How did you use media technologies in the planning,

research and production stages in creating your media product?

The benefits of technology in our media course work is widely advantageous and many of our planning and research took place browsing the internet and using YouTube, Google, blogger and etc., to gather important information about the codes and conventions of trailers, film posters and magazine covers and in our planning and research process.

We used internet explorer, in order to look at the conventions of Crime-horror film trailers. We also took a look at students blogs as well as analyzing the elements used in real media products of the same genre.

We used media technologies such as YouTube as part of our planning stage for our coursework. We looked at various forms of Horror teaser trailers on YouTube in order for some inspiration. Initially, this was part of our research. Furthermore, when looking to do our magazine cover and film poster, we looked closely at online and print media. Empire magazine is the basis for our inspiration, as we adopted similar consistency of font styles and colors in our magazine cover and film poster.

We used YouTube to explore and safari to find the traits of Crime-Horror films and what makes them so distinct and enjoyable to watch. I looked carefully at the use of shot styles, costume and soundtrack, which makes the teaser trailer effective in engaging with the audience.

Moreover, we accessed certain web sites such as ‘teaser-trailer.com’ to put emphasize on the

strengths of our analysis for our teaser trailer. The internet was the most useful source we had to

gather information about real media products and acknowledge the essential elements to a successful

teaser trailer, poster and magazine cover. Within internet ‘Google’ was the central search engine we used to access websites and other beneficial sites such as ‘www.slideshare.com’ and ‘prezi.com’ to

present the evaluation questions.

http://teaser-trailer.com/

Furthermore, we had to do additional browsing to find a suitable font style for our posters title ‘asylum’, which was downloaded off the internet. Also our research and planning was a massive part when creating our trailer, poster and magazine cover for example when we looked at exemplar movie trailers such as, sinister, saw 5, shutter, insidious and many more, which gave us aspirations and ideas we used YouTube. Furthermore, as the research and planning had a big impact on our products the benefits of the development of technology increased our potential to create successful products, for example the blogger was first launched in 1999 and we can see that over the years it has changed and become more valuable, in our case all of our research and planning, written documents such as our mind maps are displayed on the blog, pictures of the locations and costumes are all on our blog. Furthermore, YouTube has become a global and international video site which was launched in 2005 and including the soundtrack we used for our teaser was found using YouTube.

The creation of our poster and magazine required us to learn ‘Adobe Photoshop’ cs5 and cs6 and in doing so we gained skills in designing posters and magazine, as its main function is to guide people to design their own print media formats such as posters and magazines. This program in so many aspects, such as title fonts, colors and sizes also the tools were extremely necessary for us because it enabled us to design a professional poster and magazine.

In the production and post production process of our poster, magazine and teaser trailer we had access, through the college, to a very practical and useful computer software company called ‘Adobe systems incorporated’, which was founded in 1982 and has developed extremely in terms of technology designing new programs of which we used were Adobe Premier Pro cs5&cs6 and Adobe Photoshop cs5&cs6; both functions for different purposes.

Adobe Photoshop cs5&cs6 allowed us to manipulate and maneuver images and fonts by using the variety of different tools that enable us to do so, for example we downloaded image of floor cracks and we took a picture using (another great technological equipment) a digital camera, the actors one eye and rest of his face is covered by his hands, and using the over-layer tool on Photoshop we were able to put the cracks on the actors face.

We must now look another valuable technological computer software, which belongs to Adobe ‘Adobe Premier Pro’ that helped us edit our footage together and for the filming part we used a ‘Panasonic HD’ camcorder. Using premier pro gave us an additional professional feel to the whole project and we learnt various tools and skills within the program and it is the most sophisticated editing program out. To be able to edit the footage within a few months was difficult but it was somewhat simplified because YouTube had many video tutorials that guided us to learn the different tools and watching these tutorials we were able to edit the scenes together.

I want to also mention that, as technology develops programs like these will always advance and soon there will be a sc7 and we can proudly say that technology in media is a crucial and essential part in being able to be involved In such projects and we believe that we have produced an engaging and affective teaser trailer for our target audience.

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvJtjQgDTPc

Many of the programs features, such as how to add text, import videos, add sound, cut scenes and use transition tools took us time to get used to, however with constant practice we learnt how to use all these features, which were all of great importance when we edited our footage and neither of them were more important than each other. We learnt that to edit properly and professionally a person must know the functions of each tool, but as we did not have the time we used these fundamental tools to edit our footage.