Evaluation Part 3

Evaluation Part 3 How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages.

By Dayna Pendergast

Section a

In the research and planning I used a wide variety of different media technologies. There wasn’t one that I didn’t find helpful however the one that I found most useful was YouTube. The reason for this is because everything is available to you like all the trailers and documentaries. A trailer that I really enjoyed was World War Z. This trailer was set at the right pace the whole way through and the music fit perfectly to create fear and tension. https://youtu.be/HcwTxRuq-uk

My second most used media technology is IMDB which stands for Internet Movie Data Base. It helped me to open my eyes to zombie horror films but done in a different way for example Sean of the Dead was a zombie horror film but it had some comedy in it as well. Even though we didn’t want to go down the comedy side of things we could still use the knowledge and examples of body horror that they used.

There were also many other media technologies that I used like Wikipedia, Photoshop, Microsoft Publisher & Word, DaFont etc. We also watched loads of clips from DVDs. The clips that inspired me were ones from Land of the Dead as there is a spin put on the zombies like they actually have some brains and learn to use weapons. The body horror that they used was amazing and they used a lot of neck bites which is what we tried to use in our trailer.

Section b

With the construction process of my media products I feel that I learnt how to use Adobe Photoshop and Premier Pro CS6 a lot better than I knew how from the first year of media. So to create my ancillary products I focussed on using Adobe Photoshop. I already knew how to use the basics of Photoshop like using layers and cutting out pictures but I didn’t really understand how to edit the pictures and text. So I learned how to use the effects for example “Bevel and Emboss” on the text (using the FX Button) to make it stand out more.

For the horror trailer we used Adobe Premiere Pro. I hadn’t had any experience with this progra at all however I was used to using Apple’s iMovie and I knew how I wanted the horror trailer to look. I found it very difficult to use at first as the buttons don’t really tell you what they do so you kind of have to play around with it to see what they do and if it doesn’t look right then have another go at it.

I found that the bit that I was most comfortable with was cutting the shots and placing them together so that you would get a variety of camera shots and expressionist angles to create the fear. Another thing that I learnt to do was changing the scale of the brightness and contrast. When we filmed the atmosphere wasn’t as eerie as hoped so we had to do a bit of editing to make it seem a lot darker than it was which I think we achieved quite well.

Section c

The way in which we used media to evaluate our work was probably mainly by YouTube we posted our work onto there to see what reaction we could get. Also we used our blogs which can be viewed by anyone. It also gives people the option to leave their comments which can be viewed by myself. The focus group screening was the most successful way as we got a very detailed response from the class which was out audience for the screening. Anna also shared our trailer on Facebook and we got comments like “it was good” and the rest were mostly positive.

Some focus group comments.