Blogger: We have used blogger throughout the year to show our progress of learning the horror genre and conventions, and conventions of a teaser trailer. It is extremely to use and is very useful as it allows me to show my work in a more interesting way and it keeps up with todays technological world. Blogger has helped me through all the stages of this course as I have been able to blog my findings in planning, research, construction, evaluation and of course, my final product and ancillary texts. Blogger was more helpful as a way of showing my coursework than an essay because it was easy to show visual annotations of images and I was able to show teaser trailers that I had studied, whereas in an essay this would have been impossible. It was also useful when evaluating my products because I was able to show pictures of all the technology I used and I could easily compare our teaser trailer to other real media products. However, an essay would have enabled me to create an arguement about the advantages and disadvantages of the software and my production of a teaser trailer, whereas this is difficult with different blog posts that just show information.
Photoshop CS4: I used photoshop to create my ancillary texts, where it is easy to manipulate how images look to make them look more horrific and professional. It has also helped me in the evaluation stages. I have been able to produce montages of images to show what technology I have used and certain shots from our trailer and an existing trailer.
Garage Band: We used Garage band to manipulate audio files, such as booms and text message tones and then export them to Final cut pro.
Final Cut Pro: Final cut pro is where the trailer was the software we used to upload our footage, edit the footage, produce titles and add effects (such as brightness and contrast and colour corrector). We used the effects frequently to darken our footage to make it more like night time to make it scarier. We did this by lowering the brightness and changing the contrast accordingly and then adding blue into the colour of the image to create a night glow. We also used fades and the cut/splicing tools that final cut pro provides to edit our footage into a teaser trailer. In the screenshot of Final Cut Pro, you can see the timeline of the trailer with the layers of sound and images. This shows how simple it was to use and made it easy to link sounds to image and navigate our way around the trailer during editing.Flickr: I have used the website Flickr throughout the course to make my blog posts more interactive and more engaging. Flickr has allowed me to explain images in a more interactive way, so that when the mouse is hovered over an image my explanation of this image will appear. It has been extremely useful when showing parts of official trailers that I have liked and then explaining why this may be. This helped make my research much more efficient as when looking back at certain shots etc that I liked in trailers I could easily see them and why I would use them.
Youtube: Youtube has allowed me to be able to watch existing trailers and then analyse them which helped me enormously while I was researching the horror genre and trailer conventions. It has also helped me in my evaluation stages because i was able to get screenshots of different shots to put into my montage. Also because it is a Web 2.0 website we were able to upload out trailer to Youtube, enabling our trailer to be seen by a wide audience.
Video Camera: We used a video camera to film our footage, we had handheld cameras that could be attached to tripods for steady use and could also be used without that created a shakey image that we used as it is a horror convention because it disorientates the audience. We had sepperate uploader cameras that allowed us to connect it to the Apple Mac computers and then retrieve our footage.
Apple Mac Computers: We used Apple Macs throughout the year for all work done on the internet and in the software shown already. This type of computer has made the production process much easier because Final Cut Pro and Garageband are both products of apple computers, so we were able to use both of these pieces of software.
Still Camera: I used a still camera to take still images for my ancillary texts which provided a better quality then getting a screenshot from our movie. I also used the camera to take pictures of our group's storyboards.
Tripod: We used tripods to fit the camera on so we could pan, tilt and keep the camera steady. This enabled us to achieve a higher quality final product.
Click on the picture to see it bigger.
Click on the link to see my analysis of the Final Cut Pro screenshot and how it works.
To improve this you could do a number of things. Use screenshots OF YOR OWN FCP TIMELINE rather than the one you have used, and annotate it to show what's going on. Same with Garageband. You should alos consider in more depth the use of Blogger and other web 2.0 apps as a means of reasearching and, particularly, evaluating your project. Is it better than doing things the old fashioned, essay based way? What is GAINED, and is anything LOST doing it this way?
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