Tre Curran.Rhiannon Cook.Ruth Delgado.

Media Technologies!

Pre-Production:

Internet.The Proliferation of the Internet has greatly helped my group with all aspects of this coursework and was the source of our research, we used search engines such as ‘Google’ and ‘yahoo’ to find similar media products, many of there campaign and media productions were posted on video sharing networks such as ‘YouTube’ and ‘Google videos’ where we looked at the teaser trailers, theatrical trailers and exclusive content.

YouTube was also effective in showing us how effective the film companies campaign was, for example the ratings the trailer got and the amount of views and comments that they received. Through the research we found the codes and conventions of teaser trailers which helped with our own productions.

We realized as a group that the internet was a strong method of campaigning the film but shouldn’t be the only method for example “Snakes on a Plane” only posted the trailer on YouTube and when it came to opening weekend it didn’t have a great turn out as their wasn't enough awareness.

When we found the trailers we wanted to evaluate we used MediaConverter.org to download the YouTube videos. MediaConverter.org allowed us to download the trailer as an MP4 which then allowed us to edit and place an analytical voiceover on top. Some of the group had already used the media converter for songs etc, but not for MP4’s and how to place them into Final Cut Pro. This is something that we learnt from simple mistakes an re-doing them.

IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) and Wikipedia was a huge help during the research and planning stage of our project. It helped us find the other “less obvious” genres of the films, the main actors and who they appeal to, the campaign they used to promote the film, the taglines and the reviews that the film got.

This was something new to all of us in the research and planning stage, In our AS projects we never had to analytically research the campaigns and the films. We didn’t exactly know what would be available and what we would find from the research.

When analysing the trailers of the film we used the software “Garage Band” to record our pod cast/voiceover analysing the trailers. “Garage Band” allowed us to start recording our voices and sounds, and then let us listen and cut it up to create a strong fluid pod cast.

During all the stages of the project we used the Apple Macs and the applications it had available. An application that was available whilst in the pre production stage was the “Photo booth” application in which we was allowed to create video blogs and was something we used along the whole process.

BloggingBlogging was an important way for us to keep up to date with our research. It kept us very organised and was something we would do regularly. Blogging was used because it is a new way of presenting our thoughts and research in the new digital age. We would do video blogs and word written blogs, at the same time we would upload pictures in the gallery and our PowerPoint presentations.

The blog also allows our consumers to turn into prosumers as we are able to give feedback on other projects, and get feedback on ours. Blogging was a new concept for us and something we didn’t know how to do, we at first found it hard but became more comfortable in writing a fluent blog.

Production:Pictures for posters & magazines:For our AS projects all three members of the group created a magazine front cover, contents page and a double page spread which means that we used a lot of photos to create a realistic music magazine. Having already learnt from our mistakes in taking the wrong photos, and having to digitally enhance them, we instantly knew what type of photos to take.

We used a plain white backdrop to take the pictures of the characters because it is easier to cut them out when editing at a later stage, we also used professional lighting and flash which helped bring a better quality to the picture and helped enhance facial features. We learnt from last year that with not using a plain background would make it harder to cut the figure out of the picture with good accuracy, and would take more time than just having a plain background. A problem that we came across was that two of our main characters were costumed in plain white t-shirts which, when editing, we found that it blended into the white backdrop and was slightly more difficult to edit.

Learning from last year we took some time in planning our pictures and where they would be used. We had a small idea in what type of poses the models would do, and tried to keep in a “dance” theme.

In our AS projects we used an 8 megapixel digital, whereas this year we used a Nikon 14 mega pixel digital camera, which captured more detail and was quicker.

For the teaser trailer:For the filming of the trailer we used a cameras to film all of the scenes. As our project last year was to create a magazine, none of us was experts as the last time we used a camera was for our preliminary task in the first year in which we filmed a small 2 minute film. A problem that we faced with the camera’s is that it was hard to tell if it was recording or not, and we missed vital parts to our filming because we thought it was already filming. The lens was also not very strong and it was hard to see anything in the dark, but was hard to see anything when it was bright outside.

