters on the knife so it looks like they are reflecting off of it was done by simply overlaying the layer with the faces over the knife. Also moving the different elements of the poster around was very easy because of the selection tool so I could experiment with where each element could be placed without wasting too much time. Photoshop is an excellent program to us to create professional looking posters.

Using InDesign, I created the double page spread. This programme is very simple o use, all that needed to be done as to create text boxes by using the grid lines as a template to create evenly spaced text columns. The text tool was very easy to use much like Photoshop and creating coloured boxes was very simple to do, I did this by creating a rectangle and changing its colour in the options above. The traditional layout for a double page spread review, which is the three column grid rule w very easy to replicate in InDesign because of the grid lines that you make when creating a new document. Overall this programme was simple but effective in making my double page spread look professional.