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

For my research and plannning I used YouTube to look for trailers that I felt would influence my own. I chose to use it often because it was quick and it always provided me with the simple suggestions I wanted, making it easy to use. It was through YouTube that I found the trailers which influenced my trailer the most, such as the Devil trailer that influenced my trailer heavily because I liked the way that the trailer left the audience not knowing what to expect, as well as the idea of the actual devil being the villain. The Blair Witch Project trailer influenced my trailer because of the witchcraft theme and the creepy location. The Ring 2 trailer was my finally major influence because of its use of low-key lighting and enclosed locations. Another website which was very useful was IMDB which let me do any extra research on specific films I needed, like the year of production or the name of the director. Through this I could explore other films by the same director, such as all the films of Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead).

In the evaluation process, screengrabs were important for my final Photoshop products during the construction process in order to show the many layers I had in the production of the ancillary products. I found Photoshop difficult to use at first and opted to create my poster by taking two photos of Em and then tearing them each down the middle. I took one half of each image and pasted them together, and scanned that image onto the computer. On there, I added text using Adobe Photoshop. The magazine was more complicated, and used more effects on Photoshop like the Bevel and Emboss FX tool to make the writing stand out. I also created a yellow banner at the bottom and changed the opacity so it was a little transparant. The final touch was having a new layer and drawing a circle using the shape tool. This made the "62 Best Horror Films" a feature of the cover.

I created my trailer on Final Cut Pro on an iMac computer. By using the transitions tools, Final Cut Pro enabled me to create dissolves between shots to allow them to flow more smoothly, to add text with the A tool to help explain to the audience what the trailer is about, and to crop clips to the length I needed them to be using either the razorblade tool or the in/out buttons. Google also played a huge role in all of the stages, because it made it easy for me to see examples of magazine covers and posters, to find out how many trailers there were that were similar to mine, and to find any pictures I wanted to include on my blog. Through this I was able to show evidence of trailer, posters and magazine covers that influenced my work main and ancillary products.

For my evaluation Flickr was useful, because the labels allowed me to explain specific parts of my magazine and poster easily. It also gave me a final chance to check that my ancillary products had enough generic features to successfully advertise The Awakening.

The Awakening Poster, a photo by PoppyDavey on Flickr.

Magazine Cover The Awakening, a photo by PoppyDavey on Flickr.

Blogger also made it very easy to evaluate my media products, because all my materials could be collected in the same place which made it easy to keep track of my progress. I sometimes found it difficult to insert and move pictures whilst still keeping the text the same, but once I overcame this problems using the "Edit Html" feature my blog had a good appearance.