Learning new tricks on each different program I used and ensuring that everything look very professional was probably the most difficult element of using any of the new media technologies, however in the long run it improved my abilty to immeditatly search for a media product that I needed - for example in the beginning of the research proceedure it allowed me to search trailers on youtube.com and towards the end when it came to ultimatly posting all of my finished work I could load up blogger.com.
Here are some examples that I used Youtube for - 3 horror trailers that influenced my work:
Black Swan
Insidious
Grave Encounters
Youtube was the website that I used the most during the research element of this project as like I said it was instant research products at my finger tips whenever, whereever I was. Although Youtube is perfect for the visual and audio aspect of research I found that imdb.com was the best website for finding out about auteurs such as Darren Afronosky as it is much more discriptive about each persons line of work and the products they have previously made or been involed with. I found that actually these two websites worked well as a couple - I found myself searching for directors/producers/actors on the imdb.com page and then watching clips from what I found on youtube.com.
Another useful form of media that I found myself using was simply DVD's. Within my research I watched The Wrestler, Black Swan, The Blair Witch Project, Insidious, Psycho, Dawn of the Dead (2004), Dawn of the Dead (1960), Grave Encounters and Posession in order to really capture the effects used within horros and understand the forms and conventions used to create certain emotions.
When learning about differnet types of horrors I wanted to ensure that I was selecting the correct horror type for me. To do this I used Wikipedia to learn a little more about what 'body horror' and 'psychological' was and the difference between a horror and a thriller.
Construction:
In order to create my ancillary products and my main products I needed to use new media technologies to a 'more skilled' level. This was hard for me as I have never used a lot of the websites or programs before and so learning was all part of the process.
For my magazine and poster I used Photoshop.
I used the lasso tool on Photoshop to crop my main image so that it fitted with my model in the middle of the cover in order to to create a sense of symmetry and professionalism. I also tweaked with the colour balance, brightness levels and vibrancy to dull it down at parts and do the opposite in others in order to draw attention to certain parts.
Here is a printscreen of my magazine cover on Adobe Photoshop. One of the first things I learnt to do was use the FX button in order to add a drop shadow and glow over my text in order to create mysterious yet exciting atmosphere. As you can see on the right hand side of the image there is a list of layers. I had 27 different layers that were all put together to create my product - each layer was tweaked differently with different effects to create certain visuals. For example, my text - the words 'THE EYES HAVE IT' started off looking like this..
As you can see it looks very bland and wouldn't catch a consumers eye. To deal with this I played around with the effects: stroke, outer glow and drop shadow to enhance this certain part of my piece.
After playing around with the 'noise' and 'opacity' with all three of the effects I chose to use my text looked far more powerful and interesting.
I used a site called Dafont in order to find the font for some of my texts such as my title for my film Jilted and the word 'SILVER' to add complexity to my cover.
I also used Premier Pro in order to create my final product for my horror poster.
Blogger was used in order to evaluate my products. This allowed me to save my work in a safe place and update it from any media outlet. It also put my work out in front of a worldwide audience which led to me getting feedback on simple things such as my overlay and back ground on this site in order to create a more expert appearance. This site also allowed me to do the same for my peers which I felt helped us all as a group.
I also used a social networking site - Twitter - to send photos to Seraphina to transfer photos directly from my Iphone onto the college computers for easier access and the ability to edit.
For my main product I used a program called Adobe Premiere Pro. Here is a screen grab from the editing software while we were in the process of merging shots together and tweaking the audio in order to make sure that everything was heard clearly and created the right effect.
As you can see our trailer was composed with over 40 shots and we carefully added them together to maintain continuity and also to build excitement and tension. The shots which are pink and those that you can actually see are the intertitles. We used those to break up the images and express the narrative of our film in a visually appealing way to give the audience a clear understanding and mental 'break' from the actual filmed images.
The green blocking parts are the audio aspect to it. As you can see the straight horizontal line is slightly different on some of the blocks. This is due to us having to play around with the different audio balances in order to ensure that some parts, those that we wanted the audience to hear clearly and concentrate on, were louder and therefore more powerful and hard to ignore. - here I am referring to the part where I whisper into Sams ear and the moment when Seraphina talks.
Looking at the bottom screen grab and on the left you can see a faint line - this is the general cropping element.
The first bracket which looks like this --> { was used to tell the editing software where we wanted to crop the beginning of our recording and the button next to it --> } was to crop the ending of the video. From here we simply just dragged it down to the panel of blocks and placed it where we wanted it before rendering it all to ensure that it ran smoothly.
No comments:
Post a Comment