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

Research and Planning During the research and planning stage of this task I used a range of websites so I could increase my understanding of the Post-Apocalyptic genre. For my initial research I used the British Film Institute site as it is an education website, as well as reading articles online about the Post- Apocalyptic genre. One by Dr Eric Dodson, that discussed the genre in detail and the other being an interview with Shane Acker and his 9 rules to creating a Post-Apocalyptic film. Official film industry websites and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), an online film database, came in particularly handy when researching specific Post-Apocalyptic films, such as Mad Max 2 and The Day After Tomorrow. The official film sites, the industry websites, also proved beneficial when it came to seeing how the film was marketed and released. I also used the Launching Films website when researching when our film should be released as this website is an industry website and has film release dates on record. With this information we could release our film when there were no other Post-Apocalyptic films in the cinema. British Film Institute: Shane Acker Article: Dr Eric Dodson Article: Internet Movie Database: Launching Films:

Research and Planning When it came to doing trailer analyses YouTube was the most helpful website as it had all of the trailers for the Post-Apocalyptic films we were researching. As YouTube is a 2.0 website and the trailers were all uploaded on the site, it became useful as a form of marketing for films. I also discovered some blogs that were designed for specific films. The most useful on was all about the film The Road and it displayed all of the promotional material for the film and mentioned the distribution of the film. Another useful website for researching how films were marketed was Box Office Mojo as it had all the statistics about how much films cost to produce and how much there box office takings were. This also showed me which films were more successful than others. YouTube: The Road Blog: Box Office Mojo:

Research and Planning As I was researching for possible magazines to promote our film in most useful websites were the magazines official sites. This included the official website for Empire Magazine, Little White Lies Magazine and Total Film Magazine and they were most helpful as I found out a lot about the readership of each magazine and the content they each publish. A website I used in cooperation with the official magazine websites was the National Readership Survey site and this was because it could provide me with statistics about the readership and the circulation of some of the magazines. This allowed me to see how big of a readership both Empire and Total Film magazine had and it helped me make a decision about which one to promote our film in. Empire Magazine: Little White Lies Magazine: Total Film Magazine: National Readership Survey:

My Blog Throughout this task I have been updating my blog with all of the work I have been doing. It proved to be very helpful later on as I could easily look back at all my work and remember specific ideas we had thought of early on and I could make sure my promotional materials were sticking to conventions as I looked back at my earlier research. The blog will be able to connect all 4 of our group members blogs together. As this is a group task the blog should be able to connect Amaia’s, Lauren’s, Arran’s and my own blog together so our work can be viewed together. This way it is easy to see who did what in the group. It contains all of our work from the initial idea, to the filming days, to the editing and then finally the evaluation. My Blog:

Presentations I used multiple presentation websites and programmes during this task. I mainly used Prezi and PowerPoint as they are easy to use and produce a good quality presentation. Both presentation platforms allow a variety of layouts and designs that can make your work both informative and attractive to look at. I used both PowerPoint and Prezi to display my research and evaluation questions. Right at the beginning of this task, during my initial research I had to create timelines showing the development of the Post-Apocalyptic and Social Realism genre. To do this I used a website called Time Toast as it would make my timelines look more professional and capable of doing the job. All of these programmes and websites are designed to help users present there work in an interesting and attractive way and they have helped me achieve great presentations. Prezi: TimeToast:

Production When it came to filming our trailer we were fortunate enough to use a range of technologies that would allow us to create a professional quality trailer. We were lucky enough to use a Canon 550D DSLR camera with a 35mm lense, as well as a 50mm lense. We mostly used the 50mm lense as it provided very high quality picture, but as it was unable to zoom we did use the 35mm quite a lot. We also used a range of equipment that would help create the best shots we could. This included a camera slide, modisteady and tripod, we also had a boom microphone to record the best sound quality we could. As we had to take pictures of us recording and setting up the equipment, Lauren allowed us to use her Canon SX30 camera which took high quality pictures for our behind the scenes work. Both the Canon 550D and SX30 used Secure Digital (SD) cards to save the footage and pictures onto until we could put the data onto the computer. When we recorded the voice over we used a voice recorder and microphone to try and get a clear voice over sound. There have been mixed opinions with the results, but I believe the voice over is very easy to hear.

