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

Research & Planning

• The main use of YouTube was to look at horror trailers of diverse sub-genres; slasher, ghost, etc.

• This gave us an idea of what is expected from a horror trailer, editing and music mainly, and allowed us to plan our trailer using ideas we had gained from watching others.

• Google, Wikipedia and the International Movie Database helped us research horror films. Specifically, the storylines and the appearances of posters.

• This gave us some ideas behind the plot to our trailer, especially the antagonist, and also showed us how important synergy is; keeping consistent themes throughout our trailer, poster and magazine cover.

• Microsoft Word was used for a lot of the planning. The script was written, risk assessment was filled out and the overall production plan was created using Word.

• Most elements of the planning included things like written storyboards and so a scanner was used to allow an image of the written planning to be put onto our blog.

Construction

Trailer

• The main tools used for the creation of the trailer was a camcorder, YouTube and iMovie software.

• Obviously the camcorder and iMovie were used to capture clips and edit them together. YouTube was used to obtain music for the soundtrack of the trailer.

• The hashtag #readyornot seen at the end of the trailer, being the tagline “Ready or Not”, is relevant to the social site Twitter. Most trailers include a hashtag so their audience can talk about it online and gain more interest; this is the reason we used it in our trailer.

Magazine & Poster

• A camera phone, InDesign and Photoshop were the main elements that made the poster and magazine cover.

• InDesign created layouts for the magazine, allowing us to add certain features that are present in actual magazines.

• The camera phone was used to take pictures and Photoshop allowed us to manipulate and edit them to truly create synergy between the trailer, magazine cover and poster.

• The poster also included a QR Code which is common in a lot of movie posters. The purpose is for the audience to scan it using a smartphone to see more promotions for the film, generating more interest, which is why we added it to our poster.

Photoshop• Photoshop was used to alter the

appearance of images used in our poster and magazine cover.

• We took a picture of our hooded villain and the location of the woods using a camera phone. Photoshop then allowed us to separate the image of the hooded figure from the background and add it to the woods setting for our poster.

• We then played around with the brightness and contrast settings to achieve a dark and gothic look which is relevant to the horror genre.

InDesign

• InDesign was used to create our magazine cover. We had experience using it from the previous year so we used all the tools we had developed to generate our final cover.

• We had looked at magazine covers to decide on a layout and used image boxes to place images onto the page as well as text boxes to add text.

• It was all pretty straightforward as we were use to the software so it was easy to manipulate the text and other features to create a cover that was similar to a professional one.

Font• Another use of new technology for the construction of or project was

downloading font. We used www.dafont.com to find a font that we felt was relevant to the horror genre.

• The font was called “Black Widow” and was used for the title of our horror film. We decided that this font was quite jagged and heavily associated with the horror genre.

• We used the font for the title on all of our constructions; the trailer, poster and magazine cover, as we wanted to keep a consistent theme throughout which would be recognised by our target audience; synergy.

Evaluation

Feedback

• One of the main part of the evaluation is feedback and we are using different sorts of new technology to gain this.

• The trailer is on YouTube and can be “shared” through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Comments from these sites could give us an idea of what people think we did well and what we could improve upon.

• Another way of obtaining feedback would be through asking specific questions relating to appearance and relevance to horror to people and recording their answers using a camcorder. Again, this will show our strengths and possible improvements. Sites such as Slideshare can be a good way to present our evaluation and be easily linked to our blog

New Technologies• Overall, our project was very dependent on new technologies. From the

various internet sites used for research and evaluation and the documents used for our planning to the numerous gadgets and software used to construct our trailer, poster and magazine cover.

• One thing we learnt through the research is how modern horror films use social networking to promote their films. Hashtags and QR codes are two of the main ways filmmakers get their audience to generate a “buzz” and gain more interest form others. We have used these elements and ideas to create our own promotion for a horror film that would be able to keep up with and match the creations of professionals. There is no way we would have been able to do this without the vast use of new technology.