2. How did you use media technologies in the construction,
research, planning and evaluation stages?
3. When researching, planning and constructing my horror
trailer, I had to use a lot of media technologies to enable me to
do all of the above effectively and efficiently. When researching
things such as magazine covers, posters and official horror
trailers I used Google Images, as well as YouTube. By using these
two websites I was able to effectively understand what techniques
professionals use to draw the viewer into buying a magazine cover;
as well as catching the eye of a potential audience member with the
use of a poster to advertise the media product; and how
professionals use trailers to essentially scare the viewer into
watching the full film.
4. When researching films to gain inspiration for my horror
trailers narrative, IMDB.com was a very useful website to go to. It
showed me a huge range of horror films, from more successful modern
horror films, to successful films released in the 1970s- 1980s.
This allowed me to gain inspiration for the construction of Cold
Blood. I found The Amazing Spider Man 2 (2014), Evil Dead 2 (2013)
and An American Werewolf in London (1981) all on IMDB.com and these
subsequently influenced the making of Cold Blood in one way or
another.
5. The editing software that my group used to edit Cold Blood
was Sony Vegas. We decided to use this piece of editing software
above others such as Premiere Pro because one of the people in my
group (Brad Lacey) knew how to use it confidently. We decided that
it would be best to use that program because none of us were
overtly familiar with using Premiere Pro.
6. We explored a lot of different editing techniques when in
the early stages of editing Cold Blood. One editing technique that
we thought worked well in the final cut of the trailer was the use
of slow motion. We used this technique after Michael is knocked
coming down the stairs by Jason because we wanted the footage to be
in time and have the same pace as the music, therefore we slowed
that clip down slightly in order for it to fit with the music and
be more effective on the audience.
7. Another technique that we use in our trailer were quick
bursts of images. We wanted to portray that Michael has
experimented on other subjects, but none of them had been
successful. In order for us to show multiple deaths throughout the
trailer we decided to take images of the deceased victims and show
three different images of them in quick succession. This technique
is a blink and you miss it technique, therefore this ensures the
audience to pay more attention to the trailer as otherwise they
will miss the images.
8. We also wanted some of the clips to fade in and out; for
example, when Jason wakes up tied to a chair. We wanted to mimic
how he is feeling after being chloroformed. When filming we decided
to switch the focus to manual so that we could blur Jason, then in
the editing stages we wanted to make Jasons confusion more evident.
To emphasise this, we took the blurred clip of Jason tied to a
chair and used a quick fade in and fade out to reflect his
confusion, and also so that the footage would directly fit with the
music.
9. When editing my magazine cover and my poster I used several
different techniques to make them both reflect the genres that
shine through in Cold Blood, as well as advertising the film
without giving the audience a false idea of the film. It was vital
that the campaign worked well together.
10. When editing the image for my poster, I wanted it to have a
textured layer over the top of the image to connote the grittiness
of our film. After looking for a cracked layer on Google Images, I
found a copyright-free textured glass layer that would work well on
the image that I chose for the poster. I positioned this over the
eye of the model in the image. For the textured glass effect I
added a new layer and copied and pasted the image that I wanted to
use from Google Images; I then decreased the opacity on the layer
so that it was prominent, but not over-powering. The layer was to
represent how Jasons life has now been symbolically shattered
because of his transformation into a lizard-like creature.
11. Another effect that I used in order to make my image look
more serious and make the viewer concentrate more on the models
face, rather than the background of the image, was editing the
background to make it look darker. I did this by using the paint
tool and selecting the colour red to connote blood and death, I
then coloured over the text, then lowered the layer underneath the
layer for the text. I added a new layer and selected the paint
brush, I then made the paint brush have faded edges, I then
increased the size of the paint brush so that it was a little
bigger than the models face; I then clicked on the models face once
and the background became darker, and therefore allowed the
audience to focus on the models face more. This added layer has
made the image look more serious and more menacing.
12. A technique that I applied to my magazine cover is
colouring behind the text to reflect a particular scene from within
the trailer. The scene/s is when Michael is violently scribbling
out the victims photographs once he has experimented on them.
13. Blogger allowed me to display all of the relevant work and
research that I have constructed in order to make my final media
product. Blogger is an easy website to navigate, and displays my
work in a professional and easy to see manner. The feedback from
the focus group screening also allowed me and my group to receive
constructive criticism on the first cut of Cold Blood. After the
focus group screening our group then added some changes to our
trailer in order to make it more horror-like. We added a jump scare
at the end, as well as inter-titles to explain the narrative. We
also edited some of the scenes to make it look like some of the
footage has been taken from a CCTV camera. We now feel that our
horror trailer is successful in what it is trying to sell. The
genres that our horror trailer is trying to sell is a
psychological/gory hybrid horror; a horror film that connotes the
same genres is REC. It also now allows the audience to get a clear
conception of the narrative through the added inter-titles