Post-Production To edit our film trailer we used an Apple Mac computer and the Adobe Premiere programme. This programme allowed us to arrange the clips into the right order, use colour correction to make our trailer more desaturated, add titles, add music and sound effects. We used this programme to edit our entire trailer and it allowed us to do complicated editing, such as reverse and speed up our entire trailer as the ending montage, as well as desaturate the trailer to give it a Post-Apocalyptic feel by having lots of greys and dark colours. We received the fonts we used from a site called Dafont and from Premiere itself. We thought that some of the fonts from Dafont were superior to those of Premiere so we downloaded them for free. When it came to producing my film poster and magazine cover I used the Adobe Photoshop programme. This allowed me to use the Empire Magazine cover template and modify it until it became an entirely new issue of the magazine completely designed by me. I successfully desaturated the background and brighten the main image, as well as add cover lines and information about other upcoming films. My poster was also produced using Adobe Photoshop and I could increase the brightness of Lucian whilst making Ethan much darker. To create my Magazine Cover I had to use the ‘magnetic Lasso’ tool to cut out the main image, place the masthead layer behind the main image, use the ‘Hue/Saturation’ tool to desaturate the background and the add the cover lines using the ‘Type’ tool. A similar process was done when I create my poster. First I used the ‘Brightness/Contrast’ tool to make the image darker, then I used the ‘Magnetic Lasso’ tool to cut Lucian out of the picture and put him on the layer above it, I then used the ‘Brightness/Contrast’ tool again to make Lucian brighter. Afterwards I created a light source with the ‘Lighting Effects’ feature, applied the image and then used the ‘Type’ tool to add the credit block, title, tag line and critic review. Dafont:

Sound As I mentioned previously we used a voice recording kit and a microphone to record the voice over for our trailer which we used as non-diegetic dialogue. You can watch our voice over recording by the link below. Whilst searching for a soundtrack for our trailer we looked at Incompetech and Audio Network. We looked at these two websites as they have libraries of copyright free music; this means it is music we can use a not be taken to court or have our trailer taken down because of copyright issues. Incompetech had a lot of music in its library but non of it really fit with the feel we were going for with our trailer. Audio Network had plenty of music and we found some that we be great for our trailer, unfortunately we had to pay for it. It was not a lot of money and the music we used received high praise from our audience feedback. We used two tracks, one called Pandemic and the other called Witch Doctor. Pandemic was a nice repetitive beat for the scenes with Ethan’s routine and the Witch Doctor track was very fast paced which worked perfectly for our peaks of action. There were also some sound effects in our trailer that we found on the college’s computer database. This allowed us to give our trailer another dimension as we could add in the wolf sound effects and the screams of the cannibals. Incompetech: Audio Network: Our Voice Over Recording:

Evaluation I used different presentation websites and programmes during the evaluation stage. I mainly used Prezi and PowerPoint as they are easy to use and produce a good quality presentation. Both presentation platforms allow a variety of layouts and designs that can make your work both informative and attractive to an audience. I originally planned on only using PowerPoint but it became apparent that my evaluation presentation may come across as dull by doing this so I used Prezi and a YouTube video. For evaluation question 1 everyone in the group recorded themselves discussing different aspects of the trailer and this was edited over the top of the trailer. This makes for a much more interesting presentation than just reading about what we did as we are discussing what we did. YouTube was a valuable website for this task, not only for the researching trailers but for a platform that we could upload our rough cuts, behind the scenes footage and final trailer on. All of our videos can be found on the YouTube channel A2MediaVarndean. Prezi: YouTube:

Communications Over this entire task I have been using Google, not only as a search engine but as a way of communicating to the other members of the group. We created a Google Group when we first started working as a team and have been communicating via it ever since. It was the easiest way of sending files to each other and asking each other about certain tasks. We could have used FaceBook as a way of communicating but not all the members had an account and it would be unable to share large documents with each other. I have also used Google images throughout this task to be able to display all of the products and ideas I have talked about. As a group we also used the website Flickr to share pictures with each other. We created it at first to show each other locations we could film at and then started to put the behind the scenes pictures up there as well. All of the pictures of us filming on blog are from Flickr. Google Groups: Flickr: