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

The majority of our finished product involved the use of new media technoligies. The construction of our trailer was done mainly through Final Cut Pro and Motion. Final Cut Pro meant that we had to get the footage from the camera onto the Final Cut Pro software and then edit. Many problems arose during this, like dropped frames, but we managed to find ways around it, and eventually got all the footage onto the software. We used transitions to fade in and our of certain shots where we didn't want the edit to be as harsh, it allowed the shots to flow more smoothly. We slowed down some of the shots to create an eery effect, at one point a character looks directly at the camera and back away comepltly unaware, we slowed it down as we thought it was a very effective shot and outlined the voyeuristic narrative of the film. We speed up a number of shots towards the end of the trailer as this is a convention of horror trailers, it allows the momentum of the trailer build up to a climax, which in our case and conventionally, is the title of the film.

Photoshop was used for both the poster and the magazine front cover, this was a particularly daunting task and none of us had ever used the software before, however with consistant use and help from our peers, we managed to create succesful, proffescional images. For our magazine, we edited several images (which you can see in our research and planning) and asked our fellow workers which they preferred and eventually decided on an image. We edited them by darkening the colour, and adding more contrast, this made the colours darker and more harsh and we felt this made the image a lot scarier. For the poster, we edited one definate image, the mask is symbolic in the narative of the film and we therefore felt it was important that it was represented in the ancillary tasks, it's the iconography of the 'evil' side of the antagonist.  We made the outlines of the image slightly more blurry to make it look less like a mask, this keeps the poster ambiguous and intriguing for an audience.

We used Garageband to create the music for our trailer, due to the copyright on other souces such as Youtube. At first we found this very difficult, as it took a lot of searching and editing to get the music suitable for our trailer, however i think they end product works very well with the trailer, and the pacing of the edits.

In our research and planning we used several media. We used Pages to print out storyboards and drafts of our completed work. We then took pictures of the storyboards using a standard digital camera and uploaded them onto blogger. We also used pages to create a mind map of 'What is a trailer?' and used a video camera and an interactive whiteboard to film it, we felt this was more entertaining to watch and allowed us to add a more interactive and personal feel to our blog.

In our evaluation we used the same techniques as we used for the trailer, we used a camera and final cut pro to edit out evaluation. We used Keynote to make the presentation we used, and got got imaged from the internet and still images from our own work. We then uploaded the videos on to Youtube and linked them to the blog.