Evaluation Question 4

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

Teaser Trailer.

Voice Over.

Within our trailer we wanted a voice over of a news radio programme explaining and establishing some of our narrative. We used Logic to record this in the a sound booth to make sure it sounded as professional as possible.
 
Although, we did have to record this voice over many times due to sometimes having problems with the microphone or the headphones not working so our speaker didn't know is some cases when to start speaking.

When we had recorded our voice over we put the frequency of the sound to a low pitch, this gave it a radio like effect where the sound was slightly fuzzy and muffled. This we then used in parallel to our footage which was very effective as we lined up the sound with when the radio was turned off in our trailer.

Filming.

Within our filming for our teaser trailer we wanted to include multiple different editing techniques to allow for our genre of a psychological thriller to come across as well as the actual footage that we shot.

 

Time Lapses.

Before we headed out to film we looked into different locations around London which would be effective and easy to film, we went off and took pictures on our phones and cameras to gain an idea of different locations we could use and we also looked on Google maps and Google images to see if we could find places which were further away for us to use. We chose three locations to film time lapse shots (Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross Station, The Golden Jubilee Bridge) which involved us setting up our Nikon D3100 on our tripod for an establishing shot and filming for ten minutes to ensure that we had enough footage to use and chose from in editing on Final Cut Pro.

Once we had filmed these we imported the footage into Final Cut Pro and sped the timing of the footage. We did this by reforming the speed of the footage gradually to ensure that the footage would not drop any frames and run smoothly.

Once we had sped up all three of our time lapses we decided to cut one out and also only pick under a minute of the other two as this was enough to establish our locations to our audience and was effective.

Flashback Shots.

We also wanted to film flashback shots of out protagonist's past victims to establish our narrative further. To make our shots look like they have already occurred we sped up the timings on Final Cut Pro slightly in the same way that we did with our time lapse shots and also added a slight earthquake effect onto the footage to give it a shaky effect to build tension.

We also adjusted the colouring of these shots to make them look more dull in comparison with the rest of our trailer. We did this on Final Cut Pro when we clicked onto the footage it gave us the option to change the colouring. Once we changed one clip we could then match the colouring of that finished one to the others so that they all matched and this gave it the effect that these were all flashback shots.

Wording of Titles and Tagline.

As we were filming and editing our teaser trailer we began to think up some initial ideas which our tagline and also film title could be. We came up with some initial ideas after also looking at professional film titles and taglines which were also of the psychological thriller genre but could not decide which ones would be most effective for our teaser trailer.

To make a decision we decided to use the website 'surverymonkey' to see what our audience thought of our initial ideas. We spread this survey out across different social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr as this would give us a wide range of people within our target audience to gain opinions from. Once we had enough results that gave us a good idea of what our target audience thought would be the best film title and tagline line we discussed as group if the results were the of the best title and tagline and agreed that they were. After we collected these results and decided on which of the wordings we would use we could move onto manipulating and creating these titles for our trailer.

Film titles and credits.

When we started to look at the atmosphere we wanted to create for our film trailer we looked into what font we wanted to use which would fit well alongside our trailer genre and narrative. We firstly looked into psychological thriller film trailers for inspiration on Youtube and what kind of styles of font and wording of titles they used through the trailer. 

After looking into previous film trailers of the psychological thriller genre and since we also had our locations that we wanted to use a font that would be similar to our mise-en-scene. We also after watching a previous teaser trailer thought about using stop motion for our credits and titles within our trailer to keep the flow of it going and also keeping the mise-en-scene of our protagonist's journal and writing throughout our trailer.

At first we thought about using newspaper clippings for each letter and we experimented with this and started with creating the titles that would appear in our trailer through this method of stop motion editing.  We found that this method was effective when we completed it on Final Cut Pro. but the style of the news paper clippings wasn't as effective as it could be for our teaser trailer.

When we had put together our teaser trailer we had also decided on the wording our title, tagline and credits that we wanted to include at certain points throughout our footage. At first we
took a picture of our protagonist's journal with a border of the same mise-en-scene which is seen throughout our trailer. We picked out the font "CrimesTimesSix" from DaFont.com to use as it gave our titles a similarity with the mise-en-scene around the titles.

After completing these titles we looked at them alongside our footage but they didn't seem to flow with the trailer as they were still images. So, we went back to thinking about using stop motion but instead this time we would use the border in the protagonist's journal and hand write a line of each letter and take a picture after every line on our Nikon D3100 camera. After completing this we used Final Cut Pro again to shorten the images duration and edit them together to create the effect of someone writing out the titles. This allowed for our trailer's movement to continue and was effective as it stayed in line with our trailer's atmosphere and narrative.




Sound.

For our sound we used multiple soundtrack and effects after researching different film trailers with the same genre as ours, we looked specifically at Nightcrawler and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. After researching the different soundtracks on Google we started to search on free music sites and found the site 'Incompetech' and also downloading 'boom' sound effects off YouTube after gaining permission from the publisher.

One problem after completing the first draft of our trailer was that our sound seemed a bit messy and also did not intensify as much as we wanted it to when the footage got quicker. To correct this we took out some of the layers of sound we had put on top of our footage and went back to basics. We found a more effective soundtrack to use and also added in booms and more dramatic noises towards the end of the trailer to intensify the atmosphere for our audience.


 Poster.

For our poster we firstly researched different film posters from professional and previous A2 film trailers. Within the development of our film poster we used Photoshop heavily as it allowed us to manipulate and accommodate all of our needs effectively.

Firstly, we started by looking at the conventions of explicitly psychological thriller film posters to see how the elements they placed onto their poster were effective and also keeping to the typical conventions that we had found in other film posters. We looked mainly at the film Momento as it included the use of Polaroid pictures and allowed us to think more creatively with our own poster design.

We used the same font from DaFont of "CrimesTimesSix" to keep in line with our teaser trailer and we also included all of the credit wording and production companies which we inputed and edited on Photoshop to make the backgrounds transparent and also to change the colours of certain things like the production company to keep in line with our genre.

Website.

For our website we used the website maker "wix.com" which allows us to move around the elements freely.

We used photo buttons for our links to other pages and social networking sites to make use of our Polaroid pictures as they are a key element within our teaser trailer, poster and narrative. Our buttons to other links were also made user friendly as we allowed for a mouse over to change the effect of the Polaroid giving it a flash effect on the picture, this allowed for the audience to see where the button was.

We also made our trailer the centre of our website and allowed for it to automatically start playing so as this is a convention of a film website. We were able to embed our trailer and chose an option on "Wix.com" that allowed the trailer to play automatically.