We used a tripod for most of our filming in which we was able to gain different angles and different shots. This was important as our teaser trailer wouldn’t be appealing if it all featured one level shots, and as we was aiming for a dance genre we needed fast paced fast shots with different angles.

In some of the shots we used a lights to create a “performance” theme . We was lucky to have a full set of different lights to choose from when filming these shots. We had no experience using the switchboard and the lights before, so this was completely new and an enjoyable experience. The switchboard allowed us to create and choose what type of lighting to use, We used the spotlight in most of our scenes to create a focus point in the performance.

We used tapes to film our pieces and this meant that it would take longer to upload to the Apple Macs. Tapes have a better quality than digital cameras, but the problem we had was that we filmed using lots of different tapes.

We also used the camera to film the “behind the scenes” extras in which we would use for our blogs.

Post-ProductionMock Posters:We created many different poster mock ups but found that none of them suited us in our campaign. The colours we used was gathered from audience feedback on blogs and questionnaires. Our feedback was that our posters were weak and that we needed to do much more to them, which meant taking new photos.

These are experiments that I tried on Photoshop.

This was our first idea for the background of one of the movie posters.

The picture of the background is meant to connote an urban genre with the use of graffiti on the wall. I merged a London skyline into the background to create a setting on the movie for the audiences.

We took the picture with a digital camera, and enhanced and edited it with Adobe Photoshop.

Mock Background…

I placed the picture into Adobe Photoshop ready to be digitally enhanced. I wanted to make certain parts of the picture stand out and make it have a more natural but darker look. I decided I wanted the gold graffiti to be more shiny and brighter, this would make it more urban and fresh.

With Photoshop having layers, it is simple to merge layers together. There is a plain black background layer, underneath the picture layer, so on the layer I went on blending options and changed the opacity level to 31% making it blend into the background.

The picture became to dark, so I used the “brightness/contrast” to brighten up the golden part of the graffiti, making it appealing and eye catching. I darkened other parts around the area, the “brightness/contrast” created a layer and placed itself above the other layers.

I then took the picture of the London skyline and placed into onto the poster. I wanted to add the London skyline because we wanted our marketing campaign to have some focus on the urban streets of London, considering the film is one of the first British Hip-Hop dance productions, and we found that it would be important to add something connoting the British lifestyle.

I placed the London Skyline onto the document to see how it would look. I colored the picture in plain black so that it would be simple to merge into the background. In the picture the wall doesn't cover the whole picture, and you can see the footpath along the bottom of the picture. Using Free Transform, I transformed it to make it look apart of the background wall, and not the path.

How we did it…

I wanted to see what it would look like with an effect on it, so clicking onto “blending options” I added a stroke around the London skyline to bring it out and empathize the setting of the urban film. The yellow stroke compliments the golden color of the graffiti and it works well, bringing out the skyline.

I tried the different blending options like:• Lighten• Overlay• Soft light• ExclusionAfter some discussion within our group we found that none of these blending methods were very effective in showing an urban realistic background, and decided that none of these worked very well. Going back to blending options I found “Color” which made the overlay of the skyline black and white, with it being see through but keeping the yellow stroke around the edges. This “colour” blending option really empathized the London skyline, and the London eye stood out but looked apart of the wall.

How we did it…Leaving the London skyline plain black didn’t work well and I wanted to somehow blend it into the background.

After looking at our research I didn’t find that this type of background wasn't used in many of the posters. Placing possible poster photo’s onto the background, I found that they didn’t really fit and wasn't so strong as they didn’t look like a dance movie poster.

This was our first try at creating a poster, and I have refreshed on my basic Photoshop skills and it gave us a more clearer idea on what we wanted from a poster.

Also after some audience feedback we found that the poster wasn’t effective for them, and our target market didn’t find it appealing to them, so we changed the idea and began again.

