Matt's A2 Media Blog

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

In the research and planning stages of my task I used a lot of different media technologies, mainly on the internet as it mainly consisted of looking at existing products and texts. To get a feel of horror film trailers I used YouTube to watch several horror movie trailers. I also used other internet sites such as IMDB.com (internet movie database) to see what horror movies got high ratings and why.

I watched a wide variety of horror trailers on YouTube but the three than influenced me the most were the trailers for the films Orphan, Silent Hill and The Ring. This is because the trailers didn’t rely on gore to scare the audience. Although I wanted my trailer to be gore-heavy I was interested to know how trailers could strike fear into its audience via other methods. The 30 Days Of Night trailer also intrigued me as the pacing of the whole trailer worked brilliantly to scare its audiences. From these trailers I found that pacing is very important when it comes to horror trailers as building tension and suspense can be done by carefully manipulating shot lengths and montage techniques such as collision cutting.

This is a screen shot of my magazine front cover in its early stages

For the construction of all three of my texts I had to use several media technologies. Adobe Photoshop was vital when it came to constructing my magazine cover and movie poster. Although I used many effects and aspects of Photoshop there were a few key tools and effects that helped create my poster a horror movie poster. I used ‘Layers’ carefully to have a scratch-like effect over the whole poster, which I then reduced the opacity on to give a downbeat horror feel. The last of my layers was a blood ‘brush tool’ that was used to add blood splatters over the poster, using copyright-free brushes that I had downloaded. I used the ‘fx’ tool to add “bevel and emboss” and “stroke” to a number of pieces of text, both with the intention of making the text stand out from the background. I also used the contrast and brightness on the majority of my images for the poster and magazine cover, moving the contrast up to create a stark look.

This is a screen shot of the construction
of my poster toshow my use of different layers

To make the movie trailer we mostly used Final Cut Pro. To cut the right part of the clips we needed we used the log and transfer function to edit them quickly, before refining the in and out point in the “viewer” box and then adding them to the timeline. We got our sound files from Sound Bible (www.soundbible.com) and Freeplay Music (www.freeplaymusic.com) as these give free from copyright sound files and music and added them to our timeline on Final Cut Pro. To vary the way in which our shots were brought on screen we used a variety of different transitions. For example we used a flashframe transition for some of our establishing shots (see FCPscreenshot43 and also used the pen tool to fade in and out some of out text and shots. (see FCPscreenshot4). Our production logo at the start of trailer moves, we accomplished this by putting short, very quick shots together with each shot having the text in a different position. This creates a short animation (see FCPscreenshot1).

For the evaluation stages we used even more new media. Our whole project has been documented onto Blogger, with all our planning, finished projects and evaluations being included on the blog. We used YouTube to show our video to our friends and possible target audiences, and also posted the video on Facebook. YouTube was also used to show our focus group and final screenings. The only problem we had with YouTube was negative comments from anonymous people but with the positive feedback we received it outweighed the negatives so was worth doing. To analyse my poster and magazine front cover I used to Flickr as an easy way to illustrate my reasoning behind the designs.