Evaluation Question 4

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

We used the Internet a lot for every aspect of our trailer. It was most helpful for research as we did a lot of research and is a large part of what made our final piece successful as we had so many influences.  YouTube in particular was really helpful for research as it has so many trailers we could look at for research. It also came in useful when making a rough cut for our trailer as we could look up a similar sound track to the one we wanted to make. We could overlay this while making the rough cut so we had some music to work with and fit the timings of the trailer. Having a blog was also useful as it was a good way to keep our research organised, helping us use it. Our use of the Internet for research increased a lot from AS to A2. Our research improved qualitatively as well as quantitatively.  In AS the research we did felt like it was more just for general inspiration and to generate ideas. However in A2 the research resulted in much more specific ideas that you can directly see how it influenced our final trailer. For example, we spent a long time, looking at many different trailers just to look at the conventions of timings for different acts and generally weighting. We never looked at real media texts just to learn the timings of other openings in AS.

My skills in final cut developed as I got much quicker at using the software.  For A2 there was more impotance put on the editing of the final piece. This is because trailers have quite conventional timings that are followed for most of them, for example using the 3 acts. Editing is used to enhance the 3 acts, for example the third act is a montage and at the end and is made up of high speed editing.  This is to enhance the bThe I also developed my skills as creating the graphic titles was a skill I hadn’t used in AS, such as using the Ken-burn effect and the motion effect added on to the text to make it more affected. Also playing around with the colours and light of the still image used as the background of the narrative graphics.

Another use of technology is that we had a lot of excess footage that we didn’t use, but were considering. This made gave us more to play around with and could put in the bits we preferred rather than because we had to because we didn’t have enough footage. 

AC