Having already done the photo enhancing in our AS projects, it was quite simple to make our models look good but we wanted to challenge ourselves and make these the models really stand out and make the complete focus on them. I had never done anything like this before and was learning from the mistakes that we made, with some mistakes turning into positives.This is how we done it: I opened the picture from scratch and as you can see the picture is

very simple and plain. The model already looks good with clear skin and features already enhanced, so nothing needed to be done like airbrushing etc. One major thing we needed to do was to get rid of the background, the background was plain which made it a lot easier to erase out. Erasing consumed a lot of our time in last years project because we used the plain eraser tool when there was a much easier tool. We opened a new project and moved the photo across to that so it wasn't the locked background, and we had a plain white background.Not knowing this last year we then used the Background Eraser Tool and clicked sampling: once at the top.

The background eraser tool made it a lot easier and quicker for us, although at some points it would rub out the lighter parts of the model.

So after erasing the background, we had to zoom in which will take us closer to the target and allows us to erase closer to the edge. After erasing the background away from the model we then made the background black. We wanted a sort of movement in the background, and decided to duplicate the layer so we could add an effect to the background. With the FILTER tool we chose to make the other layer of the into a MOTION BLUR.

Using the motion blur really connoted a performance movement theme to the picture and really made it stand out more, it also made it seem more physical and like they are dancing.

The motion blur really makes the audience focus on the main character which is what we intended to do. The motion blur also seems to make the photo brighter and stand out more. Although this started to look good, from audience feedback we learnt it wasen’t enough and really wanted to represent this dance/dreamy feel to the posters especially referring back to the tagline.

To make the picture stand out more we really wanted to try something out. After seeing some of the blending options we wanted to see what we could blend to enhance the poster, and present a stage presence and performance theme.We duplicated the main picture again and this time decided to make one of the layers black and white: IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > BLACK AND WHITE

We used the blending tool OVERLAY which seemed to blend the pictures into each other, and it really enhanced the features of each model and also attracts the audiences eyes. The effect also represents a performance theme and makes the shine seem like they’ve just come off stage.

To finish this effect off on the photos we decided to change the levels. On the more lighter skinned models we had to change the levels more and make them slightly more lighter as the pictures came out darker than the others.

The level adjustment is something that we have used before in our last media project, so it was something we knew about already. The levels are used to either lighten or darken the figure to make specific features stand out.

Making the shine effect connotes that performance theme of the movie, and this is good as the poster should immediately show the genre of the film.

There was other edits that we used on the photos to make them fit into the genre, but this was one of the newest and most difficult things that we taught ourselves and was one of the recurring edits that we used on each posters model.

Something we learnt on Adobe Photoshop was the “bubble sparkly” effect that surrounded the main characters in the individual pictures, and was a recurring effect throughout the posters and the teaser trailer. None of the group was experts, But Tre had more experience and was slightly more knowledgeable with Photoshop. Although we had to digitally enhance and edit the pictures for our AS task, we only used the basic features and nothing high tech within the application.

This is how we done it.

We used the brush tool to create the effect. The brush tool doesn’t have the effect that we needed, so we needed to change the brush completely.

Toggling the brush tool was how we created the brush. This is more technically as through this we can change the brushes shape dynamics, we can use scatter which will separate the brush into little pieces, the texture and the colour dynamics. We used the soft round 13 brush, and made it have the diameter of 96px and this will be used for the base of the brush effect. We then used the scatter tool which created the “bubble” circle effect. I changed the scattering to 411% which separated the brush into smaller circles and moved them away from each other.

The picture is to see if it came out right. It’s not the actual final effect.

We then added the picture that we first used with the effect.

We then created a new layer on top of the picture layer, in this layer the effect will be used. Now with the new brush, we drew the path that we wanted the effect to follow. We drew over the picture merely because we could use the Eraser tool to rub out the effect parts that we don’t need. So drawing over the

We chose that route for the effect to run because we wanted it to look like it was wrapped around her. We chose to leave the torso because it’s a “sexualized” aspect of the female body and connotes the performance genre. Having rubbed out the effect on the top part of the picture makes it look like it goes behind her and gives the effect that she is dancing around the effect. We liked the effect but from audience research we found that it

was quite weak and would need to be enhanced.

To enhance the effect and add colour, I went on blending options and clicked “outer glow”. The outer glow creates a “glow” effect around each of the effects part, and can be altered to make it more darker, lighter and change colour. The default colour is yellow which we found we didn’t like for any of the characters. As Naomi's character is the blue colour, we made the glow blue.

This effect was completely knew to us and we didn’t know what we was going to get from it.

Still wanting to enhance the effect we duplicated the layer, which just made it more brighter, and we lost the glow effect around most of the circles. So I clicked on the layer and pressed CMD+IWhich inverted the layer, and made the bubbles black and the blue colour became darker. To enhance it we then used the blending options that Photoshop was offering, not having used these before we tried the different types that we wanted. Our favourite two was:

Overlay. Colour Dodge.

We had the choice of two that we really liked and thought they really connoted the dance genre. The Overlay option really defined each bubble whilst the Colour Dodge was much brighter.We chose the Colour Dodge because it connotes more of a hope and “follow your dreams” atmosphere.

Final Cut ProFinal Cut Pro was the main program that we used on to create our Teaser Trailer. The last time we used Final Cut

Pro was at the start of the first year in AS, for the Preliminary task, so none of us was experts and we was struggling with even the basic of our knowledge. We filmed a lot of footage so it took so much of our time to load up onto the Macs, and took even longer when we had to look through the clips and cut them up. We at first clipped up each sequence into small short clips. We wanted lots of short clips to merge together to make a fast paced sequence trailer, this meant that we needed to create “bins” and named them relevant names according to the type of clips we wanted.

It did take some time to cut up everything into small sub clips but became usefully quicker when we needed to go back to them to create the sequence. Organisation skills was very important.

We learnt how to place effects onto the sequence like the star explosion near the end of the final sequence, but we found that with to many it would make the sequence ‘tacky’ and to cheesy, it wouldn’t make the final product look professional and it wouldn’t be attractive to our target market. There are different effects that we could have used like making the clips black and white, sepia, changing the focus etc. We used an out of focus effect on the start of the sequence to make it seem like we are getting ready for the performance and everything is getting back into focus. Another effect we tried was overlaying two different clips on top of each other, this did work for a little while but then realised that we didn’t want to make the trailer to ‘complicated’ and full of different clips so that our audience wouldn’t understand it. We had to use appropriate effects so that it would still appeal to our target market.

Use Of Effects

We learnt that overlaying a clip with the same clip makes it stronger and improves the image. As we didn’t have cameras that had the best quality, some clips of the dancers would come out bad as they maybe moved around to fast and when we moved the camera to follow them, we lost quality. The quality didn’t become a problem as we placed two clips together which enhanced the colour of the clip and made it more presentable, as you can see from the screenshots.

Bad quality clip. Enhanced overlaid clip.

• Transition and fades.• Speeding things up• And slowing things down

We used many quick transitions to make the sequence flow more easily and freely, we had to make sure that we didn’t use lots of different transitions and that each transition fitted in and wasn’t struggled in. We used the FADE transition at the start of the sequence between each clip to create suspense and tension.

We was able to choose where we wanted the fade to begin and how quickly it would become a blank screen, and we could choose how long it would stay blank till it got to the next clip. Making the fade go down at a slow rate, and having quite a long pause creates even more tension, making the audience wait and creating a sense that the shows about to start.

Live Type was something completely new to us, but something we needed to use to create our titles.

Live Type was fairly easy to get used to and became quite simple to use so wasn't to time consuming. The only problem that we faced was transferring the titles from Live Type to Final Cut Pro.

