Evaluation p3

How did I use media technology in the construction, research, planning and evaluation

stages?

EVALUATION PT.3

Section A: Name three trailers that influenced us for our trailer.

One of the main trailers that I used for as influence for our trailer, where trailers that were generally ‘action’ based, obviously the genre of ours is a hybrid, but in keeping some of the narrative hidden from the audience – we decided to create a highlights trailer. For this, the following trailers from 30 Days of Night, Drive Angry & The Purge were three trailers that really influenced the direct(ive) style that I wanted for the cinematography and pace of our own.

A term coined as a ‘highlight’s trailer’ is what these three trailers share in common, and what influenced us to create ours like. From there, we could create a trailer and add all the best bits in, creating a jump scare/cliff-hanger at the end, and leave audiences wanting to watch it.

Section B (1): Planning & Research Stage

During the planning & research stage, I used a range of programmes in the Microsoft Suite to collect data and information in order to make the end product (trailer) as best as possible. These programmes, such as MS Word & Publisher enabled me to create digital documents that would serve as inspiration and research for key areas on my blog. When it came to creating a mood board of all the ideas I wanted in my trailer, I used Adobe Photoshop, creating a collage image of different generic types in Horror to add to a possible idea. From there, watching and researching horror films to use in trailers would come from personal experiences using streaming sites such as YouTube and Netflix.

Section B (2): Construction Stage

In terms of construction ( building and creating both our Poster, Magazine Cover & Trailer) I used three programmes. These programmes, were all created using the Adobe Suite and in particular; Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects. Creating my magazine cover in Photoshop was a relatively easy task, as I’ve used the programme before. I was able to use tools such as colour correction, masking and the rule of thirds to create a cover like the ones I’d been influenced by (Empire/Total Film). As for the trailer, this was all created in Premiere Pro – using tools like shortening clips, contrast and brightness and more to create a truly horrifying trailer in just under 1 minute 30, that we were aiming for. Our inter-titles were created through Adobe After Effects and imported subsequently. The template we used was a free-to-use and copyright free template, available from Templates4AE.

Section C: How did I use new media to evaluate my product(s)?

To evaluate our products, we first had to get an audience feedback - per stage that our trailer was at. In order to do this, we set our trailer to the rest of the class in a group feedback session, getting scores and pro’s/cons about the trailer that we could then go on and improve and change. This feedback would be available on small cue cards, where each person in the class would write down a small brief about what they liked and disliked, this enabled us to get more of a direct approach about what people liked and disliked, one of the main feedback pieces was adding in a dramatic music piece, that we then did to the amount of scores and feedback received. From there, we uploaded both the audience feedback and our final product to YouTube, where it would be easy for us to implement into our blogs.