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

During the construction of my blog, horror trailer and film posters, I have used alot of different technology and equipment, some less high tech than others but equally important. What I am going to discuss is how I used these and how we and others have benefitted from them.

One of the most important programs for me during media editing has to be Photoshop, it would have made it virtually impossible to compose some of the images for my poster and magazine cover without it as it enabled me to place layer upon layer of different textures and images upon each other. The program provides so many different and effective ways of transforming images using filter effects, brush tools, shapes, shadowing, etc, without these incredible tools it wouldn't have been possible to break down my original image and compose a brand new one with a completely new horror effect. I also used photoshop to make a shot by shot trailer analysis of a film called 'The last exorcism' which is used in my planning on the road to the creation of our own horror trailer.



To create sound for our horror trailer we decided to use the camcorder to capture it and then cut out the sound from the video, this worked extremely well and it meant that we could also cut out sound from previous recordings and edit them to sound creepier. When we added the sound we used a program called final cut pro, this is an Apple official editing product which can be expensive but can be found cheaper when use din colleges or schools, this benefitted us so much, we were able to use top editing software and it didnt cost us.

Other advantages of using final cut pro were that it was quite simple to use for beginners and was fantastic practice for future productions. Editing video clips was very easy, we were able to use the cut tool to size down larger length clips to use the exact frames we wanted from start to finish. When we had cut the video we just had to insert it onto our timeline and place it at the correct point to make it fit with our other footage, this made the timings much better and meant we could add transitions.

The transitions made the production look much more professional, it also meant we could fade in and out between shots and audio to make our trailer feel more horror like.

To get better camera angles during filming we were equipped with a tripod for our camera, this made everything much smoother to turn the camera at different speeds without shaking and ruining the capture. The tripod also made it easier to change height and how fast the tripod could move using the adjustable grips around the head of the pod.

By using web 2.0 which is basically the new interactive internet system we have adopted over the last 8 years, we are able to now upload to the internet, sell our own items, publish our own blogs and information which 10 years ago was not possible, everything was sold to us through organisations or companies. Websites I was able to use were sites such as youtube, dafont and blogger. Youtube is a video sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos, this can include music videos, tv clips and movie clips, it also advertises to its users using movie banners, premier notices for music videos and tv shows so it makes alot of money this way.

Blogger is the website i am writing my blog into, in enables me to keep a record of what I am doing and in doing this it can be uploaded for others to see, mine is based on horror so i have themed it in this way using blood, dark colours and a bloody hand. The website also lets you add pictures to your text and even video to demonstrate and explain what you are writing about. Because it is quite a social network others can comment on your work, designs,etc and is easy access for a teacher to comment on improvements that could be made. I have laid out my blog using captions which i can add to each peice of my writing, this then sorts them intoa category so when i click one of the many links at the top of my blog it connects me to that section and everything I have deemed related to that topic.