We created all of our teaser trailers titles on Live Type, and they came out good as we could add motion paths and effects etc.

We was able to also speed the clips and slow them down. Making the clips faster made the dance move look even better and made it look like it fitted into the music, it made the performance genre more alive. Slowing the clips down helps express and we used it on a dance move that was quite hard to fulfill and helps present that the movie is going to be full of difficult dance moves.

LiveTy

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MotionMotion is a software like Live Type but is used to edit motion graphics. We used it to create the Bubble star effect on the title screens. Although we haven’t ever used it, we found it quite simple to use and improved basic skills.

Sounds

Final Cut Pro also has great features that allows us to manipulate, copy and insert sound.

We added layers of sound to enhance the sound quality and to make it more clearer for the audience. It makes the sound strong when layering the sounds, but we can also add different sounds above the other sounds which will play over each other, and we can make one louder and one more quiet. We did this when we added the single “I just wanna live my life” and added digetic sound over the top.

We took sound bridges from other parts of the film for example we used it in the last clip of Naomi and added the breathing sound to it, connoting the performance genre and the end of a show.

Our campaignWe have learnt that we are apart of a digital age in which most advertisement happens on the internet. We used technology to base our campaign the most.To advertise our productions to our target market we created a Facebook fan page.

Through this fan page we was able to keep up to date with our fans, and was able to also get good quality feedback from them on our productions. From Facebook we can upload more links to other websites, upload behind the scenes footage, Set photos etc…

The You Tube account is another way we used technology in post-production, as this is another way our target audience can stay connected and up to date with what's happening with ROUTINE. It allows us to broadcast freely without any hassle, we can favourite links ROUTINE would like. Something You Tube has become quite famous is they hold competitions for the viewers to upload their own movies, this help promotes the film and creates a bond with the market.

The colour scheme used evokes a sense of hope and performance. The colour blue is a very ‘cool’ colour and is used to represent the sky, connoting a sense of freedom.

The main focus is the female character of the film. She is in a dance pose which connotes the dance genre straightaway, her hand positions and body position is “sexualized” to attract to the male audience, as well as the female audience who will see it’s a “sexy” film. She is giving the “male gaze” which will attract audiences, and will bring them closer to the film, makes them feel that she is looking at them.There is no mention of any of the stars name on the poster, this shows that the film isn’t just about the film stars but the actual narrative and dance moves.

The tagline is easy to read and very catchy. The “Heart” and “Dream” words are very eye catching and evocative, and quickly connotes the films genres of love and inspirations. It is recognizable from the teaser trailer for the audiences. It is also a statement for people to follow their dreams and aspirations, and would be used for motive builders.

The star’s in the background connote the performance theme, makes it seem like she is on stage. It also adds to the sky theme of freedom and “reaching for the stars”.

The title ROUTINE is explosive and eye catching. The font used is bold and effective, and is recognizable by all. The white used in the title is bold and really stands out from the picture with the help of the black outline. Also what makes it effective is the ROUTINE white bright outline around the title, this makes it seem like a theatre “Broadway” show and that it’s a real dance performance. The ROUTINE title is instantly eye catching after the picture of the character and is short and snappy for the film.ROUTINE also connotes back to the films genre, and instantly shows the dance lifestyle.

The quotes shown from critics makes the film more appealing and safe worthy to watch. The critics views makes the audiences want to go watch the film more. The four stars is good for showing film rating but also blends into the theme of becoming a star which occurs in the film, also the word “hottest” relates straight to the picture and the audience immediately know that the poster isn’t leading them to a bad film.

The Bubble bright effect used creates a sense of a “stardom” ladder. Its also very effective in representing this dream power that surrounds the theme of the movie.

The background explosion really becomes eye catching of the poster. It makes the focus more on the main characters, and gives them a sense of stardom as the explosion is coming from them.

The legal stuff at the bottom make the film poster more realistic. The companies names used make it seem like a more real film, the RTR logo looks more professional than the Havfilm recordings.